We have a lot of out-of-towners here tonight. One thing you guys need to know about the Bay Area is that every conversation here eventually ends up being about cryptocurrency. People have strong opinions on it. Good? Bad? Ugly?
Before discussing the obvious, let’s start with the good. All of our favorite community organizations - MIRI, Lightcone, whichever AI safety labs haven’t turned evil yet - have gotten a lot of their support from big crypto donors. Vitalik Buterin, Jaan Tallinn, Jed McCaleb, we’re really grateful to all of them. If we make it through crunch time, maybe it will be because these people suddenly had billions of dollars when we needed it most.
Then there’s the bad. Ponzi schemes. A massive environmental footprint. Incredibly annoying Twitter spam.
But this year we mostly saw the ugly. The FTX catastrophe really hurt. Partly because we were victims and lost a lot of money. Partly just because some of the people involved were our friends, and we feel betrayed. But partly because we wonder if our ideas were complicit in this event that caused a lot of people a lot of harm. We rationalists have many obvious bad qualities - annoying, nitpicky, impractical, out-of-touch, obsessive - but until last month, nobody would have ever said dishonest. Now we face one of the most basic questions of rationality - how hard do we update? Who can we trust? And if we can’t have perfect accuracy, do we err on the side of trusting too much, or trusting too little?
I can’t answer those questions tonight. Instead, I want to tell you a different story about crypto.
Crypto started with Satoshi Nakamoto, international man of mystery. Lots of people speculate on Satoshi’s true identity, and one name comes up again and again. He’s the first person named on Satoshi’s Wikipedia page. He’s mentioned as a candidate in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He’s the most-commonly cited name in the Bitcoin community itself.
That person is our friend Hal Finney.
The evidence in favor - and sorry, this isn’t going to make a lot of sense for those of you who skipped the Night part, your friends can explain later - Hal had been trying to invent some kind of cryptocurrency since 2004. The first Bitcoin transaction was from Satoshi’s account to Hal’s. Hal admits to helping Satoshi code the first Bitcoin wallet. The two worked together so often and so closely that some people wonder if maybe they were the same person. Also, Satoshi kept $20 billion in Bitcoin and never spent any of it, which would make a lot more sense if he died tragically in 2014.
I have to be honest: I don’t quite believe this theory. Hal always denied it, and he was an honest guy. The prediction markets say only 25% chance. Still, if he wasn’t Satoshi, he was at the very least Satoshi’s right-hand man, the guy who helped turn his idea into reality.
All that software Hal was forcing himself to stay alive to program? The code he wrote by moving his eye muscles after the rest of his body was paralyzed? That was the first Bitcoin wallet. And he knew how important it would be – Bitcoin was worth forty cents at the time and he was already predicting one day it would break a million dollars.
Hal Finney wasn’t just holding on in order to spit in the face of death. I mean, he was doing that, definitely. But also, he had something to protect, something he thought was really important. He believed that the magic Internet money he was working on could preserve privacy, protect democracy, bring down dictatorships, and – yeah, maybe help his weird friends get billions of dollars when they needed it most.
Whatever your reference class - rationalists, cryptocurrency, humanity - it contains people like FTX. But it also contains people like Hal. And I think if the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed by FTX-like people - powerful people, playing games they don’t fully understand, with everyone else’s lives as table stakes. But if the world is saved, it might be saved by people like Hal. Ordinary people working quietly, under impossible conditions, with something to protect.
And one more moral. In his Death With Dignity post, Eliezer wrote that you don’t die with dignity by setting out, as your goal, to die with dignity. You set out, as your goal, to win overwhelmingly, and then, if you die, it was with dignity. But when you set out as your goal to win overwhelmingly, one thing that very very occasionally happens is that you do, in fact, win overwhelmingly. Not always. And we’re not supposed to demand any specific miracle. Still, if you despair, remember Hal Finney - paralyzed, half-dead, programming Bitcoin with twitches of his eye muscles, and remember - it’s happened before.
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