A Hail Mary Email
I consider myself a fortunate man who, from a hail Mary email in August of 2015, ended up working, and forming a friendship, with Nick Szabo.
Aug 3, 2015
Hello Mr. Szabo,
I am Donald McIntyre founder of Etherplan, an app on Ethereum to help people build their own decentralized portfolios.
As a Wall Street veteran and blockchain enthusiast I think Etherplan achieves the goals of lowering risks and costs through decentralization. I think it changes a 600 year banking paradigm.
I contact you to kindly ask if you could take a look at it and, if you are interested, it would be great if you would like to participate as an advisor or if you want to participate as a seed investor too.
Please let me now, best,
Donald
He was very kind to respond with some questions, and after a couple of weeks of email conversations we both agreed to be advisors of each others’ projects. He became my advisor at Etherplan, and I became his advisor at the complementary project he was leading, Global Financial Access, Inc.
However, working together has been accompanied by an incredible intellectual experience. No conversation, email, or brief interaction has been trivial.
Modus Cogitandi
Szabo’s intelligence is notable, but, in my opinion, his passion, persistence, focus, and energy in deconstructing the topics he is interested in, from their proximate and obvious meaning to their ultimate reduction to the underlying meta and concrete physical, even sometimes subatomic, explanations, is astounding.
Smart, diligent, and dedicated persons in some subjects usually command breadth and depth in their expertise. Szabo commands more breadth, more depth, in more subjects, together with extremely original, counterintuitive thinking, and a unique personal discipline of only pursuing and producing points, arguments, and conclusions that must be completely new, thus valuable, given the current state of knowledge of the underlying subjects.
After he wrote his seminal essay “Money, Blockchains and Social Scalability” I wrote to him the following email (I left spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes to preserve originality):
Feb 10, 2017
Hi Nick,
Congratulations for the blog post you published yesterday!
https://unenumerated.blogspot.hr/2017/02/money-blockchains-and-social-scalability.html
I think it has been well received and has high impact because it provides a very good and timely framework for several things that are under hot debate presently or needed clarification for a long time:
– the block size debate (core vs BU)
– the public vs private blockchain debate
– the trustless vs trust minimized confusion
– etc.I think the depth and method you used to explain the issues is also very illustrating, for example the explanation of the relationships and functions of money and markets: time, coincidence of needs, space, information flow, etc. etc.
You also connect the content of what you are explaining in optimal historic context in term of economic history, the role computer science, biological evolution, human institutions and the past great authors who, in a way, paved the way for your insightful conclusions.
I think, like I told you once in Palo Alto, in between VC meetings and In-n-Out Burgers, you have a unique “modus cogitandi” which means “way of thinking” (similar to “modus operandi”). You have a unique ability to factorize the issues and convert them into its generic components, but at the same time telling the story in a simple and understandable way (which doesn’t mean any meaning or content is lost, I think many have to read your essays many times to understand all the concepts you explained, or maybe they just read it once lightly and just lose the complexity (which I think is the problem of many unfortunately!).
The introduction of “social scalability” as a concept is novel and extremely elegant, and its presentation as a tradeoff vis a vis computation scalability and what was is the choice Satoshi made, is a fundamental distinction I think will prevail as the standard conceptualization and market positioning between public, private and other types of chains that may exist in the future.
I think a Nobel price in economics is too small of a distinction for what you have contributed to human knowledge and still contributing, including Shelling Out, Artifacts of Wealth, Weigh and Deliver, and this Money, Blockchains and Social Scalability.
How Has Interacting With Nick Affected Me?
The title of this post is “Learning From the Quiet Master” because he was correctly described as such when he was interviewed in the very successful podcast episode by Tim Ferris and Naval Ravikant, “The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency“.
Intellectually and ethically, Szabo would have been a good and appreciated pupil of Aristotle. Especially, with regards to the ethics of eudaimonia due to his permanent search for genuine intellectual progress, truth, and correctness.
Personally, my intuition is that Szabo must be at the level of Aristotle and other philosophers. In modern times I think his work and insights are comparable to Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, Born, and Schrödinger, and, why not, Darwin and Hamilton.
It’s a matter of time until it is more widely recognized.
But, all of the above is just to illustrate how, as the pupil, of the pupil, of the pupil, I value immensely having had exposure to Nick, his understanding of, and way of thinking about, things. I think such exposure has, saving the intellectual distance, significantly changed the way I think myself, and the way I approach and research subjects.
Learning From Szabo
Szabo doesn’t lecture.
He is, indeed, “quiet”. The key is to ask the right questions or just to express a minimally interesting concept so he can give you his opinion. Especially when you are getting it wrong.
For example, once we were walking in San Francisco and I said something like, “…because blockchains are the source of truth”. He commented back, “Blockchains don’t guarantee truth; they just preserve truth and lies from later alteration”.
That alone was enough for three days of deep thought from my part to reorganize my conceptualization of what were blockchains for!
Nick is open and humble enough to not only respond to an email from a stranger like me, but to respond publicly on social media, as when many people interact with him on Twitter.
Szabo writes.
I always say that reading an essay by Nick Szabo is worth like six months of university courses.
It was actually when we started to work together that I began reading his essays multiple times, with more attention, so I could understand his thinking. I usually write down the parts and snippets I don’t comprehend, and then I do my research on them to try to have a similar understanding so I can grasp the concepts as much as possible.
Every time I do this, and I read an essay again to see if I got it, I frequently find new concepts that I did not register in previous reads, just because I didn’t have the knowledge of the concepts I had to research.
After several iterations as above, when I get to the point where I have no more doubts about everything he has written in the essay, is when I can finally feel comfortable, at least to the extent of my personal ability, that I understand the entirety of his thought, or what he wanted to convey, about the particular subject.
Sometimes, what seems like a simple five sentence paragraph is like a knowledge Matryoshka doll with multiple levels of information!
Recommended Reading
My recommendation to any person who wants to learn from Szabo, his way of thinking, and the important subjects he covers, is to do what I do above, while reading the following works:
1. Shelling Out: The Origins of Money (2002)
Link: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/
Excerpt:
We will see that some humans, too, chose highly risky and discontinuous prey items, and shared the resulting surpluses with non-kin. Indeed, they accomplished this to a far greater extent than the vampire bat. How they did so is the main subject of our essay. Dawkins suggests, “money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism”, but then pursues this fascinating idea no further. We will.
2. Trusted Third Parties Are Security Holes (2001)
Link: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/trusted-third-parties/
Excerpt:
Commercial security is a matter of solving the practical problems of business relationships such as privacy, integrity, protecting property, or detecting breach of contract. A security hole is any weakness that increases the risk of violating these goals. In this real world view of security, a problem does not disappear because a designer assumes it away. The invocation or assumption in a security protocol design of a “trusted third party” (TTP) or a “trusted computing base” (TCB) controlled by a third party constitutes the introduction of a security hole into that design. The security hole will then need to be plugged by other means.
3. History and the Security of Property (2005 – 2006)
Link: https://archive.is/dRXEK
Excerpt:
Climate-based explanations for the birth of agriculture are nonsense…
More likely explanations for the agricultural revolution are probably far less observable. The crucial role of security for the history of farming may also shed light on the birth of agricultural in the first place. Hunter-gatherers were very knowledgeable about plants and animals, far more than the typical modern. It would not have taken a genius — and there were many, as their brains were as large as ours — to figure out that you can plant a seed into the ground and it will grow. There must have been, rather, some severe institutional constraints that prevented agriculture from arising in the first place. The basic problem is that somebody has to protect that seedling for several months from enemies, and then has to harvest it before the enemy (or simply a envious neighbor) does. Security and allocation of property rights between providers of security and providers of farm labor were the intractable problems that took vast amounts of trial and error as well as genius to solve in order for agriculture to take root.
4. Objective Versus Intersubjective Truth (1998)
Excerpt:
The genetic codes (especially their “semantics”, the corresponding metabolisms) of plants and animals are examples of such highly evolved structures. We have only very recently achieved some understanding of the syntax of such codes, and grok only a miniscule portion of their “semantics”.
Memetic codes, such as legal traditions, are a still more complicated example of such highly evolved structure: dealing with interactions between highly information-rich minds over multiple lifetimes, during which certain actions at the start of life can have irrevocable but not feasibly foreseeable consequences on the rest of a life and on later generations, they typically fall within (a), (b), and sometimes (c). Only a highly evolved tradition can contain the information needed to solve such problems.
5. Mental Transaction Costs (1996)
Excerpt:
These mental accounting costs, not the physical or computational or amortized R&D costs of payment or billing method, set the main lower bound on price granularity. Judging from pricing granularity trends such as the trend towards flat rates in online services, online pricing granularity is far above suggested micropayment levels of a few cents or even fractions of a cent. The mental accounting costs for a typical on-line consumer seem to be somewhat higher than those in more familiar areas of commerce.
6. Bit Gold (1998 – 2005)
Link: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/bit-gold/
Excerpt:
Thus, it would be very nice if there were a protocol whereby unforgeably costly bits could be created online with minimal dependence on trusted third parties, and then securely stored, transferred, and assayed with similar minimal trust. Bit gold.
My proposal for bit gold is based on computing a string of bits from a string of challenge bits, using functions called variously “client puzzle function,” “proof of work function,” or “secure benchmark function.” The resulting string of bits is the proof of work. Where a one-way function is prohibitively difficult to compute backwards, a secure benchmark function ideally comes with a specific cost, measured in compute cycles, to compute backwards.
7. Secure Property Titles With Owner Authority (1998)
Link: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/secure-property-titles/
Excerpt:
New advances in replicated database technology will give us the ability to securely maintain and transfer ownership for a wide variety of kinds of property, including not only land but chattels, securities, names, and addresses. This technology will give us public records which can “survive a nuclear war”, along the lines of the original design goal of the Internet. While thugs can still take physical property by force, the continued existence of correct ownership records will remain a thorn in the side of usurping claimants.
I use political words in this essay as metaphors to describe how our hypothetical property title software, and especially its protocol for distributing the title database across a public network, could work. A group, called a property club, gets together on the Internet[5] and decides to keep track of the ownership of some kind of property. The property is represented by titles: names referring to the property, and the public key corresponding to a private key held by its current owner, signed by the previous owner, along with a chain of previous such titles. Title names may “completely” describe the property, for example allocations in a namespace. (Of course, names always refer to something, the semantics, so such a description is not really complete). Or the title names might simply be labels referring to the property. Various descriptions and rules – maps, deeds, and so on – may be included.
8. Money, Blockchains, and Social Scalability (2017)
Link: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2017/02/money-blockchains-and-social-scalability.html
Excerpt:
Instead, the secret to Bitcoin’s success is that its prolific resource consumption and poor computational scalability is buying something even more valuable: social scalability. Social scalability is the ability of an institution –- a relationship or shared endeavor, in which multiple people repeatedly participate, and featuring customs, rules, or other features which constrain or motivate participants’ behaviors — to overcome shortcomings in human minds and in the motivating or constraining aspects of said institution that limit who or how many can successfully participate. Social scalability is about the ways and extents to which participants can think about and respond to institutions and fellow participants as the variety and numbers of participants in those institutions or relationships grow. It’s about human limitations, not about technological limitations or physical resource constraints. There are separate engineering disciplines, such as computer science, for assessing the physical limitations of a technology itself, including the resource capacities needed for a technology to handle a greater number of users or a greater rate of use. Those engineering scalability disciplines are not, except by way of contrast with social scalability, the subject of this essay.
Conclusion
In summary, I feel lucky to be able to chat with Nick Szabo from time to time, but also grateful for all the work he has done further illuminating reality for the general knowledge of man.
Code Is Law
