154 – Greg Meredith: Rebuilding The Attention Economy From The Ground Up With Synereo

Transcript

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usability get it today at leisure wall calm and use the offer code epicenter to get 10% off your order and buy Jax Jax is the user-friendly wallet that works across all your devices and handles both Bitcoin and ether go to Jay a double x io and embrace the future of cryptocurrency wallets hi welcome to episode or the Shores talks about the technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the global blockchain revolution my name is sebastian fuji and my name is brain fog and crane we're here today with Greg Meredith Greg Meredith is a researcher around a lot of interesting areas such as concurrency theory type theory essentially parts of mathematics he's also one of the cofounders of a project

called scenario which I think probably a lot of you have at least heard about in in some way and he's been doing a lot of interesting work in his field among other things he's been working with Flats ampere who's been on this podcast before as well on Casper and so yeah thanks so much for coming on Greg oh thanks for having me it's it's a pleasure thank you and thanks for your patience for finding the time for us to get together no it's a pleasure well can you can you give us a little bit of background so one of the things we read about you was that you were involved in something like at Microsoft called beast talk process orchestration so I was really curious is this what was

this work it is in any way kind of flow into the work you do today related to a blockchain and decentralized systems you know it really is actually you can think of the best art process orchestration as the first generation of internet scales for contracting and just like scenarios rolling is built upon a core mathematical foundation arising from concurrency so was BizTalk process orchestration so we had a little smart contracting language that was called ex Lang that was built around something called the asynchronous PI calculus and we had a nice nice little environment

where you could draw smart contracts in a graphical interface and then it would synthesize an execution that would that would would run at enterprise scale we had a large large kinds of clients like the UK tax return system amongst amongst others that were built using BizTalk the and it gave rise to a whole bunch of standards so Apple and BP ml those all derived directly from from X Lang and from the work that we did at Microsoft likewise WS choreography that all derives directly from the work that we did on

this talk process registration so first generation smart contract is the way you think about it and so can you give an example of what kind of process or functionality would be executed or managed with these tools sure of course so one of the domains that we did was supply chain management I see you could imagine that Ford Motor Company wants to be able to manage relationships with vendors like Firestone where they they they're able to get the right kind of supply of tires and other kinds of things for the vehicles that they're shipping and so they want to be able to write down processes about when to went

to a issue orders and how those orders for tires are related to shipping vehicles out to distributors so you would need describe process for each of the different participants and then you could glue the different processes together and also verify that the execution of these different processes would be correct one of the one of the interesting things was that it was very difficult to get Microsoft to understand that this could be done in a decentralized way so the the best I could hope for in the Microsoft setting was a kind of hub-and-spoke enterprise

based execution model that was what they could understand and that's what they felt they could productize but from the from the very beginning I was explaining that this was in fact the decentralized kind of offering and in fact when I when I walked into Microsoft it was just me and there were at the time this kind of notion was called workflow and there were there were six other workflow projects inside Microsoft Office sequel and many other large groups already had workflow engines under construction when I was making my proposals and typically they built them around sort of state

machine semantics and I would say well that's that's really interesting so let's let's take a look at that in the in in a workflow that involves both Microsoft and HP who owns the state machine where does that state machine run because if you're going to run it over in HP you just given HP a critical part of your your business and if you run it over Microsoft you just asked HP to give HP's critical business over to Microsoft so that isn't going to fly so how do you do that how do you apportion that work and it was the mathematical formalism that I had that enabled me to talk about how you apportion and delineate those communications and

collaborations as smart contracts that enabled me as a single loan individual with a ragtag team of rebels inside Microsoft - to build BizTalk process orchestration dafuq despite the fact that sequel and office and a bunch of other large skill groups were trying to do the same thing they would have killed us but we had we had sort of secret special sauce that made it work that's really fascinating I didn't know about about BizTalk process orchestration and what's fascinating is that I I I'm co-founder of a company called stratum and we're building something that there's very similar to

what you described but that has that distributed component to it so yeah I'll probably look into this talk process orchestration after the show yeah also check out the standards ws choreography and befel and all of those there are lots and lots of these standards out there right now and lots and lots of workflow engines so how did you transition from that into the cryptocurrency blockchain space you know it's a it's a it was a crazy ride the what I explained to Microsoft was you have to understand that when I when I did this work I did a very sort of I guess in some sense cynical analysis Gartner Forrester and many of the other

groups were estimating the market for for this kind of work flow at trillions of dollars and I figured the inefficiency inside Microsoft would be such that I would I would only get one thousandth of that I thought okay that's still a billion dollar market it's still worth going after so when we delivered kind of the hub-and-spoke solution which with which I was very dissatisfied I said look you've left most of the money on the table let's let's go after this for real let's build a new operating system and a new programming language based around these tools and techniques and they said you're crazy but you might be the right kind of crazy so here's an

office directly under the CTO Craig Mundy have at it so we built a programming language called high wire which is not too too dissimilar from rolling and in 2003 at to bill some of the cool techniques that you could do with high wire like we introduced a we introduced it on purpose a deadlock inside some distributed processes and the compiler caught the deadlock as a part of the demo and if you look at how that relates to rolling it's closely related to how the rolling type system would catch the dowel bug and in the case of the dowel bug there's a race condition that the tied system detects and in in this case it was a

deadlock that we were we were illustrating but both are examples of liveness conditions and so so that's that's kind of some of the kinds of things that you can do with the maths but when we were looking for a market the market that I was looking at and I was quite interested was biology the reason I was interested in biology was because you know well for multiple reasons one of which was that people were beginning to employ our DeMatha medical tools and techniques quite successfully to biology and another was because that was an area where Microsoft was not and so it seemed like a match made in heaven and also it turns out if you look if you

look at this from again from a purely market perspective in the US alone healthcare is 17% of GDP so if you have good sound solutions for reasoning about therapeutic like cell signaling chains and immunological phenomena and disease phenomena like multiple sclerosis then you essentially have a license to print money so I suggested hey let's go and do that Microsoft didn't want to do that but I had already developed relationships with Merck the Institute persistence biology the Trento labs etc and I said and I said hey I've got all

the relationships I'm gonna go off and do this on my own so I started a.m. I started a little biotech company and and began sitting with the sitting with the biologist and one of the things I realized that they were swimming in data they were drowning in data and so we needed was a content delivery network just for the data alone that fit with their market requirements I'm about to bring this story home and I'll shut up and now okay open up space for the next question but so while I was doing that I was approached by another entrepreneur who said hey you know what I'm really really worried about the privacy and balance that's being created by applications like Facebook and other

social media and I'm also worried about the economic imbalance I think these two trends could be disastrous for a Democratic Society and so I listened carefully to this message and we began working together and I realized I could pivot my content delivery network into a content delivery network not for for data and biology but for social networks and then I started looking at hey how do I monetize that and that's when I looked at the blockchain and that's how I met door because we started that's you know we door and I kind of had the same intuitions about the need for an attention economy okay great that that's actually one after one

of these phrases I wanted to sort of hatch on and explore a little bit what do you mean with attention economy what is that yeah so that's that's a really great question I mean if you think about it your social feed is kind of like a little model of your present moment right it's it's what what you can see of the world and what you can make of that little particular social world that that is you know say Facebook or Twitter and whoever controls what falls into your present moment right what's within the bounds of your attention they're essentially framing your worldview and

so if there are economic factors in play for how that for how your worldview is framed well that essentially becomes a kind of attention economy right what what is available to your attention if that's if that's informed by economics well that's a kind of attention economy but this is this is a really critical idea when we start to think about the sharing of social information and I really want to set the stage here because I feel like the sharing of social information is becoming more and more important the planet is melting if you are not alarmed

by the climate data let me repeat this if you are not alarmed by the climate data you are not paying attention and so we need to be able to communicate with each other to solve the problems that are desperately facing the human race and and and the the current the current incumbents are not well suited for having those kinds of discussions where we can begin to organize ourselves if you look at let's take a look at I always pick on Facebook look I have to say I love Facebook a lot of my friends are on Facebook I stay in touch with the guitar' circle community look at dark drive community started by Robert fruit via Facebook and so I I

don't I don't mean to pick on Facebook but it really is a part of an older older wave of technologies so the way to think about this like right now if if you're a centralized company like Facebook at any point the NSA can come knocking on your corporate doors and they can say here's a court order from a secret court you know give me all of Brian cranes data and if Facebook wants to keep doing business in the US Facebook has to comply and so you know maybe that's the cost of doing business but the reality is that Facebook has also shown itself to be susceptible to manipulating people's feeds right so

they've run psychology experiments on people right and published papers about the about the results of manipulating people's feeds so if you want to see them the real impact of manipulating the information that people are associated with go go look at that that's that's real that's a that's a thing so just two more points and then I'll shut up so if you know some people might say hey that's the you know I'm willing to make that trade-off because I don't want to deal with the headaches of running data centers and all the other stuff that's required to do do social media at scale now now that might work except that there's another there's

another gotcha that ties back into this whole idea of the economics that's associated with the manipulation and essentially hijacking of your attention if you think about the analog of Facebook 50 years ago what is that that's the New York Times right but let's think about the New York Times The New York Times writers and curators they got paid they got paid pretty well now who's the analog of the of the New York Times writers and curators today that's us that's you and me we're the content providers we write the articles for Facebook and we curate the articles for Facebook but are we participating in the economics of Facebook so Facebook is

making billions of dollars in profit per quarter are we as a culture participating in that economic proposition no we're not right in fact what's happening is quite the opposite there's a growing divide between the haves and the have-nots which makes it harder and harder for the bulk of the people who are have nots to organize their own attention to solve these literally burning issues so that's kind of what we're talking about when we talk that those are the stakes with respect to the attention economy and the the the mechanism of the attention economy for

us is simply to Wed a a cryptocurrency to the promotion of content so that value follows valued content right as when you know if a bet makes a post and troy wants to promote that because he thinks that that that post which may be about climate data for example isn't ortant all right so he might put some scenario amps behind that post so that more people see it right and then if people then engage that post then amps will flow back towards Abed who is the originator of that post and maybe some of them will go back to Troy who was who

was a curator of that post right so people begin to participate in the economic engine they're part of the solution and in that way does that make sense am i yeah so I really enjoyed that whole discussion of you know of how social networks work and this is something I've been thinking about for quite a long time as well so I I've been for example following the sky an encounter port for I don't know like five years or something I've been reading his stuff and he says sort of computer scientists and he's a big sort of enemy of social media and he wrote a book called the

deep work which is essentially the argument is that this you know it's kind of destroys or focus and and I also deleted my facebook kinda like three weeks ago or something after that and it was interesting too because there was no others as a joint Facebook when I was in college when it in the US when he launched right so it was sort of I guess among the first to join it I was the longest service I've used of any application like was like you know twelve years or something Wow so yeah and the main reason actually when you think about it is it's exactly what you can't have described in your paper right it's what is what are they trying to do and they are trying to get you to spend

as much time on Facebook as possible clicking on random stuff mewing their ads etc which is obviously not in alignment with my objectives for my own life right so it's like you're fighting against that and it's I feel also work where so I think it's it's a very good point that this is gonna be like one of the key you know one of the key skills in in the future and always to be able to manage your own attention because there's it's just going to the tools to destroy yourself it's just gonna get worse better and better and III think this is a big danger that a lot of people if they're not able to do that they'll just literally not be able to do anything of

value I would add something to that Brian and I would say that and that because I watched that that talk that you'd mentioned by by this guy Cal Newport which I guess we'll link to in the show notes and he says that I think Greg you may have mentioned this earlier that these algorithms are made for are made to make you addicted to to using Facebook it I gotta say like in the last year I've seen the quality of content in my feed reduced drastically and I find myself looking at it having no interest in any of it so I mean I guess it would be valuable if I'd be interested in the

content but for some reason my profile must be in some weird spot in the algorithm where like there's a mismatch between what I actually want to see and what I'm seeing which is for some reason just Donald Trump videos I don't even live in the u.s. I am NOT an American citizen I couldn't care less about Donald Trump and that's all I see so I is on your cube right I didn't do you think my account but I deleted the app for my phone and it's been two days and like I find myself going to my phone to look at it but it's not there so I'm like okay God do something else but just just to point out that not only is it sucking our attention but it's in my

case sucking my attention with something that is just not of any value to me let's take a break to talk about the ledger nan OS the new flagship hardware wallet by ledger I'll let ledger CEO and Kaczmarek tell you all about how simple to nano s makes it to securely store all your private keys the legend nos is our latest generation Hardware wallet this is a multi currency Hardware wallet it has a screen and buttons to manage everything on screen you can generate a new seed restore seed or set up your pin on the device your seed will never be exposed to the host computer on the nano ace you have

different apps you are the Bitcoin app you have the ATM app and you have the Fido u2f app for strong authentication and for instance we serve Google Dropbox or github you can manage your crypto currencies with the ledger wallet Bitcoin Chrome App or the literal wallet is serum chrome app with the Nano s all your Bitcoin and ECM addresses are derived from one unique seed with one seed you can have in the same time Bitcoin is your is your classic balances and also if your restore your seed you will also recover all the keys associated to other apps such as Fido u 2f s SH G B G so it's very simple just

one seed and multiple applications the Nano s sets the new standard in hardware wallet security and usability you can get yours today at ledger wallet calm and when you do be sure to use the offer code epicenter to get 10% off your first order we'd like to thank ledger for their support of epicenter so let's let's then move on to let's let's move to scenario because why we're here let's then describe scenario from a high level what is scenario and what's it trying to achieve yeah so the sir those are big questions actually so I think initially scenario we sort of presented this scenario the scenario to the world as

you know a decentralized social network but in order but there's this a lot more to it and and this has to has to do with kind of peeling the onion right in order to build the decentralized social network their end up being certain technical requirements right so you have to be able to handle content at scale and right now the current blockchain doesn't handle content at scale it doesn't even handle transactions at scale so you know the kind of application that we're envisioning scenario grows up to be and it's not there yet but what we what we envision it growing up to be is essentially handling you know visa level transactions at scale and Facebook level

content distribution that scale so you know blockchain just doesn't do that and the are 1.0 architecture proposals they essentially put the blockchain side-by-side with the content delivery network and then the reason was because I built a content delivery network that I am fairly confident can scale up to that you know I think there's a lot of work but but I know the engineering path to get there and whereas with the blockchain I didn't know the engineering path and I was quite naive about you know a side by side architecture having worked in the blockchain space now for over two years and looking at proof of work and and other kinds of consensus

algorithms and and what it would take to build a consensus algorithm that is scalable I I came to the conclusion rather late in the game like if you compare to aetherium or even steam they made progress because they said we're going to own the chain itself we're just going to take ownership at the chain and build our technology around you know a codebase that that is ours that we can muck with scenario tried to use blockchain technology via off-the-shelf technology hoping against hope that we didn't have to take that on since building the content distribution network and privatizing that is quite hard eventually we came to the

conclusion that's not possible and we have to own the chain itself in order to have a scalable chain and a scalable chain technology that would allow us not only to to be in charge of how the transaction fees are related to the attention economy but also to be able to eventually put content itself on the chain for a wide variety of reasons like including making sure that that storage is a part of the proposition a part of the economic proposition of the decentralized Network so with that in mind then scenario sort of ended up having to be a much more of a platform

than we had originally thought so scenario is also you know below the social network it's also a platform and it's a platform for a wide range of applications that include both content distribution as an example one of our key partners is lively gig and they do they do essentially freelance networking for the decentralized space and they're there they're built their whole architecture around our content delivery mechanism and also and are taking a heavy bet on arching which is literally our chain the scenario chain so

hopefully that gives you a little bit of a picture if you look if you explode the view of our chain a little bit what you'll see is that there is a smart contracting language in addition to a scalable blockchain and that smart contracting language is quite distinct from other contracting languages it's not like solidity because it's it's built on a different model of computation and and and that isn't what's important there is that all of the scenario architecture is built on mathematical foundations that allow us to make everything in alignment with a correct by construction paradigm just one quick example of the Navajo shut up

um so if you look at the way the theory and virtual machine was developed and solidity work was developed they were developed more or less independently and so then there's our requirements when you build a compiler from solidity to the theory and virtual machine that that compiler does the right thing because if it doesn't that's a vector of attack all right someone could come in and and generate the byte codes for a smart contract that you wrote that does other things evil things and that and and so there's a there's a requirement to prove that the compiler is correct there's an

alternative which is that you derive the shape of the language from the shape of the virtual machine in which case there's no correctness there's no proof of correctness for the compiler the the pop compiler is correct by construction because the shape of the language conforms to the shape of the execution model of the virtual machine so that's just one example of many wear scenario is is using mathematics to shave its costs I don't have to go and hire a team of formal verification experts to prove the correctness of my compiler because we get it for free ok but perhaps perhaps we can come back

to this topic of formal verification you know you mentioned a theory and the do I believe that earlier so maybe you can come back this a bit later because I think it's important how it but staying on scenario so if I understand correctly then scenario is is the the platform which allows for this social media platform to exist but you just built the entire stack so scenario the the the social media app is one of those one app that could live on the platform which also includes a blockchain and smart content language and the storage system and also you know tomorrow someone could develop some other type of application

on that looking at it yeah that's that's exactly right and we like even in 2010 we were looking at how we would segment the market the way we segment the market relative to the potential applications has to do with risk personal risk of the users so there's not a lot of risk in posting cat memes right it's not you have nothing at stake when you post cat memes or any any any of a multitude of other kinds of things that are typically shared on social networks if you move just a little bit to the right of that then you then a jobs network like lively cake you do have a lot more risk right so it's a decentralized platform whereby

people are trying to connect with each other to either do work or get work done and there you have you know there's there's more at stake another example is something that's to the right of that is a dating site right so you could at you like you know on this the platform roadmap we have we have a little spot which we call indecent you know to play on decentralization and and dating which would be another application that you could build on top of our content distribution network and economic engine that would be of great social value so it so it could decentralized OkCupid if that makes sense so yes lots and lots of

applications can and should make it take advantage of this platform and that's sort of our aim and we we think that if the if we if we get the platform right then there's a rich ecosystem begins to emerge rather quickly so how would those applications that you see people building on scenario how do those compare with what people are building today on it Hyrum do you think that will be a similar type of application in use case that people will address error or will that be very different applications and will those application themselves look similar or will to be very different well currently I don't know how you do content distribution with

with it the area how do you do that where does the content live and how is it related to the transactions I mean I I guess one of the things that people sometimes do sort of the ipfs EDM type thing exactly right so essentially you have to do this side by side thing and that's where we see a lot of a lot of issues which is why we we ended up having to do a sort of wedded a wedded technology or a unified technology because we believe that there are significant security issues with that kind of approach and then the type of application that people who build on scenario would be especially

specifically around content distribution so video side social media network but for example not something like what people are building today you only hear him like a prediction market or some sort of maybe organizational structure like Dao typing with building and and decision-making yeah no actually it's quite interesting because I see that in in today's world all applications are inherently social let's look at a really good example right who would have thought that code version history would be a social thing right did the people the people who built subversion think about you know

code revision management and code source history as a social thing probably not but github is definitely social and I would love to see a version control system built on top of the scenario platform and that there are lots of good reasons for that right that that's that's one way that you could begin to also guarantee the security of the code that gets deployed in the decentralized setting which is that you have both the security the security benefits of the platform but you also have the security benefits of the community that's interested in that code right and that

also points back to the Dao right which has to do with with the relationship of governance to to code and governance to the behavior of these kinds of systems so that making sense you see how I'm kind of trying to tie the loop there yeah it does make sense I think that having a wedded approach as you mentioned does have some advantages now let's perhaps get into the architecture a bit more so we mentioned that there's a there's a blockchain layer so that's sort of the ledger of transactions there's a smart contracting layer the storage layer on top of that you have the application layer let's get

into perhaps the smart contracting there and the storage layer it's starting with the smart contracting there how so I guess if we were to use a frame of reference a theory would be a frame of reference with people at which people would already know how is the smart contracting there in scenario different or similar from aetherium yeah so similar what we store on the blockchain is not simply a ledger right in the same way that a theorem stores the state of the virtual machine the etherion virtual machine on the chain right we're storing the state of a particular virtual machine on on the on the chain and then ledger like or financial like

applications are built above that virtual machine so that that's the that's where they're similar the the kind of virtual machine that's being stored is very different so in particular we allow fine-grained concurrency so the variant virtual machine is essentially sequential and in fact the the the sequential nature of the way transactions are processed is it's one of the reasons why there are lots of interesting scaling questions about aetherium so just sorry Surgenor but perhaps for those who are not familiar with the with concurrency could you just briefly

explain what that means in a context of smart contracts yeah so imagine that within a single smart contract you have lots of threads of activity that are all going to happen at the same time so so for example in a loan approval application typically what you want to do is you want to go and check the title of the like I'm talking about a home loan approval n't you want to go and check the the title of the property that you're talking about and at the same time you want to go and check the credit history of the applicant now you don't have to sequential eyes those and it's a very bad idea to sequential eyes those what you'd like to do is to do a kind of

fork/join where you fork off both not this is not for work in the sense of working to change but you fork off those activities and let them run simultaneously and then and then when you have answers to both and you can continue with the process right and in this this is just key to all kinds of human activities the fort join pattern is just standard in another example is you know when you submit a paper to a conference for review as my co-author Mike's day and I just did two Foss X what happens is a copy of the paper gets forked off to three or so reviewers and then each reviewer is simultaneously reviewing the paper and then each reviewer will then

supply their comments and then from the coat you know from the collated comments then a decision will be made about the paper so the the rolling smart contracting system and the row VM allows for that kind of con concurrency that kind of simultaneous activity within a single smart contract and and we believe that this is the essence of scaling now the there's a copy out right which is that it's really easy to screw up and the Dow is an example where when you have activities that are unfairly

treated like like you accept new client requests in more with more priority or unfairly over updating the state of the chain then then you can have you can have bugs and and that's why the other side of the the other piece of the puzzle is that you have to have something that allows you to reason about the correctness of these concurrent activities and that's where the Rowling's type system is so important because it allows programmers like most programmers whether they're Haskell programmers or Java programmers or f-sharp programmers or or Oh camel programmers I mean just like most programmers in the world who are

building scalable large-scale mission critical systems are dealing with typed languages yeah I mean yes there's this whole weird JavaScript community that that is untyped but if you look at the big three right Microsoft the Google and Facebook they they they have all put forward alternatives to JavaScript that are typed so what what is a typed language or those like me are enough Ramona I'm glad you asked in today's languages which are typed essentially the types kind of make programs look like wires and there are standards for the plugs on either end of the wire so you know you don't try to to plug you know a 10 base T connection

into a USB port right that that's what the types are doing but Rowling's types go quite a bit further they don't just say you know how you can plug these together from the point of view of of inputs and outputs they say how you can plug them together more like plugging components onto a motherboard so making sure that the components all play nicely together so that that's that's you know the rough idea so I think an example correct me if I get this wrong right of something a JavaScript like you could add the number 3 plus a string 4 and then it would sort of automatically convert the string into a number and

it's a 7 and then of course those kind of things can lead to lots of mistakes if one isn't careful and then in a typed a strongly typed language we would just give an error yeah that's correct that's exactly right and and and so what that means in terms of like production level code is when you when you do have the when you do have type checking then the compiler is doing a lot of work that in other languages like JavaScript you're having to write unit tests for so in other words you're not spending money on human labor to do things that could be done in an automated fashion so code is produced more cheaply and more

robustly today's magic word is concurrency Co n CU RR en CY head over to let's talk back when comm to sign in enter the magic word and claim you're part of a listener award so Greg I'm curious about that because what one of the big arguments that people have used for solidity you know is that because it's so similar to JavaScript it's a lot of people know or can sort of easily get started and develop something and the barrier to entry is quite low now with with some of those you know ro Lang or PI cockles etc those are I think much more esoteric

languages so do you think that's gonna be a big hurdle in terms of adoption that people have to learn these new languages and especially languages that are they're very different from the ones that they're used to you know I think that's a great question and I do think there there is a little bit of a mind shift but I think one of the interesting things about this space and I'm always thinking about adoption and I've thought about adoption since since X laying in Microsoft so so the rolling the rolling design is now benefiting from what LC we released this talk in 2000 so maybe 18 years of design

feedback from working with developers so so so yeah there there will be some adoption issues but interestingly about the blockchain is it's full of intrepid people it's full of people who are are go-getters who are not afraid because you know hey this is all brand-new stuff anyway and and it's very exciting I mean I one of the things I say a lot in interviews like this and and and I say it often because it's true I am so inspired by the blockchain space because there are so many people who instead of complaining that the world is broken they are rolling up their sleeves and they're getting

work done and they're unafraid to go and try something new and and that's what gives me hope with respect to the introduction of these new tools and techniques the reality is that that formal methods and formal verification are are are kind of coming up silently behind the the sort of more traditional development methodologies and they're making a huge headway and the reason that they they are necessary in this space is because they're necessary in all mission-critical spaces it's a great idea to to go for adoption but if what you're doing is it is getting a lot of people who have no real understanding of how to do mission-critical financial

applications then you're gonna have a lot more doubt bugs a lot more so so either we we begin to adopt tools and techniques that are going to help people even people who don't have experience with them or we're gonna be willing to take the paint so what will then and this is sort of a related question but I'm interested in knowing what you think about this and what are your thoughts on major banks and even some central banks at least one that I know experimenting on etherium you know I I think it's great I think the more engagement and the more involvement with these technologies the better at the end of the day I'm not a certain point I've

begun I got a little bit nervous about you know these deep-pocketed institutions getting involved with this tech and then I kind of relaxed because I realized that for the people who are paying attention for the people who really understand what this technology is about they're not going to just get back in bed with the banks that's that's not what this is about and so if we're vertical if we're able to Tom Sawyer you know the deep resources of these institutions to build better block chains yes this is awesome and if they don't do an opensource nobody's going to engage so I

just to me and I just think there's this tons and tons of positivity about that and I'm very excited and at the end of the day we all are going to have to come to the table in this dialogue right whether you're whether you're an incumbent institution or a crazy startup doing doing things like a decentralized social network everybody's gonna have to be involved in the conversation let's take a short break to talk about Jax Jax is a multi coin wallet created by the people at the central now in the past if he had a whole bunch of cryptocurrencies it was a pain to handle them you either had to leave them on in the exchange which was insecure or you had to have have all these different wallets which

was a hassle fortunately now with Jax knows medieval days of Darkness misery and suffering are over Jack supports multiple cryptocurrencies and new ones are being added but it's not just storing cryptocurrency so you can do with Jax but you can also exchange them directly from whip inside the wallet thanks to their shape shift integration and since there's only one seed Jax makes it super easy to backup and sync to your other devices Jax works with Windows Mac OS Linux Android iOS and has browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome so go to Jack Co that's J a double x co to download the wallet and get started today we'd like to thank Jax

for the support of epicenter in scenario is there is there like consensus mechanism something I prefer for proof of stake I mean I know you worked with Vlad on on Casper as well did that influence design or is an error in any way oh oh totally absolutely I mean you know the art chain the consensus algorithm underneath our chain is a variant of Casper you know in some sense we're heavily influenced by the work of italic and of flat and and we're very excited to be you know engaged in collaborating with metallic and flat on Casper again the the point here is that these algorithms they're new they're hard they require a

lot of focus and a lot of attention and they require expertise from a lot of different fields like you know I'm I'm amazed at the kinds of expertise that vitalik and Vlad can bring to the to the picture and it's largely around crypto and economics it doesn't doesn't isn't really much around the sort of programming language semantics formal methods right but we're gonna need all of that talent and all of that skill and expertise to design something that's actually workable at scale for mission critical systems so so totally yes we are heavily influenced one of the places where we differ for example that I'm very excited about is if you look at

metallics algorithm and Vlad's algorithm to the bedding like I don't know your audience is familiar with the way Casper works but essentially there's there's there's a moment there are moments in the consensus steps where the validators and these are the entities that replace miners and proof-of-work the validators are effectively betting on which block is next in the chain so that that's a simplification but that's that's a way to get a foothold here and and and what you want is to make sure that the bets converge as rapidly as possible towards towards you know a common outcome so

that it said everyone it ultimately agrees and you can imagine the people could kind of game this system right so one of the ways that they might game the system is they could equivocate they could they could bet on one side and then the other but not in a way that's justified they're doing this from some sort of nefarious economic motivations or other kinds of motivations and and and the Kaspar algorithm the the punishments and rewards for for betting behavior essentially make it so that those players who are our well-behaved are left standing

economically whereas those who are betting in an in a sort of more in a various way they end up draining their resources so but so that part is somewhat independent from what they're betting on and if you bet on if you bet on blocks then you are effectively rate limiting the algorithm well what the are chain thing does and actually but Alec makes it makes use of that fact in in reasoning about certain kinds of timing the are chain that doesn't bet on blocks the are chain bets on propositions that describe the shape of the blockchain and

there's there's a good reason for them the reason for that so that that means that that each each validator is saying you know my requirements are that this transaction occurs and this transaction occurs and this one comes before either of those right and that sort of thing so so there are constraints on the shape of the blockchain and the reason that's important is because if you think about it when you go to buy a coffee in your local coffee shop unless either of you happens to be living in Shanghai I didn't check that no okay good right so so then the cost of me buying a stick of tofu from a street vendor you know that that that transaction should be

independent and have no conflict with your coffee purchase at a local coffee shop and that's part of the reason that global financial networks scale is because most of the transactions are isolated right and that's that will be the same in the case of validators most of the transactions are going to be isolated the only time you ever need to engage consensus is if they have constraints that are at odds with each other like I say you know transaction it has to a has to come before transaction B and you say no no transaction B has to come before transaction a and at that point that's when you have to have some kind of betting structure or betting strategy right and so bet by proposition can potentially allow for

well well I'll skip a bunch of technical details but what it can allow for is to realize tens of thousands of blocks all at once because you're only betting on the shape of the chain not specific blocks and so at the moment to reach consensus you're reaching consensus about a big giant chunk of the chain so this gives you much much better throughput rates so does that is that making sense you know to answer your question it kind of makes sense on a high level I think did the general idea right that you're gonna have activity going on in different corners of the network and that can be unrelated and it this sort of idea that every single

thing is validated together that that's maybe not the most efficient at you I think a lot of people will can relate to that easily sweet sweet so so that's it I mean it's certainly impressive just how innovative and how different and how like from the ground up a lot of this stuff is it's designed in a novel way so it really sounds complete or very much unlike any of the other blockchain projects out there yeah so I I confess I often feel funny about it just because I mean certainly we've tried to build on other's work but we've also tried to be

keep our eyes wide open about requirements right and every step every step of the way we've been driven by market requirements we're not trying to innovate we're really really you know it's like if I could just pull something off the shelf and have it do that thing that'd be great because then I could get more sleep yeah you mentioned before the currency right so we have this aspect that you know I post content on this scenario I want it to be popular so I like put some money behind that and and so we have this kind of mechanisms so I think this kind is called am can you talk a bit about but there's a few questions on this you know how many are there how are they created like who owns them how did they obtain them and then

what's their function in Network right okay so so first of all I want to make a quick distinction between amps versus REO so am sort of the unit of the attention economy they're they're the means by which people promote posts and and you know essentially how value flows in the this chain of value content Oh initially we when we thought we were going to be able to utilize the Bitcoin blockchain for our initial crowd sale we we meant it all the entire amp supply all at once and and that was via the omni layer on top of the Bitcoin protocol as we became

more and more savvy about the actual market requirements and the technological basis for delivering the market requirements we realized that that wasn't going to fly and so essentially there will be a new amp token issued on the on the our chain and there will be a conversion from existing amps which people hold and trade today to to this new amp token and of course it will be sort of linked to to you know you know risk versus versus you know reward in the sense that people who jump on to our chain sooner will be able to get a better rate for the conversion than people who wait and until later but

essentially that you know that kind of makes sure that we're we're holding true to our promise to our investors so that the amp is the the crypto token that's associated with the attention economy and ultimately amps will be convertible into the arching equivalent of gas right and that's what allows you to essentially buy if every post ends up being its own smart contract and we believe that this is kind of the killer this is the killer app for rolling is that the reality is that every post in the scenario network is its own little tiny smart contract so so if that's the case then there's a there's a reason to

have to amp this is this nice connection or thread from amps down to the rate-limiting feature of the the Rovio so so just to rephrase that if I got this correctly said there was any sort of an amp sale that was done with on the omni layer which omni some people may remember that as master coined once upon a time and and now when the scenario is kind of life there will be a new currency equivalent to hearings gas that's gonna be created there those amps are gonna be essentially can be kind of moved over and so you're gonna have a new a new crowd sale to sell additional of that gas like currency or that's this close

let me then let me make it slightly more accurate all right so so yes we have we've had not one but two cross sales and which we sold the minted tokens to capitalize the project when we have our chain you'll be able to convert those tokens directly onto the tokens for for the arching the the etherium is gas is not the same as ether right you convert you you can essentially purchase gas with ether so the amp token is like is like ether more than gas yeah yeah right yeah and and you know it's not necessarily the case that the conversion event is a crowd sale it's just that we want to make sure that people move over

to our chain right so people who are holding amps should be moving to our chain as soon as possible now that said you can use the bits right now you can go to docker and get our Ducker image and stand up a note right now so you can you can play with it you can have the user experience we do not recommend this for any sort of you know mission-critical amps the only amps that should be flowing through those notes are tests net amps yeah so you recently I believe ended the the crowd sale cause you increase it to and in which you raised close to 5 million

US dollars one seven million I think so can you talk about well I guess there was a couple questions about this one is what is the structure of scenarios as a company is it a foundation what will the government's model be around the allocation of those funds and and what do you plan to use that money for yeah so those are all fantastic questions I mean I should say that even before the crowd sale launched we were holding us the first scenario governance conference so we are fully fully committed to this being a network owned by the people who use it and we are we

are working as hard as we can to build a cookie crumb trail from the current situation where scenario limited is the company that holds the amps to a place where and hope holds the funding to a place where you know the funds are are allocated according to the will of the community all right so that that's that the letters are you know hard we hold fast to that name so scenario Limited is an Israeli based company in order to do any sort of you know to pay for people doing work for scenario there has to be

some kind of incorporation because there's always taxes involved right and so the choice at the time was to to to do an Ltd and and but now we're essentially moving in a step by step you know recent fashion to a structure that is a better a better governance model so one of the things that we are aiming to do is to move from a sort of standard corporate CEO CTO C Starro structure and then reports like that is to have a partnership model more like a law firm where you have managing partners partners and associates right and then people can engage at whatever they the

level they feel is appropriate for themselves so that that's kind of steps 0 from where we are to get to something that's that's much more flat and and then one of the things that we hope to do is for the are chain itself we build a nonprofit organization and I'm hoping that that is going to be a cooperative so we're again we're we're learning as much as we can about that kind of governance model I was in cooperatives when I was in college so I went to Oberlin College in the US and more than 25% student body there is lives and works in cooperatives that my own co-op

we we made all our own tofu did all our own yogurt granola make Tyler own bread we ran the housing and everything right so so I'm quite familiar with these kinds of governance models and they make me very happy and we're fully committed to this stance in which the scenario the way the funds are allocated in Scenario reflect the will of the community but we have to operate within certain parameters in today's society until we can you know sort of build a practical step-by-step mechanism to get to that place and so then I guess before we wrap up here let's talk about the product a

little bit you mentioned that you can download a docker container and start playing with test net amp coins well where where's the product at right now and the roadmap and was that road might look like over the next six to 12 months yeah so essentially what we've got is a rough sketch of the user experience and a very very rough sketch with further content distribution mechanism that's built around some abstractions called which I've been developed called the reactive media so this is essentially taking the reactive programming paradigm and applying it to social media this is no big surprise Facebook is engaged in similar kinds of activities but they're

but the the the programming paradigm is specific especially well-suited to this domain and a bunch of other domains as well and so so please take a look at the you know what what it looks and feels like to you know to post and and share with people use in the user in the content part the content distribution part of the user experience the very very nascent part of the attention economy is also available in one of the branches and this would be SOC 92 omni that will be moved into staging presently in which case people will be able to play around

with the Tesla amps so the big picture is we're going to be rewriting the backend so that we have you know one one thing which is the content distribution network on top of arching and so that we don't block the development of the user experience this is effectively the reason we're releasing these bits we want people to play around with it give us feedback help us you know get it right and that will inform iterations of the UI while we're rebuilding the backend and so the aim and the hope is that we have the backend redone and the

UI in route in version 2 by q4 of 2017 with lots of interesting drop points along the way so we're hoping hoping very much to have a drop point where people can be playing with our chain kind of q3 of 2017 so that that's kind of a rough picture of things of the roadmap so yeah I mean we've we've published the road map in various forms so please go check that out as well and you know if anybody has any and if

anyone in your audience you know has thoughts about the federal ways to organize the road map or or anything that I said we really really welcome comment and feedback yeah it was certainly good encourage that and we're gonna have links to all of the resources I mean there's a very comprehensive white paper and website and links so people can also I mean you can download the software today right and and this will play around if it yeah and great so thanks so much for coming on Greg it's fascinating project and I certainly look forward to seeing how it evolves I think it's super ambitious and I think you're onto something so let's

let's hope it's gonna have that impact that you're hoping for it thank you so much and I really really appreciate the chance to chat with you guys it was very stimulating and you guys that's really thoughtful questions I really appreciate it yeah thanks so much great and of course thanks so much for listener so we are a part of the this topic on network you can find this show and many other shows on let's so freakin calm and well of course you can subscribe to the show in any of the podcast players or watch the videos on youtube.com slash episode of VidCon so thanks so much in real code