{"id":2232,"date":"2026-07-27T12:24:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T12:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patrickdomanico.com\/bpm\/?p=2232"},"modified":"2026-08-21T15:13:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T15:13:08","slug":"bill-laboon-on-web3-ai-digital-freedom-and-quantum-computing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patrickdomanico.com\/bpm\/2026\/07\/27\/bill-laboon-on-web3-ai-digital-freedom-and-quantum-computing\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Laboon on Web3, AI, Digital Freedom and Quantum Computing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Web3 Foundation\u2019s VP of Technical Operations on digital freedom, privacy, AI-generated fakes, quantum computing and why regulation could become Web3\u2019s next major bottleneck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https:\/\/www.patrickdomanico.com\/media\/DYST\/Bill%20Laboon-Interview-Web3_Summit-Berlin-2026.mp3\"><\/audio><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<pre class=\"wp-block-preformatted\"><strong>About this interview:<\/strong> This conversation with Bill Laboon was recorded in Berlin on 19 June 2026 during the Web3 Summit. It was later broadcast live on 27 July 2026 at 7:00 p.m. as part of my radio show, <em>Do You Speak Tech?<\/em>, on Dublin community radio station Near FM.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: Bill Laboon, I hope I pronounced your name well.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: Okay. You are the Vice President of Web3 Foundation.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Yes. My title is Vice President of Technical Operations.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: The summit talks about digital freedom. What does digital freedom actually mean in everyday life for someone using apps like, I don&#8217;t know, WhatsApp or Google products, Instagram, TikTok or online banking?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: All of these products that you mentioned are centralized entities. There is one person or one entity that is in charge of that code. You know, when you were using WhatsApp, when you were using Facebook, when you&#8217;re even if you&#8217;re using Signal, there was one person who was in charge of that code that could update it. And perhaps that data is encrypted, but they could get metadata from it. You know, understanding when you&#8217;re calling and perhaps putting together a map of where you&#8217;re going and what times you&#8217;re awake. So when we speak of digital freedom, I would say really it&#8217;s in two parts. So the first part is just a sort of precursor to digital freedom is understanding what you are not free about? What data are you leaking? What data are you giving out to people? Who is taking this data? So I would say this is the first part, just understanding this. And then the freedom part is then can I still do these things? Can I still communicate with people without having a third party spy on me? Can I interact with someone and not be, you know, not have this information go out to people? Can I not have people looking through my data and figuring stuff out about me? Can I be private about that if I want to? And conversely, can I express myself digitally? Can I run code that I want to, that I want to run? Can I communicate with people I want to communicate with and not have once have someone stop it. So there&#8217;s really sort of a negative freedom here and a positive freedom, right? The positive to do what you want, and the negative freedom to be left alone and to be able to put that all together technologically, not depending on the government to do it, but rather just on the code that we produce ourselves.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: What&#8217;s the biggest myth about decentralization?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: The biggest myth, I think, is that it&#8217;s not possible. Okay. There are a lot of people that think like, oh yes, decentralization sounds good, but there&#8217;s no way we&#8217;ll ever get out of a world where there are major companies that are looking over us. It just doesn&#8217;t happen. But we see this in the Web3 world. There are a lot of possibilities. There&#8217;s a lot of software that are privacy preserving. There&#8217;s a lot of options that individuals can do. So I think a big myth is just that we have to give up on this. This is the world that we live in, but there are alternatives. And a big part of my job, I think is making people aware of these alternatives is what is making people aware of what they&#8217;re giving up when they&#8217;re not using.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: Let&#8217;s talk about your job in Web3 Foundation. So this one is a position that also brings community engagement, open government, funding, technical promotion under one unified strategic framework. So as a foundation, your ultimate goal is a decentralized internet and no profit. So how do you balance playing the role of a centralized coordinator and the strategies for a Web3 foundation while strictly maintaining decentralized, non-hierarchical ethos of the ecosystem?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: So there&#8217;s really two parts to that question, actually. So the first part is that, as I mentioned, with my role changing, we Web3 Foundation has continued to be more and more hands off, you know, when the Polkadot network started, for instance, you know, we were running all the validators before it actually launched. And we&#8217;ve had a slow decentralization process. And part of my role, the reason it&#8217;s changed is that Web3 Foundation has been stepping back more and more. So I don&#8217;t, you know, my title is no longer VP of ecosystem because we&#8217;re allowing the ecosystem to, to operate more and more on its own without Web3 Foundation being a part of it. We&#8217;re, uh, this is not part of our mandate anymore. However, that said, I think that even during the period where Web3 Foundation was having a much more explicit role in ecosystem growth, a lot of it is just coordination, not something there was never really a top down. Okay, well, this team, you need to work on this and you need to work on this. And we don&#8217;t like this product, but rather allow people to communicate, you know, putting together events like Web3 Summit, where people can, you know, talk and meet each other and build, have discussions about the direction of the future. Same with Polkadot, decoded, subzero, a lot of these other events that we historically have helped put together or have been a part of. And I think that there&#8217;s a very big difference between coordinating and helping people when they have roadblocks. So something I think anyone you ask, like if they have a question on Reddit or Twitter, you know, most of these people, if they tag me, like I can, I can answer them and they say, hey, we&#8217;re trying to do this. I&#8217;m like, oh, hey, this other team is also doing this. Maybe you should talk to them or I&#8217;m having an issue with this. I think this is a big part of ecosystem growth is solving these roadblocks for people, as opposed to having a top down directorial role to play. And that&#8217;s how I&#8217;ve always seen Web3 Foundation is really a coordinator rather than a commander.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: I really like this one: coordinator rather than commander. It&#8217;s nice. What&#8217;s the hardest part of Web3 today? Explaining the idea, building the infrastructure or getting people to actually use it.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Today, I would say getting people to use it. If you asked me a few years ago, I would give a different answer. I think that a lot of people now, especially the people that are interested, have a general idea and building it, while it&#8217;s very difficult. It&#8217;s never easy to build things. It is something that&#8217;s a known problem. We know what to do, right? We know how to build code. We know how to make distributed systems. It&#8217;s just a matter of will. Then. But the part now is like getting people to understand why it&#8217;s necessary, why they should use it. I think this is the big challenge today. And I think a lot of people, especially in 2021, when there was a mass cultural movement of people using this stuff. It was much easier to do. People were doing this on their own. However, the usability wasn&#8217;t always great. It was difficult. This was a big problem. And so now things have progressed. It&#8217;s become much more easy to use and understandable for the end user. But it&#8217;s not as much in the cultural zeitgeist. And so a big problem right now we see is just getting more people involved. We see here at Web3 Summit, we had, I think over seven hundred people. There&#8217;s still a lot of people interested in this stuff. But I do think that we need to do a better job of bringing people in, making them feel welcome, and making them understand what the benefits are, so they want to use it. There&#8217;s that old quote. Sorry, I don&#8217;t mean to ramble on too much, but if you want people to build a ship, you don&#8217;t say, all right, you build the sails and you build the hull. You tell them. You make them yearn for the vastness of the sea. You make them want to go there and then they&#8217;ll build it themselves. And I think that&#8217;s something we&#8217;re still trying to do in our industry.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: What would have been the answer two years ago instead?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Yes. So maybe two years ago, it would have been similar. But four years ago I would say that the problem would have been much more explaining how it works to people. People didn&#8217;t trust it. They didn&#8217;t understand it. I think it&#8217;s been around long enough and in the cultural consciousness long enough that either they know the basics or they don&#8217;t want to know, they don&#8217;t need to know the basics. And if you ask me ten years ago, then I would say building it. There were still a lot of open questions in 2015, 2016, you know, that we&#8217;ve essentially solved now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: And still continuing playing this game\u2026 What about in five years? In five years, the answer will be \u2026&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Oh, in five years. So, so hard.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: I know this one is like the closing question. So usually, but because we went over this time frame now three years ago. So let&#8217;s imagine\u2026 in an ideal world, of course\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Yeah, I would say in five years, probably it will still be \u2026 It would then be a regulatory problem. So it&#8217;s still explaining things, but it then would be explaining them to governments. I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;ve tried out the <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.polkadot.com\/apps\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Polkadot app<\/strong><\/a> and the Web3 summit app that they&#8217;ve put together for this.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: And it basically acts as a web two app. It&#8217;s amazing from what <a href=\"https:\/\/www.parity.io\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Parity<\/strong><\/a> has done to develop this and so you can see that we now have reached the point where you can have a Web2 experience. You don&#8217;t have to worry about a lot of the stuff \u2026 the difficulties that we did. And this is like, you know, in the very near future, right where this will be out there. And I think people will see the benefits of running things on the blockchain more. But we also see there&#8217;s still a lot of discussion both on this side, the EU, but also in the United States, but in all sorts of countries about how do we handle this from a regulatory perspective? And that moves much more slowly than technology or culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: in the US.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: I mean, I would say in all countries, right. Like technology tends to progress very fast. Culture progresses almost as fast. But politics and law, it&#8217;s always a bit slower, right? At least in democracies. Right. Any time to discuss it and you need time to actually create these laws and for people to argue and debate. And so I think in five years, this is going to be the main bottleneck.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: I think realistically speaking, it&#8217;s a good point because regulatory it&#8217;s like the main bottleneck. Let me use the same word again. And I was also listening to your answer and I really love the parallelism. Okay. Maybe because I&#8217;m getting old and there were some experiences from the past, but I remember when probably Linux revolution, let&#8217;s call it in that way, you know, was probably what Web3 is trying to do now, you know, because of course, that one was a kind of technology open much more better. And now we have the internet, like if I remember well, more than 70% of the servers around the world that are using Linux as an operating system. And I think that one of the main aspects was like regulatory. And I think if you go more like in the past. Richard Stallman with GNU &#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Yes, the Free Software Foundation, yes\u2026&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: And yeah, I think like, maybe this one is also like the purpose of Web3 foundation trying to do that.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Yeah. I&#8217;d say that&#8217;s actually, it&#8217;s a really good parallel. I would say there are some differences, though, to it. So first is the Linux revolution. It took place. I&#8217;ve been a Linux user since 1995. Um, personally,&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: Four years earlier than me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: I began in 1999&#8230;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Oh, okay. Yeah. So I&#8217;ve been using Linux for a long time. And I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;re so if you&#8217;ve also been a long time Linux user, you&#8217;re aware of this ongoing joke, right? Of Linux on the desktop, right? This is the year of Linux on the desktop that the end user will finally start using Linux. And I would say Linux was a tremendous success, but very few people use it as a desktop operating system. I have it on my home desktop, but not on my laptop, for instance. But I&#8217;m a weird nerd, right? Most people, uh, never use Linux on the desk. They&#8217;ve never like &#8230; But they&#8217;re using it, right? They&#8217;re using Linux every time they&#8217;re accessing almost any server on the internet. If they&#8217;re using their Android phone, you know, anytime they&#8217;re doing it, they&#8217;re using Linux and they don&#8217;t realize it. And so in some ways, I think this is what&#8217;s going to happen. There are so many benefits to using blockchain technology behind the scenes that many people will use it just like you&#8217;re using the Web3 Summit app. If you didn&#8217;t know, you would have no idea it was on the blockchain. It&#8217;s just as fast. There&#8217;s no weird usability quirks. We&#8217;ve gotten to the point where you don&#8217;t even know you&#8217;re using the blockchain. But on the other hand, like the difference between Linux is, I think in order for Web3 to be successful, the end user should know about it. I don&#8217;t think with Linux, they don&#8217;t need to know about it. They don&#8217;t need to know. But I think that it&#8217;s important from a societal perspective that they know that they&#8217;re using maybe not a blockchain, but they know they&#8217;re using this privacy preserving technology that&#8217;s keeping their data secure. I think that a big part of our mission is not just to have people use it, but also to understand why they use it. Now that said, sorry, let me real quick. That said, I would much rather they use it and don&#8217;t know that they&#8217;re using it. But, I do think that we have a bigger mission than what Linux had.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: Absolutely. But yes, I like the parallelism. There are a lot of similarities in the history of technology. I remember that with Linux, one of the main bottlenecks \u2026 today is the day of bottlenecks. Like a word, I have to upgrade my vocabulary\u2026 But I remember that one of the reasons why Linux wasn&#8217;t very popular was, first of all, a matter of technical aspects, because until when we had to use like the console (for our audience, the console is like that part of the terminal that we have to type in specific commands rather than having like a user interface that was much more easier, like, for example, for Windows or Apple. Okay? cool). But aside the technical aspect, I thought it was also a matter of appeal. Until when we saw people I don&#8217;t know, with a longer beard, you know, for example, uh, people that like for\u2026 let&#8217;s use maybe this one is not like the best word. And I apologize for that\u2026 But until when Linux was a matter of \u201cweird guys\u201d, you know, people maybe were also scared to use that. Do you see parallelism even from that aspect? Or do you think the appeal of Web3, blockchain is completely different or colonized by people that speculated with Bitcoin and so on?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Yeah. So I would say there are a lot of parallels. Not exactly the same. You&#8217;re right that the image of a Linux user was, yeah, this old guy with a beard or some nerd. Right. And I would say the image of the early Bitcoin users, you know, 2011 or so. Oh, these are people buying drugs online. These are people that want to hide their money. These are people that want, you know, because they&#8217;re doing something evil, right? There is this vibe of either, you know, the cypherpunk, coder or somebody using it because they wanted to do bad things. And then I would say then we had like in 2017, 2018, up to 2021 or so. Then we had the crypto, for lack of a better word, grifters, right? You had people that were selling and that became the vibe. Oh, crypto is just a bunch of crypto bros. And they&#8217;re, you know, they sort of colonize. But still, it was a stereotype, right? What I want to do is get people to realize that these stereotypes are true. Or let me rephrase that. Like, yeah, these stereotypes may exist for a reason, but you do not have to use that for the same reasons as these stereotype people are. Right. Just like now. I don&#8217;t see myself as this long, gray bearded, long gray beard guy because I use an Android phone because it has Linux, right? Or because I access a web server. Or if you think even going back further, right. In the 1970s or 80s anyone was using a computer. Oh, there&#8217;s some nerd, right? Like the glasses and the\u2026 You can imagine. Right? And so I do think like that&#8217;s part of it. People want to use technology that they think belongs to them, that it looks like people that they associate with are using it and not some subculture out there somewhere. And so I do think that&#8217;s part of it is like, and what I think we&#8217;re doing here, we&#8217;re showing people, everyone has a need for this technology.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: That&#8217;s great and thanks for the explanation. And I was covering with Doctor Andrea Leiter a similar concept before when I was interviewing her. And we were, more or less, agree about the fact that technology can help for a lot of things. For example, I was bringing the example of blockchain, for me as a journalist, as a part of my job, for example, blockchain, I think it would resolve a lot of issues, for example, for copyright, because let&#8217;s imagine this interview today. So I&#8217;m going to upload that with my specific code. And even if there are many, not copy and paste because it&#8217;s different with blockchain, but there is always the record, the primary that for example, with the so-called web2, it was impossible because this one has been one of the Yanis Varoufakis yesterday said the technology disruptors that web2 has been. For example, let&#8217;s imagine journalism before Web2 was a matter of, I don&#8217;t know, I write the article, I&#8217;ve been paid for that. And with web2, copy and paste everywhere with no specific guarantees, let&#8217;s say. you know, and I think a blockchain in this case, going back to like the example of parallelism with Linux appeals and something else like technologies in this case is going to be something good. What do you think about that?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Yeah, I mean, I think that content authenticity is one of the big use cases for blockchain that hasn&#8217;t really been used very much yet. But as you mentioned, putting data, it&#8217;s very simple to prove that you had some data at some point and that you produced it with blockchain like this. This is a particular very mathematically easy to do. And so especially in the world of AI today, where it is so easy to create fakes, you know, you could show, you know, whatever President Trump tap dancing in the ocean or something. But if you use blockchain, you can use blockchain to fight against this, right? Because you can put a record. All right, well, you&#8217;re a journalist and you say, look, I actually took this video at this particular time, you know, and we&#8217;ve even seen it like in hardware. So like, you actually can be signed. It was taken by this particular phone or this particular camera at this point in time. And we can do mathematical proof for all of this. So I see journalism as sort of becoming a, I&#8217;m not sure of a good way to put this. So let me think of a, in the old days, if you saw something in the newspaper, very I mean, 1700, 1800. Right. And then somebody would draw like, hey, this is what I saw. And then we had a photo. But you know, then it&#8217;s very easy to fake that. And then we had, you know, photographs, but then it became easy to fake them. Well, now we can have blockchain proof, right? So just like you, we can. So I think this is a huge thing, uh, as well as protecting copyright. So, that one thing is content authenticity. But once you have that, if somebody else publishes the same article that you did or the same photo or whatever, and they don&#8217;t give you proof. The fact that this could all be registered on the blockchain and done in an unfalsifiable way means finding these copyright violations or people just, you know, copying your information becomes much, much easier and almost automated, like a simple trivial thing to do.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: Absolutely. One question.. one of the most common questions about blockchain, Web3, and so on is, okay, what if we don&#8217;t have a computer? The computer doesn&#8217;t work anymore? You know, how do you answer this question?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: So, one of the things to remember about blockchain is that the data, aside from your key, is not on your computer. So it actually in some ways is much more efficient than your computer. So if your computer breaks, but you have this key, right, which could be a hardware item. This could be something written down on paper like a passphrase. And you just, you know, you just log in and you get another one. Everything is already there. So yes, you do need a computer to access it. This is going to be, or some, device to access it. But the question is really, what are the alternatives? So like, what is the downside to doing this from a blockchain versus having everything on paper? Like, yes, there are benefits to having everything on paper. It&#8217;s, you know, it&#8217;s stored there, but you have so many more benefits, right? Using blockchain. So yes, like you need electricity, you need Wi-Fi, you know, we&#8217;ve seen or, or some sort of internet connection to really access this if you want to access it in real time. But nowadays computing power is so cheap. Interaction is so cheap. Uh, getting internet is so cheap that this is becoming something that the vast majority of the world can&#8217;t afford. If that&#8217;s if that&#8217;s the question about meeting the computer.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: Absolutely, absolutely. This is one of the most, I think, is that the main question that non-technical people usually ask? You know, because even if you try to explain all the benefits, let&#8217;s say, and what blockchain can solve. But then there is a: \u201cokay, and what if?\u201d I think it&#8217;s normal?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Yeah, it&#8217;s a good question, right? If there&#8217;s a big electromagnetic event in every computer in the world, it will be destroyed. Okay. In this case, like blockchain would not be good, right? But on the other hand, like that also would mean that basically no cars would work. It would mean, you know, and we don&#8217;t say like, well, what if, uh, you know, my computer or my car doesn&#8217;t work? You don&#8217;t think about it. The computer on the airplane, your most airplanes will not fly if the computer isn&#8217;t working. Right? So like we are or not, in a very computer dependent environment, in a very network heavy environment. So the question is then do we want to use computers or not? Right. Blockchain is a specific technology that gives a lot of benefits. And if you say, well, what if you don&#8217;t have computers? I mean, that&#8217;s a much broader question than the question is not should we use blockchain? It&#8217;s should we use computers at all? And, you know, there&#8217;s certain groups in the world that have decided, no, we shouldn&#8217;t. But if we are using that, then, I think that using blockchain makes a lot of sense.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: Absolutely. Well, just for a laugh, there was this Italian .. where I come from, maybe you already realized that I&#8217;m Italian, like Umberto Eco.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Yes, yes, I read Foucault&#8217;s pendulum.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: Yeah, exactly. And I remember one of his interviews, you know, he said, do you know what&#8217;s the oldest technology? Paper. You know? And what if a magnetic, as you were saying, is okay. Well, but the papers from Egyptian people, sometimes it&#8217;s a matter of technology. And there is another person I cannot refer [at the moment] that [he said] we shape tools and then tools shape us, you know, and maybe it&#8217;s interesting\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Web3 often talks about giving users control over their data identity and digital life.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Yes.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: But control also means responsibility. How do we design a system where people are empowered without being overwhelmed?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Yeah. So this is a difficult problem. I would say this is one of the problems, right? And I mentioned like, education is very important for this. And I would say it&#8217;s even more important a few years ago, when you had a lot of people starting to use this and the safeguards weren&#8217;t around as much. So first, like I would say, anytime you were becoming more self-sovereign. You are also getting more power, but you are bringing on more responsibility. And so I think that there is a \u2026 on the part of the user, there is a responsibility to understand that and to learn how to use it correctly. Now that said, we have been making a lot of strides forward as an industry in ensuring that there are safeguards. Right. So if you make a mistake, I&#8217;m remembering like the early days, I&#8217;ve been in Bitcoin for a long time, and you could send with some of this old software to an invalid address that no one could ever spend from. And if you did that well, all your Bitcoin is now gone. It&#8217;s stuck forever. And now the [virtually &#8211; inaudible] all software will tell you like, hey, this is an invalid address. Or hey, you&#8217;re sending this in an incorrect way. There are what we call checksums to make sure that this address is valid. It&#8217;s what you meant to send it to. And so from a technological perspective, we&#8217;re doing a lot of work too. And there&#8217;s more safeguards that can be added. I would say the big concern that I have is there are also a lot of scammers and these people can I say this, this I think is actually like a big challenge we are facing. I get scam messages and emails all the time. There&#8217;s North Korea and other entities, you know, other government entities that are trying to steal your tokens. It is a difficult world, but on the other hand, we&#8217;re figuring out lots and lots of ways to protect against this, right? Hardware wallets, for instance. Again, we&#8217;re not around when I first got involved in Bitcoin. So a hardware wallet, just a, you know, a small device that is very well protected that you need to do things. So it is a problem. But I also think that we as an industry are doing a lot to make it less of a problem, giving you the benefits without as many of the drawbacks.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: Okay. Thank you very much. Before moving to AI, because of course, it&#8217;s an aspect that we have to cover. What&#8217;s your idea at the moment? What are the main challenges that we are going to experience once the theoretical idea of quantum computing will become something real? So, what are your thoughts at the moment?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: So I actually just gave a talk on quantum computing. So I have a couple of different ideas on this. So first I would say quantum computing is not something magic. It&#8217;s not something that&#8217;s going to destroy blockchain. We have lots of cryptography that is quantum resistant. It&#8217;s really just a question of social coordination of how we are going to move to this. And there are still a lot of questions there about how we&#8217;re going to do it. But there are a lot of possibilities. And every time, historically we have seen a problem. So again, we were talking about the 90s. You know, I&#8217;m also a software developer in the nineties. One of my first jobs was updating code for <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Year_2000_problem\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Y2K<\/strong><\/a>. And Y2K was a huge problem. Right? I mean, it was real. There was this issue, but we knew about it. It wasn&#8217;t oh, how are we ever going to deal with this? I think that quantum computing is similar. We don&#8217;t know exactly when this <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Quantum_Threat\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Q-Day<\/strong><\/a> will happen when we have a cryptographically relevant quantum computer. But we know that it&#8217;s coming at some point, we&#8217;re working towards it and we know what to do. We know the benefits, the drawbacks. We just need to have the coordination to figure out what exactly we want to do about it. So while I do think it&#8217;s good to be aware of what&#8217;s going on, that all these open questions. I also think it&#8217;s something that is extremely solvable. The specifics aren&#8217;t there, but in general, we know what to do to deal with this threat.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: It&#8217;s funny because when you are talking about the nineties, I got a memory about the so-called millennium bug.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Yes, yes, Y2K. Yes, yes.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: What are you going to do with that? And then. So we survived.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Yes, exactly.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: Unless we&#8217;re dreaming, everybody is the same.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Yeah. But I think it is like the millennium bug. It&#8217;s like we know what we need to do to fix it. It&#8217;s really just getting everybody to agree on that and to actually work on it. And that&#8217;s the same problems we&#8217;re seeing now with quantum computing.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: What do you think? Talking about quantum computers, the main challenge, let&#8217;s say. So even not something realistic in your idea with your expertise, your experience, and of course, your position because you are handling things that I, for example, despite my technical background, I don&#8217;t deal with daily. What do you think? Like \u2026 What might be one of the main challenges, let&#8217;s say.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: So I think the main challenge \u2026&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: Something that, you know, an idea that at the moment when you think, okay, quantum computing and you say, okay, I have to fix that. I have to think about how to sort out that thing.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: So, the big issue is, generally, to move from non-quantum resistant to quantum resistant (<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Post-quantum_cryptography\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Post-quantum cryptography<\/strong><\/a>). You need to do something. You, as an end user. So the question is what do we do with the people that don&#8217;t do anything that leave their tokens, their coins in an address that is quantum vulnerable? And for most ecosystems, that&#8217;s not much of an issue, right? You know, ones that were created in the relatively recent past, we all expect people are still interacting with these things. The real question becomes what about Bitcoin? A lot of \u2026 About one third of Bitcoin is in a quantum vulnerable address. And then what do we do? What do we do here? Right? You know, if Satoshi has about a million Bitcoin or not moved by Satoshi, there&#8217;s lots of possibilities here. We could just freeze those addresses. We could give like, hey, there&#8217;s three years. If you don&#8217;t do anything, then they get whatever they become mining rewards again or, uh, and none of these are a perfect solution, right? Of what we do with this unmigrated Bitcoin. But, I think there&#8217;s going to be a lot of discussion and arguments about this. You know, the other problem with Bitcoin has such long block times in comparison to everything else. Let&#8217;s say it takes about five minutes to crack a key using a quantum computer, given the public key, finding the private key. Well, if you&#8217;ve got ten minute blocks on Bitcoin, as soon as you issue a transaction, your public key is visible, which means it could be cracked by the time of the next block so someone else could issue a transaction. So I think Bitcoin specifically is where we&#8217;re going to see a lot of the issues with quantum computing. Uh, personally there&#8217;s still a lot of open questions because as I mentioned, they&#8217;re not really engineering questions. It&#8217;s more of a social coordination. What are we going to do about this? How are we going to solve it? Who would make these changes that would allow us to be more quantum resistant? And one of the great things about Bitcoin is how decentralized it is. But that also means it&#8217;s harder to come to decisions on things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: I think it&#8217;s the same problem, similar problems that even the banks are experiencing, more or less in terms of even crypto. And, uh, yeah, it&#8217;s interesting. I think it&#8217;s probably the main problem at the moment. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. AI. Just super quick about AI. We already touched on the topic a bit, but what do you think? So let me rephrase everything in the same way I put that down [in my notebook]: as AI rapidly accelerates data extractions and platform concentration, how can Web3 primitives decentralized identity and mathematical proofs of personhood act as a critical counterweight against a future web with AI agents.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: So I think, yeah, we see a lot of problems with this already, right? I always like to joke that blockchain is all about truth and AI is the opposite. It&#8217;s very easy to make up whatever you want with AI. AI hallucinates all the time. And so I see a lot of different counterweights, right? So right now, when somebody responds to me on Twitter, I have no real way of knowing if it&#8217;s a bot or not. I can make a guess, but I can&#8217;t really know with proof of personhood, I can know this is an actual human, and maybe they used a bot to type it out. I can&#8217;t tell that, but I&#8217;ll at least know this is a particular human that&#8217;s doing this. And that&#8217;s very possible with blockchain content authenticity, right? That we know a picture, this camera produced a picture and I can prove that on the blockchain, right? And then I know that it was not AI generated. So if you look like you with signing right. I can prove that I&#8217;m the person that owns this account. And it&#8217;s not some bot or even prove that this bot owns this account, right? Uh, so, so I see blockchain as this way of, you know, throwing truth right in into this, this like just a mixture of lies that can be made by bots and lies, hallucinations, stories, however you want to call it.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: Okay. So thank you very much. I don&#8217;t want to take advantage of your availability. Thank you very much for everything. I have just the last question that I asked to everybody so far, because I think it&#8217;s very interesting: What&#8217;s one thing that&nbsp; listeners should do after hearing this interview?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Wow. So I would say the one thing that we discussed earlier, what is digital freedom? I said one thing you should do is actually read the terms and conditions. When that little cookie pops up. Next time you go to a website just one time, read it and see where all your data is going. Because it&#8217;s probably going to hundreds of places that you&#8217;ve never heard of. And it really is eye opening just looking at that just one time. So I recommend everyone does that and maybe they&#8217;ll be much more interested in digital freedom after seeing it.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: Thank you very much. I have a lot of questions, but you are very busy, especially now during the Web3 summit. So I want to say it&#8217;s very interesting, a lot of very interesting speakers. And I&#8217;ll be back for sure next year. Where can we find you online?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: So Twitter or X is probably the best place. I&#8217;m <a href=\"https:\/\/web3.foundation\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>@BillLaboon<\/strong><\/a> there, and, of course, the Web3 Foundation where I work is at <a href=\"https:\/\/web3.foundation\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>web3.foundation<\/strong><\/a> online and we have lots of papers and articles etc. that we are publishing.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Patrick<\/strong>: Thank you very much, Bill.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Bill Laboon<\/strong>: Thank you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Web3 Foundation\u2019s VP of Technical Operations on digital freedom, privacy, AI-generated fakes, quantum computing and why regulation could become Web3\u2019s next major bottleneck. About this interview: This conversation with Bill Laboon was recorded in Berlin on 19 June 2026 during the Web3 Summit. It was later broadcast live on 27 July 2026 at 7:00 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":2237,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpai_generated_summary":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-talk-with-coco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patrickdomanico.com\/bpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patrickdomanico.com\/bpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patrickdomanico.com\/bpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patrickdomanico.com\/bpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patrickdomanico.com\/bpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2232"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.patrickdomanico.com\/bpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2244,"href":"https:\/\/www.patrickdomanico.com\/bpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2232\/revisions\/2244"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patrickdomanico.com\/bpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patrickdomanico.com\/bpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patrickdomanico.com\/bpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patrickdomanico.com\/bpm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}