YouSaid · the spoken record

Sergey Nazarov

lines on the record: 197
first: 2021-05-01
most recent: 2021-05-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And then there's oracles and Oracle networks. That is all the world's data, right? We're talking about taking all the world's data and making it consumable. For all the world's use cases that have trust issues. So the amount of variability there is absolutely massive, right? It's like the decentralized Oracle network and the conditions that that decentralized Oracle network needs to meet. Going to vary very widely from an insurance contract to a lending contract to an ad network contract to the data sales contract that we discussed to any number of other smart contracts. So really the ability of a decentralized Oracle network to flexibly address all of those requirements is what's necessary.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oracle networks, conversely, have to interact with all the world's data and provide all the services that blockchains don't provide. So there's kind of a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, you have blockchains that are highly secure, highly reliable, highly tamper-proof, highly transparent, but are not very feature rich. For example, they cannot talk to an API. Many of them can't generate randomness. They cannot do some kind of privacy preserving computation. So they're very secure and there are these kind of data structures and smart contract platforms to hold unchained code that can define conditions, receive value, pay value back out under conditions, and create transparency around all that, which makes perfect sense.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's the fee structure for those blocks. They're going to keep getting composed. Transactions are going to get put into blocks, blocks, they'll get connected, and it'll continue, right? And that's a very focused type of system. And that's great. And that makes sense because it's focused on creating security for that category of on-chain activity, which is once again a critical, critical part of building a highly transparent system and something that Chainlink enables and doesn't compete with and just enables to do more.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, absolutely. I think that's a great question. And I think that actually gets to the core of what the Chainlink network is supposed to achieve. We are supposed to achieve a maximally flexible system. So once again, this is the big difference between Chainlink and Oracle networks in general and blockchains, in my opinion. Blockchains do not seek to be maximally flexible, right? They say, here's my block size, here's the transaction types you can put in those blocks. Here's the contract language I have. Here's kind of my blockchain system, right?”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once again, we still need to look to the future. We need to look to how do we take the decentralized infrastructure concepts that Bitcoin initially put forward, that Ethereum then improved upon and created into these scriptable smart contract formats, and how do we expand that into the world of real world outcomes to change the global financial industry, the global trade industry, the global data marketplace industry, and many other global industries.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In different languages. We are excited, and I am excited, and the Chainlink community is excited. And basically there's a lot of, I mean, for lack of a better word, excitement, in seeing our industry graduate to providing more use cases, more usable hybrid smart contracts, right? Because once again, it's absolutely amazing that Bitcoin created non-governmental fiat money. It's an unbelievable innovation and invented decentralized infrastructure and birthed our industry. It's an unbelievably great achievement, an amazing achievement that we now have scriptable smart contracts through something like Ethereum. Once again, monumental achievement.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the next step in line with our body of work is how does that scriptable on-chain code become more advanced in its interaction with all of the systems and events in the real world, which is, in my opinion, the final missing piece of the puzzle. So my body of work, the body of work that I'm involved in, would not be where it is right now without Bitcoin by any measure. It wouldn't even be where it is now without Ethereum and the growth in smart contract development that they've created. And now what I think is going to happen next is there will be a lot of different smart contract platforms, a lot of different layer twos. Some of them will be private for enterprise. Some of them will be public. There will be some public winners in certain geographies for maybe regulation reasons, maybe other reasons. There'll be other public winners in the larger internet. And there will be a number of different people building smart contracts.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I found it fascinating after Ethereum launched, and I still find it fascinating. And I'm also very grateful to Vitalik and the Ethereum community and all the core developers there for taking our industry a step further. So I think they absolutely deserve a huge amount of credit for taking our industry from it takes months to make a really small smart contract to it takes weeks to make a relatively secure, relatively advanced piece of on-chain code that anybody can script and people can do audits on and that's an unbelievable leap forward for our industry and I'm genuinely grateful to them for that.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm personally a fan of Ethereum. Ethereum has done a huge amount for our industry as well. Ethereum took us from a world where it literally took months to make a new smart contract by being forced to code it into a protocol. You had to go to the protocol developers and you had to say, hey, I need a DEX or I need some kind of smart contract. Put it in the protocol itself, put it in the actual blockchain mining and kind of block generation transaction generation protocol. That would take months or sometimes even over a year. That was a horrible experience. And obviously very few people wanted to participate in that and so very few people made smart contracts, which I was not a fan of, right? And then Ethereum came along and really did a lot of innovative things and introduced this approach to scriptable smart contracts where you could script all of these different conditions. And I found that fascinating before Ethereum. I found that fascinating once Ethereum arrived.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More data, we see more financial products go live. Gaming, we provide VRF. So we have this kind of focus, and it's a very useful, useful and valuable kind of valuable for our industry focus. At the end of the day, I think that smart contract platforms like Ethereum made a different set of design decisions from Bitcoin and others, and they focused on creating these smart contract capability. And they kind of wanted that functionality to exist. And I think since then, there's been a number of people that try to improve on that or try to make variants of that. From our point of view, we want to support smart contracts in all of their variations and in all of their use cases. So one of the things that I personally like about Chainlink is their ability, or Chainlink's ability and the Chainlink network's ability to be useful to many different chains and across many different use cases.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think about a lot. I think it's complete. We're completely complimentary. So there's no competitive dynamics in my opinion. We are completely collaborative and complementary with Ethereum and all other blockchains and all other layer twos that operate a contract. So we do not seek to operate a smart contract. We seek to augment and enable smart contracts to go further in what they're able to do. In fact, Oracle networks have some value, but they don't have nearly as much value in what they do if there isn't a mission-critical system like a smart contract that needs their data, right? So we've made our own explicit design decisions and our own and created our own focus around guaranteeing that smart contracts can go further. We've already done that, right? Decentralized finance, the rate at which we put data is to a degree the rate at which certain decentralized financial markets grow as we put.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, what is the design decision for Bitcoin? Is it that Bitcoin will be just about the Bitcoin ledger or does Bitcoin want to evolve into an anchor for all these other systems and maybe create additional data kind of more data on chain on the Bitcoin blockchain related to that? I'm excited to see how that evolves, but until then, kind of results speak for themselves and the results that Bitcoin has achieved for our industry and for itself as kind of the dominant cryptocurrency and the conception of our industry that people interact with first is obviously very important and something that I think really everybody in our industry is grateful for, right? Because without Bitcoin, where would our industry be? And that's obviously something that we can't forget.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know at the same time, whatever design decisions people make are the design decisions they make, right? And so if you've made a design decision that this ledger and this thing will be about Bitcoin, it won't be about colored coins, it won't be about Operturn at 80 bytes, it won't be about these other kind of nuances that you don't want this to be about, then that's fine. That's fine and that's a logical decision and that's called focus and focus has a lot of value and a lot of great technology products have focused on something and done that. And then there's a lot of smart people around Bitcoin building kind of additional systems that anchor their security within Bitcoin. And I think that's an interesting approach that could bear fruit. I think it'll eventually require an interaction with a Bitcoin protocol in more advanced ways. And then there will be another question of”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Additional features and additional risk. And that decision is a decision that was made and has kind of the benefits of focus and the benefits of a certain amount of security and a certain amount of guarantees around Bitcoin and what that is and the value of that. And then it has certain limitations as a consequence of doing less or having the system hold data that isn't related to Bitcoin or not having the system hold contracts or smart contract code. So I think it's just kind of a decision, right? And I understand why they're excited and I'm very excited. I started in this industry going to Bitcoin meetups and I met a lot of fantastic people, libertarian people that wanted to see the world work differently and shared a lot of my beliefs and a lot of my points.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think at the end of the day, results speak for themselves, and Bitcoin has had an amazing impact on our industry and has had an amazing impact on the world. And I think the result is still that Bitcoin is very widely adopted and driving the adoption of our industry in many ways. So I think it's very difficult for people to say that Bitcoin maximalists don't have something that they can latch onto and say, hey, there's something very real here. I think there's been decisions made by the Bitcoin community and the people who made the Bitcoin protocol to focus it on Bitcoin and to focus it on the kind of storing of the ledger of Bitcoin and the information about Bitcoin and the transaction of Bitcoin and to focus on securing that. And I understand why this decision was made to a certain degree, right? It was about focus. It was about getting something worthwhile right without adding”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably not. I don't see the, I think that it would cause a lot of distraction and a lot of weird stuff. And so realistically, I don't think it would help anybody or even the person who discloses it, but just to be clear, I am not. And whoever it is, I think they haven't said anything because they don't want the attention and they don't want the distraction and they don't want all the problems from this. And that makes sense to me conceptually.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're in some kind of weird thought experiment here. If I was this guy, let me think about this, which I'm not, by the way, I am not this person”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Substantial significant effect or bearing on the functioning or the value or the use or the security of the Bitcoin system. So I think whoever it is, they're probably better off not making that public. And I think beyond that, whoever it turned out to be shouldn't matter because it has nothing to do with how the system is made useful or secure or anything else. And so I think that's the point of view that I have.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know who it is. I think if I had to guess, it's probably a group of people, some of which might not even be around anymore. Obviously, I'm very grateful to if this is a singular or a group of people for kicking off this entire industry and making this amazing change in the world that I have the privilege and luxury of being part of in some small way in the work that I do. I think also this kind of focus on who is Satoshi or who isn't Satoshi shouldn't, in my opinion, matter so much because regardless of who it is, that, in my opinion, should have no”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so what that hole creates is a hole that we all fill, right? We all basically come to some vague kind of group understanding that Bitcoin is worth this because it is tied to, let's say, All non governmental fiat money comes into question. Everybody doubts it. Possibly due to inflation. And everybody says, you know, this is nice, but I'd like to keep 10 20% of my wealth in non-governmental fiat just in case, you know, what are those numbers? I mean, if that happens, I'm guessing you can add a few zeros.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's fine, right? And that was one conception of Bitcoin as let there be Bitcoin as micropayments platform, right? But then the value rose and things changed. There was enough expansion in certain ways. And now the conception has evolved into this other conception. But at the end of the day, I think governments have a very clear set of steps for directing the public's conception of their fiat, right? They say our fiat is worth this for these, these reasons. Bitcoin doesn't have that. Bitcoin doesn't have an official Bitcoin spokesperson that goes out and says, the non-governmental money called Bitcoin, the non-governmental fiat money called Bitcoin, has value on the basis of this, this, this, and this. Here's our fiscal budget, here's our future plans. Our money will continue to be safe and secure and reliable.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's the world where Bitcoin is a certain percentage of everyone's ownership as a hedge against governmental fiat money not being so good? Haven't done the analysis, but another example right here's this conception. That's the conception. So when I look at Bitcoin, what I see is a lot of these fascinating conceptions of what the fiat let there be value of Bitcoin is. By the way, all of them could be true. Maybe some of them are true. Maybe some of them aren't true. And the fascinating thing is that I've seen this conception change, right? So when I started in the Bitcoin space, the conception was micropayments, the cost of Bitcoin is low will have micropayments. Micropayments are wonderful.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that, interestingly enough, doesn't just depend on you or me or the people who made Bitcoin or anything else. It actually depends on current events. So for example, if people suddenly say I'm more and more worried about fiat currency, I'm more and more worried that governmental fiat, even if it's the most reliable version of that, is not as good as I thought it was. Maybe I should go on the PayPal app. Maybe I should get some Bitcoin just in case.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know what that's worth. I also know what that's worth, but it could be worth a huge amount. So I think it's not, I don't think it's, I personally don't think it's super important what I think it's worth or what many other people think it's worth. I don't think that's really that important. I think what's probably important is understanding what the societal conception of Bitcoin is and how does that societal conception evolve over time.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As this conception of Bitcoin, what's the value of that? I don't know. That's a great question. Probably huge amount of value. Then there's a further conception of Bitcoin as some digital gold. There's a scarcity dynamic. There's all these other types of dynamics. What is a portable version of digital gold with some kind of built-in? Built in scarcity worth kind of artificially created scarcity. What's that worth? I don't know. That's a great question. I haven't done the analysis on that is the point might be worth a lot. What is it all worth if all three of these things flow into the same fiat kind of let there be Bitcoin as these three things conception of Bitcoin?”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, great. What's that worth? I don't know. It's probably worth a lot. I have no idea what it's worth. But it's as an idea, as a concept to underpin the fiat money, the let there be aspect of fiat and of Bitcoin. You basically look at it and you say, yeah, internet money. Okay, that could be worth whatever $60,000, $600,000. Great question, right? There are other versions of the world, right, where people say, you know, there are countries that don't have a good fiat currency, and I see a lot of people using Bitcoin. So, Bitcoin isn't internet money. Countries without a good currency money All the countries without a good currency now use Bitcoin and let there be Bitcoin as this.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way that governments have stopped that in the past is if anyone tries to make another fiat currency in their country, they immediately shut it down, right? They immediately say, hey, this is really bad. You've done something really bad. It's time for you to stop. Don't do it anymore. It stops, right? That's been the history of non governmental fiat currency. Bitcoin is really due to its decentralized nature, the first, and possibly in some cases in many people's minds, still the only true non-governmental fiat currency. Now, how powerful is non-governmental fiat currency? I have no idea, right? This is why it's really as powerful as the ideas that people ascribe to it are, right? So let's say people start saying right now people are saying, hey, it's internet money. It's the money of the internet.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think valuing all these tokens and determining that isn't something I'm particularly great at. I haven't spent a lot of time on that. I've spent the majority, vast majority of my time on building these systems. Architecting them and getting them to fruition and getting them to a place where they operate properly on both the technical and the cryptoeconomic and in every other sense. I think with Bitcoin, there is Certain conception of non governmental fiat money that Bitcoin is really the first creator of, right? So there's this very powerful idea called fiat money. It's basically more or less a kind of 40-year experiment. I think on August 15th of this year is maybe, I think, even the 40th anniversary. A government can say, hey, I have a currency and it's worth something. And here it is. In terms of”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But once again, the incentives to maintain whatever the core business is so strong that the innovation people, even though they are there, I think they get a phone call and go like, what are we doing for this? And the ones that actually did good work and got ready to do something for this have done their employer and their organization a very positive service, whereas the ones that aren't ready, I mean, they'll make up something and maybe they're really smart and they'll get it together. I don't know.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the earnings call. And I promise you by the next earnings call, there's a plan. And then the question on the next one is, well, when's the plan going to happen? And then by the next earnings call, it's plan is happening. And that's what these people are sensitive to. That's what these organizations are structured around. It's not completely economically disconnected, right? They have this core business. They want to protect it. I understand that idea, but I think the problem with that is sometimes it requires It requires this myopic focus, right? And that's what all the innovation stuff is about every time somebody at a corporate entity is about innovation. They're trying to sidestep this.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How things will evolve from there, I actually don't know because that hasn't been the case yet. But my thinking is that there will be people who don't want to cannibalize certain parts of their business or don't want to change certain parts of their business. And then there will be people who say, look, I think this is how the world's going to work. We're going to make a very, very heavy. Kind of set of commitments to put resources towards this. I already see that with a few banks working on various blockchain-based systems. But granted, they've been working on those for years. So I think all”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know a lot of those assholes in a lot of these different industries. First of all, I think they're getting listened to more. And second of all, I think all of these places, as I look at it more and more, I think they have a fundamental line of business that they try to protect. And then everybody's compensation and everybody's metrics and goals is focused around that line of business. So the second that Things begin to impact that, then everybody will be in a senior meeting and that asshole will be quite listened to because he will have the only thoughtful explanation as to why this is happening.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the second, some of them start losing business because of that, they're gonna move very quickly because that's what all of their compensation structures and all their goal planning structures are based around. They're based around what is losing us business or getting us business.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of them that don't, and some of them that do it faster, some of them that do it slower. And that's an economic decision that they'll make. I think their whole question is, is this a foregone conclusion? I mean, I think my answer, my answer is yes, this is definitely going to be happening. I think they still have a question of is this going to change my industry? But I'm seeing a definite shift in people's understanding. And I think that shift is going to accelerate rapidly as one or two of them of their competitors throw their hat in the smart contract ring and say, well, I have smart contracts. I guarantee my outcomes to you. What do they do for you? You know, it's risky. Just use mine.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we will. I think what will happen with the banks and all the insurance companies, by the way, is not that they'll just die or something. I think it'll be just like the internet. There'll be some of them that adopt this.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My failure rate is non existent or really low. And here's my Oracle network. And by the way, it's also settled a million of these. And so it's not the logo, right? It's not, hey, what a nice logo you have on top of a building above a train terminal or something, it's much more, hey, there's a million people that got settled correctly. I have all the proof that I could ever need about that and it's not something that's very easy to game, right? Because real value was at stake. Real value was moved around. And so I think once again, the transparency aspect comes in where you're able to prove that The cryptographically enforced contracts are better.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is where there's one of many network effects where the more that smart contracts and Oracle networks are used, they themselves generate this immutable on-chain data that proves their value and reliability. And improving more and more of that in more and more kind of use cases and more and more variants of the same contract, they arrive at a greater body of proof that they, like I am the decentralized insurance contract for crop insurance used by a million users”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Evaluate where this smart contract runs. Oh, wow, this smart contract runs on Ethereum. Great. Thousands of nodes, lots of computational security. So now I've made this determination, I've gotten all this clear, transparent information about this system that combines the contract code with a decentralized Oracle network, and I've made my decision to participate in this decentralized insurance kind of crop insurance policy. I've sent the Bitcoin or the stablecoin or whatever I have on my Android phone, and then time goes by. Let's say it doesn't rain. Lo and behold, the smart contract returns the relevant amount from the policy back to me. I continue my life as a farmer. And by the way, the fact that that happened contributes reputation and contributes proof back to both the contract as something that can prove to other people that it has settled and the Oracle network as something that can prove that it has properly assessed reality or properly triggered a contract.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Considered to be the state of a transaction. And that is how it's achieved, right? So it's achieved by users looking at these mathematical contract systems and saying, you know, if I have money in a bank, there's one single person who controls that money, that's the bank. They could choose to give me my money or choose not to give me my money. And that's great, but maybe there's a percentage of what I own that I want to put into another system where there's thousands of independent computing systems that are promising me, you know, with the help of cryptographic primitives that I will be able to always have access to this, whatever this is, whatever this token is, I will at least, or at the very least, I will always have unfettered complete control and access to it. That's one example. Another example is, hey, we have a hybrid smart contract for something like crop insurance. I, as the user,”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, at the end of the day, it comes down to consensus, right? It comes down to a collection of independent nodes, a collection of provably independent computing systems arriving at the same conclusion impartially. That conclusion might be the transaction is valid between address A and address B. Address A has one Bitcoin, wants to send it to address B and address B has one Bitcoin, right? So that's one degree of validation. It has certain cryptographic primitives that are used, certain levels of cryptography, encryption, and other methods that basically provide clarity and those guarantees. But fundamentally, it's this level of consensus that multiple independent computing systems came to the same conclusion, verified that conclusion, and created a sense of finality, created a final state that is globally”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it does. It works fine and very well as long as nothing goes wrong. And then in the cases when things go wrong, which they pretty much invariably at some point do, then you find out that, well, you know, turns out they don't have to pay me or turns out I can't trade or turns out the ATMs can be locked up and only give me 66 euros per day, whether I'm a business or an individual, like what happened in Greece a few years ago, right? The reality is that once that becomes a strong enough kind of realization for people, I think they will all just migrate the mathematically guaranteed contracts. Because why wouldn't you? In the world of mathematically guaranteed contracts, kind of how do we and cryptographically secured and decentralized infrastructure powered, how do we evolve into that world?”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is the brand based paper guarantee model, for which, up until now, there has never been an alternative, right? So up until now, if you had a bad experience with a bank or insurance company or some logo somewhere, you would only have one option. Your option would be to go across the road and down the block to another building with another color of marble and another set of agreements that are fundamentally still paper brand agreements, right? Now for the first time you have mathematical agreements. You have mathematically guaranteed encryption secured, decentralized infrastructure powered agreements, right? This is really the shift. This is really the comparison and the alternative through which people should view all of this, in my opinion. Because there's once again this conception that everything is fine, everything works very well.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big building, lots of marbles. This is why banks have such nice buildings, right? It's not because they want to spend money on buildings. It's to create confidence in them as an entity in order for people to transact through them, right? This is why all these kind of go-to cities that had gold rushes, go to cities that needed banking as a service in certain time periods, they're the most beautiful buildings, at least in the United States.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it is fundamentally just a paper agreement with the legal framework behind it. And if the paper agreement you have, with say Robinhood or somebody else suddenly has to change, well, it changes and you can't really do anything about it. You won't be able to change anything about what happened there. There's some long-term service. There's some other agreements around all this stuff. At the end of the day, that's the brand-based and paper guarantee world where it's all very vague and opaque and you're kind of hoping for the best because there's a nice logo. It's been around 100 years. There's a lot of marble.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's good, and that is definitely better than that not being there. And that is definitely a huge improvement for how people conduct commerce, letters of credit from branded entities are very important for global trade to take place in the early stages of global trade. So that's good.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, sure. I think it's important maybe to have a conception of what the alternative is, right? What is highly reliable, trust minimized off-chain and on-chain computation and alternative to. So this is just kind of how I see the world in these two camps. One camp is the traditional, what I call brand-based or paper guarantee camp. And this is the world, as pretty much most or all people know today. This is the world where there's a bank logo or an insurance company logo or some kind of logo. There's a very big building with marble arches and columns. It's the biggest building in the town. It's bigger than the church. And everybody feels very good. Everybody's got such a nice logo. It's such a big building. Why don't I give them my money? Why don't I interact with them on the basis of any kind of agreement?”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then if you can get an answer to that question on a case by case basis, that's when you'll understand why blockchains are relevant. And then once you do that with enough use cases, it becomes a little bit mind-blank.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's it. And we're all very comfortable with that. I could even make conditions that your algorithm isn't analyzing the data for something I don't want you to analyze it for, or you can make conditions that the data has to have any number of properties. And once again, you haven't leaked any signal to me and I haven't leaked any data to you, which is once again just another type of trust issue that all of this solves. So it's the same pattern. If you work in this industry long enough or if you really look at these use cases long enough, you'll simply come to the question, and this is the useful question, what is the trust issue this is solving?”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now the autonomous agent takes your algorithm, keeping it private for me, and takes my data, keeping it private from you, assesses it on a random cross-section sampling for quality of data, returns the scoring back to you, allows you to determine a price, and now both you and me know that we've arrived at a fair price for the quality of my data for what you want to do with it. And that's once again from what I've seen in the data marketplaces, which are full of people who want that data for these learning models, often for financial markets, often for other reasons. This is their fundamental problem, which amazingly enough. There's a trust issue that is getting solved, and I think you can see even on the face of it, once that trust issue is solved, those markets can work a lot better, right?”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, guess what? We need an autonomous, impartial agent. We need impartial computational kind of agent, an on-chain smart contract with an Oracle network to assess my data, right, to basically take random cross-section samples of the data, assess it for quality, assess it for signal from the algorithm you have, which you don't want to share with me because you don't want to know the algorithm you're working on, right? You don't want me to know what you want the data for.”
2021-05-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #181 – Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink, Smart Contracts, and Oracle Networks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source