Comet: Destructive or Disruptive

Transcript

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hello everyone thank you so much for making to my talk today on public goods I hope you guys are having a really good time at HCC and the whole blockchain week in Paris so I took the liberty of changing the name of the title so thank you for bearing with me so today I will talk about public goods and what I want to do is not shill a product or like not do some kind of Shilling but what I want to do is like sorry about that

what I want to do is like give you a framework to look upon give you a framework to work with and I will use Comet as an example which is like the the consensus protocol as an example of public good but you can very well strike down comment and then replace it with your project and see how it fits into your narrative so with that reduction given let me start of this presentation by throwing a question at you guys what do you do when a commit is approaching Earth and for some the answer might be obvious but some might have a mischievous mind so while you think about the answer I

will give you a quick introduction about me so my name is Ali and I currently work at informal systems if you already know informal systems hurray if you don't boo well informal is one of the core contributors in Cosmos which does a lot of things so be Steward Cosmos Hub we used to word comment bft we also work on a relayer called Hermes we also do formal verification we also do Kofi and a lot of other things so basically I can go on and on about the company but in the nutshell we are a core contributor to Cosmos ecosystem now come a question that I asked before what would you do when a comet is about to

hit the Earth and the same answer to say would be you would take proactive measures to prevent the comment correct now if you would say oh um that's something that might happen in the future and we're not concerned about it well you want bad luck because if the comment is actually coming and you're not prepared for it well you are going to die and it's going to be Doomsday and I use the analogy of comet because public goods in a very very similar fashion is like a comet so you have a public good which is like awesome doing awesome things and if you don't make sure that

this public would exist in the future and if you don't take proactive measures to prevent this public good from like drowning or disappearing or whatever you might end up in a situation where the ecosystem might collapse or might just be like would have sort of useless so for today's agenda I want to primarily focus on three things one thing I want to focus on is setting up the definition of public goods I spoke to a lot of people in this conference in other conferences I spoke to a lot of people both online offline and the definition part is kind of missing I think that we should get that straight first uh number two I want to

like talk about a bit about Comet bft what is it and that will give you a landscape of why and how does it fit into this Narrative of public goods in general and then I would like share my concerns and possible solutions now again I will use comment as an example but as I said before you can just strike out comment and put in your project and the framework would still work for you and lastly a bit of a looking ahead thing a code and and sort of like open up to you guys to kind of ponder upon the thoughts okay so let's start with the definitions and this is the formal definition of public goods so

um you can read about it but my personal understanding of public goods is it is a tool that makes your life so much easier but you're thankless about it well that's not a very apt way of saying it but like most of the people are thankless and don't even know that something like this exists that makes their life better because if you don't pay for something you kind of don't pay attention to it so that's the definition of public goods that I have in mind along with this theoretical definition that you can like maybe take a picture of or whatever um and I want to talk a little bit about like comment bft as well so um then we can like put it into The Narrative of public

goods so how many of you know about tenement like Thunderman the consensus protocol so um I think a handful of people already know about tenement so Thunderbird is the State application engine that has been powering almost the entire Cosmo stack um in December last year tenements the team that was maintaining tenement I mean the original team like they froze development of tenement at 0 34 and that's when we took the reins of it and we forked it to be called Comet bft so common PFT right now is the default consensus engine for almost all the

applications that are run on Cosmos ecosystem except for a handful of them most of them would be running on Comet bft well the technology that powers such an important ecosystem ironically it's a public good and there is no way for us to make money and this is the reason why we have been pondering upon this idea of how do we make sure that we are sustainable um so if you're wondering by any chance like how how do we pay salaries for the team of government PFT right now so it's being funded by interchange foundations and I will in my concern slide I will like talk about like why is funding

through a foundation a very very bad idea especially for things like common PFT which is like a such a critical important piece of software okay so my aim is to give you guys a framework that you can walk out with and Ponder upon think upon start like start mix start your brain juices flowing so that you can build on top of it so these are like not exhaustive concerns your project might have some specific Niche concerns but like the idea is just to give you a base to like start thinking about so I've like identified four concerns that are

um that like I have seen repetitively over different conversations that I've been having my number one concern is regulations and this is the most controversial concern that I have because how do you make sure that a piece of software is being correctly regulated as in like how do you make sure that the outcome is uh they're not just bluffing and saying oh we are making this we're making that and not delivering anything how do we how do we really regulate that if you go to one extreme you could have a situation where you could have something as strong as SEC but that would be like a No-No in a decentralized world if you go to the far other end of the extreme like do whatever you want

and then it's again uh no one is being accountable so regulation is one of the things that like I deeply think it should be like the thing that should be addressed properly the other thing is like who decides on fundings if any one of you has been fortunate enough or unfortunate enough in a sarcastic way to deal with the drama that goes on in Cosmos most of this drama like stems around fundings and the problem really is like uh many people don't think bad of the funding many people are not like they want bad for the ecosystem but the problem is they don't understand what is being

asked for so let's say like um I put up a proposal on Cosmos Hub and say I need like one million dollars for x amount of things half of the things people don't even understand what what it is and uh it goes back to the first question like how do I make sure that thing was being delivered in the first place so only a handful of people understand and if even they are being corrupt or whatever then it is a situation where people are not fully satisfied in voting like on deciding who gets the funding then it leads you to the third point which is why not the foundations funded so in the previous slide I said that Comet PFT is being funded by ICF right now

but then there's a major flaw in it ICF is a non-profit organization which has no source of income so it has no best way to replenish its sources and if and it handles right out currently uh funds common bft Cosmos SDK IBC Cosmos Hub the whole interchange stack so if I ICF keep give keeps giving money and has no way to like replenish its sources it will soon run out of money so as common bft as like other teams interchange stack we have to start thinking of how do we make money through combat bft and not rely on One Foundation solely and lastly as a developer myself I hate this point

but still I'm going to say it that who is responsible for the mistakes if I make a bug in the software I mean if it's a small thing it's fine it's patch and everyone carries on with their life but if it's something big if it's like a huge thing which exposes the entire system to something and keep in mind like common bft like is the core consensus protocol so if we like um if you mess up something like at that level like I mean a lot of chains on the top would be just be screwed so who is really responsible for the mistakes what do we even do like we fire people does that like solve the problem like like how do you like penalize how do you measure that the people don't take this

for granted and that brings me to my solution space again this is like the solution that I have identified it's not exhaustive you can fit in your own Solutions and you can fit in a lot of other things but yeah that's the point the first thing is Grants which I personally hate the most so think of Grants as a battery that's needed to give the ignition to the car okay you got the ignition the car is started but to run the car you need fuel you need fuel for combustion so grants could act like this starting point of ignition just to Kickstart the project but then you still need other ways of fuel to keep the company keep

the project running so grants is my least favorite one um tax on usage so this is a a bit of a controversial one like you kind of tax the usage um in in case of comment we have to very simple thing to do so we I we identify all the chains that use common PFT and we we tax them and we say oh if you want to use Comet you have to like pay this amount of tax but then the question is we are open source software so how do we stop them or how do we like make sure that they are paying the tax so that would lead us to going to the other part of the thing which is like pool of funds so each chain would keep a pool of funds that is that is responsible for funding

a public good so that's a customer's hub for example osmosis for example would have a pool of fund that is funding the public goods item I know what you're thinking how do you make those chains pay how do you make those chains contribute to the pool the answer is my fourth solution which is correlation I use this word mafia not a very good word to use but I use it I use it as an adjective not a verb so what I really mean by a mafia is a group of people right a group of validators for example a group of developers a group that like puts social pressure or like whatever they could do

to kind of make sure that the change of funding or the chains of putting money back into the ecosystem through like um some sort of community pool or whatever so I I think like uh for the other two solutions to work Coalition is kind of an important thing it's sort of sort of like leads to a different kind of an area which is which might be negative but I think to get started this is a good way uh and the last two things are my uh the easiest one the favorite ones one is hybrid model so with hybrid model um I like to give the example of Wordpress

uh I really love how they do it so it's a freemium model where you get certain things for free so um we just like open up our software I mean it's already open so we have all the features open but we selectly select a few features and close them and only if you pay for those things we open them up to you so it would be like a Freeway model just to make an addition to that thing uh in hybrid model what we could also include is consultancy kind of things so to review your PR or to provide you with Solutions on like or whatever things uh dedicate like certain amount of time to you to like make sure that your project is running correctly

according to the standards we could do like consulting services so that could be in addition to this hybrid model and lastly what I have is like fun individual features so here's my thought on it we made a list of features that we think okay this is the list of features that I want to finish in 2024 and I passed it on all the teams and I say oh are you interested in like any of these features to be done on a priority and you would say yes this is a thing that could like get me millions of dollars worth of um whatever assets are and then you say okay can you prioritize this and we say okay we can prioritize this and we'll charge you x amount of money to prioritize this so we um we make sure that you get the feature

and you get the value occurred with it and that also like in turn pays us and then we can pay our salaries okay so just to conclude uh I started off with the definition of public goods and I started off giving you all of the different things that uh like how common bft as a project could fit into this Narrative of public goods which again you can like put in your own project and then I spoke about a bit of about the concerns and the solutions of like how I think public goods should be addressed and in my last concluding two slides what I want to do is like

I want to leave you with a thought a thought to think I am praying the best projects will only survive through collaboration so if you think that you can survive in isolation or without the help of other projects especially without the help of public projects then I'm sorry you're truly truly mistaken and I will leave you all with this quote um hopefully you can like take a photo of it and tweet it so I'll leave you with this quote um and yeah that's it that's it from my side I think we might have some time for the question so again I appreciate you all listening to my talk thank you [Applause]

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