#255 Kathleen Breitman & Arthur Breitman: Tezos – The Long Road Towards A Digital Commonwealth

Transcript

hey we're core organizing a live event at the San Francisco blockchain week it's called SF blockchain epicenter and will be October 8th and 9 at the Hilton Union Square you can come see members of the epicenter team and a lot of familiar faces from the show there are reduced rates for developers and you can learn more at the SF blockchain week I owe this episode of epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft Azure configure and deploy a consortium network in just a few clicks with pre-built configurations and enterprise

grade infrastructure spend less time on blockchain scaffolding and more time building your application learn more at akms slash epicenter and by top down top dollars addressing the talent shortage from the blockchain space connecting companies of all sizes with the world's best blockchain engineers if you're looking to scale your team check out top tail comm slash epicenter hello and welcome to episode of the show which talks about the technologies projects and startups driving ESET Relations and the global blockchain revolution my name is Brian Fabian crane and I'm ahead Roy today we are pleased to welcome back on

the show Arthur Brightman who is one of the co-founder of Bezos joining Arthur Brightman is Kathleen Brightman who's on epicenter for the first time Kathleen is also a co-founder of Bezos so Arthur and Kathleen welcome on the show thank you so before we start this show we'd like to disclaim that both Brian and I participated in the tezo's found fundraiser and we continue to hold our daisies so we are not exactly neutral interviewers for this episode now with that Brian you want to say something on that now of course they sauce we've we've been aware for a long time and all listeners have been aware for a long

time actually one of our most popular episodes was was with with Arthur back and I think we've had maybe 40 50 thousand downloads on that one and that was in a long time ago in 2016 or at this long time ago in in Bitcoin age or locked-in age and that was around a year before the fundraiser and already at the time the the tasteless white paper actually was quite old so thisis white paper was originally published having in 2014 under the name LM Goodman and some who've been around in the blocks in church for a long time may this may ring a bell LM Goodman of course there was journalist Leah

McGrath Goodman who had basically outed this poor guy in California so that was Tesla's first encounter was really bad investigative journalism yeah yeah and there was definitely a remarkable episode so that was named after that and I think at the time you were still working in in banking and then afterwards spent some time at Google and was kind of developing it taste us on the side and then so it's been a really long time until you know the fundraiser happening now of course at this point aces being you know live projects and quite a vibrant project it's been a long pregnancy yes yeah so one of the things I thought would be

interesting to talk about a little bit to start this off is can you give a bit of context like how did you decide back then to you know work on Tasers and what were the main the main triggers for the core ideas of the white paper back end well what I found really interesting was the idea that this blocking system is represented Commons and be going ahead a way of paying for it centrally a decentralized way of paying for a Commons which was the security of the network but it didn't you know that was very it had very many minimal governance and on one hand it's good to have minimal governance because

you you have a smaller surface area to attacks but on the other hand there was also a lot of innovation coming this field I'm singing in particular of smart contracts in aetherium or zero knowledge groups of knowledge transactions in zero cash and energy cash so all of these things were happening and I didn't see a very clear path for how they would make their way into Bitcoin without explicit governance and I became fascinated with the idea of what what what happened during fork based governance and what happened if you had more formal governance to me it always seems so visionary that the tezo's white paper was published before

the Bitcoin block size drama happened so kind of you anticipated that a problem like that was going to develop and already had written a solution like at least a solution that could work in practice but then as as time passed on tezo's also acquired its second flavor which was around smart contract safety right so how did that come about yeah and you know you can see the safety aspect is present in India on your original papers one of the thing I I got really interested in was formal verification as a technology so it's it's been around for a long time it's the idea of creating a program as a mathematical expression and making many medical proofs about your program it's

typically been it's typically required a lot of expertise and a lot of time and efforts and so it's been used in cases where the bugs are extremely costly for example Aeronautics where if you have one bug your rockets can go crashing down instead of going up that that's something that actually happened and so smart contracts are or even you know in general the code base that underpin this neutral assets are really prime example of small code bases that's good easily but that could be verified unnecessarily easily and and for which there is really a it makes financial sense to actually verify those code bases and at the same time the tools and technology for doing

formal verification has been gone an eat has got an easier and easier so there are better libraries for the theorem provers like [ __ ] you also have automated approvers using SMT solvers so all of these feel that has been making strides and in the same time we have perfect candidates for it so it seemed like a really good fit so of course that's that has been absolutely correct in both of those points where governance has become a massive topic I think today lots of new blockchain projects come and governance is always one aspect that they're you know they're where that's a problem there has to be some some solution around that formula verification as well or like smart contract security and blocks and security has become massive of course after the tasers white paper we have

things like the Dow hack and in the parody multi-sig box and other things like that that have really made that very apparent but one of the other things that I thought was interesting is that today if you look if you ask people what are the biggest issues in blockchain no probably would say number one would be scalability I think and then interoperability is another one probably interoperability scalability in governance I would say would probably be the numbers the three although I'm sure some people would have different answers and on on scalability on interoperability there hasn't been a topic for tasers it wasn't in the white paper do you think this is something that was sort of it should have been

more of a focus off pesos that's a good question it's def you know so you mentioned - two things that were I mentioned one was interoperability and the other one was throughput in terms of super I think there definitely needs to be a higher throughput than a four transaction or ten transactions per second that you let you see on those almost blocked rings however I've always been on the mind that the best solutions for throughput were pretty much second that your solution so things like the Lightning Network or even you know not necessarily not even necessarily trust those things I so different people see different things in the in this in its market and for me I haven't missed I

don't necessarily think so much as to the currencies as a way to disintermediate but more as a way of making the the system of intermediation permissionless and so in this respect I've certainly been less interested in in supports also in terms of Shivaji you know just moving from a proof-of-work to prophetic system are increasing can increase your stupid quickly although you you can get the same saying in proof-of-work using bitcoin ng type of model but so there there's a lot of ways to get more on change scalability not you know get not get a thousand X or ten thousand x but like reasonable gains that really make the level two solutions practical I also think that the reason everyone is so focused on throughput

right now is because of a narrative around the theorem gap so in a first phase you had people who figured out it's like hey if I create an application and somehow I managed to tie it with a token even though that not necessarily make sense then maybe I can make money you know maybe I'll make money this way and then you know people will use a token and so they tried to build these applications and none of them really panned out that well perhaps because it's early but I think perhaps because a lot of the times the tokens or the applications themselves didn't make a whole lot of sense there were applications which were perfectly fine is being centralized and people were decentralizing exam for the sake of using tokens and so when you know when he became a parents that that will

really wasn't going to work people point it out at cryptic ideas and say like oh well the problem you know of course everyone would be working on all these great apps the only problem is we don't have the super to do it right you know we'd have decentralized Facebook decentralize all of it we just need to have the stupid necessary on the blocks and finally we'll be able to do that and so I think that's one of the that's one of definitely one of the marketing angle of a us I don't think that's - I think that the problem is product market fit and the fact that the centralization is only useful in specific cases and so I I don't I really don't think that through food is gonna make the apps popular I definitely think it's gonna make for the next few years hi circuits blockchains popular because

I think it's a beauty contest and people will use a throughput as a mark of beauty as opposed to something that's really important for their platform so you'll have a lot of discussions of throughput but I sing at the end of the day it's it's not as important the other one is interpret interoperability so interpretability assumes that you have many different block strains a very heterogeneous ecosystem and that makes sense if there's some trade-offs so if one way to design a block chain let's say you want to design a block chain for smart contracts and now you want to design a block chain for payments and somehow making you know designing it for payments or for store value makes it very different that the design you would

use for smart contracts let now you need to have these two block chains because you have all these different use cases which require different architecture in that case interoperability would be very important because you would like this block chance to talk to each other but I don't believe that there are such trade-offs I think there's very very few trade-offs in in the design of block chains one of it is I think the centralization and throughput that's good I'm more generally speaking you know how decentralize do you want to be and how safe and save you the very like general sense you want to make sure that anyone can participate and everyone kind of agree so you proceed very slowly and carefully versus something more centralized where you can go faster so that's a real trade-off and I think we'll see block chains are on that

spectrum but I don't think the other ones really are and so since they're not trade-offs I think one system will end up absorbing a lot of the a lot of the rest so I don't think interoperability is as important as it's made out to be so I'm really interested in like to do very interesting ideas you put forward in in what you said the first was you made a statement like you weren't that interested in disintermediation itself but in in making intermediate intermediating permissionless did I state that correctly yes right yeah so let's let's go into that concept a

little little bit more what does it mean in depth could you could you restate the concept or like sketch out a vision for what it means for intermediation to be yeah and I miss I should say that I have you know I have many ideas about this space and some of them I hold very very strongly this is one of the more speculative one I'm not I'm not I'm not as sure about that one as it would be about about other things so the general you know there's a general concept in economics that what you should worry about is not a man up but really not de facto monopoly but really freedom of entry right if you haven't anomaly but any company could come in and compete it doesn't matter if they actually compete what matters is that they can come in and so the problem

is financial intermediation is perhaps that they're so few intermediaries if you have very very high barrier to entry in financial intermediation then you're gonna have lower quality of service higher prices perhaps less trust whereas if anyone can participate you have more competition and so with possibly you have better service so that's one that's one point of view but there is something to be said about the fact that black shinza cryptocurrencies for the first time they are low long-distance payment without intermediation that's never happening in the history of humanity so you know I would not I would not be too quick to just take that and say like oh that doesn't matter that's certainly something that's important but I also I

also think that being able to have a lot of difference a lot of different centralized parties bloom and participate in network evaporation is uh is is very helpful in fact if you look at lightning like that lightning Network some people of the Lightning network say oh it's centralized look it has to have all these herbs and spokes and so on so forth yeah but you have freedom of entry I don't have to use your lightning and if I don't want to I can I can make a direct blocking transaction I can fall back I'm some other node you have the freedom of choice and at the end of the day that's what really matters and so as a result I'm less concerned about the own train transactions to put by yourself I see basically what happens on

Shane as a fullback for a flurry of activity that happens off chain the second interesting concept is like you expressed like some kind of skepticism about the value proposition of decentralized applications in terms of the product market fit and on the other side like so decentralized applications what are they well there's an there's I tend to think of them as like applications that do not have a single individual like service provider or central server that's like serving that application it's like a network of nodes that serving that application II and so you express like skepticism on product-market fit of decentralized applications but your you yourself built a smart contract chain what's the value

proposition of smart contracts if not decentralized applications so I think is a people are starting to make a difference between and it's not as if I'm mental difference but it is a spectrum but when people call it DAP and what people call the smart contracts so I yeah I heard about this DAP recently is that and I don't know the name I don't want to point any fingers but it's a dab that lets you you know you take some video and then you will encode the video for you and this is a decentralized network of people who can encode your video and so and so forth and you know that's far as life here and I'm not so on the idea that that you need to do this through the centralized network as opposed to to a as opposed to like facing a centralized website that

gives that service and maybe I don't understand it okay I just I I don't see directly on the other hand of the spectrum you have something like a multi-sig contract that's a smart contract but no one would take a look at the multi so you can call it a death okay so this is a smart contract because you want to make things like multi-state contracts because if you have a smart contract language implementing something like the radiant network is a lot more trivial than implementing something like the Lightning Network there was his comment on Twitter recently that I thought it was really spot-on he was like something that's a paper in Bitcoin is like a blog post in a cerium just because of the simplicity of having a smart contract language so it's making it easier for people to write contracts

like insurance contracts oh I think I think succinctly Arthur thinks that you know smart contracts are a bad name for smart contracts and one thing he'd prefer is automated escrow so it gives you an idea of the amount of expressivity that he'd like to see in in these sorts of pieces of code so yeah as far as the idea of automated escrow is that look you have some tokens which are like stuck in the smart contract and you wants to release a certain sum to certain parties depending on certain conditions it's now I don't say there's a substrate or just run a full fledge application but you know or or so yeah automated a screw also alludes to the

idea of you know just go to the blockchain for adjudication you know you were running an option contract you had a dispute you goes as a chain and then you verify yeah you verify what happened so that's that's opposes the use case I I see for its that being said again I I try not if I don't need to have a very strong conviction in something I want and so obviously I want this to be a platform that accommodates all kind of applications including including the apps if the apps want to use tezo's like I say there's not a whole lot of trade offs so maybe maybe Sherwood is a trade off and that's one I would personally favor less than decentralization about it's some ah you know at the end of the day the protocol is in the end of the of the community and so if they decide to

push it in a direction that's more towards Rupert and abscess what will happen that's my personal preference ya know this is a fascinating answer now I'm do you think it would it be fair to say that one way to think about Tasers is it's like Bitcoin but there's governance there are some smart contracts and this proof of stake instead of proof of work yeah yeah you could see you you could say that and because because one of the interesting question of course is is if you had if you looked at the theorem and if you looked at the etherium basically pitched that if you made back in when did it the

fundraiser and after it was okay if here amidst this world computer and you can run any kind of application only theorem and in its trustless and any theorem the token or easter the token is gas to pay for computation on this thing right so it was also from from a token perspective seen as a very different thing from Bitcoin which maybe this money so do you do you think when you look at tizzies do you see those more in the kind of money camp than in the gas camp or how do you look at that yeah it's interesting when a cerium came up with that that [ __ ] I saw they were being Stroh chien you know I said they were they were saying of course it's a

cryptocurrency but if we say that we're competing head-on with Bitcoin people are not going to take a seat seriously so we're gonna find a different shader says that bitcoin is gold and say that we're gas and that's what people will see value and then we can establish ourselves as a currency that's how white that that's that's what I saw was going on because in my mind was clearly cryptocurrency but no I think they meant it now I know things I meant it for me I mean these things are primarily useful as money and so I see it as a critical currency but that being said I don't think you have to be in the in the application camp or the money cab or it's worse people tend to blister is like okay well you have privacy coins and then you have money coins and then

you have applications going on like I said not a whole lot of trade-offs there's no reason why you can't have privacy you can't be money and you can also be used to power that's and smart contracts I mean at the end of the day if you know it's not like physical gas it's not like you have gas and then you have to break down the molecules you're just paying you know you're paying minors or bakers to include your transactions and if you're gonna be paying them you're essentially using money so it's money that's used for a certain type of application and the best money is the money that you can use for the most type of use cases and so you know be it gas be payments being everything that you can think of if you've listened to previous episodes

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you're saying the things that will have the most usage and basically the kind of smart contract or application platform that that succeeds at the biggest scales like whatever token belongs to that platform is also gonna become the you know the most valuable store value does that kind of tie into yeah ya know I would agree with that thesis although I think that they are very very very strong story this and so just by virtue of being the first Bitcoin as a very massive lead I and it's not clear that's being able to be used for smart contracts is enough of a benefit to do change or shelling points in people's mind that you know Bitcoin is it and so that's that's really an uphill battle

for any any cryptocurrency out there including for tensors yeah you to refute a source of course okay more more supportive is any Syria because it is new to the game yep very interesting so so in a sense idiom tried to create at least like publicly this different market of a world computer and this asset as gas in that world computer whereas your perspective is like all the cryptocurrencies are ultimately stores of value there or they all compete with each other including pesos pretty much and I and I think that most of the DAP cryptocurrencies even though they have are being used a store of a store of value because they're basically I've

given you have gotten the money like characteristics there's cars people are using them as as money and a store of values ah more than more than anything but but but but but there's there's conversions in in in in in money and I think you end up having the most likely one or the most useful one these are one that dominates yeah and I mean part of the reason a conversation around this that talks about it as like an app for one thing is because you don't want to say like yeah I'm competing with Bitcoin and I'm competing with aetherium because there's a lot of entrenched players and entrenched interests and you don't want to go head-to-head with it you want to say like no you know no I'm not competing with aetherium because you see I will be the application for dog-walking on the blockchain and so you

can't say that I'm competing with so-and-so so I think more you know for being intellectually honest we're all kind of operating in the same space it's just very few people want to admit it because it invites a lot of vitriol towards you the second you start to say this yeah but there are people who know that these things are competing it's critical twitter twitter twitter is pretty bad but if you look at it and the reason you see so much animosity I think is because deep down people know that these things are competing at each other well yeah that in a lot of time on their hands but yeah yeah yeah but you know just because you're competing doesn't mean that it has to be like a like a ferocious like and ugly and ugly battle I think right now I think I I don't want

to steal your quote well it's not my choice program no but I always I think people overstate the amount of animosity between different project leads I think Arthur and I have a pretty good working relationship with a lot of people who work in this space who might be considered our competitors because as I like to say but i appropriately some program you know a start-up doesn't usually compete against other startups it usually competes against people not giving a [ __ ] about it so there's even more true bug blocking in courtroom approaching protocols because really like if you look at the amount of people who actually use this in their day to day it's actually quite meager compared to the amount of hype sand headline headlines that have been circulated around this so really you know a rising

tide lifts all boats you know relevancy for one blockchain helps out all the others it's it's not you know it's not crazy to posit that helping out one project become relevant you know helps the others and so yeah I remember when I was a kid anyway I watched on TV a couple some misty there was a TV show series for a Highlander and he was always weird to me when he had a friend who was also a Highlander and it was like but I wasn't gonna have to like kill each other down the line at some point were they friends you know he was born after 1990 Arthur means to say is like well Highlander there can only be one exactly so like you know like pull out knives

when when all of these things have have become the way that you pay for coffee and Dubai and and and I don't know Frankfort respectively well what is the real casualties was a friend made along the way yeah I don't think so anyway you know the point is like we have so far to go in terms of realizing the you know promises of this technology that it's really not worth trying to take out other people or malign others at this at this juncture so that that's a very interesting perspective and like I I'm like tempted to contrast it to a lot of different projects in this space like the clearest contrast to me comes out with Definity right like so a project

that's trying to build like you know like Facebook on the blockchain or Gmail on the blockchain whereas like in tazers like at least not as us but you yourself as founders of it ideologically believe in a very different direction for the for the cryptocurrency space so yeah look at the end of the day if everyone if you know definitely comes out and everyone starts building all these applications and affinity and it becomes clear and everyone starts using them and it's great and everyone loves them you know at this point I like okay I guess we need I guess we need to have throughputs the domains thing to know about tables is that it's an evolving ball system which which is really designed to favor innovation and

evolvability I I think the there's a lot of ideas in the Definity consensus which are really interesting the idea of doing like sortition but like a buzz in agreement with sortition using as a threshold signature for getting your randomness all of those are really good ideas but that you know I do expect that at some point their code will be open source their papers I'm more like the part right now that that strikes me as a little difficult as a whole this real key generation but loves yet you know Zi I think the ideas and the consensus are really good and if they're if they're good there's no reason for tasers not to adopt them users demand for it so let's switch to a different topic now the

topic is of course like the Tesla's foundation drama we need to cover it even for customs sake I guess so so like it Tasos broke out in the in the media and in the crypto narrative because of the Tesla's foundation drama it attracted a lot of attention so could you just like walk us through what really happened in this episode and maybe some of your learning stated well basically like Johan gave us was called self-dealing and so he fabricated a scandal with the help of Ritter's in order to create ambiguity I'd also he had like a lot of contacts and it could be of allies that he leveraged to

predict himself and so you know what should have been a fairly straightforward removal of a board member who committed in proprieties turning to was made into a scandal by Reuters who was trying to sell copy but thankfully um you know an outlet that has far more subscribers and much more page views and wired actually took the effort to find out both sides of the you know so-called scandal and quickly it became obvious that you know Arthur and I were quite wronged by this man and his accomplice Commuter Schmidt screw matka and yeah I mean all's well that ends well like thankfully tez this was in such a good place that you know the network was able to ship relatively on time and you know no harm no foul I mean if the Swiss

really wanted to live up to the expectations that they said for everyone who they give tours of the crypto Valley to perhaps they'll prosecute Johan givers for you know disloyal management much like they did you know the folks at FIFA I think this is in the same ballpark of malfeasance but yeah like we don't spend that much time thinking about what a South African masseuse thinks so why should you what often parts of like at least the occurrence of events as I saw it is so you had like three board members so Siwon givers Guido shoots crow maka and then there was the ego pons so the Diego as I

understand it was always very supportive of of the two of you yeah it's you know supported the technology cuz he understands it that's you know a first asset Diigo is also not a [ __ ] crook so that helps so yeah you know Diego had a bit of it up on the two of them but nonetheless he he still had a backbone yeah yep no I seem to mention like remarkable resilience and yeah I mean this thing is it's like the board headed two out of three failure because I sing because of the concentration in a group the valley so like the board had a two out of three failure and I actually thought like your hand

Diego's hand was just too weak because like it was almost that like Johan and and Guido had had you cornered in some sense that is that is the impression I got but then things suddenly turned around and like these situations solved how and why did you Han did give up control well there's a few things going on here first of all Johan is a terrible tactician yeah but without spending too much time on it I think essentially what happened is that you know he gives his very weird to talk in January at the crypto ah uh DiCaprio conference you know without quotes of himself and the community which had been misled by

rulers into thinking this was a dispute and like he says I say they were like okay no this guy is nuts and he was obviously nuts and readers knew that you know they did it on purpose and so you know once that stilted the community released user support behind an initiative that also came from the community called the t2 foundation and when it became clear that the t2 foundation was actually gonna be the one releasing the protocol I think it forced the hand of I sing it for the hand of the first foundation who had to what to basically understand it you know they would the position was becoming untenable I mean basically let's face it you know all of tezo's broadly construed those who want to see the protocol of the wild are very freakin lucky that their

arch-nemesis were in our era Steve Sekulow brenneke sorry Johann Garros and greedy Schmitt screw Macker they were not easy a team yeah they're not exactly a team like we were dealing with a pretty weak hand on the other side so even though they had a billion dollars and all of the narrative that they wanted to do to an international press publication really to publish anything they would say literally anything they would say they still managed to fail because guess what soft power prevails in the narrative Ron Texas is not that of enriching a South African masseuse but rather launching yeah so I mean really I I don't want to strip my laurels because this is a

pretty easy thing to trounce but the the sort of soft narrative around tezo's was really not in favor of them ever having any clout whatsoever I mean even the mere suggestion that tezo's would never launch which is what word is tried to write twice once in September because they didn't understand when to put option was and the second time you know and this whole governance crisis came through the the whole suggestion was that Tessa never launched even though there were 40,000 lines of code they've been running on a test net for over almost a year 60 but you know it's still yeah the technical literacy is that no one technical who yes she would not shake yeah it's just like it's annoying I don't know if it was malice in their

part and just you know wanting to like knock an ICO down or like you know one of these things or if it was just like pure incompetence but you know the end result was basically the same and I think they made a complete fool out of themselves I mean the horror stories are on an alone are just worth a warranting you know its own examining that's one other time yeah that's another time but in any case like it's not worth it it's not worth dwelling on folks you can never like compile the code around tezo's to talk about how to talk about how like you know they made it kind of a kerfuffle around this so of course it's always tricky to abstract from you know this pathetic story but still do you have some some kind of lessons that you take away either for you you know that apply to I

don't know business or working in general or maybe that's specific to people starting blockchain projects and foundations or what a kind of you main takeaways here I mean there's a there's often a tendency to over generalize life s and then sometime you know they're just they just narrow accidents but I think the most useful generalization I can give movie ever teach you not to business in the crypto Valley I think they value their image a lot more than the value integrity and I don't think it's a good place to to do business I try to be to be very very attractive of the things but at the end of the day they haven't really attracted enough the technical talents not a critical mass and yeah they you know they haven't been

reliable when when things are suffered they were nowhere to be found or to help well I mean what's more you know when when the whole givers Fiasco kind of came into play we were told by many people who are more than happy to say nice things about Johan prior to us you know going to this contract with the Tesla Foundation oh yeah John's a great guy but pretty much in October program was like yeah no one likes that dude and we're like when were you gonna tell us and you know it kind of spans the gambit from from regulatory officials to to people who worked for monitors we're actually contributed to the ptosis fundraiser what do we witness overall was a lot of cowardice yeah a lot of Carrodus um yeah so I mean I just would never do business there anymore

anymore yeah another thing is you know yeah sometimes it's just just that simple mmm-hmm okay that's great and so are there are years of moving some of the tasers foundation out of there as well I mean I know for example if hiriam they have shifted some activities to Singapore although I guess the foundation still there so I'm not totally sure to what extent but it's or is this that something there's a foundation is there and it has to stay there should have done well sure to ask the question but I know that there are other foundation there in the world which are

active like this is Korea this is Japan TC if in the u.s. so there are there are a few other foundations I don't know what the foundation intends to do yeah have you ever considered that one of the biggest factors holding back growth in the blockchain industry is the lack of talented available developers by some estimates there are up to 14 job openings for every single blockchain developer in the world that's where top down comes in top tail is a global network of talent in business technology and design and they pick their members by selecting only the top 3% of applicants when you work with top tell you're getting the CEM that XM we've got a blockchain specialization that's an on-demand service that connects your business to an elite network of developers and engineers specializing in areas like solidity smart contracts

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and we'd like to thank top dal for the support so recently like des us launched its main it write and tell us how the how that how that experience has been and how they mean it has shaped up I Cigna Chris rather you know the world has been mostly used with smooth in a sense that you know it worked I sing the longest it's the longer the network wasn't available was maybe for you know they were periods like one hour I think twice were no blocks were produced and ya know it's it's been about it what was really great was to see how quickly Baker's took off so one sort of thing that worried me at first was they you know before the launch it was not a big

ecosystem of bakers that had been developed but as soon as it happened they were 20 and then it was 1,500 bickers on the system right now there's 400 addresses which are rigid too big there's about a hundred that are actively baking and so that really really took up very quickly and so on a technical side seams were smooth and on the baking side we had a lot of distant under ization very very early on with a lot of people getting into the network so I think that's been that's been fantastic and I think that you know to launch when the way that the dysfunction can get it around the launch was a little low-key I think in contrast with some launched nature now anyway

yeah but you know what this environment does not really like counter signaling they're like you know you see a lot of people whoa where didn't you do a party with a pup store for your launch yeah because it's a technological project yeah well I think people like the comfort of looking like other things yeah yeah so it's more like it's not about oh you actually want to see Snoop Dogg play it's about we want the assurance that you're just like the other projects that invited snoop dogg to play yeah so I mean it's there's a whole psychology to be written about this very weird million in technology a mouth and Aamir's had a had a talk about as a she's going waterfall I mean it she had like fake hearthstone cards the game where you play and then you do it like

you play partnership and it's like yeah you play launch party and you know something you play and obviously it gives more value because we all agree that it does and yeah it's a lot of mana yeah of mana and and what I sing these things are transients at the end you know at the end of the day having some things I bus and secure that useful is one end ups prevailing yeah I would love to dive into a little bit how his proof of stake works because I remember reading about this before it launched and in the kind of description and I feel this was quite interesting and unusual and it was a little bit so yeah maybe you can speak about that so right

sidebar it was yeah but no I was I was somewhat skeptical but I feel I totally agree it's been interesting to watch the the baking ecosystem evolve and I think it seems to work out pretty well so far so can he can you talk around how you know maybe the role of Baker's delegator roles endorsements and like how how kind of this Baker community together works on validating transactions and producing blocks yeah and so one of the things that you need to separate in the algorithm is first what is your kind of consensus pool like you know who's really taking part of the consensus in which proportion and then how do you reach consensus so the first part you

know who's you consensus pool so it's based on proof of stake idea and one of the one of the design goal of tezo's is that even if you have a very very small stake you can still have a very very small influence on on the blocks here's the ad being like if you have 0.1% of the network you should be able to create 0.1% of the blocks that's one property that I wanted to that I like about Tasers that you don't have in in systems for example like the boss so I wanted to preserve that property but you also need to have some form of delegation because a lot of people aren't necessary gonna be online or not gonna run machines so there's the idea of this optional

litigation model where you can make you know make yourself create blocks yourself or you can give that right to another key which can be controlled by different machine by someone else by a consortium so you have a wide variety of option and then up so you know once you do that you have this idea of saying okay so now you have different these different keys which you can create blocks and they all have different balances you add a coin tracking mechanism to it it's a technique node for the Satoshi the main benefits of it is that if you have a fork like not a hard fork like more like a another branch someone cannot shuffle the corner round and make it look like they own a lot of things and they do you will see that only a small fraction of the coins

ar-ar-ar-ar participating the consensus because you can't just move your corn between two different addresses the system is gonna track them so it's drag but to be it's tracked at at an aggregate which is a roll level which is about ten thousand tokens towards at the end of the day when it balls down to is you have these different delegates or people participating directly and they have a stake which is rounded down to the nearest multiple of ten thousand so since there's about I had 800 million coins in total that means that you have up to eighty thousand rolls so now you have 80 80 thousand rolls how do you do consensus right you could say well I'm gonna do Byzantine agreement on 80 thousand but you know that's too much so it's a chain based algorithm which precedes in epoch one epoch is 400 in

4096 slots and in each slots you have a random priority so it's your turn to create a block and then the next turn it's someone else's turn to create a block and so on and so forth and in order to converge faster in order to so not it's not like having finality it's more like trying to be you try to be a chain based algorithm I kind of like optimistic DFT it's the sense of like instead of trying to get everyone's agreements you try to get people to agree and then you just count how many people agree and if a lot of people agrees and it's probably going to to converge so we have a mechanism of endorsements where after each block you have certain two random stakeholders we can come in and sign and add they're at their signature choose a to the block so

that may be and if the you know the main benefits of doing that is that if if the network is really active and its really lives and you'll get a lot of endorsements which means there's a large fraction of the stage that's involved in validating the chain and so you need only a few confirmations in order for you to be confident that it's not gonna be reversions and if the network is not working as well you'll get few endorsements and then you'll wait a little longer to get your new confirmations so that's basically the algorithm I think you know the closest all their algorithm that I can think I mean his face would be Ouroboros which is would turn out to be very very similar to to the algorithm for tezo's with the difference that it doesn't have

the endorsement aspect but you know it does have the benefits of being simple enough that you can do a full mathematical treatment of it which is nice because you can actually prove power properties about it whereas in tencel's and one of the thing you were alluding to when you were shaking your head a little bit you have more heuristic arguments of of safety yeah because one of the things with many like let's say if you look at the example of like tenement or I think you need affinity is a similar way right in that you have like let's say in tenement right you need two thirds of the stake to sign off on each block and so you have this finality and you also have two scarran tea that okay as long as less than one third this malicious

you know the chain progresses and every block you know they can't be like Forks and stuff like that so here you you don't have that but of course at the same time you you have this probabilistic characteristic that you know maybe you sort of implicitly have that because you would have to get extremely extremely unlucky to have you know a bunch of malicious entities being Joseph's block proposals in a row or how do you look at that kind of resilience to a group of malicious bakers so the way you analyze it short of being able to do formally medical treatment is mostly simulation so um and and and that's why I refer to when I'm in the Lee heuristic argument so you simulate a

system where you have for example ten percent of the stings that's not doing anything fifty percent of the stakes that's participating and maybe 40 percent it's malicious and then when you what you try to do as a malicious participant is you try to say okay let's say that I want to revert in transaction in a specific block so I can start earlier and I can in later how often am I gonna get a series of block creation rights and endorsements that will let me create a chain with more weight than the other chain so you know how often is it that I can make that I can catch up to a chain which has 104 endorsements and if you you know if you do wanna call a sampling of that long enough you get you know you

get you get some indication of how fast this thing is decay and having endorsements make a desk a a lot faster and even if you don't have endorsements okay so but you basically have this characteristic that a little bit like similar to Bitcoin maybe that right yeah as long as chain and it starts becoming very unlikely that somebody can create a longer chain it's no longer strain it's it's stole number of endorsements that's the way yeah okay okay so it's like it's it's it's like chain but with this yeah added endorsement I mean you dosed me this purely subjective thing that you know let's say I as an exchange will take into account if you send if you deposit some daisies on the change and I

might say okay what are the endorsements currently in a chain and how many transactions do I need or confirmations to an eat until I say I credit your account you don't count confirmations and blocks I kill you come confirmations in endorsements and right right now I think the recommendation is ways already blocks because there's still some there's still better numbers which are pending which are based on now on confirmation in practice I think yeah given that every blocks has like certainly two confirmations I sing in practice after a couple of blocks you're probably you're probably fine but you know waiting for disease I think it's important to wait for these these numbers so both Brian and I have spent significant part of this year working to

build a validator for the cosmos network and in the cosmos network that's also proof of steak but cosmos has has the property that when a block is produced with a set of transactions in it and a set of greater than 66 percent of the evaluator set signs off on that block and if I'm a user and my transaction is in a block like that when I see that single block I can be like okay my transaction is confirmed and it can it cannot be reversed wait a visit like this block finality at the point the block is produced actually yeah thus deserts have something like that or do I as a user need to wait a few blocks

many blocks before considering my transaction final no yeah you have to wait a few a few blocks so basically the idea of something finality and something that goes most is that we were going to get until everyone and not everyone's to serve but like a sufficiently large fraction of everyone agrees on everything and they're not gonna you know and they're not gonna agree until they agree so potentially it can potentially sometimes it can take longer for them to agree but once they agree you know that it's not gonna move whereas here you'll get some of like a tentative agreement it's like well you know it looks like they're starting to agree and then you know what a few blocks but the thing is is like you know what's the difference between finality and something like a 10 to the minus 9 probability of reversion if you wait

first or number of blocks so for me I I don't see the finality as opposed to waiting for a few blocks to be that big of a that big of a deal what does seem more important to me and to the benefit of course most is that tender mint is a so so you know Bitcoin or tezo's they're both synchronous protocol whereas you can do partial synchrony with something like thundermans which means essentially is that in turn which you can afford to go as fast as you want and then maybe you won't get to go that fast because maybe you'll have network delays or an attack or a delay so maybe you'll take longer to reach your consensus but there's no harm in trying to try and get it very very fast or as in Bitcoin for example

you have to set 10 minute between blocks because you don't really know how much an attacker can delay blocks and so you have to kind of like sense this high conservative value it would be nice to say like I don't know what the deal is are but sometimes writing as fast as possible and any of their July's I'll go slower but if there are no delays I'll go fast so to me that's one of the main you know the not being fully synchronous I think is one of the main benefits of these approaches and and for that you need something like a like a Byzantine agreements I mean I've been singing of different chambers algorithm and so one possibility is if you notice that you're missing some slots for example a blog the first blog of suppose to be produced is not produced and so now you have like

the second priority so if you notice that you could increase the times you could say ha you know what I'm missing some blocks maybe they're being delayed by an anniversary so I'm gonna wait longer so you could do that and it's funny because if you do that then you're out you know you're you're you know you become safer against attacks but at the same time you start slowing down more when they're attacks and so you can think of it as a continuum between safety and liveness like you know you can get slugged you can get more sluggish and more sluggish but still have lightness and have more safety so they're really a continuum between the two now that being said I think that when Bitcoin camera right so the two reasons for doing something like like a chain based algorithm is I think when when we Cohen came around there was

this idea that people would just like open their laptop or their computer and participate and go online and go offline you don't really know who's gonna be online and offline where as quickly this thing has become professionalized all the mining pools are professional most of the bakers are on tezo's or professional or semi-professional and so since you since these people are gonna be available anyway is a risk of the risk of knots of not being able to find 2/3 is actually sig lures and what was anticipated when when Bitcoin was designed oh yes I mean or even for Bitcoin was like anyone could participate in the mining process and get them involved and quickly it's becoming not the case yeah so I I don't know how much of them I'm generally wondering how much of how much are you

losing when you're doing finality on every block and send the other problem is say well ok but what if I have you know 80,000 rolls I don't just like selling the top 100 because I don't want to be I you know I want the person who has 0.1% to do 0.1% of the blocks but on the other hand I don't you know I come to visit an agreement that they scale because it's just like way too many and then you get into stuff like affinity where you what you just like randomly select like a large enough sample and YouTube is in the agreement between them it seems to be a matter taste yeah yeah you know at the end of the day I think everyone's kind of over building for say yeah for the demand right now in

terms of consensus and throughputs so there's a lot of really cool science and engineering that's being done all around I think it'll come down to what applications actually need I think that doesn't mean I mean differentiated Fortezza so it was like this idea of inclusivity for anyone who wants to participate in in the algorithm but I think we're getting a little off-topic if we go down that yeah no absolutely physicist is not married Sue's consensus algorithm yeah they're dating in here and to us has a wandering eye yes yes it does so of course like des can change the consensus algorithm but is that something that you will actively pursue and if if if so are

there particularly attractive targets that you want to evaluate oh I so like I said there's two parts to a consensus algorithm and you know the first is like how you select on your quorum is was a role and delegation model in tezo's yeah El Paso model I think is pretty good and nesting is that that thing is why the solid what you could improve though is as a lag between you delegating tokens and then having creation rights a lot of these logs are created for security and foreign minister narration so you can improve these things again reduces lag yeah no I definitely I'm interested in improving that thesis consensus algorithm you know reading the literature when it comes out thinking about it I think the first the first order of business is is improving what

they already exist in tells us I think the randomness generation there's an easy way to improve it you know using also a trick use in in several projects is to do a PBS s in order to generate randomness so we have that in a bridge but it's not in the main it's done in the main branch so I think that would probably be be a good addition I think the block time could be reduced a lot for the first slot so maybe you know you get like you can you get your first lot within 10 seconds but then the second slot takes a minute so that way you get to have a block every 10 second when everything goes goes well and if there's some delays you still have it's still very forgiving before someone else can start stealing stealing slots so

improve you know once we get better simulations with a formalization of sequences algorithm we'll be able to just to tweak it and get rid of for months out of it and then start it awaiting what's out there and what's what's the best bet for pretty so there's a lot of projects with a lot of big big claims coming up and proof is in the pudding it's really hard to execute but we keep a close eye on them yeah but I'll say that I really like so I realized enter Mint as an algorithm I you know when one compliment had made before is that soon as they made consensus boring in a sense of like it's really classical it's a really classical method but at the end of the day you get so much better properties and there's a lot of really weird and cool science

being done in shame bail algorithms but at the end of the day what are you really buying you know when you're doing it chain based algorithm so I think that's really cool doing sortition in doing sortition in tender means like this is doing is really cool I don't think you necessarily need to do it with threshold cryptography you could be using something like PV SS to slowly even generate randomness and do that so I think that would be a fairly easy path to uh to take as things that's a fairly yeah that's a fairly straightforward thing to do what not yeah so so that's like one axis which is like the the consensus part of it but on the other part is like having privacy preserving transactions with the network and the

sort of implications of that on all right oh yeah I mean yeah once you start having privacy preserving transactions and when some of the state becomes privates it big it gets a little trickier to to let people have their stack privates and participate in the in the concerns out there isn't because you want people to leave their stake in sides a commitment tree so that you have a bigger anonymity set and but yeah yeah but so these people should be getting making rights but it complicates uh complicates matter of quite uh wait a bit so that's an interesting aspect as well so you both just mentioned privacy preserving transactions in pesos but I didn't fully understand what exactly

that means in what context they would be used to so do you mind expanding a bit on on what ideas you have in that direction yeah so you know at the end of the day what do currencies are trying to do is a cache right so most of the money today is electronic but it's in a it's in the banking system and so it means that if you want to use electronic payments you can you have to go through intermediaries you have surveillance you have censorship you have all these things whereas in cash you have a lot of you of privacy you have a lot of freedom so can we get cash but electronically you know right that's been the dream and one aspect of cash that's really not replicated by Bitcoin or tezo's or cerium for that matter is the privacy aspect you know you're it's kind of the

opposite of privacy your broadcasting your payments to the entire entire world and you know based on your payments you could be you could be targeted you could be discriminated against and also I think just not having privacy curdles personal expression they're saying that we won't express in the private sphere that we don't necessarily want to express in ledgers that's gonna be recorded for everyone to see for all of eternity right so in that respect privacy super important and there are different ways that people have tried to tackle this you know Leon Cohen joining with with Bitcoin and then efforts around ring signatures and crypto no transactions

the most privacy you can gain is basically with zero knowledge proof of knowledge like Z cash is doing and so for me that's the most interesting technology to deploy on Tasers to have private transactions so yeah so you mentioned privacy preserving transaction and of course I think many many of us will be in agreement that that's a very important thing and I think that brings us to another topic which is you know one of the main main topics around Tasers which is governance so how actually would something like that be implemented in governments have with the community reach agreement so governance was of course one of the main selling points one of the main areas of focus for Tasers so what's implemented right

now in terms of governance and are there any activities already in Tasers in terms of people making proposals or people building systems to vote or like what's the kind of state there right now yeah no so in terms of what's implemented the the voting procedures are described in the in the white paper is implemented so it's a vote in several phase we're in one phase many people make different proposals then you have an approval voting phases like just one of these proposals then each proposal is submitted to a vote then you're just into a testing phase and then after testing phases there's a to prove it so that's the process there hasn't been any proposal made

there's active development in the get lab report for tasers and so you know probably I think what's gonna happen is at some point one of the the master branch would start getting frozen into a proposal branch and that branch will be will be proposed within the community and then yes the idea is that the Baker's who are who represents different amount of stakes get to vote on that on that proposal so basically like this this as I understand it there's two phases so one is the phase of like approval voting which is like should we consider this proposal seriously or not followed by actual voting and then in actual voting I am assuming there's some

form of quorum and percentage of affirmative votes needed and once that's there prior to the voting process the new client code base will already be uploaded somehow to the network and then if there's enough votes you switch automatically yes that's yes so the automatic switch that already happened on the network then works which you know the first thing the network does is switch protocol so the gene disease block in tazers is actually a block that signs and activates a protocol which then starts so the the political change that's that's happened on the Chinese hasn't happened yet has triggered by a vote well that's the next step cool so when do you expect we'll

see you see one of these changes what governance followed by clients which I I don't know right now some I think you know I speak to different teams working on pistols and I think right now most of these most of these teams are really using the time after the launch to really get up to get up to speed on a code base really understanding in details clean you know clean up as much as possible what needs to be clean had documentation so I think we're really in interphase now I I don't think it's exactly clear when when they will be the first proposal but I think if I mean I would be surprised if it it were in more than six months I would be surprised no there hasn't been

proposals to date but you know there there's an intention to take whatever is a master branch of a kid love and make a proposal out of it so of course like there's been quite a bit of skepticism about the idea of there being a vote in a decentralized system followed by an automatic client switch and one of the issues that has been pointed out by Philip Diane who's I think he's from Cornell is that like crypto currency based voting systems are vulnerable to vote buying on a grand scale right so if you have a normal democratic process let's say the u.s. election people can

bribe voters to vote in a particular way but then there's no way for them to verify that somebody they bribed actually voted the way they wanted them to because the voting is probably in the form of some electronic voting machine or paper that doesn't leave a certificate of how they would happened but like with with cryptocurrency there's a this of course you can build technology that allows people to prove that they voted a particular way and therefore you can have smart contracts where I as large-scale governance attacker can create a bounty where I pay X Y Z disease to people that vote a certain way and and basically attract

bribe an anonymous group of people to vote the way I want by paying them money do you think this is this is this is going to be like a practical issue in the pesos governance mechanism and how will you deal with it I think this issue is this issue is a is really interesting and it's strongest when you are trying to do one-person one-vote right if you're trying to do one-person one-vote then obviously you're and a half like they can be a lot of bribery happening and also on top of that you have the problem of identifying people in things of the type of look that you have is more one token one vote and so as results people already have you know they have an incentive to vote in a reasonable way just based on just based

on their stakes and so you could try to you could try to bribe people but if you know if the decision they make is bad is gonna end up hurting them then you would need to spend a lot of money for this bribery and I think ultimately it's better to try and prevent bribery so these kind of academic incentives by ensuring skin in the game then you know that than by trying to uh you know to to to try to UM to obfuscate vote that doesn't mean you can do both I mean there's definitely a very more literature in now in Kuta graphic voting and what this is doing is very very simple and it's all just a public broadcast at the end of the day if you don't have something like as I like an isolation booth it's really hard to prevent the person from just you know

giving user key and this thing is like we're talking about really kind of remote scenarios where like oh you know you bribe me but I could completely trust you so give me an SG excitation that you're not gonna get my money back I mean you know people just like trust weird exchanges to not steal their money so clearly you know what's you know what's what's what would stop them from being bribe is not the lack of SGX attestation it's interesting you can we can either sighs but like I would contend that people are much more bribable that even what's is what is assumed so really the only defense is to a I'll try to align it can be incentives so that priming is not aa big issue in mind you you can still try to play games and say

hey everyone who votes for this proposal gets newly-created money everyone who goes against States loses it and then everyone is like oh no prisoners I have to vote for it but there's a lot of delays in these things ah you know there's long testing periods and there's enough time for people to coordinate and to say well that was a stupid vote well that was manipulative and hard work out of bad decisions like this so I'm not I'm not really concerned about the practicality of these attacks I'm more concerned about attacks that don't look obviously evil like no master pearline villain which looks like they would be for the benefit of the network whether we actually end up harming the network or

devaluing than that okay well contest well that's more about like introducing bugs it's more of like you only wait my bad proposal I vote for your bad proposal like you were told that project a bad project and we have an equilibrium that way yeah you need to get eighty percent of people to vote for your pet proposals that's a why that's a wide array of people you know the voting entails is not so much about like oh my god let's all wait to do this change its I you know it's like I want to put this change oh no how am I going to do that I get to get so many people to agree it's gonna be hard the point of governance entails is that if something is really obviously good it should go

through if it's not is gonna be hard for it to change and in some sense it makes it makes it can make changes to the protocol harder so imagine you have a protocol where you say there's never going to be any change whatsoever we can't change it if you challenge it's a scam okay so you try to have a cultural taboo against this but then people are gonna say oh but we really need to change it because you know we have this and that and really need to change it what are we gonna do well we're gonna hard fork okay well if you're hard working what else is on the table and then now you can do everything whereas if your protocol if you have a protocol and you say well we really need to change it and then she's like well of course you can change it all need to do

is first convince the prediction market it is a valuable proven goal and then you need to get a coalition of 80% to vote for you protocol twice after a long period of testing and all of this stuff then now you can't really agitate for a hard fork anymore because there's a viable path for inclusion even if the space is hard so having some flexibility in protocol changes can actually make you more resilient to protocol changes that's that's a paradox of that's a paradox of of having formal governance the other thing is there's interesting predictions that you can use at the protocol level so protocol in tazers introspect into the change so you can't you don't just accept anything let people send you first of all everything

is send boxed so a protocol that you accept is just a pure function it's all going to be something that acts as a file system or any or anything like that the second thing is it's a set of files so you can choose which file you're a lot to change and which far you're not allowed to change so in your camera module system it's pretty straightforward to create a module that handles all of the token creation and talk and move you into the construction so it's fairly straightforward entails those who have a rule that says hey you know what you can change the protocol with a vote but you cannot have you cannot create more than 10% of took in the year like you constitute that if you want to do that you need 95 percent of the vote for example so you can you can introduce

these rules you can go even further and say well have a proof checker in the protocol and then unless you have a formal proof that you verify such-and-such properties then you won't like set accept your change so there's a lot of things you can do to improve the governance beyond a simple voting the point of voting integers is not to give everyone a voice it's to make good decisions yeah I think the biggest misconception that we come across is that Arthur and I are somehow like Pro democracy and we came up with tazers because really Pro democracy and pro everyone having like a voice and a way to express themselves like really governance is a procedure that's a means to an end and the end is is a better way

to incorporate new innovations into the blockchain and so it can take a lot of different manifestations beyond just one one token one token one vote yeah you know people the idea of democracy is not so I say in general political system the idea of democracy is not to give power to the people just destroy power because you have a lot of people who have a lot of power and instead of coordinating and making a revolution they're gonna invest all this power into someone who doesn't really have any power and so that's a really neat way of like not having power and not doing things in now in in a government I mean that that's my take on it's more than there's anything but you know what there are people who participating tittles because they love the participating aspect and maybe I'm completely wrong about it and maybe

tails is great for reasons other than the one I believe it's good for and that's completely fine this is a lot of smart people who are very welcome to disagree about these things and it's that's the beauty of having a community of like you know thousands and thousands of people who have their own unique voice and things so if this would be very unfunny if it was just it was just the voice their opinions of a few select folks who were coming at the table I mean the opinion is overused but a strong opinion weekly held yep cool well let's speak briefly a bit about well first of all on the government side I'm super excited see this in you know in real real action when some proposals come and we will actually see some upgrades and all of

that and I think it's gonna be one of the most interesting areas off of experimentation in governance in the next few years and you know let's see which way it goes but I would love to speak a bit at this point about the tasers community so there has a community merged since the fundraiser and since the network launched so can you speak a bit about you know what are some of the main players in this community and also what is the role of sort of your company at Els you know going forward and in the relationship between the company and the foundation um so I'll let Arthur take the hard question first which is was the relationship between DLS and the foundation because I think that's

something that's very poorly understood but deserves clarification yes so so originally taylor swift a block by this company called dynamic ledger solutions was a pretty boring name i think it was preferably boring and it was developed with a team of programmers a doc mlpro and so the foundation sign the tailless foundation signed a contract was DLS back in back in june i think of of 2017 and after that they basically took on the responsibility to to develop the project in to further its ecosystem and so when givers and we don't renege on their obligation to do that DLS try to keep in to keep involved to keep the project going but so you know now that

the foundation has a functional board we've taken back seats and this itself it's being developed by many companies pneumatic obsidian genomic so then as one has just started in in japan so there's really an array of delivers around the world working on um tasers and icing like for forgetting forgetting tinnitus for myself what i what i try to do is is meet with these developers and you know and try to sit down with them and like hey you know here's what I sing it but the consensus algorithm this type of thoughts these things yeah we spend a lot of time evangelizing but we have no formal role within the foundation and DLS doesn't or hasn't over for over a year had any contractual relationships

with any development job so it's a very interesting interesting yo cat where is reputationally but yeah it doesn't have it doesn't have any formal role within development current day but as image before there's like tens of thousands of people in the tazers community you have a contract like in Nam back in January oh yes but he's been a while yeah June doesn't know in January guessing okay but not worry yeah okay it felt like more than a year yeah sorry um it's it's time dilation is an issue here but I digress yeah back in July of 2017 at least you know thirty thousand wallets are open

for the Tess's fundraiser this represents you know tens of thousands of people across the world there's many more people notices community arguably than those participated in the fundraiser but for sake of argument you know that's a good good metric or a good number to kind of put our hat on you know since the fundraiser is has occurred and since the board has been governed by you know sane people there's been a lot of interesting interesting more formal and informal ways that the community has come around one of them has been in in terms of nonprofit foundations across the world notably Tess's Japan and Tess's Korea which have taken the mantle of evangelizing and

creating meetups and whatnot baking classes and baking classes and really getting into the roots of the technology so we see a lot of strong presence in Asia and strong presence in the US and in Europe for for interest in tezo's as in Latin America as well liked his results are pretty big baking baking cohort yeah yeah and that's truly this means the network like this I mean I can't be easily either you know banded or or replicated so we see that as a true strength of tezo's is the number people who have you know showed an interest in this technology just to clarify briefly mentioned TLS

had a I mean of course TLS was the company you found it and that was originally started working on a sauce and you mentioned that Eli's had the contract and was kind of working for Taser foundation but not anymore so it's does that mean at the moment neither of you has the kind of you know formal work engagement on behalf of Tasers and you just sort of working on your own time or like what does it look like at this point yeah pretty much we're working on our one time I like the term fun employment but you know not formally working sounds good too yeah and and this the idea that down the line are you are you planning on building GLS

into like an organization or like so you don't have it or building out the team to work on tasers or maybe starting I don't know different types of projects or building things on taste oh so what do you what are you longer-term plans no no the agreement was that the phone you know DLS itself would be acquired by the by the potatoes foundation and you know it remains to be seen what you know well that what I want to do is it but you know that hasn't happened we haven't made money yet but pretty comfortable lifestyle so we're not in any rush um yeah I mean I think just logically like you know Arthur and I are pulled officer positions and DLS I'm the CEO or there's a CTO moving forward I think it makes more sense for me to focus on the

application layer for example and it makes more sense for ortho to focus on the protocol layer is he's just outlined he has many ideas about it I have less conviction about what types of libraries ought to be added and whatnot so so we just in general like our natural or natural interest kind of lead us to separate at this point and so I you know I look forward to doing my next thing north of his his his role with tezo's whatever he winds up wanting to do but the logical endpoint for our association with DLS Zooey's you know the launch of the network that was robust enough that the foundation felt comfortable with so holding to that holding to that you know I guess

milestone it doesn't really make much sense for DLS to operate much further yeah so essentially like as DLS you you mentioned early in the show that you have a put option with the foundation which means that once the network is functioning well maybe even better than today and it has met certain metrics then the LSD company can be sold to the foundation and then you as the promoters of that company will receive letting 10% of daisies and a percentage of the fundraiser proceeds and thereafter sort of you can form your own other companies to either focus on protocol development or application development and this will

be completely independent of the sauce foundation yeah exactly okay okay so Kathleen would you do you have a particular application level project in mind that you would want to pursue that you feel strongly for oh yeah well I think I think I mean problem to having blocking technology adopted broadly construed is that many people don't know how to interact with interact with the blockchain in particular smart contract seem to intimidate people and rightfully so it's very easy to shoot yourself in the foot and so one thing I was thinking of is like any you know there's a bunch of different use cases that everyone's views on panels at all these different conferences the one that I find to be the most engaging is online video games because I don't think it's a coincidence

that one of the most popular applications that started to use Bitcoin was magic the gathering exchange so these people have a sort of natural natural disposition towards using digital assets first and so I want to focus my efforts on understanding how people might interact with smart contracts and it makes sense to that end to use video games the hook for for building up better applications and tools and I found a really cool co-founder hopefully we'll have some news over the next few weeks about the exact direction we want to take things in but I don't want to jinx mice so thank you for asking and I'm sorry it can't be a little bit more explicit with

my intention but that's the idea you know that's why and I think the main the main contribution I can do to today's O's is I keep seeking in the direction of it was a the three directions we've mentioned which were you know the type which kind of which kind of concerns algorithms are going to be most helpful for Forte's O's how to get security in a code base and in in a small contractor in and around tezo's and also especially governance you know how to improve the governance model very explicitly ease of the voting mechanism is a bootstrap mechanism potatoes and so improving that with shiitake with constituional ISM and rules around which amendments are permissible and not permissible that's

mostly what I want to be researching and developing and essentially proposing to the community we've spoken a little bit about this before but you know since tasers the ocean thesis concept was developed of course that the blockchain space and especially the space for you next generation blockchain is becoming extremely competitive and extremely active and I think also a lot of investors and they be sees that basically they saw a theorem and there was such a massive amount of money made with the theorem and then they were all like oh no we didn't make any of this money so now we have to invest in the next thing and so I think because of that we've seen a massive investment in

you know next-generation blockchain project and and many of those are working you know with large team so there's things like cosmos affinity polka-dot Algar and yas and and many others you know with also lots of money one of these is not like the others right now one of the interesting question then becomes the differentiation right like which of those is you know is it going to be winner-take-all or are there particular areas where our projects is going to do better so how do you see pesos differentiated in these aspects and do you think that there are LP particular types of application relatives will do best in so you're just

weighs two different shades one way to differentiate is you can be Bitcoin and you're like well you know where the first one was the most legitimate one and obviously we're you know obviously we're gonna win and then if you convince enough people of that then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy so that's one that's one way to diverge it yourself if you're not a Bitcoin it's trickier and I don't think you can do it by just having better technology especially since most of these technologies open source and so as long as you have other teams who are competent and who can integrate that thing you know who can observe good technology who can be wise enough to not have the not invented here syndrome and adopt it's inside your own platforms you

know I I don't think technology becomes an advantage so what really becomes important is how good your community of core developers is and how easily you can improve and incrementally develop on your platform people make a big deal about the entire you know developer ecosystem in this area and it certainly has strengths but it's only an application layer ecosystem there's not a whole lot of core developers and so having having a really really strong core diverse we're really personally invested in your project you really want to you know make it make it a big success

that's that I think allows you to to integrate the technologies at the different some frogs are having and so at the end of the day I think the differentiator becomes community and governance if you have a large community and a good governance model then it be then is that's something that's hard to are to compete with yeah and I mean obviously you know to some extent we think those are strengths that Issus has so we're you know there's a bias here yeah there's a clear bias here but in general I just think you know if you look back at other projects that launched over the past years that had a lot of technical strengths you have things like NXT you have things like stellar Sun and so forth and they sort of they sort of came off with a bit of a

whimper because they didn't it sort of had this organic natural community behind them anything that's telling a grunts it's a little bit in governance but it's also a bit in in the message that they had around them in the and the myth that they had around them so tezo's you know you could say many things about it but one thing is for certain is it's got this sort of grassroots organic quality to it that allows people to really get involved in the in the heart of the algorithm by by allowing for this inclusive inclusive algorithm so I think that's something that like at least gives it an advantage over other

projects and the other things like new technological advances are things that tezo's was meant to incorporate it because it anticipated these things um so I do think yeah yeah it's also you know it's also feel will you succeed by not face planting so you know if you're around money enough and and you stick around and you don't have major problems and and yeah and you keep being used just by by virtue of doing this for a long time I think you gain now you get a lot of credibility and and resilience yeah just by just by doing this so and and it's not easy it's not easy to have longevity in this space it's tough because a lot of the narratives around other projects really start around what they what they promise to deliver and

very very few of them actually focus on what's there today there so this romanticism around what people say they're going to do that that drives a lot of invitation for comparison but if we look at like what's actually been shipped you know it's it's it's a bit of a merger territory it's also you know development we already because you still have efforts to make and at the end of the day you know if you're not if you're spending a lot of you know if you're spending a lot of if your community spend a lot of time developing solutions for getting a million transactions per second and here's out no one needs it yeah then you wasted a lot of time whereas if you can mean T developed I don't know for example all solutions for having more privacy new transaction in

turns out that a lot of people want that then then you end up having more more staying powers because of that oh well thanks so much for coming on it was really a pleasure to you know speak again about tasers and here bit an update project and it's been fascinating to watch how the project has developed and the kind of ecosystem has started emerging since the domaine 8 launch and beta launch so yeah thanks so much for coming on it was a pleasure express and yeah thanks so much for listening for once again tuning in if you want to learn more about Tasers of course we'll have links to many of the things we talked about in the show notes so you can learn more about it and if you want to support show you can leave us an

iTunes view that helps new people find the show and we're very grateful for that and yeah we look forward to being back next week so see you then [Music] [Music]