#278 Daniel Lehnberg & Michael Cordner: Grin – Cypherpunk Mimblewimble

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft Azure configure and deploy a consortium blockchain network in just a few clicks with pre-built configurations and enterprise grade infrastructure spend less time on blocking scaffolding and more time building your application to learn more visit AKA ems slush epicenter and Daniel M back to cool developers from the great

implementation of the member lindakhaas I am City cast and my name is sunny Agora and so like fatir mentioned today we have two of the developers from grin you know I kind of grin is this very interesting project that has a very interesting backstory that we'll get into today and you know I kind of heard about them very early on and there you know creation with the member wendel protocol first came out and kind of ignored it for a while and then in the last couple months like you know it just suddenly gained a lot of adoption they launched very recently just last month in January they're one of like I think probably the few projects who announced a launch date and actually met their launch deadlines which is you know very

cool and just you know one disclaimer is I am currently actively mining grin so just a little bit of a disclaimer there that's a jump into the episode today on epicenter we have on with us Michael Cordner and Daniel LAN burg two of the core developers of the grin blockchain which implements this very interesting protocol called member limbo and so you know throw a presenter you know we briefly touched on member wendel here and there a lot of like you know we've had adam back on before and Greg Maxwell and they've like slightly touched on member embo mentioned it in passing as like you know future of scaling options but you know we never really got a

chance to fully deep dive in - member Wimble and you know it's just very interesting protocol where like you know offers a lot of a you know in a ways it's very similar to let the Bitcoin protocol like uses a lot of the same cryptography and a lot of like the same intellectual basis ease but you know brings a lot of these really cool features and you know it has this really cool backstory to it which you know will cover it throughout the course of this episode but you know before we get start but you know Before we jump into that Michael and Daniel thank you guys both for being on and you know Michael maybe you can introduce yourself how you got started into the space like you know before even getting into grain and

member luahn Bowl and then Daniel maybe you could do the same yeah sure okay well thanks for having us what just starts on my name is Michael Cordner and I go by the name yeast gloom in green circles that would be my handle and I've been working on grin for I'd Sara coming up on on nearly two years maybe a little less than two years I'm at first just as a as a part-time developer contributor but from about say February of last year I've been working on her in full time using donations given to grin by the community so previous to grin I was I mean I have about 20 years worth of kind of overall software development experience ranging

from financial to games to kind of to educational software so so I think kind of a a good broad background there immediately previous to to working on grin I was doing kind of a lot of low-level cryptographic work on in the smartcard industry which has a bit of crossover with with the cryptocurrency industry when it comes to hardware wallets um what have you so yeah so that's basically my background and why I'm here today cool and how did you get you know started with bitcoin is like drain sort of like the first blockchain project you've worked on it's the first one I've worked on property I mean I've been following Bitcoin and derivatives for quite some time but it was only kind of

recently as I got kind of more of a got better at applied photography through previous jobs and then the more kind of cryptocurrencies tended to appeal to me because I realized it kind of pushes all my buttons when it comes to interests and technical interests rather I see very cool and Daniel yeah what about you how did you get involved sure thank you for having us I I work as a product manager for a gaming company I've been there for the past 12 years lately I've been doing a new product development and I heard about Grimm the first time I think a year ago and started reading up on it starting to get kind of watch the space

of a bit read get it chats and so on and then becoming more and more involved mainly on kind of the project management side in the governance side and I've been following the blockchain space for a long time this is my first project ie heard about Bitcoin in 2011 dismissed it and then bought bought a Bitcoin in 2013 and then kind of been monitoring the space but but being quite comfortable watching from the sidelines until I stumbled upon grin and its structure the way the ethos of the project was and you know the approach taken in in developing it made it really attractive and made it

really easy to participate so I just kind of got something that's interesting and so most of them are great developers actually anonymous right but you guys are here on the show using European names you also go to conferences with your clear names what what made you decide to go public with your identities well sure I probably wouldn't say mostra nonnamous now I think there's only two really who were chosen to remain completely anonymous and that's ignore since the founder which one I'm sure we'll talk about him more later and then we have another developer Antioch Peveril which in Harry Potter lures his brother who who also chooses to remain anonymous but the rest of us are fairly freely open in the open I mean for my my own perspective probably just didn't

know any better when I first got involved with the project so that's why I'm of the open but also because I'm taking funding from various sources I feel it a bit it's it's better to be out there so people know who they're dealing with and you know I can be up there on podcasts and promote written without having to worry about that and on of that invisibility cloak yeah this is similar from my side of me not know I was aware there were anonymous developers on the project but I just kind of did like I know trade off in the sense that you know in order to be really anonymous you have to put in a lot of effort to do that and I just didn't really see that you know rather you do it you know the full way or you don't do it at all

there's no point in it because if somebody needs to once it's motivated enough to find your identity they will and and I just didn't really seem I see a need for it I think a lot of the reason why we might feel comfortable being out in with clear names is also because the founder ignores is anonymous it might have been a bit different if it wasn't for that so you mean like over time some of the core developers who maybe weren't honest I've slowly started like revealing their identities over time no I mean what I mean is I mean there's only two who are actually actively trying to hide their identities the rest are just using nicknames online but that doesn't mean that they're actually trying to be perfectly hiding

in their identities if you see what I mean Oh interesting okay everyone except for the people are anonymous we know personally I mean we've met a few times now it's actually quite hard to keep yourself anonymous and do it well it's quite a time sink as well and you have to be really kind of dedicated to it to do it to be able to know you know know exactly what you're doing online and be able to cover all your tracks in all cases is challenging so it's quite a lot of effort that's interesting different to the public perception that a lot of the developers are actually anonymous but that's probably just because you know the the founder himself or herself is anonymous so yeah yeah that's right yeah cool so you know that's maybe let's jump into

a little bit of this founding story then and so you know I think this you know I remember I was teaching a class on Bitcoin back in like 2015 or something and that's around the talk you know we when this we were teaching this class we heard about this like oh there's this new proposal that's been around that was just like posted on like you know I first saw it on our slash Bitcoin but you know can you tell us a little bit about this story of how this white paper got put into the world and who put it there sure I think film is immune so I'll do that so basically there was this IRC Fred RC group for Bitcoin developers it

was it was it called Bitcoin Wizard right like an anonymous person basically came in there and dropped the paper that outlined the kind of the sketched out the kind of the basic concepts that member window which was then picked up by Andrew Paul straw and I think prime mission Bishop as well and they kind of had some interactions there and a new poster and repose to formalize some of the constants in there into a paper and and took it from there right because from what I remember like you know the original document wasn't even like you know it was like literally just a text a dot txt file that was dropped in there and had like it's look they're just like you know some quick thoughts I'm like what this guy was thinking and like some

ideas and also you know for the listeners one of the you know one of the cute little story things there is like it's a sign that the anonymous person they signed them themselves using the name Tom Elvis Jadis or which is like you know the French name of Voldemort like in the English versions it's Tom Marvolo riddle so it's the French alias so yeah do you guys have any like you know guesses as to who it may have been like you know I've heard like you know clearly in the text file a lot of these ideas were heavily derived from like Greg Maxwell's previous works like coin join and confidential transactions are you know I've heard Greg I've heard it posited that you know it may have just met Greg himself or you guys have any

like theories on who this was or is it not even like I'm interest to you and you actually don't even care to find out I don't I don't personally have any theories on it it would be interesting I but as you just said there I think that's kind of key there were a lot of the member grimbo paper it builds a lot a lot of builds upon a lot of ideas that were already there and kind of developed by established cryptographers the actual kind of portion of it that that makes up member Wimble is just kind of a small insight / addition to what was already presented before so whoever it was didn't necessarily have to be a great cryptographer it was certainly a great flash of insight wherever it came from but um no to me it I mean I don't think we're ever gonna find out who it isn't

even if the even if whoever it is makes themselves know no one's probably no one will believe them at this point so I think we just have to leave it as a mythical creation story at this point right there was like no cryptographic signature or anything all over the file so there's not even any way to know like no one could even prove it at this point anyways just a text file and so what was Andrew post res contribution here so you know I remember so this file with us positive and then like you know what was the original kind of response to this where the people like immediately realize that oh there's like something big here or was it more of like people like oh okay another proposal and Andrew poster was like did it take time for him

to realize that oh there's actually something like you know much more insightful in this document here um it took I mean I wasn't around in the early days but from what I can see and Andrew poultra had to look over it and just to make sure that it was found um I think there was a mistake or two in there that he eventually corrected and I mean he was interested enough from that to write a further white paper on how an entire member Wimble blockchain would work and I mean he published a further kind of a proper white paper based on that which is a little bit outdated at this point but and then he he had some other kind of additions to it of that um you may have seen some presentations of

his about about how to do some additions to its scripted script because there's no script too nimble Wimble there's a lot of a lot of things that you can do in Bitcoin or it's obvious how to do in Bitcoin by scripting that you can't necessarily do as obviously in nimble memo but you can still do it so a lot of kind of additions to the protocol like that some of them theoretical some of them real fixes to what was there and I think that was it I mean after the publication of those papers I mean he hangs around if we need to get ahold of them to ask him any questions and he's there but he hasn't been too too active now aware of the past year either just busy or working on other things at this point so yeah that's interesting so in a way it's

it's unusual for someone to actually pick up a proposal by someone else completely and so deeply immerse yourself in it that you actually find mistakes and connect to it substantially and make it into a fully fleshed proposal but what would you say helped for this to happen I mean do you think this is just a lucky break for a member wimba are there tons of those proposals out there that just someone needs to pick up and make into something great and fight but it did Andrew look at this and saw the gem in the dirt and you know you know how do you think about this if you drop a new proposal for something or a new idea on in a place like Bitcoin wizards it will

generally get looked at very quickly by by some serious you know serious people in the industry so I do genuinely think that this it's not just a matter of getting lucky or you know being filtered somehow it was genuinely a very very you know transformative insight on what was already there so um yeah like I said it seemed we've seen plenty of papers oh there's actually another paper put down by someone claiming to be the same Voldemort in this in a similar style that was dropped maybe about six months ago and that was looked at and completely trashed by the community is going no this act makes absolutely no sense that this and people to the poker this is probably not the same the same Voldemort Oracle was he got lucky that

one time so so yeah I don't think there's an element to that like I think there's a genuine if you have a good idea and you're presented in the crypto space it will get considered generally yeah and I think he was I mean the the original text file was far from perfect as you studied it had some errors in it as well but it was actually presented very succinctly and a very approachable way which also helps of course because it makes it easy for anybody who's reviewing it just to understand whether there's some merit to these arguments or not and because it was building on already established concepts that were already popular in the space that also made it much easier so how did how did it turn you on from that so how fast that this proposal that

was then transformed by Andrew Parra how fast did it pick up steam how fast the developers at you come on board well the first car manager wrote the paper and I think it was kind of not quite forgotten about but you know put aside for a couple of months it was only when I'm when now ignore someone by the name of ignore just pepper oath who was the founder of the project appeared again on the same Channel I think it was a revived around December of 2016 roughly I think he I think even October I think if I remember cuentas presentation so it was quite fast yeah yeah yeah and then he said this was I've actually started a an open-source version of this and uploaded the code

and invited everyone to take a look and I think it was it's clear kinda from the early conversations that there was a it was almost obviously apparent that the signals Peveril person knew what he was doing and you know had put up his was starting a really serious effort to put together a nimble Bembo blockchain and then i think i think also there was yeah a few months later towards December the member wendel mailing list was established which probably also helps a lot in kind of taking the project forward there was a lot of discussion going on with a lot of noteworthy but kind of well-known people in the field contributing well it's also kind of helped raise the awareness of the

project itself [Music] this episode of epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft and the azure blockchain workbench getting your block team from the white board to production can be a big undertaking and something as simple as connecting your blockchain to IOT devices or existing ERP systems is a project in itself well the folks at Microsoft had you covered you already know about the azure blockchain workbench and how easy it makes bootstrapping your blockchain Network pre-configured with all the cloud services you need for your enterprise app their new development kit is the IFTTT for blockchains suppose you want to collect data from someone in a remote location via SMS and have that data packaged in a transaction for your hyper ledger fabric block team the development

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like nimble winnable blockchain and this movable protocol but like you know what even is this min the limbo protocol and so you know maybe we can start off with like let's assume our listeners are you know relatively very familiar with the Bitcoin protocol how would you explain min the limbal to them and you know and kind of explain what's going on here right okay well I think it's rather than just kind of jumping in and to the mechanics of what we should we should say what what the goals of it are and that would be compiling to provide what I call a very good privacy intrinsic to the blockchain so you know on some other other coins that may have been made have been originally derived from Bitcoin the

privacy would kind of be bolted on in certain ways like so other funds like Manero would kind of kind of a few different ways but the core of the chain itself would kind of be the classic Bitcoin chain as in the ledger transactions going back forever with the middle limbo protocol you have the the privacy built right into the core level so if I put if I perform a transaction what ends up on the chain is is basically it looks like random data and this the way this is done also allows some other interesting properties to come out of there such as a positive effect on the transaction size are on the chain size it ends you end up

getting them much the same privacy as other coins with the much greatly reduced storage space requirements as well as some other kind of nifty features that I don't see what all of it kind of adds together to enhance privacy without kind of the the bloat that you may get in some other chains so that's kind of fundamentally what what member wendel itself is about so you see it as the the primary benefit being the privacy side of things yes absolutely I know man it's built in it's at the protocol level it's not optional interesting cuz I remember when I like first heard about member wendel I always actually usually when I heard about it in the car of you know scalability and like you know increasing the sink times Oh like

of the chain but then I feel like I only started actually hearing about like the privacy benefits like no later on so it's interesting that like you know I I guess I decide I haven't been as involved with it so no I guess I kind of heard of I didn't really hear about the privacy side of thing and until much later on it's definitely like it's a privacy point it's a confidentiality point now that would pretty much be the from our perspective at least the number one the number one reason for being um the scalability stuff is certainly nice to have and it's it's something that that were we're improving on as time goes on you know finding ways to make it even more scalable how do we reduce the size the UT Exocet etc we'll probably talk about some more technical details

later on yeah and maybe it's it's good to kind of point out that yeah there's the Member window protocol which we talked about which was kind of dropped on the IRC Channel and everything and then you have Grimm which is an implementation of the minimum women protocol but it's so much more than that as well of course it's not only the protocol itself but a bunch of other things and different approaches and philosophies that add to that essentially and it kind of a key key things that kind of really stand out in terms of implementation wise from green I think is there's tries to be very privacy-preserving to the greatest extent possible I tried to be scalable and and it tries

to be minimal in the approach that it takes and in its design as a as a as a as a blockchain in general to be very kind of like lightweight and that kind of contributes also to the privacy aspects because you don't want to put a lot of information on the chain and so on you want to do as little as possible basically and that adds to it has like some nice properties to it there's no there's no addresses on the chain for example and so on which it contributes to it being lightweight but it also helps in the privacy aspects of it so I see the privacy aspect is the main feature of a mobile but the is also one further add-on that you want

for the add-on benefit that you get and could you briefly explain how it works on a technical level yeah I mean this is kind of it it is a bit difficult to do without um without whiteboards and a bit of time and dealing with confused stares but basically instead of how Bitcoin works is you have a ledger of transactions going back to the beginning of to the Genesis block basically and you need to verify each and every you know transaction in order to start a new node nimble wimba works on it a bit more mathematically so so rather than the ledger itself or having to validate the lender itself you just need to validate the sum of what's happened before so

when I put maybe I intro and walk through a bit of transaction example if I perform a transaction right I have inputs and outputs and transactions are basically a load of inputs plus a book plus a bunch of outputs and it doesn't matter how many there are it doesn't matter how many participants there are just a number in the the amount of the inputs that have gone and have to equal the amount of here puts that have come out okay so long as that's true then the transaction is valid now on top of that we have something called an excess value which is used to prove which is used to enhance privacy as well as prove ownership of something so say I

have a load of trans a load of inputs and it adds up to a certain number I will then choose a private key that represents another addition to that number and only I know that number so and that's my private key so in order to validate that inputs plus outputs plus my private key that I've chosen which is an excess value what everything equals zero I can do that without actually having to store the values of the amounts in there right so validators can just add this all together check it out I check everything equal zero and move on so that that's fundamentally what happens on a in the wimba blockchain does that make any sense

it does so I think I think it's actually really difficult to explain with without white food as you said but what would you say it's fair to describe it as being cryptography that is we're known and is also used for Bitcoin with additional elements for our first Kaysen yeah absolutely I mean that we basically use the same library that's used in Bitcoin we use the same the same curve it's it's all based on the same fundamental mathematics it's just the way we're kind of putting it together is slightly unique remember Wimble okay and so this results in a blockchain where not only the transaction amounts are

alpha skated it's it's also alpha skated to where they're coming from and where they're going and that's what would you would you say that's factually correct yeah it is correct no matter how wouldn't even say they're all fitted they're just not there yeah look there's not another I should say you know that this is no there are no addresses on the change so of course you're not gonna see from where it's going but there is a chain of outputs of utx folks essentially on shape but it's but it's very hard to derive making any sense is that that's basically the only information that is on there so if there's no addresses right so you know

how do signatures work in this system Remo ballistic did a signature it's a signature basically proves that I had that that excess value that I was talking before because I that's that's what I use to sign the outputs that I put into a transaction right so I mean the blockchain itself it's kind of its outputs all the way down there's no transactions on there and in order to spend an output I need to ensure that I have this excess value for each and every output that I put on there and then all of these added together become I have to prove I knew the sum of all of these and then validate that I can sign with that and validated will be able to

use that to to prove you know to witness the thing and to prove that I have the right spend it I see so essentially what's gonna happen here is like you know there's some excess value in this last transaction that was sent to me and I am the only one who has knowledge of it and I'm able and by revealing that proving that knowledge of that I'm I'm the only one is able to spend this but how did this excess value get into the previous transaction so you know how did yeah why is it in the output from the previous transaction if I did like didn't that mean that whoever sent me the coins had to have known that excess value right no they knew their excess value but when

when a transaction happens I create a new one which represents my thing so what happens is someone sends me a bunch of inputs for a certain amount and then I will create and as well as the signature will contain their excess value and that gets sent to me and what I do is I create my own excess so I can create an output for that amount right and then I have one output that I know the excess value for and then I can validate all the inputs that Canada the transaction from the other person equal that amount so the sum is there and that's how that's how that's validated right so one of the kind of key features or differences here with the member Wimble system is that in order to

receive money I have to actually like you know be part of the transaction making process right that plate on the graphic trend said if it's an interactive transaction and that's distinct it doesn't mean you needs to be online it doesn't mean it doesn't any of those connotations it just means to parties need to interact to they need to exchange information somehow and that can be on the internet by HTTP it can be via sending files to each other it can be by a tin can on a string it just has to happen somehow does this have any implications for the user experience as opposed you know when you compare it to sending say bitcoins oh yeah tons of it it's it's you know it's

a it's a very very different experience and so it for good and bad as well right it's so it's so it's just different I would say so as Michael said there's a you know full round-trip is required to complete the transaction which means that I as a sender need to send you some information you take that information you you process that return it back to me then I can finalize it and put it on the chain right but that also means that in order for you know unlike for example Bitcoin where you can just cut out in the blind should transactions two addresses here actually both parties need to participate in order to receive which in some cases can sound like it's a lot of hassle of work but in other cases it's

actually really good because then you can actually if you want to make sure you have to keep like an audit trail or like kind of keep your finances in order you can ensure that you you have full control of the funds that you receive because you're actually actively participating in in receiving them if you see what I mean nobody can kind of spam you with with with a bunch of transactions right some people actually may actually see this as a pro because I remember about a couple weeks ago this is like youtuber who I like kind of follow his name is Tom Scott and he kind of got into an argument with Brendan Eich who is working on as you know brave or basic attention token and he was kind of getting upset that in brave it basically tension token and so and really any most

cryptocurrencies day Bitcoin theory um that people have the ability to send you money without you're like you know consent essentially and this could have like weird sort of legal or regulatory consequences and so you know to some people they might actually see this as a pro and like help the like adoption from like a legal perspective as well absolutely and also from like you know from a from the from the point of like being a merit merchant right and you said you know instructions to your your customer how to pay you it prevents a lot of user error as well because if you use it does something wrong you did hopefully you could take that as part of building that transaction and you can reject those transactions rather than

the user sending it to the wrong address getting that processed and then saying hey where's my where's my money where's my where's my stuff and you have this kind of disconnect where you try to figure out what actually happened here it's much easier to do that in interactive protocol weather merchants can kind of sense check whether it's the correct behavior and this expected behavior from the customer but it is it is also like I should say so it's a different paradigm than like what's usually being done today in blockchains so there is like a lot of Canal extra effort or thinking that that that goes into it for from like merchants perspective and also from users perspective so so it is it is a kind of

a different approach that's that we're taking okay so in member when Bob and while it's interact to create privacy-preserving interactions how does this help when scalability right there's a few things I think most simply in order to think if I'm a new node on the network in order to sync up I don't need to have the whole history of the chain behind me I need I simply need to have the headers and I seem to simply need to have enough of some what we call the transaction kernel which which contains all of the all of the signatures to date to make sure that they add up to zero and I need to make sure that those all add up

so instead of you know if you if you think a new big point know for instance you're downloading the whole history in this case no you just need to download the headers and then enough information to make sure that your sum of the sum of the entire chain equals zero and then you should be good to go I mean it's only only 30 days for the green chain at the moment but you can already see like this distinct process is a few minutes and that should provided the header sync time kind of is fast enough that the same time should remain fairly constant for a new node coming on no matter how big the chain is so that's certainly one advantage there and there's other ones which are probably the they were mentioned in the paper but they're probably in practice not quite as quite

as you know good for quite as bountiful safe for scalability one of them is the notion of cost through which is if if I send transaction I send the transaction to somebody and they immediately send it to somebody else I can actually cut out some of the outputs in the middle of that because everything will still that up so I'm basic I'm basically taking you know the same number of both sides of an equation and yeah Daniel may have stopped you have anything to add as well yeah I think you covered it but I wanted to point out that you know as part of that thinking process this is not like a light client sink or anything like that this or SPV approach it's actually like a full node

sink and and it gives you like proper security guarantees and it's much faster than you know conventional approaches right yeah I mean so I've actually been you know gobbling around with like the grin nodes and like I've been trying to run a grin miner for the past like week or so and so when I actually started I opened up my grin node and it's like synced in a matter of like 30 seconds or so and not that like you know the grin box chains only been around for a month anyway so it's like it wouldn't have been that long anyways but it kind of to me away that's like I'm like whoa did it actually just sync like I'd probably mess something up and you try this again like it kind of blew my mind yeah we're gonna thirty days for the blockchain but

it's even after a month like it should take longer if it were a traditional blockchain it would be taking longer already so right exactly and so that really amazed me there so with this cut through thing so you know you're so you're saying we can you know kind of like to give some intuition for the listeners what essentially what we can do here is once transactions have been spent we can kind of like delete them from the chain essentially we're aggregating everything that's already spent and so all we have is the current you txo set and nothing of the history right is there and so does that mean it's constant is there any like piece of data that has to stick around from the

history or is it it doesn't all completely like a hundred percent disappear no no that the transaction kernels need to stay around and that's probably the biggest the biggest point against scalability or something we'd very much like to see there's no way to currently compress the kernels into you know and to sum them off basically that you can most other parts of the system if you do figure that out one day then we're gonna have a very very compact Chane I'm not even sure you can call it a chain anymore at that point could you explain slightly what this kernel is like right right so the signature I was talking about earlier um there's a few there's a few things that most importantly is that signature that proves the value and that's and that becomes part of a sum so if I need to sum up all of the kernels in the

blockchain I'm basically I'm basically summing up everything that's ever happened and so long as it equals zero it doesn't matter how many there were where they came from then I know the chain is valid at that point and that all has to be contained within the kernel which unfortunately we haven't found a way to to to get rid of at this point or or some IC and so that one question another question here is um I'm sure you guys may have heard of a project called coda which is like they use sort of what they call a recursive snarks to achieve actually somewhat very similar properties to what you're achieving here and so but you know that the benefit here is with snarks you kind

of you know you can do more than just these like basic transactions you can kind of essentially in theory you you know you can essentially put any sort of computation into here including it like very complex smart contracts and whatnot but you know it seems the con here is you know obviously they're depending on somewhat more complex cryptography and so what how do you how do you see the comparison between this nimble imbel protocol and these coda recursive snarks yeah remember wimple itself it's it's being can see this was a as a positive or a negative but because it is so succinct the cryptography that's used it's basically algebra chopper cartography that there and because it's

so succinct and so kind of compact and kind of self-contained it's difficult to kind of put any other stuff around it necessary so like there are no scripts in there but I mean we were talking earlier about this notion of scripted script so there are there are ways kind of other mathematical trick tricks a lot of them still still theoretical that could be employed on top of this so that's that's kind of the main difference I think that it's so succinct and so compact that it's difficult to sometimes add more functionality to it or to think of how you're going to add functionality to it and also it as we pointed out it relies on minimal security assumption but the discrete logarithm problem is

hard and that's it and you know that's that's very very important and makes it a big difference yeah absolutely I mean I'm a member when bullets it's zero knowledge all the way through zero knowledge proves the all the way through and we did an episode on coda a couple of months ago so if you're interested listener go and check that out and so um how would you say does member embo compare to Lucy cash on one arrow or other privacy fest chains um from what perspective from a technology technology perspective or from a functionality and technology perspective I mean both of them kind of touch upon things we've talked about

like and again I don't want to be disparaging to any of these projects I'm this is purely a point of comparison and we have a lot of respect for for the present cash and Manero in particular so is that cash rent we're talking about it it's it's it's based on the snorts they were talking about earlier two completely trusted set up nimble win will itself and any memorable coin is going to be completely zero knowledge so although there's no non like a key ceremony or anything to start it up it's all completely trustless on the case of Manero I mean they have a lot like probably say more privacy features than what's in number windmill at the moment but a lot of that comes at an expense so they use Briggs ring signatures at some

point they use a what's coming to mind right now but do all of the kind of different methods they have a Bobby skating transactions are kind of on top of a Bitcoin like structure so and again member wendel itself is just a very compact concise way of doing it so those would be kind of the main comparison points I would also describe the madero is more kind of mature compared to - - with grenades but Green is Hitler there's a lot of more privacy features in one era but still green is simpler and achieves kind of a lot with a little spaces approach minimal approach with easy cash you have which fully shielded

transactions better privacy properties but as Michael was saying requires a trusted setup and also has this problem of shielded versus unshielded transactions so you don't have actually privacy on by default in the in the protocol itself which is it's very different from from from green and that comes with its own kind of problems I know that Z cash companies and the foundation is actively working to improve that and have more and more transactions going through the shielded ones which are more computationally expensive than the unshielded ones but but that's a big big difference and then we have governance approaches of these of these two projects we serve we sort

of generally different as well so when you think of like you know the impact that you know the effectiveness of a privacy solution how I usually think of it as like you know what is the privacy set the anonymity set here right and so when you when you use mine arrows ring signatures you're basically choosing a couple of other transactions to mix in with and the a and your anonymity set is only the size of a few transactions like no you know I think the default was about five or something and then the idea is as you keep making more transactions gets muddled but in Z cache the anonymity set is the entire set of all other shielded transactions right so how would you what's the and so clearly

the anonymity set of Z cash is much much larger than that of Manero where does how would you describe the anonymity set of min the limbal right ring signatures in particular I believe those are used mostly to to cover up the the transaction graph as then if someone is following you know is monitoring nodes and is watching transactions they can kind of start to piece together information about what's happening there and then that's something that that's an ongoing challenge that we always have discussions about that right now we have a protocol in place called called dandy-lion which is in a you know an attempt to to to hide not completely conceal would

certainly make it more difficult for someone to follow a transaction graph and that works by instead of just win or no gets a transaction it doesn't just burst it to to every node it knows about it actually follows during what we call a stem phase send it to one node that sends to another node to another node and eventually you know Brandon Lee one of them will then do the the fluff phase with which is broadcast wall it appears it knows in terms of the animal anonymity set in theory it you know because you're doing with member one will you support non interactive coin joints assuming that the you know you can aggregate all the transactions basically in a block or you know send out to an aggregated transaction

broadcast that out to the chain as well so you have a lot of kind of there's a lot of opportunities to improve that anonymity such as it goes out yeah we're going to say I mean like if you're looking if you look at the blockchain do you have nothing else to go on you're just looking up the contents of the chain of the Ute Exocet there isn't you can get absolutely nothing from it there is no way to get anything from it and the point of the system and the anonymity set is very much based around how easy is it for someone to construct the transaction graph and reconstruct what happened and it's something that we're continually working on through to various you know research into various technologies and additions to what we're doing if like you know once transactions have made it onto the chain it's

essentially a coin join amongst all transactions that have happened and so it does kind of give you a you know a very very large anonymity set but it doesn't solve the problem of you know the of observing the peer-to-peer network and you know anyone who's trying to break privacy will definitely be doing that and you know I know companies have done this in the past that chain Alice's and whatnot and so that's where this like dandelion comes in and dandelion is sort of this like privacy feature in grin that is actually you know completely independent of member embo it's like a separate privacy feature and so you know you described it a little bit about this like fluff thing but he can you describe it

little bit further from my understanding you can kind of think of it as this like horse mix net kind of thing for transactions is that like a am I having the right mental model here or I mean I mean dandelion it's so did there's a few things happening dandelion a member will itself or very complementary technologies okay because in order to to perform this this coin going type aggregation that we've been talking about it needs to be done in one way and one way only before is the chain because you could have problems if all if all nodes everywhere are putting together transactions and lumping them together in different ways and then you can end up with with issues when they try to get to be a reconciled we got applied to the

chain now with Dandy lion because dandelion there's a distinct phase where the transaction is being sent from one node to the next node to another node one at a time along the stem as I was calling it that gives us an opportunity to apply this this coin joint to transaction to go along so as the transaction as a transaction goes to the stem phase it gets aggregated with the book with other transactions as it goes along until finally since until finally it gets to you know at some random point one know where when I say right no more aggregation and then explode and then all of the nodes all of its peers know about it and it gets propagating it that

way so visiting when you do you do because like you you basically every node kind of just immediately when they have something to broadcast they broadcast it out to everybody they're connected to in your network right and here the purpose is down the line is basically to do that but it's just not you who does that can I explosion the gossip protocol you said I pass the transaction that you have through one of two directions and a member is basically a coin flip between for every node whether they're gonna spread it out or just pass it along to a single node that makes it much harder for somebody who's monitoring with the entire network to figure out where that transaction originated from in the

network because just because it gets broadcasted out from a node doesn't mean that that node that the trans actually belongs to that node if it's you see lemon okay so you know maybe we can like kind of walk through how this dandelion process works so well essentially happen here is let's say you know we have this large network and I'm the one who's creating this transaction I will go ahead and send it you know maybe to Michael Michael you'll send it to Daniel and then Daniel has this like seed thing that like it tells him when it's time to propagate it right and so he'll be the one to like pushes to the rest of the network but where's this aggregation happening is it that like let's say if it just so happens that the two stems of a

dandelion intersect then that person who ever had that intersection of two of the stems that they'll like be the one who's locally aggregating it yeah so there will be you know at every epoch there will be a couple of nodes that will be fluffing notes and a lot of transactions are gonna end up at those fluffing notes and at that point they get aggregated and before they get fluffed out okay so there is some mechanism of like so the the the path of the stem isn't just completely random to the peer-to-peer network they are kind of moving towards some aggregator node who will do the aggregation there but it changes after every epoch it kind of resets and

everybody cannot do connections at least that's that's how it's done in dandelion plus plus which is I think what we're actually I think we have a simpler version implemented in in wind today it's like the original dandelion paper and I think with version 1.1 I think it's gonna come out another approach how are these nodes chosen exactly they're chosen at random aunts themselves like there's a coin flip on each side am I gonna fluff it or I'm gonna pass it along the stem and that's just in the current simpler version but I think there's the reason that there's a 1.1 of this coming out is because it it kind of reduces the the chances or the

occurrence the chances for for any aggregation to happen so for aggregation to happen here you need a transaction to come into one node and then enter and then to be stemmed through another node that has some other transactions in it right so what channels are subscribed for Dundee plus plus is a way of ensuring that more aggregation happens in the dandelion Network so what happens if there's not a lot of usage on the network and they're not enough transactions to actually compound yeah if there's not a lot of you should and then transactions don't get don't get aggregated I mean you'll see I mean it's early days for the chains I mean you see a lot of blocks there it's you know one transaction in the row two transactions in number one plus the coinbase so yeah I mean the more users are on the network

the more transactions are going around the greater the chances of there being aggregation so it is you it is definitely related to the you know the amount to use it on the network I mean that's also why we're building it I mean we're not building it for kind of like low usage and see where we go we don't really have any interest in doing that there's nobody kind of like it's better off for doing that instead you know everybody's kind of working towards this idea that this is gonna be you know a big well use protocol that's the assumption sure so as you just briefly management I mentioned when actually launched January that was last month so Green is actually the implementation of member wimba that both of you are

working on and we kind of skipped over about this we skipped over this a little bit there's also another implementation named beam would you can can you tell us how beam and grid actually differ from each other the Green was launched in October 2016 I think and the beam is the second member will move implementation that was announced I thinking may or june something 28 2018 and they do a they take a different approach governance structure organizational they are there's a development company building that does it in different language has some adopted some of the approaches that

we do in green but they are on their own kind of separate paths it's not like a fork or anything it's their own separate project and you know we in general you know of course it's going to be many different payment will implementations if anybody who wants to can put put one together so so I think that's that's it but it's very kind of it's a very different structure in terms of how they were organized and what their approach is to some of the things that so is there like you know what is Dec sort of the relationship between the teams is there like a lot of information sharing because I know for example you know the Green Team is that one who kind of came up with this idea of dandelion and so then being kind of adopted it but I know

there's also some like interesting innovation happening from the beam side where you know I was reading some of their documentation and they have like a mechanism of sort of these are the kernels we were talking about that are being left in the chain they have a method of that kind of pruning those out and incentivizing the pruning of those they also have this a bulletin board thing that they were talking about where like it helps with this interactivity needed so is there any any like what are the kind of communication between these teams and like you know any plan so kind of like port over some of their features back into grid right so just to point out that you know deadline is not our invention it's Julie Avanti and and some other researchers that have put together

that protocol and yeah there are different you know in general the the green project interacts with any team or any kind of any individual or researchers that want to interact and want to share knowledge in like an earnest way we do have some connect communication with the beam team as well they donated to our - to our fund we don't have like about we have like a good relationship with them generally though what what kind of I think green is focused on is to do this very kind of minimal implementation that doesn't have a lot of overhead and doesn't have a lot of keeping things simple and and we're definitely open for influences and new

ideas when they come out and when they do we evaluate them we vet them and then you know if they're good we we adopt them any thoughts on the current like some of the ones that they've already started on like this bulletin board or the kernel fusion and stuff maybe the the kind of the fundamental difference here I think is that the greenest is as adopted a community approach to a lot of things so for instance like the bulletin board that you just talked about is basically it's it's a way of dealing with the the interaction problem that we were talking about earlier how do you how do people interact how does it work if someone's not available how do you send funds to somebody without without them being around or online to perform the transaction and and I mean

Grimm have a demon brother has a what if a beast a prescriptive approach to this right you built a moat important and you do your shows actually here and this is a solution grins approach is to leave that up to the community and other authors so for instance for that particular problem our approach is to provide a very decent set of wallet tools to do the fundamentals and building transactions and put wallets together and then let the community come up with different ways of handling solutions to these problems according to different needs you know some people might might only want to meet in dark alleys with bits of paper and that's how they want to do their transactions and that's fine we can support that other people might want to come along and build some solutions on top of that like

there's a there's a there's an open-source project called wall at 7:13 that has another solution built on top of that each time you add a solution like this on top of nimble Wimble you're also adding you know you're actually lessening the security and confidentiality a bit as well so that has to be taken into consideration so I think like a fundamental purpose community we're trusting the community to take written as the core layer and then build build custom solutions or whatever suits various groups on top of that yeah and I mean it's exactly as Michael says and I mean that's the beauty of it because it's not prescriptive and it lets you know basically the community figure it out

and try different approaches and see what is the one that's gonna get traction then usage I I'm you know for full disclosure I'm involved in and all this is one tree and the green box transaction protocol that we're doing and the reason why we did it was because we saw a need for it an opportunity to do it that would make sense and add some value so we do that and as a result there's now you know many you know there's another team now doing the building on top of grim right and I think if you look at it like a macro view on it it has to be many different development teams are trying to solve specific problems that they have you know make things better in the usage of a chain rather than like this reliance on on like a single entry

point it's a single central kind of company or or whatever organization it would be I don't think that's a scalable approach because yeah you know it becomes yeah you need to let like many attempts kind of to solve the same problem and see which one works basically it's like the bazaar versus Cathedral discussion writing software development so you know we talked a lot about member limbal and just and Alliance stuff but you know and I know another area that you know the green team has been kind of like developing heavily is uh you know kind of innovating on this like you know proof of work algorithm as well as like you know experimenting with like new issuance models inflation models and so

you know I know you guys are using this proof-of-work algorithm called Kaku cycle and like you know it kind of started with this like desire to try to create like an ASIC resistance hashing algorithm but then over time it seems that like the goals of this hash proof-of-work algorithm design have changed heavily and now there's this like you know complex like to system version and can you kind of explain to what's going on here sure so it's like a high-level kind of summary of this like a family of proof-of-work algorithms created by John Trump I called you know the kuku psycho family which basically the the algorithm they're the whole

objective is you have like this bunch of of nodes connections between different units in a hash table in the kuku hash table and and the objective is basically to find like a forty to forty two loop loop that connects 42 nodes and that's a solution for your proof of work and and as an description of what we do today we have basically two proof of one is the asic resistant algorithm which is kind of optimized towards GPUs and the other one is an ASIC targeted algorithm which is optimized towards

basic development all right and when we launched the balance between these two proof-of-work was that 90% of mining rewards was going to the GPU and 10% of mining rewards are going to the ASIC tuned algorithm over time in the course of two years this is all this is disbalance is going to completely so that 100% of mining rewards are going to ASIC tuned so in two years time the idea is that everybody is going to be mining on the ASIC tuned algorithm originally as you pointed out there was one proof-of-work could recycle and when John first initially revealed the the work

algorithm it was believed that it could run you know that you could mine efficiently or competitively using a mobile phone it's it's a but but overtime optimizations were discovered that basically meant that CPU mining was ruled out as efficient and it was like daily advantages for ASIC miners to you know there was a lot of opportunities to build a fish into a C's miners using the cuckoo cycle algorithm now the reason why we moved away from from a single proof of work into to prefer works was that this algorithm was known and it was available widely known before we launched the coin and we had received several very credible indications that

Asics were being built for this algorithm which would at day one of the launch of the coin completely taken over the hash power kind of centralize the entire mining which we didn't really want we don't even think that was a good idea we do however see that because of all these you know time doesn't stand still and what we've learned since you know John first published that that algorithm and and since the beginning of grid is that you know Asics are inevitable and there will always be a way to kind of do I if optimizations and even if you're not gonna optimize on the a6 you're gonna be able to optimize you know the guy mining with a GPU at home he's not gonna be as efficient as as the person who's connected to to a dam in in China and has 10,000 GPUs so there's gonna be a

lot of efficiencies and and that's inevitable however trying to launch a coin in a fair manner in 2019 puts a couple of problems to that so you need to have a way to basically bootstrap the network in a way that gives people some chance to mine fairly to the point where you know over time you can gradually shift over to to this ASIC friendly algorithm and give ASIC manufacturers enough leeway and enough time to prepare for that and have multiple ASIC manufacturers maybe build at the same time in order to create as competitive of a marketplace as possible for these for these Asics it was very kind of long answer but but that's kind of have you

wanted Michael you know if you have anything to add the thing about the to create enough proofs the work is Asics are gonna happen anyways and that doesn't matter you can you can try and avoid it you can try and design an algorithm that you know can't be done it won't happen they're gonna happen at some point so the best thing you can do is try and make it as fair for everybody and try and actually make it your algorithm simple to specify for Asics manufacturers to allow more of them to allow a market I mean Asics themselves aren't necessarily evil they're actually you know the closer you get to some this is something again we're back to Andrew poster paper II called it the thermodynamic limit if you had a machine that was absolutely the most optimized

it could possibly could be for proof of work algorithm and everyone has one of those machines then every time that's actually the best the best case for mining there is so by encouraging AC development and hopefully there will be a you know a few options to choose from they'll be readily available this should actually help secure the network as well see I'd lost my point there basic mining basics themselves aren't evil it's when they're all under control of a single entity or a single corporation then that's a centralization pressure so by to encourage as many took as many hardware developers become to develop a sixth and we're hoping for a more fair market so you end with them the two proof-of-work a system in order to

ensure continuous decentralization throughout the life of grain but that there are disadvantages that come with proof of work and this is why many people are talking about switching to proof of safe from for many different chains this is something this that is in a concern for us grain developers as well are you firmly committed to proof of work no we're very firmly committed to proof of work at the moment nobody has proven that proof of stake will secure that will secure a network as well as proof of work nobody has proven that you know it is entirely fair like it very much rewards people who already have a stake and proof of stake in it so no the green team at the moment is very

much proof of work only yeah as someone who's been working on proof of stake for like you know two years now I actually completely agree with you I don't think there's been any evidence that like proof of stake can properly secure Network and especially it seems that like you know Green seems to be one of I've heard the story is like you know green seems like the next best bet at money other than Bitcoin and like you know if you want to create decentralized money you know you need to have had a similar origin story and anonymous founder and like and so if you're creating I just don't think proof of stake works properly as an issuance mechanism so you know it's you know when I was what would be in ten years time in general that the team and the community

in general is open to any new technology as long as it's kinda makes sense and right at this stage produced a doesn't make sense as you correctly pointed out as well you couldn't we couldn't have launched with loops to a mistake because it creates huge problems of how you distribute the coins fairly and and at that point you know in terms of actually initial distribution of coins as far as I know I haven't heard of any better you know ways to do it fairly this improves work so speaking of this like initial distribution and issue and so I guess two-part question here one is you know this issuance mechanism you know you guys have an experiment like a new monetary policy that I haven't seen the only other coin I've seen this like similar monetary policy in his dogecoin but

essentially this idea of unlimited supply where it's but constant issuance so it's like you know you have this like it's finally like little time is money meme going on where it's like one one grin per second or sixty grand per minute and but until the end of time so like there's no fixed cap like there is in like Bitcoin or like coin or any of these other money currencies that are trying to become base money for example and so kind of what led you down to what who made that decision of like trying this new policy you may I think it's something that the team arrived at actually actually fairly early on in development when we're talking about

various models and schedules of how to do this I think most importantly okay but a few things I mean it's a big can of worms and you get all sorts of hate mail for anytime you you start talking about this the the model that came up originally by Satoshi in Bitcoin as in they were going to be a fixed number of bitcoins it's going to be an entirely deflation Airy system at that's great you know there seems to be a wide health widely held belief out there that this was handed down to him on a tablet from God at some point and this is the way it should be for all time there's a lot of problem with that approach and you've seen that in Bitcoin everybody's seen this with the hyper deflation that you

see in Bitcoin now you know the paper said it was supposed to be a digital cash and it's turned into a store of value and that's the story now so that approach is quite problematic the other thing is nobody yet knows whether a fee market on its own is going to be enough to secure a network when the the fees from Bitcoin become too low so we think that the approach you've taken which is just a constant block Commission sixteen grins per block once a minute forever and by the way this is this is actually quite conservative as far as putting a currency out there I mean the inflation rate becomes zero you know thirty years on and your bear

imagine if you could only print sixty US dollars a minute like you'd have hyperinflation you know that this is actually a rather conservative approach and you know it is it is new in the cryptocurrency world I don't think it's it's that radical I think it's easy to understand I think it will it will help secure the network when fees run out it will help it will help people to use grid as as money as opposed to hoarding it because they're afraid is gonna be worth far more tomorrow so yeah so that's that's kind of where we're can't speak for the entire team but that's basically where we stand on it at this point and ultimately it's very simple all right it's very very easy to explain

very easy to understand it's it's hard to kind of I haven't seen a lot of arguments as you know well well-constructed as to why it is a problem and since then it is you know very simple structure we like it it's elegant right yeah you know I think this whole time is money meme I think actually it'll work I think it's easy to explain and you know I think there's a lot it'll be very interested to see how this fair start plays out like you know I don't think we've I think the last time we saw something similar to a fair start but clearly not as fair was like the Z cash start and even that was you know they had their whole like developer fun side of things but um you know and I remember like what happened what I

remember my roommate my ex-roommate she like no it's really hyped about the grin mining and I know like there was like you know I've heard a crazy figures about like B C's like putting hundreds of millions of dollars or something into like I don't know that much but crazy amounts of money into like you know mining ventures very early on in Grand when it like started realize Eero supply so it'll be very interesting to see how this new fair start and issuance mechanism works out so now that we're kind of drawing towards the close of the episode you know just want to talk maybe ask a few one or two questions a little bit about you know a bit about the future of grain and what the future roadmap is and whatnot and so one of the

questions that you know often comes about green is that in order to make this member Wimble feature work we kind of had to remove Bitcoin script because you know you can't it's not part it doesn't work with aggregation and so how will we what is the plan here for you know does this mean that you know is it possible to do multi SIG's on on grain will it be possible to do H tlc's atomic swaps is any of this possible on the roadmap absolutely as a matter of fact atomic swaps with both if they're UN and Bitcoin have been done before multi-sig is definitely it's it's possible we know how to do it but just I don't think it's been implemented in the code but to be

certainly have kind of the foundation in there to do that other stuff you know it's more contracts we've talked about script the scripts of it those are essentially ways of kind of enforcing in fortunately usual conditions you'd be enforcing in a contract without having to have a contract in particular in place so yeah they're definitely possible I won't say we have the answers to all of them at this point there's certainly a lot of research outstanding and if you kind of look through our site and what we have there you know there's a list there of technologies that we're looking into and researching how to do this and yeah that's basically a futureman the future is gonna be for us we'll be you know building the tool to support community building on top of grin and on top of nimble limbo as well

as you know slow and steady research as to you know other technologies become you putting in here again like atomic swaps some you know lightning like network on top of that so yeah that's that's and it's very briefly what our future looks like and so back to that question about the fair start and like you know so the Z cache team with their fair start they funded themselves by giving themselves a like a developer cut of all the block Awards you know Satoshi funded his fair start by like you know do it like mining like crazy when like Bitcoin first came

out and because it just wasn't very popular but like I said you know lots of outside money was poured into green mining from there early on and so what is the funding model here now for the green developers how is this gonna be sustainable there's no pre mine nothing like that so Green is a hundred percent community funded we you know live by I mean Michael is funded through donations there is a dead fund and a security audit fund that raises donations for for specific purposes but but it relies a hundred percent on donations from the community and from from miners and other companies active in the space to

contribute and and I think you know you touched upon a very important thing there that yeah you know how what is fair and and you know what what is what is a fair launch and I think grin is has probably been one of the more fairest launches that have been around because it's easily because of the fact that you know it's had a lot of attention a lot of eyeballs on it from day one which a lot of other projects really didn't have including Bitcoin early on and and you know equal opportunity doesn't mean equal outcome and you know we welcome anybody to come in mind and you know whether the VCS or not or whether their users and whether welcome any but any

anybody to come and participate in the project and and that's the strength I think it's the reason why I got involved you know a year ago because it's very easy to participate it's very easy to become active in the community when there's nobody else kind of making you know having an advantage of you earning more money or something because of your contribution anybody who's here and want to contribute is actually just doing that because they believe in the project and and they want to do so and and that makes it very easy for new people to come in come in and get involved and it becomes also a self-selection exercise I've noticed like we have a great community and I think part of it is because there's no get-rich-quick scheme here and and you know we don't have to pay people to do to do work it takes

care of itself and ultimately as well you know I'm not some people asking you on this all or always this kind of questions is this the right way is it sustainable will it last well it's completely up to the community right if nobody wants to fund us then you know maybe maybe there would be fewer development developers and less development going on if nobody cares about that but I guess it wasn't very popular in the first place but if people do care about that and they want to actually take a grin forward then anybody can participate and do that so it's like it's like a non-issue for me you know in a way so you don't see any issues with them I mean I can see how the story right now is super peeling so it's fine currently no one actually makes huge amounts of

monies building businesses on grid but once they're actually active people who have actively benefit from the grid Network and build business on businesses on it do you think the volunteers will still be there to actually build the infrastructure where they feel exploited and withers turned into a tragedy of the Commons such a situation I don't know I think it I think it depends a little bit I think it but I think it depends on the businesses how they act in the community what what kind of how they operate as you know if I if I was starting a business you know when you know that the stuff we're doing for example with wind box in Baltimore 3 it's all fully open

for anybody to use if you're a business and you make money off grid it's kind of in your interest to contribute to the dev fund right because you know it's your protocol that you're making money from so it kind of makes sense for you to ensure that somebody's looking after the protocol in the protocol level and so for what we're seeing is that it changes mining pools you know a proof-of-work mining software providers are contributing and they're making contributions I can't say whether it's gonna be enough or not it's very early days we'll see about that but you know it really is up to everybody else everybody involved to actually could excuse me to contribute and and I I don't I'm not too worried about it and and you know just because there are

companies there that make money rightly so they should be doing that if they're offering value to the community that shouldn't preclude a community member to to contribute if they want to on their spare time on on something some other corner of the of the protocol but the difference is I guess with other setups is that if we for example as developers we're taking 20% tax on all coins nevermind that creates this very weird relationship between us and the rest of the community right because it's also something we have a stake in improving the value of the coin which is not necessarily what is in the interest of the community right will you eat something if we get 20% of all the coins

then it's really in our interest to just raise the price of the coin all the time and then kind of focus on that whereas maybe what we should be looking at is adoption or you know getting making more users using the coin that doesn't necessarily drive up the price of the coin though do you see what I mean it kind of has like a weird incentive alignment yeah I I agree that it's really difficult to find moral standards and align incentives well but saying and you trust in the good in companies to me that that seems didn't Eve I mean if you look at the off chain word for instance Apple massively bills on public

infrastructure and applicant only exists because there are structures the structures that preceded it like the the judicial system and the road infrastructure and the internet ever chooses to not pay tax so basically this is like the like major corporations have ways of circumventing paying tax and and I mean they in principle their life or to pay tax but somehow they still end up paying very little or joke sooner no taxes right I mean I can't comment on that then I can't comment on whether Apple pays a lot of tax or not but but I guess that the point is that generally speaking the whole purpose was grin as a

project was to be very minimal on the top layer protocol right in order for that to kind of make sense intuitively it means that you know other entities underneath need to kind of step up to the plate and deliver products and services to to help to facilitate that because it's very minimal on the top layer because it's very minimal on the top layer it shouldn't be you know needing 20% of all the coins of mind to sustain itself right it's the whole that's the other I appreciate the idea and I think it's super idealistic I never hope it works so I'm not holding against you I'm just yeah I'm sure I'm just asking whether you also like you know as I tell companies cuz there are companies that

cannot approach us and they kind of say hey we want to get involved we want to do this when I did that how could we do how can we get more involving Orion and I say that like if you contribute to the community deaf fun it's like the greatest way to create goodwill and add it and marketing for your company in in the community right by just kind of making active contributions and of course companies can choose not to do that but I mean that stands for themselves and and I know you know I understand that you might think it sounds idealistic or naive but I actually don't think there's a better way to do this I don't think it's better to to to crew to to stop it's like a death tax or something i I don't think that's gonna lead to longer term success for for for

green and what its long-term objectives are if you start off with the dead talks and that's how you're gonna fund then you will always be paying to developers to work on the change for those reasons like why am I gonna put my time in to make someone else to have someone else profit off the end of it I know it kind of sounds a bit naive and that there seems to be I've seen criticism on the internet again no it's not gonna work because you need to pay developers but I think they've it's been around for two years now the interest is still growing first in the I mean I've been funded for for the past year and I'm funded again for the next next six or seven months to work on a full-time you know a regular developer salary and and I think and

this is early days I said before the Chamber's even launched in people had their businesses that they they were gonna build on top of green so I think the early signs are encouraging anyhow take what we're seeing with exact exchanges as an example right we're not actually I mean we welcome and encourage all exchanges to to list us that want to and if there are questions we'll help them and so on but we're not really chasing exchanges we're not applying for exchanges we're not filling out any documents there's no legal entity nobody can give any money for for list fees or anything to exchanges because we're broke we don't have any money right so instead exchanges list us without us asking and without any any preconditions but if we had like a pot of gold that we were sitting on which

was like 'ok waiting to to a chunk of of the total coins mind but I think this story would have been very different yeah so I mean and certainly they have been open-source projects that have been going on for tens of years and they're still around so I'm interested to see what the future holds for you guys thank you for coming on ok thank you for having I thank you very much thank you for joining us on this week's episode we release new episodes every week you can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts and if you have a Google home or Alexa device you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast go to epicenter TV

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