As part of ChronoLogic’s series of interviews with EthCC speakers Chronologic.Network sponsored and presented at EthCC .io and picked the brain of speaker Clement Lesaege to learn more about his project and his thoughts about “time and the blockchain”.

Clément, who is based in Portugal, is a well known computer scientist currently working as CTO for Kleros (A decentralized autonomous organization that delivers fast, affordable and transparent justice for all).

Clément is focusing on developing technologies related to smart contracts enforcing dispute resolution.

Q:What inspired you to join Kleros?

Lesaege: I was interested by smart contract enforced dispute resolution in the early days (in 2013, at that time it was about using 2 out of 3 multi-signatures on bitcoin with a centralized arbitrator holding one key in case of dispute). When Ethereum came up, it offered the possibility of creating decentralized arbitrators. My initial envisioned use case was solving Open Bazaar disputes, but I told myself “let’s make it general, we don’t know yet what kind of disputes would need to be solved in the future”. I participated in the Ethercamp Hackathon with Nicolas Wagner. I developed prototype smart contracts of Kleros. Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof of Bitnation put me in touch with Federico Ast, who was also working on crowdsourced online dispute resolution. We decided to join our efforts, that’s how Kleros was born.

What does justice mean to you?

Lesaege: I think most theories of justice (natural law, social contract, utilitarian) have good arguments. Two important features are predictability and consent of parties. Predictability, the possibility to know that if you act this way, you would be treated this way, is really important for securing human interactions. Predictability is the difference between revenge and justice. The consent of the parties is fundamental, otherwise the rules are just made by the mightiest. Consent is the difference between tyranny and justice.

Do you consider modern societies just?

Lesaege: Yes and no. Modern societies have made huge progress in term of predictability, but consent still has a lot of room for improvement.

When did you first get involved with digital currencies?

Lesaege: It was in 2013, I was introduced to cryptocurrencies by the writings of fellow members of the pirate party: Rick Falkvinge (founder of the first pirate party) and Ploum (Lionel Dricot, an active pirate blogger).

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve ever had to face?

Lesaege: Keeping coins secure and making sure that centralized actors (governments or banks) can’t hurt us as cryptocurrency users. This has to be achieved by both educating them and technological tools to preserve our privacy and make systems resilient to attacks of centralized actors (thinks countries banning crypto, banks closing accounts of cryptocurrency users and cryptocurrencies credit cards). It also our duty to protect the space from malicious actors (we can think about scammers which pollutes the space now, but worse stuff like assassination markets could happen), as a community preventing them can avoid centralized actors using bad actors as a justification for their intervention.

Do you believe smart contracts will help us solve everyday problems in the future?

Lesaege: I believe they will, for now most people use blockchain just to transfer value. Money is the first use case, programmable money the second one. For example I could see people making multiple arbitratable transactions (sending money which is put in a escrow contract for some time such that the payer can dispute it to a dispute resolution platform like Kleros to get its money back if the good or service it bought as not been properly delivered) each day.

At ChronoLogic, we’re very interested in time as an asset. Can you describe the value of time as an asset?

Lesaege: Time is an asset which is impossible to transfer and has increasing marginal cost. It gets harder and harder to get more of it (you can, by having good healthcare and a healthy lifestyle, but even if you do and are lucky, you are really likely to die within 100–150 years). This may change with transhumanism.

Why is time important for you?

Lesaege: It’s an asset you need to use to get other assets and to enjoy your life. Almost everything requires time and we have so little. That’s why I’m really pissed off when I see people making others lose time. Recent personal example was passing the immigration. A more common one is time lost due to advertisements. I think blockchain can provide micro payment business models acting as an alternative to ad-based (where people pay with their time) ones. If someone would like to work on a blockchain platform allowing users to make micro-payments in exchange of ad removal, I’d be a huge fan.

If you are interested to learn more about Kleros, you can visit the project’s website https://kleros.io/