Ep 340 - Humanode: One Person, One Vote with Victor Vernissage

Steve Grumbine: 00:00:43

: All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today's guest is an interesting one.His name is Victor Vernissage and Victor is an entrepreneur. He's also the cofounder of a project called Humanode. And this caught my eye while back because I don't think I've hidden this.If I've hidden it somewhere, maybe you haven't paid attention. I don't believe we live in a democracy and I believe there is a thousand, million maybe pieces of evidence to prove that I am correct on that.I don't believe that I'm stuttering. I don't believe that I'm wonky or off or conspiratorial or anything else like that.I believe that I'm saying things that have been in plain sight that have been documented. I frequently point straight to the Princeton study in 2014 that shows that the people have precisely zero, when I say zero, I mean zero impact on policy, zero impact on our government, that our government serves oligarchy,that our government is filled with corporates, corporations, people that serve corporations, and the people that are in elite circles that do not represent the people in any way, shape or form. Now, I have been very critical of crypto in my past. I remain so. However, obviously I've worked with the Blockchain Socialist in the past as well.There are opportunities to use these technologies for good and to bring about outcomes that are maybe different than what we've thought of.We've talked about smart contracts with guys like Brett Scott and we've talked about "How do you prove who you are?" and "How do you prove the work you're doing?"And it was another project that I was on years ago where we talked about building democracy through these kinds of blockchain-based worlds, if you will, and environments that allow us to work on things that matter to us. We've discussed these things. We've discussed mutual credit. We've discussed a host of them. But Victor has a unique approach to things.Now some of the stuff they're doing is obviously similar to others and I'm going to let him dive into all that here. But one of the things that fascinated me was the biometric way of proving who you are without giving up who you are, without allowing your person to be spammed and thrown out there and hacked,but yet at the same time still proving, if you think about it, one person, one vote, and obviously these are incubator-type things, they are not in the mainstream yet.They're not going to suddenly take away the lack of democracy that people funnel billions of dollars into every year for consultants to get rich and other insiders to get rich on. This is experimental.And so I feel it's really important to take the understanding we have of modern monetary theory, to take our understanding of democracy or the lack thereof, and to understand the way that these kinds of technologies can be leveraged to maybe blaze a new path or maybe a shadow of the government that we think we have, but we don't have as a means of organizing people and organizing projects and finding a way to get past the blockers that we all face. So without further ado, let me bring on my guest, Victor. Welcome to the show, sir.

Victor Vernissage: 00:04:06

: Hello Steve. Thank you very much. It's really an honor to be here, given who was here in the podcast before me, my teachers, let's say. 

Steve Grumbine: 00:04:16

: That's awesome. Victor, you have a unique product in Humanode. And I'll be perfectly frank for everybody to know this. I am not a crypto expert. I am not a developer.

Victor Vernissage: 00:04:27

: This is not financial advice. 

Steve Grumbine: 00:04:32

: Yeah, this is not financial. Exactly. I am not an investor, you name it. I am also not selling a product here, but I am selling ideas. I am trying to get us to think differently.So with that, Victor, tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us a lot about Humanode.

Victor Vernissage: 00:04:46

: Sure. Well, I'm an economist at heart.I first fell in love with economics when I was 12 and later on started few traditional IT startups, let's say. Not that exciting.Then I run a crypto research firm for a few years and that's where we understood one basic fact, that all these crypto networks, blockchains as we used to call them, ledgers of shared truth, right? Because that some truth of the monetary system that we agree on, this is what is kept in the blockchains. They are not decentralized at all.I mean, the technology is decentralized because anybody can use it. Anybody can take it and launch another ledger with their own people running it.But eventually the security, the governance, the management of these "decentralized blockchains," they are all based on capital requirements.You either have to buy a lot of equipment in order to mine bitcoin, which is now you will not need a person who mines bitcoin at home because it got industrialized and also politicized heavily.And then all the other blockchains are even more directly, let's say oligarchic, and just resemble the same equity system we have when we run our companies and sell shares and all the rest of the blockchains, you basically buy the token. You launch a small server. You lock these tokens in a small server, and this gives you the power equal to the number of tokens you have. It really looks like the social structures we had long ago, before we discovered the thing called democracy.And it feels like now crypto is still in the dark ages, even compared to the financial systems we have. If we don't just look at the speed of transactions, but how it is governed.And Humanode is the answer to that, because we are the first ones who are trying to build a decentralized ledger which is managed and governed on the principle of "one human, one vote."So every human can launch a server at his home or buy a cloud server, which is a prerequisite to start validating the transactions as on any blockchain.But instead of asking people to buy a lot of equipment or lock their tokens, we welcome anybody who does have a lot of money to start participating in the system just by launching this small server. And important thing, may sound dystopian, but we're working on [the] privacy of biometrics.Biometrics became accurate enough in order for us to understand whether the person in front of this computer is real and whether the person is unique. In a couple of seconds, on a scale of millions of people, it already works fine from any device with even really bad camera. And that's how we built Humanode. We merge the blockchain with cryptography to make biometrics private with biometrics themselves.And of course, the most difficult part we're working on is the social structure that governs how the blockchain is updated.What are the next things we're going to develop in order to improve the system, and even how the treasury of the project is spent, which can be 10 million, which can be billions of dollars, and how we can build a system without it falling apart. Have we ever had the systems like that, which have no autocrat on the top who can come in and veto anything other people do?We are asking these questions ourselves every day. We're still architecturing this kind of system for the last five years. And yeah, in short, this is what we're working on.And the beauty of Humanode in economic terms, and I wish I'm going to live till the time when such a kind of system can be adopted, at least inside a small community or a small island country.Imagine if the banks would be just applications, right? And these applications all run on a blockchain like Humanode or any decentralized ledger like Humanode.So all the citizens become the equal holders of the truth of the ledger.And what I mean here every citizen has a small server, participate in the consensus and they can know that they have the same power in the consensus over the records we have. And these are not just banks having different ledgers and sending information privately to each other, but it's a transparent system.And the beauty of it is that when anybody sends money to anyone else, the transaction fee doesn't go to the pocket of the banks, it gets distributed equally among all the citizens. And this is something I hope could be a basis of UBI [universal basic income] built into financial system.So I think that's enough for the interest Steve, and we can delve into any part of it.

Steve Grumbine: 00:09:52

: Yeah, so really obviously we're talking about the difference between private ownership here, in this case, in a sense it would be a shadow versus the public space which is run theoretically, it's run democratically because we elect these people, blah, blah, blah. And that has been the standard by which MMT has had its authority, is understanding that money is a creature of the state. It's a creature of law.And as the state issues money and it gives charters out to sublet money issuance through banks, it ultimately still is very disconnected from democracy.

Victor Vernissage: 00:10:28

: Yes.

Steve Grumbine: 00:10:29

: It's not democratically run because we don't have a democratic society. We don't live in a democracy.No advanced capitalist country has a real functioning democracy. I mean, the only place I've seen that remotely looks like this, and I'm going to just probably blow some people's minds because they want to hear the CIA propaganda is I look at China and even if they have a bit of an autocratic government, they seem to be never allowing the rich to have more power than they should and raising wages for the average workers. And again, this is a state that more closely resembles that. Aside from that, my plea has been to build parallel systems.

Victor Vernissage: 00:11:14

: Yes, yes.

Steve Grumbine: 00:11:15

: To build out a way of breaking free of the control, to be able to organize.Because see, when you organize within the political parties, those political parties have masters and those masters are the ones that kind of get to decide what matters and what doesn't matter.And by building parallel systems, we're not held prey to the every-two-year, four-year, election cycle. We are able to build up power and build up organizing outside that's resilient.If people talk about a general strike, how in the world would you have a general strike if you have no funds, if you have no ability to finance yourself and to keep people housed and to keep people fed through mutual aid, etc.? How would you do any of that and actually have a general strike against the oligarchy? Which is what every union person says.Even the most normie person out there tries to point to a general strike, but they never ever talk about how to build up the capacity or the resiliency of the individuals that would have to actually participate in that.And if you've ever been in a union anywhere else, you know that the minute the strike fund dries up or the minute the people's budgets start getting pinched, they start crossing the picket line. Without some form of resiliency built up outside of that system, I have no idea how to take on that system.So this is what is intriguing to me about this. Because it is one person, one node, one, one, one, one verified across the board equal ownership of the truth, as you say.And again, I have my misgivings about some of the right-wing versions of this, but from a working-class perspective this sounds like it has potential. And I would imagine you have smart contracts written into this.I would imagine you have a host of other things that allow people to have confidence in the means of interaction. Would you get into kind of the bones of your system? Maybe you even comment back to what I said.

Victor Vernissage: 00:13:05

:  The bones of the system. That's a simple blockchain.There is a consensus on the level of transmitting the transaction data or any kind of contract data that run on top of blockchain. If anybody's familiar how Ethereum works, pretty much any other blockchain works the same way.You have the base layer of it, which is what we're building as well, which is responsible for all the transactions coming into network. Transactions can be anything.It can be a loan. It can be claim of the reward in the game, or it can be the result of the voting, for example, in your small community of 10 people and basically 66% plus of the servers participating in the network in our case have to agree on the same state of the recent transactions and that's when it is added through the chain of all the transactions that been before. And then again we're talking of the basic level. You have to govern this system somehow.This is what we call in crypto "decentralized autonomous organizations" [DAO]. But all of them currently are capital based. It's really hard to call them decentralized because of that.You usually have in popular blockchains 10 to 20 people sitting in one Telegram chat and deciding the fate of the decentralized voting, where one venture capitalist who bought in early can change the direction of the vote in one second.And really there were no very successful experiment on running decentralized organization without the principle of "the more money you have, the more voting power you have," even on the level of not the blockchain itself, but the smart contract level on top.So basically, Steve, smart contracts, they run on top of blockchains because you can build any application for organizing your community, organizing your union. Yeah, it would be an application on top of the blockchain that we built.But what's the reason to try to build a democratic experiment if the base layer is purely capitalistic? This was our question all along. We're still asking this question to other people and they're like, they don't have an answer to it.I mean, people from crypto.

Steve Grumbine: 00:15:17

: Take me through this.When I think about autonomous groups getting together voluntarily, coming together, thinking about ideas, coming up with ideas, using their one of one power to develop ideas and bring them together in these working groups.You know, for people that aren't really familiar with this, can you walk us through a day in the life of, you know, start us with "Hey, I've got a neat idea," and how that plays out on something like Humanode.

Victor Vernissage: 00:15:46

: You got an idea. You go to the forum first and you post this idea. You get into discussion with the community whether this idea is viable at all. And eventually people say "yes," this idea goes to a voting.And this voting, if it's simple, if we're talking about an application, yeah, an infrastructure on top of blockchain, on the blockchain itself, then there are pretty simple tools to set up these kinds of votings.Usually I would have let's say 10 tokens, you would have 100 tokens. And we vote with these tokens. If the quorum of 10,000 tokens is passed, then the vote is valid and it's either yes or no.Basically, when it's yes or no, the idea gets funded.And eventually there is also a vote after the implementation of the idea is ready, whether we want to merge the new thing we just developed or the new rule we came up with, with the current structure or not. And this voting would again be like, you have 100 tokens, I have 10 tokens, we vote again. Of course, you decide more.And my vote is almost unheard of, and it would act almost the same way if we're talking Humanode. But instead of having money as the proxy of voting power, we would have a more complex social structure, let's say.Because you see, when you have just one parameter that decides who can vote on what and which vote will be accepted or not, it's pretty simple to build this kind of structure without it failing in some small ways, but it will be always failing in a big way, because people don't want to live in an oligarchy. And crypto right now is purely oligarchic structure. And in case of Humanodes, Steve, it would be a more complex procedure, okay.So first of all, not everyone can plug in and vote. Why? Because we can all agree democracy has never worked. And there is a wisdom of the crowd, of course, but there is also stupidity of the crowd.And there is also a very huge bottleneck in terms of we can't have every person vote on every proposal, otherwise we would be still voting, and we would have to be experts in everything. This is why in Humanode we approach the governance like that. So, in order to get the vote, you first have to propose something which is accepted.And it's again, you're going on forum. You discuss it with people. If some people in the decentralized organization who already have some respect tell you, "Yeah, let's go," your proposal gets accepted eventually.And then dependent on what kind of proposal you had. Engineering proposal, marketing proposal, design proposal, you get what we call a cognitocratic score. [measure]Okay, this is just a score, let's say from 0 to 10 for how valuable your proposition was. If it was a minor optimization, you get one if you created a great fix for the system, otherwise it would be destroyed. It could be 10.It doesn't influence your vote. You still have one vote, but now you at least can vote in your chamber, for example, engineering chamber.You will not be able to vote in the design chamber because you're not an expert there. You will not be able to vote in other chambers as well, but only in the engineering chamber.And the cognitocratic measure you got, as we call it, is just signaling for people to understand that you did something very meaningful for the decentralized organization, let's say. And eventually you have all these different chambers with people inside it. And each voting goes through two stages.The first stage would be the proposal pool.The proposal pool is the way for us to filter spam so that you don't have voting on every proposal there is, but it has to go through proposal pool and get some core enough attention there.Even if many people said, "Oh no, this is an awful idea," but it still got the quorum of attention of well, I won't delve into numbers, okay, but this is some political science experiments we're doing. So these numbers can change. Eventually if you even had a lot of downvotes on your initial proposal, it can still go through to the DAO because we know that sometimes the majority can be blatant to truth, and then it goes into the real voting, after which the proposal will be funded, will be accepted, and you as a person will be accepted to participate in this democratic process. But I would say it's still permission-less.Anyone can join, but people have to be smart enough and people have to have time for this in order to really end up as a part of the system. And a really important part of the system is that you can delegate your vote to other people.Because even if we only have those people who got into specialized chamber, we only got them to vote. Maybe they only want to work and come up with ideas and never govern, but they are sure that, for example, I am a good governor.I am seriously reading every proposal and I am commenting on them, making them better, contributing to getting the system going. They will just delegate, let's say, design to me, but then can delegate engineering to another person and I will vote on their behalf.But compared to the "democracies" we have right now, it would be a liquid democracy where if you see that, yeah, you believe the person, he was acting completely rational, he was making great decisions, but then something wrong happened to him and now he's taking the opposite direction and you can unvote him and get your vote back anytime. This is what's really needed.Well, let's say when we scale to the millions of, as we call them, Humanodes, it would be already like a pretty decent country size and we would have dozens of proposals there every day.You have to first filter them out, then you have to make specialized chambers for this proposal to not go through all the millions of people, but just through 1,000 people, let's say.And you have to have this liquid delegation in order to make sure that the voices of the people are heard, even if they don't have enough time to vote on every matter in the decentralized organization. This is like a bird view of how it's going to happen.

Steve Grumbine: 00:22:25

: Okay, I'm just informed enough to ask dumb questions. And hopefully my dumb questions are questions other people would ask.

Victor Vernissage: 00:22:31

: Sure. These are the hardest usually.

Steve Grumbine: 00:22:33

:  It really is. But I think some of these you've kind of spoken to.But I'm unfamiliar with the kinds of attacks that systems and platforms such as Humanode might face in this space.I know there's one thing called a Sybil attack, and I don't fully understand what that means, but I know it's a big thing and it take us through some of the types of attacks that you guys would be anticipating and how you would defend them, at least at a high level.

Victor Vernissage: 00:23:02

: Sure. Steve, I will always be starting with the systems that we have right now, [right] before Humanode, let's say. And these are based on proof of work and proof of stake, like Bitcoin and Ethereum.So Sybil resistance in general, let's say Sybil attack in general, is a way to cheat the system to get unproportionally more power in the system by creating multiple accounts.For example, you are on the forum and let's say my daughter, she is trying to win a contest in her school, and the voting for those who are going to win the contest is, is happening on a regular forum without any checks of the identity of the person. And this is when I would set up an automated army of bots to vote for my daughter and she wins. This is a Sybil attack, as simple as that.It's happening all the time on Twitter. It's happening everywhere in the web too. And this is how people pay for Sybil attack, to get them up in the algorithms and do the things like that.Then the Bitcoin and Ethereum guys, they have the thing that we call Sybil acceptance. They accept that there can be a Sybil attack, and they say, "You can do a Sybil attack, but it would cost you a lot of money."So in terms of blockchain, Sybil attack is a really hardcore thing, because at the minimum, if you get either 34% or 51% depends on technology, of the stake in Ethereum or the mining power in Bitcoin, you can at the minimum, stop the network, which is a really bad thing for a financial system. Okay?And you can also change the history of the transactions, which is the worst, or you can double spend, which means that you're sending the same one coin to a few people at the same time and creating few [many] coins out of one. So Sybil attack is a very serious problem for blockchains, for the base layer, the one that we're also building in particular.So these guys, they have Sybil acceptance. They say, "Yes, you can Sybil attack, you can create a lot of accounts, but it will not change anything because you don't have more money."And the more money you have, the more power you have. Actually, there can be a Sybil attack on Bitcoin or Ethereum any day because the capital is not decentralized.And it's really easy for the biggest holders to coordinate and have an attack on the network. The beauty of it is that it is not in their interest to do so because they're earning money off the network every day and they don't want to stop.

Intermission: 00:25:42

: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast by Real Progressives. We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible. Please consider becoming a monthly donor on Patreon, Substack, or our website, realprogressives.org. Now back to the podcast.

Victor Vernissage: 00:26:04

: You want to build a network based on human identity, not on capital requirements. This is when Sybil attack can really destroy you. And we do have biometrics as the first mean of stopping Sybil attack.So that one person sitting at home could not create multiple accounts, could not generate a lot of deep fakes and pretend he is using the video camera, but in fact he's not. So this is not possible with the private biometrics we have without knowing who the person is. But there is a big problem of sockpuppeting as well.And sockpuppeting is when you go, for example, outside and you ask people to scan their face and now you control their identity in terms of Humanode network. And now you can get the rewards instead of them. You can vote instead of them. This is selling your identity.It's not exactly theft because the person gave it away for some money, probably to you. But this is what is happening and there are ways to stop it, by of course tracking the history of the person's contribution to the network, tracking the history of his on-chain transactions and his participation in the voting, all these things. But if there is a big incentive, there will always be a Sybil attack and especially a sockpuppeting attack, okay? And this is a really important issue for us because if, let's say there is a million Humanodes and 34% of them coordinate and download malicious or just a different software to their servers, they will be able to stop the blockchain.

Steve Grumbine: 00:27:43

: Okay. So Victor, one of the things that jumps out at me is that these things tend to be with very techie people with very unique kind of personalities that tend to be attracted to these things as early adopters. And for you, obviously you're in the exploration phase right now. You guys are developing these things as we speak.Do you have laypeople that are not indoctrinated in crypto kind of lingo as test people so that this can be expanded to more common use? Or is this always going to be intended for niche kind of groups?And I guess as a follow up, would your intention to be a single standalone platform, obviously decentralized, or would your goal be to build bridges with other crypto spaces or other blockchain spaces to create a connected ecosystem?

Victor Vernissage: 00:28:39

: We do have people who are not into crypto and they're like 77-year-old professors of English who are also writing books on the future of the world, how the world could look like if it had humanotechnology built in it. There are examples like that.I'd say for the scale that we have right now and the resources we have right now, we are not really trying to include regular people in all of this because we don't need more Humanodes for now, unfortunately. It's a dynamic system that grows with the number of transaction fees on the blockchain and we first have to build on the economic part of it and then go to the scaling the infrastructure, scaling the number of Humanodes. But Worldcoin probably proved that any cryptosystem can be targeted at regular people.Because Worldcoin, they just created the software so simple you don't even understand you're using crypto. You don't need special crypto wallet, all these things it is possible to do.The better the user experience is, the more resources you need to build it. Right? This is the constraint we have right now for the less techie people.But eventually you would be able to launch a Humanode using your phone by clicking one button and the payment for your server would automatically go through the blockchain without you even seeing it. So yeah, it's totally possible to scale it and to make it usable by normal people, not crypto natives or early ambassadors, let's say.

Steve Grumbine: 00:30:12

: Sure.

Victor Vernissage: 00:30:13

: And yeah, it is possible. And your second question, Steve, was whether we are interconnected with all the other chains? Yes, of course, you cannot survive without it basically.And there is no reason to not be interconnected. It actually takes a lot of resources in development and working with all these bridges between blockchains.But right now crypto is already very interconnected. In one click you can take the asset on one chain and turn it into another asset on another chain. It already happened.And what we actually do to other ecosystems, which is out of scope of the current podcast.But in our ecosystem we have an application which basically allows you to register just one blockchain address for your like physical identity, which stops Sybil attacks for all the other applications out there in crypto on different chains. And yeah, this is what our tech brings to other chains besides the social experiment that they can adapt later.But, I think they will all be looking for us for the next couple of years. How we do it first. And nobody dared to risk so much. Yeah, of course nobody ever pulled it off before in this space.What we're doing with Humanode and decentralized governance, this is one of the hardest things not in terms of cryptography computations.This is just a hard thing to work on just by talking for hours and hours and hours, years and years and figuring out for some reason there is no paper on how can we build a robust system without autocracy or without some shadow rulers behind the system.

Steve Grumbine: 00:31:52

: It's funny, I interviewed a gentleman named Dr. James Fishkin who wrote a book and does these seminars around the world and has actually worked in like small areas like Mongolia for example. They were able to create deliberative sessions with random people through sortition.And they had experts, but the experts were only able to present their ideas to the folks that were picked. Kind of like jury duty almost. And those individuals then would enter into deliberation. There was no rhyme or reason.Some of these people would be absolutely opposed to the idea. Some of them would absolutely be for the idea, but they would enter into a period of deliberation. Deliberation brought people together for a change.Unlike we are in today's very weird social media world where we're just stuck with ADHD meme-level understandings of subjects and never take the time to really dig beyond that. It seems, based on your description of how an idea comes to be, that a lot of that is based on deliberation as well.It's not going to happen if you don't get people convinced the idea is a good idea. And then once people back the idea, then there's an idea to go through this. My focus on this is as much on democracy enabling as it is on anything.Because I do believe there needs to be an opportunity in there for people to transact without fear of the government. And when I say this, I'm not talking like some black market mafiosa.I'm thinking of it as an activist who's trying to organize against an oppressive oligarchy and build robust capacity outside of the electoral process. So within that, how do you envision that deliberative process enhancing democracy at a governance level like your island example.Let's pretend like we've got an island called Humanode. 

Victor Vernissage: 00:33:43

: Okay.

Steve Grumbine: 00:33:44

: I mean, we can name it whatever and we start a government there using this kind of system for our voting, for our ability to democratize the commons, to create a commons, whatever. Walk me through that on your island example.

Victor Vernissage: 00:33:59

: Oh, that's a hard one. Basically, about deliberation. We had actually the same question just yesterday.We understand that the system we have right now in terms of the decentralized organization, how it's structured is not perfect one. Nobody has the answer to how we could structure the system not based on capital or power given to you by representative voting.And we were thinking, should we spend another half a year on deliberating between each other? Like it's usually six people talking to each other for three, four hours, two times a week.Or should we just build what we have right now and give the people talk about it later? Because we'll have more people involved, maybe we'll have brilliant political science guys involved and they will see more than we see.Or, or we have people who already run these experiments helping us fix the system. I would say that how we build Humanode is not how I would build a Humanode island, most likely. Or maybe I would. That's a good question. Because...

Steve Grumbine: 00:35:04

: That's the point, right? Every time I think about this, I hate our fake democracy.I hate when I see true believers with their Styrofoam pork pie hats and their red, white and blue and, and they're little pom-poms and they're cheerleading for non-people. These fake focus group tested lies that come out as messaging. They call it "message discipline." I call it a lie.And they go out there and these people just cheer and cry when their person wins or loses. And then nothing changes. It's still the same garbage war. You're still murdering people abroad.You're still stealing from the poor. You're still fattening the rich. Nothing has fundamentally changed. And it just keeps getting worse and worse.So when I think about this, I genuinely am thinking, "How can we make something like this work as a shadow government?" as a means of organizing the proles, so to speak. I am a socialist, period. I mean, that is who I am. I'm flat out a MMT-informed socialist. So I am tired of the neoliberal order.I'm tired of the people that celebrate it. I'm tired of the people that treat it like it's an okay, reasonable system. I'm looking for change.And obviously we're not voting our way out of this, but maybe there's a way of getting people organized.

Victor Vernissage: 00:36:21

: There is. I really think that we actually shouldn't even start on a distant island, because nobody cares about distant islands.We should probably start at the community level, which is like the local level. Okay?If you have a small area that sometimes even has its own funding because you pay taxes to the local government, which is not a currency issuer, we should care about these taxes, at least about this one. Unless the federal government can give them money directly. And this is where people can already self-organize.Let's say you have, well, ideally 10,000 people. Otherwise the experiment would be too hardcore.And they are all plugged into a common software where they can propose ideas of replacing old benches with the new ones, of cleaning out the lakes from the dead bodies dropped there 10 years ago and all these things. And then they can get accepted by other people living in the community and you could delegate your vote to your neighbor.If we're talking about the local community and things that we all use our common goods like parks and things like that, we shouldn't even have the system as complicated as Humanode is because you don't have to specialize in building benches to vote on whether we should place a new bench under this tree. And this is actually what we could easily start with.

Steve Grumbine: 00:37:45

: I love it!

Victor Vernissage: 00:37:46

: It probably takes just the political power of the person who's currently in power on the local government, right? And he could say, "Hey guys, from now on our area is using this application and you can propose things. I will propose things too. You can vote on them.Let's say it's not right now if we all vote yes.A pure yes, but it has to be confirmed by a person who's keeping an eye on the budget and by me, for example, who's now in power in our local government." But this is how we can run tests. And what is stopping us from this? I don't know.

Steve Grumbine: 00:38:25

: I think I do know because the folks that are, how do I say this? People that get "elected", and I hate to use the term deep state, but like these deep party operatives, they kind of control the power of the party and power of who gets the support and who doesn't. And you can see it in the United States specifically. You can see the insanity with the Democratic Party, you can see the insanity with the Republican Party as well. And third parties were just not geared for any kind of meaningful multi-party democracy. We don't have ranked choice voting.We don't have any means of bypassing oligarchy. The system itself is run by oligarchy. So at a local level, that might be the only way to get it.And it would have to be something part of me wants to say. I would like to see it done separate from the actual government in a way of gathering the people.Because, you know, I interviewed Christopher Shaw a few weeks ago, and he talked about how banking politics worked back at the turn of the century in the 1900s. And these were people, they were everyday farmers. They were not brilliant, smart banking people.They were just determined to not let bankers foreclose on them or withhold funds when there would be a drought or when crop yields were hit by pestilence or whatever, and those bankers would come in and seize you.So they were looking for a different kind of banking, a different kind of understanding of democracy and a different kind of understanding of the way that money worked.And so if you think about that building resilience outside of that system and bringing it to bear with the actual people themselves, saying, "Hey, listen, we've had enough. We know where the power lies. We are the power. And you either deal with us in this way or you deal with us in a different way."And I'm willing to go down that path at some point.

Victor Vernissage: 00:40:18

: This is actually what I heard about Vietnam when I went there. Because...

Steve Grumbine: 00:40:22

: Really?

Victor Vernissage: 00:40:23

: Yeah, in some countries, the people in power can do anything to the people. Right? But in Vietnam, the people are still so strong after all that have happened to them in the last century, that the government can't actually do anything they want because they know the people will rise up if they go beyond the limits.

Steve Grumbine: 00:40:41

: Beautiful. Beautiful. For real at this point in time, obviously you made a great point of the idiocy of the majority as well which is a terrifying thing when you consider the idiocracy kind of scenario.

Victor Vernissage: 00:40:56

: At the same time. I'm sorry, Steve. Yeah, at the same time, I'm talking about the wisdom of the crowds.

Steve Grumbine: 00:41:00

: Yes!

Victor Vernissage: 00:41:01

: Because it works.We see Polymarket, you know, one of the best things created in crypto, the prediction market, and it works better than any expert out there.

Steve Grumbine: 00:41:13

: Interesting.I think we need to rethink how we gather as people instead of kneeling and bobbing down in front of a sellout candidate, talking to one another, who only have our lives to concern us.So with our wellbeing, our survival, and then putting those demands to these "representatives" of our "representative democracy", which I just laugh about. I have so little faith in what they call "democracy" at this point.

Victor Vernissage: 00:41:46

: Exactly. Why couldn't we just start with a simple thing?People in one local government demand that 10% of the budget will be spent on the things people want and 90% still spent by the guys in power. It's kind of a nice tradeoff for them. We're not asking for everything.

Steve Grumbine: 00:42:03

: There should be something, but we have to take a step. And I think the problem is people are afraid of change. They're afraid of things that they don't understand. And I'm not any different.I have trepidation about our conversation right now. As much as I'm trying to understand, I know that there's enough that I don't understand that I struggle with...How do I cipher through some of these issues when I don't have this specific knowledge to really understand every bit of it? Right? I know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be truly conversant. So I gotta have trust in you, Victor, and others.

Victor Vernissage: 00:42:36

: Well. And I have to have trust in my engineers because I'm not the best engineer.

Steve Grumbine: 00:42:41

: Yes. So we're all interconnected at some level. And to me, things like this. And again, I'm not saying this is the cure all or even the answer.It might be. It might not be, but it is an opportunity to explore ways of organizing people.And I really do like the idea of in whatever fashion, there's gotta be something other than what we're doing now, which is just horse crap, it's just not real.So in the spirit of making sure that people walk away with a good understanding of not only Humanode, but I'm also hoping they walk away with some "aha moments" of thinking differently even if we can't spell everything out for them, that they walk away thinking that "There's more to this story. I need to learn more. I want to learn more."Take me through what people really should get from Humanode and what the possibilities are that you really would like folks to focus on.

Victor Vernissage: 00:43:34

: I really liked how you talked about the parallel systems and this is why crypto is a great space. We can build parallel systems which we can engineer and that would work even without us. Right?And the beautifulness of it is that we can go forward as a humanity in building new economic social structures without being killed by trying to change what we have right now in the whole world.And when we do it on the internet level, in the community of 10,000 people, we can just take the same application and give it to a local community in a developed country. And of course these kinds of changes, they should be bottom up and ideally without any blood spilled, at least in the beginning.And the takeaway would be that we all hate our, sometimes our governments, sometimes our financial systems and we feel like we cannot do anything about it. Which is true if we're talking on the level of a country, especially the big countries like US or China or even UK.But we can change things on the local level, on a scale of one thousand, ten thousand people. And nobody will say, "Stop," or kill us by doing that.But then if we try it on the internet, if we try it in local level, it can be scaled 1 community, 10 communities, 100. And then the whole state can work on a new political, social, economic structure. This is possible.People just shouldn't forget about changing the world because they can change it from top down. Of course nobody will let you do that. But we can build parallel system, test them, work on them until we die because one day they may become global.

Steve Grumbine: 00:45:29

: That's really fascinating. Do me a favor, Victor. Tell folks what's next for Humanode and where we can find more information about it.

Victor Vernissage: 00:45:40

: The website is Humanode.io. Go to the "Learn and Paper" section right away where we have the white paper describing the system, which can be a little bit technical, but we also have purely political paper on the governance system we're building called Vortex. The main takeaways from this podcast would get people especially there.What's next? We're working on somewhat boring things of adoption helping projects get to our chain because in order to scale the network you have to get the resources scale the network. And these resources come from transaction fees going through the network. And this is a lot of work on many sites.But the most exciting thing is that by the end of the year we expect to launch our one-human, one-node, one-vote governance system, at least on the testnet.Then we're going to play with it, then we're going to give it a little bit of money, something like hundred thousand dollars and we'll see how the wisdom and stupidity of crowd and the system we created will play out. Eventually a few years later, transitioning to the full treasury being in the hands of the egalitarian system, not completely democratic because we have to come up with some new things. Pure democracy. Hard to imagine it works.

Steve Grumbine: 00:46:58

: Yeah, yeah. I mean the challenges just from a technology perspective have to be immense. But then just purely a design approach.I come from an IT background though, not a developer.But you've got that whole requirements: design, build, test, deploy, recursively doing that over and over again and I'm sure with more agile development work you're coming up with things and testing things based on sprints and ideas and so forth.I find it fascinating that we get anything accomplished in this world because it's so hard to gain consensus, much less getting people to work in a structured way or even a decentralized structure. The Agile approach to project management, I'm a Scrum master.It does provide some opportunities for building small things and not waiting till you've got the big thing fixing things as you go so that when you see something doesn't work, you can change and pivot quickly. That kind of the approach that you all take to development or is there a different way?I know we're kind of talking past the close, but this is exciting to me.

Victor Vernissage: 00:48:06

: It depends on what we're developing because in building blockchains, if you are moving too fast, it can be not secure enough and well, it will get hacked, everyone will lose their money and the project may die.So when you build infrastructure like that, financial infrastructure that also manages the treasury of tens of millions of dollars, Agile development is not something you can do.Yeah, that's why I'm telling you that we're sitting for years spending three, four hours twice a week talking about how we build it and it doesn't fall, in the next minute it launches.And you know what I noticed in this world, haven't you noticed that 10, 15 years ago we had a lot of books coming out, a lot of articles coming out on circular management where there is no head manager and people are actually talking to each other, making decisions together and then during the last five years it all disappeared somewhere because all the projects run by a tyrant, Elon, are actually working pretty fine when he can just come destroy everybody and say, "Your ideas are bullshit. We're going to do it my way."It's an interesting turn in the development of the management theories, to be honest, because I don't see anyone talking about decentralizing the decision making in corporations.

Steve Grumbine: 00:49:27

: That is very true. That is extremely true.I really appreciate you helping me tie that together because that's been a challenge, is that you got all this theoretical methodology and in practice it sometimes falls apart, huh?

Victor Vernissage: 00:49:41

:  Yeah, everyone forgot about this. I haven't heard any book on this for a long time.Maybe we will be like the next ones already because we will at least test it from the ground up on a decentralized structure. Probably these things just don't work in the corporate world at all because they don't belong there.

Steve Grumbine: 00:49:59

: That's an interesting point of view. And on that note, Victor, thank you so much for taking time with me today.I hope that I was able to get enough of the Humanode story out there for people to get excited about.

Victor Vernissage: 00:50:12

: Sure.

Steve Grumbine: 00:50:13

: I hope that people find the idea of building parallel systems in a world where there is no democracy. I hope they find that to become more than just some catchphrase, but begin to think in the world that way.We're not going to change anything until people think differently, until people are willing to conceive of a different outcome. And I think this is at least one way of looking at it. Right? I'm excited. Thank you so much for your time, man.

Victor Vernissage: 00:50:39

: People like you keep me going and still excited after five years of building Humanode. Thank you for that, Steve.

Steve Grumbine: 00:50:46

: You got it. All right. So folks, my name is Steve Grumbine. I am the host of Macro N Cheese.I am also the founder of Real Progressives, which this podcast is a part of. Real Progressives is a 501[c]3 nonprofit that relies 100% on your donations. We do not paywall. Maybe we should.We don't paywall anything that we do because we feel the information is too important to put it behind a paywall. Maybe if we made it scarce and you had to pay for it, maybe people would find it more appealing. I don't know.But we're trying to do it a different way. If you find value, become a donor. Become a monthly donor. You can go to patreon.com/real progressives.You can go to our Substack, become a monthly donor there. Or you can go to our website, realprogressives.org. Go under the Donate link and become a one time or a monthly donor. We appreciate all donations.And with that, on behalf of my guest, Victor Vernissage and myself, Steve Grumbine, on behalf of Macro N Cheese and Real Progressives, we are out of here.00:51:57 Production, transcripts, graphics, sound engineering, extras, and show notes for Macro N Cheese are done by our volunteer team at Real Progressives, serving in solidarity with the working class since 2015. To become a donor please go to patreon.com/realprogressives, realprogressives.substack.com, or realprogressives.org.