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Collection for podcasts • 511 items • Updated • 2
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A | What's the final stage of any civilization? Right? It's probably to create a universe. It's like the final thing you do. You're like, okay, we've explored the universe, we've conquered the stars, we can use all the energy. So now the final thing we'll do is we'll create a universe and we'll let that universe do whateve... |
B | Welcome to bankless, where we explore the frontier of Internet money and Internet finance. And today on bankless, we are exploring the frontier of on chain universes. On Ethereum, which is actually a real frontier. Space is the final frontier of physics and matter, but autonomous worlds are the new frontier of digital ... |
A | Hey David, thanks for having me. |
B | I think Lattice and what you guys are doing over there is probably got a pretty strong cult following of enthusiasts, but might not be pretty familiar with the general bankless audience. So can you just at a high level explain what you guys are doing over at lattice? What is your guys scope? |
A | Yes, the scope is to make unchained games real. So I feel like our origin stems all the way back to good old dark forest. If people here remember, that was a few years ago. I worked on it very briefly, should not get any credit for it. I was not there at the beginning, but I got my interest spiked. I stayed with the pe... |
B | Yeah, I think that gives listeners a snapshot of the tone or the vibe of where we're going here. I think there's two potential versions of what this conversation could be, and there's one that I very much want it to be. And one potential version is we could just explain what games you guys are building at lattice, why ... |
A | Yeah, so I think the challenge here is not to go too philosophical too quickly, because that's one thing we'll get. |
B | There at the end. |
A | Yeah, I'm sadly too good at this, so feel free to interrupt and bring me back to earth whenever that kicks in. But so I would say one way to think about this whole thing is that we're adding a new dimension to digital things. Digital objects, basically. It's like there's. We've been like, since we got computers going, ... |
B | Not just that. There's actually, like a geometry to the space. There's coordinates in the game. There's structures, there's visual structures, right? Maybe there's not matter there, but it's just close enough to the point where that does feel like a real space. |
A | And the thing that's interesting is, I would say it might be close enough or maybe it's not. Can we get to digital matter? When people talk about digital matter, all of that stuff, they always think about the input output. It's like, how does our body experience it? It's like, oh, let's put regroid VR headsets, or let'... |
B | Yeah, right. And really, just to remind listeners about the conversation thus far is we're talking about different ways to perceive Ethereum, right? Which is typically perceived as like, a revolution in money and finance. And I think what you are offering is like, well, there's a different way to perceive Ethereum as l... |
A | Yeah, sure. So the TL doctor on dark forest is. So many people were involved in Dark Forest originally. The original founder of Dark Forest is Gupt, who kind of, like, put the first version together, got the people to work on it. He wrote an essay called the strongest Crypto gaming thesis, which really got on chain gam... |
B | I've referenced FOMO three d a number of times on the podcast. It's basically, well, it's also a money game, right? It's a money game. It's specifically a specific economic game, but it is meant to be a game. |
A | Exactly. It is meant to be a game, and there are rules, and there are no hacks. The person that won respected the rules. Everybody was like, well, you cheated. But no, these were the rules of the game, and you won. Right? So Dark first was probably not the first game, but it was the first game that was like, okay, let'... |
B | What'S around me, because so listeners think like a Starcraft or like a game where, like, you, you start out, but, like, the map is unknown to you because you literally haven't explored it yet. So you always know what's in your, like, locale. |
A | Exactly, exactly. And it's a little bit like Solaris or something like that. They're just planets in space, and you start on a tiny planet, basically, and you can either explore around you, using your computational power to explore around you, or you can explore wherever you want. But the thing is, if you start explori... |
B | I literally have it right here because I use it to stabilize my. My monitor. |
A | Show you on camera? Yeah, exactly. That's issued a new book, and don't want to spoil the book, because I guess now many, many people are going to want to know the story, given it's on Netflix. But one key thing in dark trust is the idea that the universe is dark, and you don't know what's going on there. Right. So that... |
B | Can I pause and let's do some bullets about really, the impactful points about that story that I want to make sure that listeners captured. One is that the state of the dark forest universe is fully on chain. |
A | No servers. |
B | No servers. Right. This server is Ethereum. It's a procedurally generated universe, and there's different planets. And because of the leveraging of cryptography, CK proofs, you as a player of the game, you would literally go to the Dark Forest website, you would be dropped into this universe, interacting with this smar... |
A | Yeah, I think that's. That's brilliant. And I would say one more thing, which is that just like this universe, all of us can engineer and do science in it. In. In dark Forest, anyone can engineer and do science in dark forest. You know, you can all go and participate in this rule set, because the point is, the computer... |
B | Right. Okay. And so this, I think, dark forest kind of really opened up, like, exploded. It was the big bang of, like, autonomous worlds. Like, people are realizing the properties of these things, like, after the fact that they're created. And so, like, where does the story go from here? |
A | So the story goes, after dark forest, nobody really gives a shit. So people really are like, wow, darkface is really good. And people are like, wow, man, we really want more dark forest rounds. But it kind of stopped there, you know? And so one thing to know about dark forest is it was a tremendous effort to make dark ... |
B | So it was built, it was an assumption of a complete abundance of block space. |
A | Exactly, exactly. Complete abundance of block space, lower latency, et cetera. So kind of stopped there. And when me and Alvarez, the co founders of Lattice, the two of us kind of, like, ended up a summer with the dark fries founders, and we're like, let's try to build another game like this. Let's just see what it tak... |
B | And that's really for people like me who don't code. Can you like unpack that take for me? Because I actually don't understand that. |
A | So there's different kind of like levels of abstraction when trying to explain something to computer for it to do it. And the lowest level of the computer is tiny instructions for the CPU. That's called assembly. Right. And so you can write this by hand. That's what people were doing before we went to the moon. I mean,... |
B | But so you're skipping over every single layer of extraction, writing it straight to getting really close to the metal machine code. |
A | Machine code. |
B | And the benefits of this, at least in the defi context, is that your contracts are really gas efficient. |
A | Yeah. So the idea is a lot of people distrust the solidity compiler being like, I'm smarter than the solidity compiler, because what the solidity compiler does is you write some code and it turns that into machine code. Right, right. But every time. |
B | But there could be errors or whatever. |
A | Exactly. And then also it's just like way harder. It's just going to take you like 100 hours to make the most basic thing in many ways. So you have these layers of abstraction. Right. The first one is the introduction of a programming language. That's a big job, from assembly to a programming language. But in computing... |
B | Okay. And I think that starts to get into, like, why, what is lattice and what is it doing? So I'm going to go ahead and guess that lattice is some level of abstraction for building fully on chain games. On chain, exactly. |
A | Yes, yes. And we think that one of the big gifts we're going to make to the Ethereum ecosystem is that all the stuff that we're building for on chain games, it's secretly for anything. There's nothing that we're putting in our toolkit that is specific to games. It's just for any apps that is sufficiently complex. |
B | Gaming is a really good first use case to be a very complex use case. |
A | We care about it a lot, right. Because if we kind of like backtrack to a little bit of a philosophy interlude we did at the beginning, what we want is we want to add more verbs to ethereum. You know, Chris Dixon says blockchains adds the own verb to the Internet. And we think that's, like, a tremendous level up when it... |
B | Okay, so kind of just like, speed running through the history of, like, gaming. Specifically, we had, like, the crypto games of 2021, which were basically like Axie Infinity, right? These, like, Ponzi esque economic games, kind of a flash in the pan. They kind of spurred some development, but they really haven't made a... |
A | Yeah, and one thing I will add is that it's not only scale, which is one thing I think people focus a lot on, rightfully. Like, if you think about 20 years ago, we could have had a billion IBM mainframe instead of ten. It would not have changed anything. It's like, okay, we have a billion IBM mainframe, and what do we ... |
B | I haven't played these now, all of. |
A | These were games that were running in the browser, and they were essentially built around the limitations of browser games at the time and browser technology technologies. So what we're seeing today is a similar trend. Games are being built around the limitations still of small teams, plus blockchains today, which are,... |
B | So I think the vibe here is that there's just a bunch of teams who are kind of, like, assessing out the boundaries of what is really able. |
A | To build right now knows what needs to be built. It's not like there's something out there we can copy. Because the thing with the games we were talking about, which are like AAA games with assets on chain, is that they know what is going to be successful. They don't know if they will be successful. They're like, okay,... |
B | And I also want to just bring back something that you said about Dark Forest. Is that the original dark forest? And I think there's actually been some iterations as well, some, like, further versions, but it's still running. It's running right now. I played Dark Forest, like, three years ago or something, back when I l... |
A | Yeah, I think the word. I mean, what do you think about the word metaverse. I kind of erased it from my brain, to be fair, because of, like, how overloaded it come. |
B | But to be really overloaded in, it got really overloaded. |
A | But to be fair, like, I remember when, when I was working with the dark fresh folks, we were like, holy fucking shit. This is the metaverse. This is the real metaverse. The metaverse. This is not about how you perceive it with your eyes and your body. It's about the universe is real. |
B | It's real. |
A | It exists. It doesn't care about you. It has its rules. Machines will be able to interface in the universe the same way you do. You know? Like, you might need things in this universe that are kind of like aliens, you know? Like, what does it look like to have dark forest native like, things living there? That's very st... |
B | Right? So, like, chat GBT LLMs, like, the reason why, like, stable diffusion or chat GBT, there's always just errors in all of them, like, all the time. Because they have to be trained to ingest our human universe, our human Internet. Yeah. You have to go through a very intense training process for them to be, like, re... |
A | And you can simulate it. You can just be like, what would happen if I did that? And they can. They can know. They don't have to ask someone to tell them what would happen. They could just simulate it. |
B | Right. And so the learning process and the execution process for like, on chain agents is going to be vastly just more simple than the world of AI that we know as chastity. |
A | Totally, totally, totally. |
B | And then also at the same time, you have inside of these games that are being birthed, the assets inside of them are completely interoperable with the rest of Ethereum. Right? Totally. Is that true? |
A | They are, they are. I mean, they are up to the universe at the end of the day, these kind of like autonomous worlds. The world decides to what extent. So as an example, the world can decide, hey, it's interoperable, but I might take it away from you if someone in the game actually takes it away from you by violence. Th... |
B | Different rules of that universe. |
A | There's different rules, yeah. You can accept that universe and reach the other one, which is ours, but yes. So that's the thing that's interesting, is the assets are not sovereign. The world is sovereign. At the end of the day, you're an inhabitant of that world because these web 2.5 games, at the end of the day, the ... |
B | Yeah. The specific monetization model, I think, kind of will just come. I think the first order of business is just like, just grow the gdp of all of these. Exactly. Once there's a high amount of GDP, you'll figure out how to monetize. And the cool thing is, just growing in GDP is a monetization route for anyone who ma... |
A | No, it's in house for us. |
B | Okay. So, yeah, so he just. It's a one click deployment for rollups. And he said something where, like, the total number of supply of rollups will be a function of how much demand for compute that there is. And then he also said, like, well, there might be, like, times where you just spin up a roll up, but its state gr... |
A | Yeah, totally. I mean, one thing we're thinking a lot about with lattice and kind of, like, we started with Redstone, which is one chain already, like, much bigger blocks than the blockchain, is really optimized for mud. But the idea the long term is like, what does fractal scaling looks like, what does it look like to... |
B | So the thing is interesting with git. |
A | Exactly. And so I think it's interesting with worlds and with physics and all of that, and very viscerally for people playing video games, they know that when they do something in one part of the world, it doesn't have to be able to access and write to the state on the other side of the world. Right? Like, it takes tim... |
B | You become the God. |
A | Yeah, exactly. And then, and the thing is interesting is because roll ups, if these things that allow anyone to force include a transaction, you know, even if the sequencer doesn't like you, if I lend into the part of the universe that is run by an enemy guild, they can slow me down, but it can't slow me down infinitel... |
B | So you're starting to actually leverage what was previously external properties of these systems, and you're actually invoking them as actually part of the system itself, part of the universe itself. |
A | Yeah. |
B | Really interesting relationship between just like the hardware, software and actual, actual users. Okay, so you guys just deployed your layer two. What is that layer two going to do? What is that going to unlock for you guys? |
A | Yeah, so when we started, so we first, we built games, right? And we're like, okay, we have to build this operating system for Ethereum, right? Like, it's just, it's untenable right now to build games or any form of complex apps. So we built mod and we made a lot of nice thing with it. We're like, okay, you don't, you ... |
B | Okay, so there are some of these call demo games, like I said, sussing out the boundaries of what you can really do here. But let's zoom forward to just really use your imagination. Where do you think these types of games could look like in like ten years, 20 years? What's the final form of these games? |
A | Yeah, I think it would really depend how serious people are about them. You know, how early bitcoin it was like, oh, I have all of these bitcoins. I don't know what to do with them. Like I'll buy a pizza for like, I don't know how many bitcoins. And it was just like this thing that you just play around with it, but now... |
B | Make a perfectly rational decision. |
A | Everything is a calculation, right? And the thing with over financialization is that it basically gets all of us to slowly become homo economicus. In many ways, it's really hard to resist the homo economicus. So I think that I just want to see where, I don't know in which direction is going to go, but it will heavily d... |
B | It is Minecraft burning man. |
A | It's Minecraft burning man. Exactly. And I think it will look way more like that than a super polished, like, oh, I'm playing my first day of this triple a game, and I'm being like, kind of like following the tutorial. I mean, the great thing is companies can go do that. You know, if you have one of these worlds, if I'... |
B | I think that there's, it feels like this is such a strong conclusion of, like, where all of this blockchain stuff goes. Because, like, if you believe that we're going on chain, like, this is where, this is what that means, right? And this is, you're putting more stuff on chain and not, we're not just like, putting stuf... |
A | And that GDP currently, the way people try to create that GDP is very reflexive, because if you have a world that has no rules but money, it's like, well, you bring money to make more money, and then you swap that money for another money, and then you speculate on that money, and then you can take it out. The thing is,... |
B | Like, literally server. Yeah, right? |
A | Yeah, yeah, literally. I want to be uploaded in an autonomous world. I don't want to be uploaded into something else. Another thing to kind of, like, throw out there as, like, truly speculative stuff is that what's the final stage of any civilization, right? It's probably to create a universe. It's like the final thing... |
B | Beautiful. Well, Justin, this is exactly. It's cosmic, because I was hoping this conversation would be if people are peaked and they want to learn more about what you guys are doing at lattice, where should they go? |
A | You guys can follow us on Twitter. Lattice XYz. We have a bunch of blog posts on lattice XYz as well. You should check out Xerox PaRC as well. Xerox Parc is the founder of Lattice. It all comes from Xerox Parc. Dark Frost, the blog post and everything. I'd say the more cosmic vision of all of this is usually, usually s... |
B | Well, I will certainly be at the autonomous world assembly at Defcon. I've had autonomous worlds in the back of my mind ever since playing dark forest, and so it's been something that I know is out there. I just know it takes a lot of development. Like you said, there's a bunch of abstraction layers that still need to ... |
A | Thank you so much. |
B | David Bankless nation. You guys know the deal. Crypto is risky, and in autonomous worlds there are actual real consequences in them, which is kind of the cool part, but nonetheless, you can put what you put in. We are headed west. This is the frontier, and it's not for everyone. But we are glad you are with us on the b... |
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