Interview with Scott Stornetta
Scott Stornetta is a scientific researcher and physicist who invented the world’s first blockchain with his partner, Stuart Haber. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University.
Scott Stornetta’s Permanent Record
Contents
Max Raskin: You are one of the two inventors of the original blockchain, and I wonder — is there something to your life philosophy or ideology that values permanence or is skeptical of others?
Scott Stornetta: There's something about the transparency as well. In other words, I am who I am. I’m not suggesting that makes me perfect in some way, but we all are who we are. And I'm not troubled by the inability to edit after the fact to make everything look pretty.
What I'm troubled by is the growing sentiment that says, “Let's take advantage of some misstep that someone made where they said the wrong word and let's turn it into a whole meme to characterize this person for the rest of their life.”
MR: But in some ways, doesn't blockchain make that worse? Because it creates a permanent record of something.
SS: It definitely creates a permanent record and what I'm saying to all of my colleagues in the American endeavor is: Chill Out. Don't take advantage of the fact that people are flawed and they say things they didn't mean, and they do things they wish they hadn't done. You’ve got to relax a little. You’ve got to cut people some slack. And so I don't fear the permanent record.
I'm not a big fan of “privacy.” I know that it comes wrong into the ear, but it's that I think we've misunderstood privacy. What I am a big fan of is liberty. And as Brandeis characterized privacy — the right to be left alone. That's different from people knowing what I've done and haven't done.
MR: When you were writing and publishing on the blockchain and writing about blockchain, do you remember the books that you were reading, the non-technical books that you were reading?
SS: I know one thing that influenced me is the work of Adam Smith that no one ever reads. The title was The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and how he really captures the fact that what really makes the world go round? What really makes the laissez faire engine — a term I use rather than the capitalist engine — because I think the term “capitalist” focuses too much on the accumulation of capital. What makes our laissez faire engine work is that we have empathy for each other, that we recognize we can put ourselves in the other person's shoes and ask what would they want? And then we align our interests towards what they want. That's why the economy works.
MR: But he does talk about the limits of compassion when he gives the little finger analogy — talking about how someone in Europe would sleep fine after hearing about an earthquake in China that killed millions, but be restless if he lost his own little finger. It’s a pretty searing indictment of the effective altruist philosophy which says there shouldn’t be any moral distinction on account of geography.
SS: Yes, we frame it through a window. We have local perspective and so why not start incrementally? This is the joke about “I love mankind, it's people that I can't stand.” Learn to have a little more empathy for those that you come directly in contact with. Learn to see them as peers.
Scott Stornetta, Libertarian
MR: Do you label yourself a libertarian?
SS: Yes, I would definitely say that.
MR: Was that always the case?
SS: I'm afraid that's always been the case.
MR: Do you remember your youngest political memory?
SS: I remember reading Plato's Republic when I was 13 or 14, at the suggestion of a great aunt of mine who went into my hall of fame that very day. It was a real wake up call to find that there were other people that thought a lot about ideas, that ideas mattered.
MR: Do you remember who exposed you first to libertarianism in a formal way?
SS: I don't think it really worked that way. I came to the conclusion that a modest to minimalist government was really the ideal and that the United States of America was the instantiation of it, trying to make it work in the flesh. So to me, it wasn't so much of being exposed to libertarianism as simply drawing the conclusion on my own about where we should be and how we're a little off course.
MR: But was there a thinker that when you read him or her, you said, "Oh, I'm that."
SS: I took Humanities 5 at Harvard — it was the history of Western philosophy. I was certainly influenced at that point by Mill and Hume — by Kant. But I'm afraid that my libertarian response initially wasn't so much a pure idealistic response as a reaction to what seemed to me to be federal overreach.
MR: So this is a little pet hypothesis I have, which is that everyone who is a libertarian had some authority they were rebelling against when they were younger. Did you have that?
SS: Boy, I sure don't conceive of it that way. I guess I feel like I was raised in a laissez faire family where they didn't tell me everything I had to do, but I was able to follow my parents' examples as role models and free to become who I wanted to be. I feel like I was raised in a family of liberty.
MR: Did you ever get in trouble as a student?
SS: Yeah. I ran for class president and then didn't do anything and resigned. I think that was my most shameful experience.
MR: That’s funny — there’s this apocryphal story about Ludwig von Mises being asked what he would do if he became president of the Central Bank of Austria. And he said, "resign immediately."
SS: I have an essay that I'm writing — “Why I'm not running for President.” The reasons aren't because I don't have a million YouTube followers and don't know how to raise a hundred million dollars. The reason is nobody should be running for president. Plato says in the Republic that we basically would have to bribe somebody to agree to be the leader because it's such a burden. And the only way we could get the right person is to guilt them into realizing that they're the right choice.
The Folk of the Fringe
MR: A few years back you sent me a first edition copy of Orson Scott Card’s The Folk of the Fringe. Do you think his Mormonism influenced his writing?
SS: It did. And yet there was a sense before Orson Scott Card that you couldn't be religious and write science fiction.
MR: Did you ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz?
SS: I've very much read that, very much enjoyed it. And in a sense, for me growing up, my first religion really was science fiction. I'm talking about the kind of science fiction that's not focused on the hyperdrive technology, but on re-instantiating society. Using science fiction as an excuse to jump into a different world with a different set of constraints. Reading Heinlein, Bradbury, and Asimov — they were all philosophers dealing with re-imagining the world. But it's not the technology so much, that's an excuse to get you license to create a new world with a new set of starting points.
MR: That’s how I feel about bitcoin and crypto — it’s not the technology. It’s the philosophy.
But I do love Neal Stephenson who is very much about the technology — have you read him? Did you read Cryptonomicon?
SS: I actually just recently read that in fact, because he was involved in an auction at Sotheby's that we were also participating in. It's a little dystopian to me, and I'm puzzled why there's so much dystopia in science fiction. I think it's a failure of the imagination to see only dystopian futures.
MR: Did Cryptonomicon influence your thinking at all?
SS: It did not, because I read it later.
Latter-day Saint
MR: Do you believe in God?
SS: Yes, very much so. In fact, to be a little aggressive, I assert that there is in fact a God.
MR: Do you believe in an afterlife?
SS: Most certainly.
MR: Did you always?
SS: No. I very much had a real crisis of faith when I was 13, 14.
MR: And how long did that last and what brought you back to faith?
SS: I'd say it lasted about a year. That's what led me to end up being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I was raised in a good Protestant mainstream household.
MR: You were not raised Mormon?
SS: No, not at all. I was raised in what was then the mainstream sort of Protestant ethic.
MR: Where were you raised?
SS: In Maryland.
My dad at the time was a professor at the Naval Academy and I just felt like I got to be about 13, and then I wondered whether anything was true. I went back to Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum” and with that as a starting point, lapsed into solipsism. I know this is not all that politically correct, but for me, it was getting a hold of a copy of the Book of Mormon and reading it and saying, “Whoa, there's a different world here.”
MR: How did you get a hold of it?
SS: A friend of mine gave it to me. The same person that I was trying to impress at the time when I ran for class president.
MR: Was it a girl?
SS: It was.
MR: Did you stay in touch with her?
SS: She died actually just a couple of years ago, but I did maintain some contact over the years.
MR: What did your parents think about all this?
SS: It was definitely outside the bounds, not to be allowed, not going to happen. So it was only when I left for college that I made the decision to convert, if you will.
MR: Did you tell them in high school that you were interested?
SS: Yeah. And they said, “No way in whatever is that going to happen.” It got better after the first 20 years or so.
MR: Were they religious?
SS: My mother was, and my father felt it was a good thing, so he was willing to follow in her path.
MR: But were there actual conflicts over religion with your parents?
SS: Simply the assertion that I planned on doing something different than what they believed in, something that they viewed as very much outside the mainstream. So there was definitely conflict there, but it was more conflict of agreeing to not talk about it.
But then when I chose to go on a mission to Japan, that really was the low point.
Although I have to say, I was so caught up in this notion of “I'm right and they're wrong.” Now that I’ve got three children and five and one-third grandchildren — I could have done so much more to just ameliorate the situation. Just talking it through, finding common ground. Back as a teenager, I felt like if I'm right then everyone else must be wrong. And I've come to understand that the world just doesn't work that way.
MR: In some ways, that's a little bit of your engineering mind, no?
SS: Yes. Again, no disrespect for engineers. But I think of it as a scientific model that just says, look, if F=ma, then that's what it equals.
Someone can disagree, and that doesn't make them a bad person, they're just wrong.
MR: And are you involved in the church today?
SS: Very much so. To me, I think of it a lot more as a vehicle for becoming a better person
MR: Are you interested in the doctrine?
SS: Yes. I don't want to give any impression that I'm intellectually disengaged. I'm a full-throated, red-blooded member of the church. I buy it all.
The organization and the hierarchy, is it perfect? Of course not. Are there problems? Of course. But I'm definitely all in. Let me be clear about that.
MR: I think it would surprise some people that someone with such an engineering mind is so religiously devout. Can you talk about that just briefly?
SS: I guess the standard meme is that science and religion are at odds, but to me, it's just about finding out what the best model we have for the world and executing on assuming that model is true.
MR: You don’t have to answer this, but do all your children share your faith?
SS: I don't mind answering just about any question. I'm not concerned about whether it's overly personal or whether it puts me in a bad light. I just want people to feel I'm being authentic.
So we have three children and I would say two of them are quite active and one very much adheres to the notions and norms and whatnot, but he's kind of on his own path. And again, I'm entirely comfortable with that. A key tenant of being a latter-day Saint is just how deeply we respect each person's agency. That is so fundamental. And that the whole idea of any kind of coercion with respect to religion is just so anti-religious.
Culture
MR: What’s the last show you binge watched?
SS: Andor.
SS: There’ve been three new things that came out recently that were much promoted. The one was the new Lord of the Rings effort from Jeff Bezos, the one that was the new Game of Thrones, which I'm not old enough to watch because they are R-rated and from the reviews and what I saw of the ones, they were just modern people dressed up in old looking clothes. And then to have Andor come in that is full-throated and every character is compelling. You really believe that there's that world out there. Again, that's that whole idea of falling into a science fiction world.
MR: Will you not watch rated-R programs?
SS: No, I don't. Like I say, I'm just not old enough for that.
MR: And why is that?
SS: It's degrading. We don't need excess stimulation when it comes to violence and sex. It's not progress.
MR: Do you think internet pornography is one of the great ills of society?
SS: I think it's the decision of people to look at it. That's one of the great ills. Okay, we're free to choose. There's my Milton Friedman again.
MR: What kind of music do you listen to?
SS: All genres. Something that's just recently catchy and classical and jazz. I played a lot of music growing up — I came out of a musical family.
MR: If you had to guess what movie in your life you've seen the most?
SS: Could be Chariots of Fire.
MR: And if you had to guess which album in your life you've listened to the most?
SS: It certainly would be one of the Beatles albums. I got to the point where the collection of Beatles albums, the ‘62 to ‘66 and the ‘67 to ‘70, I had not only memorized all the words, but the sequence of all the tracks.
Thinking About It All the Time
MR: When you need to think or when you’re inventing blockchain — how do you set time aside? How do you work?
SS: There's a quote from Isaac Newton and I preface it by saying, I well understand that I'm no Isaac Newton, but it really resonates with me. Someone asked him after the fact how he came up with the law of universal gravitation. And his answer was, "I thought about it all the time." He saw that as the vehicle that got him to what he wanted to accomplish. And to me, it's almost something that happens without conscious effort. It's like the proverbial oyster with a grain of sand that gets inside. It bothers me that there's an unsolved problem and I latch on to two or three unsolved problems and I think about them all the time.
MR: Is there a problem you've latched onto right now?
SS: Yes — I mentioned before talking about privacy being misconstrued and that we really should pursue liberty. And that liberty, in fact, follows from greater transparency and the ability for more information to be available about us. That's something that I think about quite a bit.
I also think about the current use of advertising to basically subsidize the internet and feel that that is the source of half a dozen of the world's ills. And it even goes into Twitter. I've been trying to understand how to reverse that model so that rather than producers chasing after and harassing consumers by artificially trying to inflate the need for consumption, what a world would look like if it was the consumers that made producers aware of what it is that they felt they needed. A reverse advertising model.
Proof-of-Life
MR: I’m going to do a speed round right now — I’m going to say some things — can you tell me the first thing that pops into your head?
SS: That should be easy.
MR: Because there’s no cheating. Well, I guess you can cheat, but there's no wrong answers.
Satoshi Nakamoto.
SS: A brilliant artist, a brilliant piece of art, but not necessarily the best engineering solution.
MR: NFTs.
SS: More important than Bored Apes would make you think. Movement of all assets eventually to be registered on the blockchain.
MR: FTX.
SS: Had nothing to do with the blockchain. Old style corruption — or to give Sam Bankman-Fried the maximum benefit of the doubt — total incompetence. But note that it was a world that was entirely non-transparent.
MR: Blockchain.
SS: It's fundamentally a better way to do things. Does that mean that the existing players are creating value? I take it on a case-by-case basis. But eventually it is the way to store data.
MR: Stuart Haber.
SS: A wonderful colleague that it took me 20 years to understand just how great he was. There's an old joke, a Mark Twain saying, “When I was 14, my father was so ignorant…but when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” He's a wonderful person and his willingness to put up with me is the only thing that allowed blockchain to be birthed.
MR: Bitcoin.
SS: Not a fan of proof-of-work. I think it's clear from our papers that proof-of something closer to proof-of-stake was what we had in mind all along. Obviously, it got the ball over the goal line.
MR: Ethereum.
SS: I really appreciate that Vitalik is trying to have a discussion about heaven. The best software engineers are really about social engineering. How do we change the plumbing so that we relate to each other in different and better ways.
MR: Scott Stornetta.
SS: Flawed but trying to make the place a better world, and not bothered by the fact that other people are trying to do the same. I know I'm on record for saying that if you really want to change the world, you really need to embrace all the other people that are trying to change the world.