"the following is a conversation with sylvia mccauley a computer scientist at mit winner of the touring award and one of the leading minds in the fields of cryptography information security game theory..."

"silvio mccauley let's start with the big and the basic question what is a blockchain and why is it interesting why is it fascinating why is it powerful all right so a blockchain think of it is a is re..."

"from a bunch of different perspectives including like a technical perspective but you often talk about blockchain and some of these concepts of decentralization scalability security all those kinds of..."

"correct again i apologize for a set of ridiculous questions but uh you mentioned cryptocurrencies of money what what is money why do we have money do you think about this kind of from this high philos..."

"uh you have a deep like network of beliefs about how society operates so the value is assigned even to sheep based on that everyone will continue operating how they were previously operating yeah some..."

"is something you know and i've been reading more and more about different cryptocurrencies there is a kind of uh belief that the scarcity of a particular resource like bitcoin has a limited amount uh ..."

"of blockchain and cryptocurrency what does scalability mean so remember if we said that the blockchain is a ledger and each page receives that gets transaction and everybody can write in this in these..."

"it has to be everybody should be able uh to read and not to alter the pages or the content of the pages that's okay but you know what that is actually easy cryptographically easy cryptographical means..."

"being not that i want to volunteer for a job but then i would have more power than any absolute monarch in history because i would have a tremendous power to say these are the transactions that the en..."

"you should be given to add to the ledger yeah so somehow you want to make sure that you know you need to work because you want to prevent you want to make sure that you know you get a one solution eve..."

"and they say well why don't we do that we have a solution well first of all a page every 10 minutes is not fast enough it's a question of scalability and second of all to ensure that no matter how man..."

"and so then now you have air conditioning uh galore to add to the thing it becomes so expensive that fewer and fewer and fewer people can actually compete in order to add to the page and the problem b..."

"fact i believe if they're going to remain honest for the foreseeable future so when do we do ourselves a favor let's entrust them to add the page on behalf of all of us to the ledger okay okay but now..."

"uh um when thinking about algonquin for a different approach and so we have a man approaching retinol is really really decentralized because essentially um it works as follows so you have a bunch of t..."

"the power but you know once uh up in a while one of your tokens is selected and you are in charge of this committee to select the next page but this goes around very quickly so and if you look at this..."

"randomness as a powerful tool to get decentralization so what does honesty mean and uh now we're into the social side of things which is uh how do we know that like the fraction a large fraction of uh..."

"all grant is not a majority of a small group but is a majority of the token holders had to conspire with each other in order to think of a very economy for which they own the majority of yes but i thi..."

"the security as you as you mentioned that you're referring to is basically security against dishonesty right or manipulation or whatever yes yes so essentially when what you're going to to do is to be..."

"not enough times until you win and when you pull the lever case one either you win in such a case you have a winning ticket or you lose you don't get any winning ticket so if you don't have a winning ..."

"because what you have to do okay yeah to do the lottery how long the lottery takes it takes actually one microsecond whether you have one token or two tokens or a billion tokens is always one microsec..."

"for that and um and so what they got to write is they make that is make if it is hard to subvert and change value to to cancel a transaction it's not impossible that is very hard what they did not get..."

"well that is difficult to do so you're talking to somebody that when i decided to throw my heart in the arena and i decided first of all i as i said before i much admire my predecessors i mean they go..."

"applications correct yeah yeah i still wonder what kind of applications are yet to be like enabled by it because so much the interesting thing about nft is you know if you look outside of art is uh ju..."

"and then you have to have this kind of blockchains to uh the scalability security and decentralization and decentralization is of course the tricky one because uh people in power start to get nervous ..."

"complex living being is distributed i mean um uh i don't know if somebody is a okay tell silvia now it's time to eat uh right so you have millions of cells in your body you have billions of bacteria e..."

"philosophy and the how let's start with the philosophy so i really believe that uh nothing fixed last very long and and so i really believe that life is about intelligent adaptation things change and ..."

"is there so we've been talking a little bit about cryptocurrency but is there spaces where this kind of blockchain ideas that you're describing which i find fascinating uh do you think they can revolu..."

"finance is uh an incredible form of freedom i mean if i free to do anything i want to but i don't even mean to do anything that's a bad idea so i really think the financial freedom is very very import..."

"that the first guarantee of financial growth and prosperity are really the legal system the courts because we may not think about them and say oh the courts are kind of a bunch of boring lawyers but w..."

"there is a little bit of attention that i wonder if you can speak to where this kind of transparency there's a tension with privacy is it possible to achieve privacy if wanted on uh on a blockchain do..."

"privacy for the fact that who knows if this keys belong publicly belongs to me or to you right and i can when i want to change my money from one public key i split it through other public keys go on t..."

"algorand is like one of the most exciting technically at least from my perspective technologies ideas in this whole space what's the future of algon look like uh is it possible for it to dominate the ..."

"so there's a idea i don't know they call themselves bitcoin maximalists which is essentially the bet that uh the philosophy that bitcoin will eat the world so you're talking about it's good to have va..."

"let me ask the well first the ridiculous question do you have any clue who's who satoshi nakamoto is is that even a interesting question well is it you your question by the way are very interesting so..."

"when you look at the bitcoin is a piece of work that as it defects yes like anything human but it was captivated the imaginations of millions of people as subverted the status quo and i'm saying you k..."

"living being unfortunately easy the other way around very hard and so the fact that the notion of a function which you have a recipe that is in front of your eyes to transform an x into f of x and the..."

"actually the foundation of all the cryptography and let me tell you is an old notion because very often in any mythology that we think of the most powerful gods or goddesses are the ones of x and the ..."

"is x f of x going from x for x to x r let us do predicting bits by a magic of reductions in mathematical apparatus this simple function morphs itself into pseudogenomic generation this is simple funct..."

"what are those what uh what's the difference in those and the generators should run random number generators okay let's start how do they work let's uh let's go back to pseudogana number generation ye..."

"and you see all the bits i produce so far if i if you were to bet given all the bits produced so far what is the next bit in my sequence better than 50 50. of course 50 50 anybody can guess right but ..."

"used something pre-modern cryptography unfortunately they'll be better served to take 300 uh real seed random number and uh and then expand them properly as we know now uh but met has been a very old ..."

"in which all the experiments you could do all the inferences you could do all the things you could do there you would not be able to distinguish them from truly random so if you are not able to distin..."

"well the answer is actually maybe but if there exists most probably is expensive to get and uh and uh and in any case if i give you one of mine um you'll never tell them apart yeah but not any other s..."

"you know the world is deterministic at the core i mean it's against the debate but if it is in fact deterministic at the lowest possible level uh at the at the physics level uh how do you make if if i..."

"at some point and the space of free will seems to shrink we realize how more and more how much of our say genetic apparatus dictates who we are why we prefer certain things than others right and why w..."

"which most probably is the case of this week or i've been very very unlucky because it's like if i had a hundred coin tosses and i got a hundred heads very improbable right so that is a way and so thi..."

"to belabor and check all the the passages of a very very very long proof and you better check all of them because if you don't check one line an error can be in that line and so you have to go linearl..."

"that an assertion is correct without having any idea why this is so and so people fail to say if you want to verify something you have to to have a proof once you have a proof you know why it's true y..."

"there's power in games yeah and you've recently gotten into uh recently i'm not sure you can correct me uh mechanism design yeah uh so it's i mean first of all maybe you can explain what mechanism des..."

"and it is a very hard science and art to design with games and it challenges us to actually come up with solution concepts for way to analyzing the games that need to be broader and i think the number..."

"then what do i do when you need to enlarge a way what a rational player can do so for instance uh in my opinion at least in some of my i played with this for a few years and i i was doing some exotic ..."

"be equally happy and so i really believe that um this type of analysis you know is uh as possible and uh as a bigger radius so it reaches some more games more classes of games and uh and after that we..."

"no incentives essentially and and but but technically speaking there is a notion that uh uh is actually believable right so that to say um people want to maximize their utility yes up to a point let m..."

"essentially means of it you know the reason uh having no incentives is actually a good thing because to prevent people from reasoning how else i encounter game the system but why can we achieve an arg..."

"since you're italian sicilian i also heard rumors that you are a connoisseur of food uh what you know if i said today is the last day you get to be alive i'm rushing you shouldn't have trusted me you ..."

"in a dialect a very poor language very unsophisticated to express a very sophisticated situation i love it people who love it and italians are not italian but but what i got of it is that you know ver..."

"our strength and i think that rather than complaining about eliminations we should embrace them because if you embrace our limitation limited as we are we find very creative solutions that people with..."

"so i don't know if uh you miss some of that when you're speaking english in this country yes in fact actually i certainly i i'm uh i miss it and uh somehow it was a sacrifice that i made consciously b..."

"so all of a sudden i found myself on the border [Laughter] so i had to fight all my way up back up and but but i'm not saying i go back to fasting their limitations are actually our strength in fact i..."

"feel like i have quite a few limitations but more practically on the russian side i'm going to try to do a couple of really big and really tough interviews in russian uh once coveted lifts a little bi..."

"beautifully said thanks for sharing this is great yes i totally understand you yes you've accomplished some incredible things in this space of science in the space of technology space of theory and en..."

"of them as artists as well if you are a human being so you are really to live fully your emotions and to the extent possible sometimes emotions cannot be overbearing and my devices try to express them..."

"unfortunately we humans are mortal or appear to be for the most part uh do you think about your own mortality do you do you fear death i hope so and i because i mean without death there is no life so ..."

"to guarantee privacy and and give you the security of interaction and not only in that transaction like it would be a blockchain transaction but that is really one of the hardcore of my emotional prob..."