Devcon Panel – Censorship Resistance and Credible Neutrality #B007

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm Federica ant and I'm coming to you from Bogota where Devcon is happening this week with a special bonus episode I moderated the panel on credible neutrality and you will be listening to the audio track for that we didn't plan on this but the discussion was so good and in this case that means so controversial that I decided to release this as a bonus episode to you on the panel we had Sebastian burger from Harper who was on a regular epicenter episode two weeks ago Phil Diane from flashbots who has been on before as well and Martin kapperman from gnosis who has been on before as well

Patrick Macquarie joined for infuro and sriram Cannon joined from eigenlayer Martin had given a lightning talk previously so I skipped him in the intro round on the panel but you will hear him in due time I give you some background to the heart of the discussion though a couple of weeks ago a number of smart contracts related to the tornado cash were put on the sanctions list by ofak we did an episode on that at the Time with Peter van welkenberg from coin Center the move itself is debatable because in principle technology should not be able to be on a sanctions list but in response to this a large number of ecosystem players stopped to interact with any address that had tornado touch points in the past

uni swap other dydx balancer the list goes on inferior stopped serving requests for tornado addresses flashbots Mev boost that currently builds half of all ethereum blocks stopped including tornado touching transactions into any block they're building effectively censoring tornado transactions you know from every other block and this numbers going up like crazy so all of this is highly problematic and this is why we talked about credible neutrality on this panel please enjoy it thank you guys so much for joining us for this panel um it is a discussion on credibly neutral systems and before we actually

dive into it um let's get very brief introductions and I mean like like elevator brief uh maybe we can skip Martin but let's let's let's start with sriram um hi everybody uh I'm sriram uh I'm founder of this project eigen layer which let's you uh build new Innovations on top of the ethereum trust Network by using this mechanism called restaking yeah um my name is Patrick McCory historically speaking I'm a researcher but now I'm an intern at infuria uh hi I'm Phil I'm a CS PhD student at Cornell and a steward of flashbots and I am addicted to Med

hi I'm Sebastian founder of Hopper incentivized mixed nets for private data transport and recently we're working towards private RPC providers we call it RPC overhopper fantastic so before we dive in um I I expect there will be some contentious topics here today so if you feel you want to say something to some of these to some one of the other panelists just jump in okay don't let me you know don't make me call your name so uh fantastic so when we talk about credible neutrality in a nutshell what would you say that means to you so what's credible neutrality to use Sebastian

so incredibly neutrality to me is the inability of third parties to influence the system in any way directly or indirectly and I think that's important I actually don't know what it is to be totally honest um I don't necessarily fully believe in the meme so maybe I'm going to add some spice to this panel I think it's a nice idea and it like implies a lot of nice things that people want and that I agree are like good like you know I think censorship resistance is is great by the way uh disclaimer these are all my personal views not the views of Cornell or flashbots but I think all this all these all these implications are great but the devil here is in the details and like can you really build a system where like third parties can't you know do things in kind of ways that that they

might and do even want to because like sometimes you want third parties to be able to make choices or Express preferences those are open questions I have so I'll be I'll be pressing on those more soon I guess there are many words that uh to me mean the same thing uh censorship resistance permissionless Innovation uh credible neutrality but yeah I think it all boils down to what you said that um if if you build an application uh on top of such a credible neutral system you can be sure that yeah that rules of of of that system don't suddenly change uh against you

awesome and just to clarify my opinions are my own anatom viewers as well so throw that out there um so in terms of the incredible incredibly neutral I mean Google had this old slogan you know we won't be evil you know we will do our best to ensure that everyone has equal access to the system and we won't abuse the data but when a nation student knocks on your door and says oh well you know if you don't start signing it's entering this transaction then we're going to do bad things to you and so to be credibly neutral you have to have this response to say that I can't you know follow the the the instruction that I was given by this nationstator in this all-powerful adversary so you won't be evil on a level you can't be evil it's just impossible to be evil because otherwise

you'll get slashed or you'll be removed from the system so incredibly credible neutrality is really you just can't follow the instruction without self-harm and it becomes like a an mad you know I'll express my views on censorship resistance so if you look at a what a blockchain is doing it's actually freezing something temporal into something eternal right you have transaction flow which is temporal and the core aspect of the blockchain is to harden this transaction flow into something that is frozen and Perpetual so that a future can then come and see what happened at that time so the way I look at a blockchain is essentially as bearing testimony as

bearing eyewitness to the happenings at that moment and censorship resistance is the ability to provide this service without discrimination to what was actually happening you just stand there as a neutral Observer and see what happened there and record it that is censorship resistance and there are some very powerful properties Downstream of the censorship resistance which is for example what I call Meta censorship resistance what is this matter censorship resistance we talk about sensorship resistance for transactions but there's also a censorship resistance for the ability to deploy new functionality on top which leads to permission less composibility

so if you build a system which has which does not have the meta censorship resistance which is the ability to deploy new features on top that is again a degradation of censorship resistance why do we want this in in our view why you want this is the entrenched parties in the system so we want to build a world where there is open competition on almost everything but the entranced parties in the system need to be credibly neutral in order to make sure that there is open competition on everything else so on a base layer of censorship resistance you can build competitive systems on top but if the entrenched

layer itself is behaving in self-interest they can ransick the heck out of the whole system so everything we're building here crumbles if you don't have such censorship resistance so remember you've used censorship resistance um as synonymous with Incredible neutrality um would you guys agree or do you see a difference I have a question which is how are the rest of the panelists defining censorship resistance because when I think about this I think of like Old School academic definitions where it's like if a user has sufficient incentive to include transaction X in a block there's some censorship resistance parameter Delta where like within Delta blocks the transaction will be included is this like our operating definition or are there disagreements I think of like

two like two breakdowns to it I think there's two different forms of censorship one is the clear case you know if the block proposer wants to stop the inclusion of this transaction at all cost no matter what if that transaction gets included the block gets dropped and they'll and if you're super immuno your majority block proposal you can single happily do this the other one is this delay in the inclusion off it so maybe you don't have a majority of the harsh reader of this you know the validators you only have one third or less but you will do your best to delay its inclusion I think even delaying it for 10 blocks 20 blocks 30 blocks that is still a form of censorship but this is not as harmful as full censorship so very similar okay I would say that it is probably better

to use the term uh incredible neutral or at least that's that's what what what is in my view important that is not just the censorship resistance uh but but but go to but to go a step further and to say um transactions are treated equally so it's not not enough to say well if you are willing to pay efficiently then you will eventually get included but I would say to be credible neutral and then it's maybe better to specifically use that term and not the term censorship resistant I would say to make the claim system is credibly neutral it would need to have the property uh that yeah kind of if there are two two transactions and they pay the same fee they should be

treated equally and that's currently not the case on ethereum unfortunately cool oh not cool but I mean maybe where the phrase it as that maybe credible neutral is the goal that you want to achieve but to do that you need a center chip resistant mechanism or the allowed to be credibly neutral or maybe to say kind of censorship resistance is the uh or maybe credible neutrality would then be even A Step Above censorship resistance and you can say but but you certainly need to be uh you certainly need to be censorship resistant to be credible neutral but yeah kind of again it's a step further just to clarify why I use the word

censorship resistance I think there is many different layers in which you can be credibly neutral and we were talking specifically about transaction inclusion and I would agree that the standard that we really want is that irrespective of the content of the transaction when I said that you're baring testimony to what is actually happening irrespective of the content of the transaction you are actually treating all all transactions equally so that would I would agree with that as the definition but I view credible neutrality as a principle which transcends transaction inclusion it is a more basic principle and as as an example we are talking about transaction inclusion I would agree and I also think that if you talk about credible neutrality it kind of

reframes the entire issue right so basically if if you talk about census censorship resistance um it's always kind of the you know you have this image of you know you know like spies or whatever and you know people who do evil things and basically credible neutrality is just um creating a base layer that belongs to no one and hence belongs to everyone right so basically that's kind of uh as an opinion I mean for me it gives me like Switzerland during World War II Vibes and like I don't know if that's good like um I don't know I I I just so I guess question like in y'all's views like when has Eve been or not been incredibly neutral and like where where has it been in the past on that spectrum and where

is it today basically would be curious yeah I I would say uh it used to I would say probably two three years ago that statement that I made was true that that if your transaction um if there would be two transactions and they would pay the same fee they would be treated equally with the Dow hacker agree yeah I think that's true no well I hear you I mean I mean no of course of course it was the DOW Event in in that case ethereum was clearly not incredibly neutral I mean there's there's no uh no no question about it but but since then yeah I mean back then I was certainly

also in favor of of doing what was done and and probably yeah if today there would be an issue let's say with something where 15 of all these are would be affected let's say I don't know the reptisa contract would be had an issue I would probably also be in favor of uh kind of hard [ __ ] or kind of hard [ __ ] uh if it would be possible in such a clean way as it was because the day but but yeah but but now um yeah I think we well we lost it and of course they are reasons why why that happened and maybe um I guess you would claim they are it

it's inevitable that that happened I would say there could have been and maybe should have been several or there are it might be many many options that are not explored or not not done that could try to yet to come closer to this goal of of um or at least maybe you should start to say kind of teach around is it is it the worthwhile to go to kind of have this credible neutrality it seems like you're saying it's it's not that's not what I'm saying I'm saying the meme is not clear to me and I think if you use it to make choices it will lead you to sub-optimal outcomes because like there are clearly cases where like the community wants to make a choice right and like people also have the

right to make choices so to me like there's also a subtlety here maybe I want to get into with the panel which is the definitions you all gave were kind of technical like you have tx1 tx2 if they pay the same fee they're credibly neutral what I was understanding from like you know italics kind of writing on this in the general like diaspora is it means more that like people believe that the system will like treat them fairly like that's the credible part and that's not necessarily the same as like these two transactions that have the same fee get mined at the same time for example the people who invested in the Dow may not think that that's the fair model um so I'm kind of trying to like challenge a little I'm not trying to troll you too hard yeah no I feel like I

can just jump in quickly there is like chaos backs to this there's the day-to-day operation of how the transaction system works and there's the backstop in the social consensus to uh socially recover about situations so let's say there was a ma slash an event because there's a zero day exploit in a consensus client will that be reverted or not I believe it will be but a lot of people say it won't be you know that's sort of the backdrop of the neutrality no I just wanted to get back to what Martin Martin said that a few years back you know uh maybe ethereum was credibly neutral I would say I don't necessarily agree because you know the system was in some regards easier to capture than it is today so for me censorship resistance is one necessity for getting to send to

credibility neutrality and in order to get there you know we need decentralization and privacy actually and you know both parts were actually less advanced than they are now so you know I think since the launch of the beacon chain you know having more client diversity is a is a great achievement of course we're not fully there yet but there are some points which uh yeah I wouldn't say it was necessary better than maybe let's uh bring this into the very concrete so recently we've seen instances where credible neutrality has clearly been breached so I'm thinking for instance of the tornado cash sanctions that kind of led to several D5 projects no longer touching addresses that had previously interacted with

tornado cash infuria no longer serves tornadoes two elephants in the room here yeah a flash flashbots uh sensors uh tornado cash transactions so is the community dealing with these issues in in the correct way what do you say so maybe let me take this first um in my view it's not that flashbots the project like is intended or you know the goal of the project is to censor ethereum or anything like that I think we look at the game theory of how can we most effectively achieve our strategic aims which are basically ensuring Mev doesn't centralize if in like today's model so from that perspective like yes

we do censor certain transactions no we do not want long term to like have the ability to impose censorship on eth that's like a very hard line for us like we won't step into that position and again it's arguable about whether it's already happening or not my personal belief is it's it's not um the other thing is like you have to look at this game theory right of like you have companies that are providing services and they also have like choices to make and like certain rights so like if you're a validator in the U.S and the government comes knocking and says like look you have to remove these transactions or you have to shut down or you have to go to jail right what ultimately ends up happening if we like throw up the middle finger immediately is that all of those validators will be

shut down and it will move elsewhere the same thing that happened in China basically um and to me this reduces the robustness of the ethereum network it reduces the censorship resistance ultimately what we need is geographic diversity and ultimately if everyone in this geographically diverse system you know agrees to like build blocks a certain way like it's above my pay grade to try to stop them to an extent so our philosophy is to provide paths and try to decentralize and build as much competitive globally competitive infrastructure as we can that's why we're open sourcing a lot of our stuff that's why we kind of D vertically integrated our client after the merge within that boost and we're going to keep kind of aggressively pushing towards that direction but at the end of the day like you have to be

realistic as well angle of the flashbart angle you know censorship resistance you need to have like a good granular definition of it is still the same before so if you're a block proposer there's two ways you could prevent the inclusion of a transaction either I just don't include it in my blog and that's what's happening on flashbots today you know I propose a block it's missing the transaction because the relay just didn't give it to me but if there's another block you know but so if one I don't include it in my blog two I have to pick a block to extend there has to be a parent block that I extend if that includes the center transaction but I extend it anyway then you're not centering the network you're just centering it from your own block so

that's more like a delay you're delaying its inclusion but you're not censoring it because as long as there's one honest party it will get included eventually but but where do you stop so can you attest to a block that um that that has a tornado cash transaction in it plus what happens you know with t-waps that might have you know catastrophic failure modes if certain transactions do not get included so I think it is not fair to say that you know delaying things it's just delaying things it's not censorship it might have catastrophic failure modes in some you know apps I actually disagree with that I think if you're not building around like short-term censorship you're completely insecure even in like a completely honest Network because if someone a single block producer has a

few blocks or like one person with substantial hatch power decides to attack you like you need to build your parameters such that you're including enough of a set of miners that it gives you the guarantees you want and like once you've done that you won't have that so what is enough what what is enough what is enough I mean that's like up to the parameterization is a good example of that because they were 10-minute auctions and it blew up and now it's like six hours exactly but but of course like what is enough very much depends on the question of in um well kind of if you say previously like let's say 10 blocks were enough but then let's say you move to a situation where suddenly 80 of the uh or let's say just 50 of the validators kind of don't uh don't include your transaction then

suddenly it means well now 20 blocks are enough but the issue is you don't know kind of whether it's it's 50 or I mean I feel like uh having that yeah I kind of having this an additional uncertainty about yeah again whether the uh whether the network will how do we treat your transaction will make it kind of impossible to determine this parameter uh what is enough it's a hard problem and it's something you have to continuously adjust but that's the case anyway even when we've seen congested fee markets where your application might just be censored by not being able to pay the fees for a while right we have like important Concepts like uh kind of the the base fee and

kind of where where did it what is is an important piece why it's yeah you can at least measure that so you can measure uh uh congestions somewhat objectively those extra or those other forms of of not including transactions it's much harder to to to reasonable measure I would say I don't think so I think it's very easy to reason about what percentage of blocks today don't have tornado Cash There's a dashboard on it online but then I mean also like if you think about the alternate security trust assumption if you're just delaying inclusion you're relying on one honest validator you know that's a good trust assumption to have if there's a full out right censorship and they're not

extending blocks with Centric transactions then you rely on the honest majority so there are two different cases that should be considered separately I also think an interesting point is like if you do have validators that are choosing because ultimately this is a validator choice how they build their blocks to not include certain transactions that increases the revenue for anyone who's like willing to adopt the opposite policy so essentially it's a subsidy for the network a self-healing subsidy away from censorship especially if the systems are designed appropriately I would say that the argument like the example that we started with you know kind of doesn't support your point because like tornado is an application that didn't have a [ __ ] lot of transactions right so the subsidy that you get from it like the Mev potential and so on is minimal so you're basically censoring like a large

you know very interesting set of use cases and you know you do not actually provide significant upsides for anybody to take up these very few very little value transactions I feel like I'm trolling everyone here but this is a misconception like Mev is not proportional to the number of transactions it's proportional to how much those people are willing to pay to not be censored and if there's like an active censorship going on that number will increase so you have to so you think it's an okay idea that you know 90 of people um kind of censor it and therefore like my costs to offer tornado inclusion goes up by 10x I think if that's the validator choice it's like not unethical for them to do that personally um and I think like you know they're they're degrees right like it's a question of like what is the X it's like

a utilitarian calculation um to me it's like a fallacy to think that like every validator will ultimately choose to include everything especially when today are at one of our largest validation pools is a regulated U.S exchange and I expect that will like continue in proof of stake so I don't see an alternative really oh yeah I mean there are plenty of Alternatives so I mean just to mention one is of course this idea that you can have that you can commit to transaction inclusion while transactions are are still encrypted what's this about you no I mean then you can just ask people to like kyc or endpoint and still censor it right there's no it privacy doesn't solve this issue ultimately like the government's not going to say like oh this is private we're not touching it that's also a

fantasy I feel like I feel like what should have included was the CR list in their implementation uh yeah so you know I can't I again these are all my personal views on this panel not a flashbots but we did we did actually you know uh we we do like extensive work on this with the key stakeholders in the industry and like again like I think this will more will come out about this soon basically I I would I would definitely push back yourself because uh because uh in in my understanding it's absolutely not clear that um that uh as validator you even have that obligation to to censor those transactions I mean uh in my understanding uh it is even allowed for U.S persons or you could kind of there

is there's there's a way for you as person to to to get permission essentially to withdraw from yeah from from to Nato in specific situations so if that is even allowed then then then it needs to be allowed also for uh for for validators uh to include these transactions I I don't agree with your analysis and I think this is one of the things that like what part I mean uh I don't agree that like uh it's currently clear in like the legal game theory that validators have no obligation to censor transactions doesn't serve as the first part so you agree it is or the law says I don't want to get into legal analyzes that's like not the direction I want to go in but

like I want to make a meta point which is like a lot of people here are looking at other people's actions and saying like here's my legal analysis of it and like you're not really in the position to like make that call like their lawyers are right so like it's easy to look at a coinbase and say like wow you don't have to be doing this you're going overboard but they don't want to over comply right they're talking to their lawyers and they're like getting advice and like you know our legal understanding as a community doesn't supersede like their risk calculation against going to jail or like having their company liquidated so like we do have to respect people's preferences as well in that in that regard I think do you think validators have a moral obligation to serve everyone I mean obviously you don't but I mean I mean I

don't like what if you have a validator that says this is a transaction that has like some really morally offensive content to me and if I don't mind this the community is going to slash me right like is that a good position to be in is that what we want for our validators no I I I I I see your point but say for instance what do you have said the same thing about kind of delivering mail or kind of connecting phone calls um based on whether you like the person or not delivering now is not censorship resistant neither are phone calls like you can't ship crack in the mail right like I want to say as as as a postal carrier look I will generally deliver mail but not to African-Americans or not you know no I mean I think getting into the details of like why things are not

being delivered is a whole separate argument but the mail is not censorship resistant and neither are phone calls like you can be censored but should they be can I jump can I jump in sir this is what's going on there isn't there is a very fire pit so I think like theoretically speaking it should be best in the feed but empirically speaking the Accenture ship has always been an issue in cryptocurrency so if you consider Bitcoin Luke Jr tried the bond Satoshi dice because it was spamming the network back in 2013. many miners were notorious for making deals with very large exchanges to make sure their withdrawal transactions would always get processed even if they couldn't pay the fee at the time now the difference is that because I mean one there's way more validators now so it's very difficult to trust the the five people who are basically

ordering transactions and proof of work and now this is why the flash boss issues come up because there's a last trusted systems you actually have to build a real you know trust-free maximum you know maximizing the trustee protocol between the relay and the the block Builder so it's uh yeah is it basically empirically has always had this issue it's much more evident now I agree and there's like many edge cases here like is selling block space Futures and then mining something lower fee later because you've committed it to it is that censorship or is it is it not credibly neutral is if you're a mining pool putting your withdrawal transactions first and having zero fees on them because that's what they all do is that not is that not credibly neutral I mean it's not right so like ultimately to me we need to realize that people have

preferences and they need to be respected so you would say uh it's kind of expected that let's say your logitechs uh or there are two competing dexes and and one will eventually say okay let's let's do a deal with validators say kind of we get generally preferential uh treatment that's just how it is and that's how I mean it's even worse now because like that's what these are yeah well like the theoretical model around the transaction fee was that the minor we pick up all the fees and that was their main source of Revenue we're actually in ethereum we burn all the fees you get this constant issuance so you don't really care about the fee Market as much anymore so it's less of an impact for you know deciding which transactions I include because I'm just getting tips

it's not a major short of my Revenue anymore I have a question for the people pushing credible neutrality namely Sebastian Martinez sriram here um I think that credible neutrality needs to be enshrined in the technology itself or can it also be a societal consensus that people behave in a certain way or validate us behave in a certain way my view here is I think Patrick was alluding earlier to the idea of don't be able to can't be evil and I think we need to make sure that technologically it is impossible or difficult to break credible neutrality I

think societal ways of enforcing it lead to only further conflict I think it's not going to be easy to enforce censorship resistance in a societal way ideas like for example you know we I like the word the way that you are described credible neutrality as a better way of phrasing it just like net neutrality right like you just want to send you're a common carrier just sending packets through and we need to get to that model to actually make sure that the core function of validators I think I don't I don't even like the word validator so I think it's a very bad word you should call it consensus nodes because or even better witness notes they're only bearing witness to a

certain flow of information this should be their official Duty they're not validating any transaction they're just sitting there and observing a certain transaction flow and recording it for perpetuity and their liability and duties end there are purely trading in information they are not trading in value the attribution of value to that information is ex is should be separated from the construction of an information flow and the blockchain is purely a construction of information flow that has been recorded for perpetuity and and things like transaction encryption actually make it technologically more

feasible to actually get to a system like this so I think credible neutrality should be more enshrined by technology and the core function of the blockchain should shift or or the consensus nodes should shift from validation or execution or other things to just bearing testimony to information flow and in which case you're protected very strongly it's just you're trading in information and that's really the main thing which which cannot be objective the only subjective aspect and the only reason we need a blockchain to begin with is to freeze this subjectivity if there is no subjectivity everything is just execution I'll just

do zero knowledge proofs on my server and then send you proofs the only reason we need a blockchain is to resolve this liquid temporal fluctuating thing into something solid for the future and we should build blockchains whose consensus nodes main feature is to Bear witness to this flow yeah I I would certainly say I'm not willing to give up on the idea of having a credible neutral uh platform I think it can be done um for for ethereum but we will certainly try to push as hard as possible on yeah on another chain in the direction and I would say the the list of potential ideas of how how to do that

is long so we we are starting with uh from the very beginning um yeah putting a lot of effort in making uh this diverse geographically diverse validator set with many kind of uh yeah validate from home uh people there is this option of this shutterized Beacon chain kind of the the idea of um yeah privacy or yeah encrypted predictions um there are ways to unchain objectively um yeah measure some ship and you could have rules to um yeah kind of to then do automatic

slashing based on that objective measurement and furthermore there are several uh yeah potential ways to reduce the freedom of um of a of a well data of a builder to build a block I mean super simple one would be would be to say you need to you need to sort transactions by um by field but you there are also ways to kind of sort them pseudo randomly but but any any anything that reduces the anything that reduces the freedom of the Builder or of of the validator to to

produce um blocks will reduce Mev to some extent um and yeah with those uh yeah a bunch of different categories we will push as hard as possible to achieve or to come as close as possible to this incredible neutral base layer yeah I don't think it can be directly kind of enshrined in Technical Solutions this credible neutrality because to me credible neutrality is a goal and this goal has some you know has some paths to get there and you know those are some of them are technical like shutterized Beacon chain is is one of them

um but the other one to me is kind of on the social side on the social side now get get to troll feel a bit back it's like let's stop being naive right let's stop like thinking in our tiny little comfortable box where we get to think about you know Game Theory and that's you know maybe not like YOLO uh Incorporated Delaware LLC just because the most convenient thing to do is not host domains that end on something.com just because the most convenient thing to do and make ourselves capturable right and making ourselves capturable is something that is just we see now you know well you make yourself capturable because he's taking a little convenient box and you know now we you know find out right as people say so

um I would say uh this is something we really have to tackle we have to be serious about it maybe a positive shout out in the end is you know there's people who work working on that and that is yeah actually removing these single points of failure liquidy is in my eyes one great example to remove these Central choc points as for example the front end and decentralized properly so if we take this seriously and if we actually strive for that I think we will end up with systems that overall are much more credibly neutral than what we have today where there's some like violent regulator which happens to be called Uncle Sam that you know comes after us and we say oh we are very surprised about that do I get to respond

or is it a censorship situation here I'll make it quick I promise I myself I'm not in the habit of tensioning people so okay great so sriram two things on your points number one I disagree that we have net neutrality especially when it comes to ofac so I think that Meme is great and I love the comparison and I like totally agree with it but Gmail censors of fact you know Google sensors so do many many any web 2 company is under this regulation right so like we as a society yes we want this but we've also accepted the trade-off so like let's be realistic about where we are and like that this will be another instance of like the same pad in blockchains because like we are not above the law right that would be Fantasyland the other thing I wanted to

just troll you a little bit on and probably only you will get this is like I don't agree that you can separate the like information transfer from the value flow I think in these systems the like one and the same and this like relates to this crystallization of like State process you've talked about but we can go deeper on that later because I don't want to take up all the time um the other thing is like so I think making trade-offs for example in gnosis chain that like increase credible neutrality that sounds great and like I'm not opposed to any of those things I would love to experiment with all those things like amazing um on the other hand they they imply trade-off preferences and this is why I was kind of drilling into this definition because it might be the case that like if you achieve this technical

definition of credible neutrality to many other people that makes the mechanism not credibly neutral right um like it's not just because you have this technical notion that true transactions pay the fee that get in that like some random person sampled from the population will say like yes this is credible to me that this is neutral that's like a separate social property that we need to be careful about conflating um anyway trying to go rapid fire and and yes I agree with you completely in your trolling um I think flashbots is not trying long term to build centralized infrastructure we are trying to build decentralized infrastructure I want to be super clear about it I think the criticism of the path is valid and like the success the path has had um I think the counter argument would be like this is a rock and a hard place

situation of like there are doors to knock on and is it going to be flashbots or is it going to be the validator it's basically the choice when we incorporated Delaware LLC uh that we were facing and I I do stand by the choice we've made I I don't expect the community to love it I expect that the community will keep trolling us and pushing back on our actions and like our actions will need to like be above this kind of uh you know be kind of respond to this as well and like we are going to do that so no trolling love it uh amazing Sophia tell us about the road map or you know uh venturing towards you know a more credibly neutral Place sure uh decentralization Global competition and by decentralization I mean of economic power in the market

um and of Technology as well um Global competition and also like engaging with everybody in the community everyone in this room everyone on this panel yes also The Regulators yes also the validation Community everyone who's a stakeholder in this industry um because I do believe like the pie is bigger when like people can cooperate that's ultimately what we're trying to build here that's what the internet is trying to build as well and I think like really the entire Community is a line behind so that's the road map uh if you know if you want more specific information all I'm going to do now is pump my talk on Friday um so we will we'll drop some Alpha on you there uh yeah we'll come to your talk with more questions Sebastian tell us about uh Hopper and how you're trying

to get to Credible neutrality yeah so as I said to me censorship resistance is One requirement for neutrality and censorship resistance needs decentralization which everybody talks about which we all love but you know a decentralized world needs privacy much more than a centralized world and that's something that many people don't realize you know and we only start to realize that now so you know the trust Assumption of the web too they are kind of okay right I like to bring this example of Facebook and US uploading random stuff to Facebook that's okay right like you don't find like really embarrassing pictures of yourself on the billboard across from your home right but that trust assumption doesn't work

in the web 3 which is not protected by any laws and regulations so the only thing that actually protects Us in the web 3 world that is fully decentralized is strong privacy Tech and that's what we built on Hopper at hopper in the most like fundamental layer not all these fancy on-chain stuff that's all great but even the most private chain does need transport privacy and yeah that's why we built at Hopper with this uh with this mixnet and you know one point that I like to also point out because we talked a lot about validators it's like you know if we don't have validator privacy there's going to be a whole lot of weird stuff that will happen so even if we have a single secret leader election you know maybe I can I you know

knock out in a targeted uh fashion Fields validator but in a targeted fashion but I can still just troll him you know because you know it still likes to get trolled and you know I find it funny to just DDOS him all the time so even with uh ssle we do need some fundamental error of privacy it's a hard problem especially when we talk about the trade-offs for example of latency versus privacy so lots of work ahead there but I think it's an absolute necessity to get us in a Direction Where We I think all want to go laughs Patrick tell us about infuria and uh yeah yeah I I heard you're interning there well if you're no longer the

master node so I'll start with that um no that's a joke um so obviously Infuse a web 2 company and it is following the oafac sanctions and obviously not allowing people to send transactions to uh to uh to tornado cash so inferior is working on a new goal for decentralized inferior but the goal of that isn't necessarily censorship resistance but I think those would be a side you know a side you know a side effect offered because if you ever you know a Federated network of I don't know 10 20 30 different known providers they'll be reasonably additional reasonable geographically be distributed and you'll hopefully get that for free but inferiorism focused on redundancy and reliability you know I'm sure you've all seen the metamask outage that we don't

like to talk about but uh that sort of inspired decentralizing fury because we want to make sure even if we go down metamasto works is that sort of why I'm fear is focusing on right now thank you sriram what about you and eigenlayer eigenlayer is an add-on layer to ethereum so it does it cannot increase ethereum censorship resistance in a basic way but we do think a lot about how we can contribute to potentially increasing the censorship resistance before I talk about iron layer I just want to address this point on he's sitting here waiting for it between value and information because I think at the end of the day Gmail may

have to censor but optic fiber companies may not have to censor what is going through and this is the right layering that blockchains be treated like optic fiber companies especially if it is not even feasible for them to look into what is going on inside and I I'm not saying therefore that we will get value censorship resistance there'll be information censorship resistance is different from value censorship resistance because value needs what we need to do is to push more agency to agents and the system should not have any agency and what is an agent you know a company which is trading on top of this blockchain as an agent the user

who's receiving money from somebody else is an agent they are counterparties to somebody else they should be able to express their Rich inter-subjective preferences on who they want to deal with and they will take the liability so it's exactly like when it's a matter of layering and restricting the scope of what is happening at different layers answering the question on what we can do to increase censorship resistance we had this proposal uh on how we can potentially let our plot proposes subscribe to uh additional ordering constraints by restaking on eigen layer so when this when the block proposes are restaked on eigen layer they could

potentially participate in different kinds of markets which potentially for example including things like distributed relays distributed building uh there are different things you can build on top of that um I want to add one more point on a different way of achieving censorship resistance which is uh to give more agency to Life notes we talk a lot about light clients in the ethereum community but only in the context of validating safety but I think the real real value of like clients is actually in their ability to add to censorship resistance because you know they are the most widely distributed and if you're that in every single phone and if they can contribute back to censorship resistance

in various ways um that would be something which is quite preferable how would they contribute to censorship resistance so these are schemes we are working on internally but the core idea is something like for example everybody who's holding it in their wallet can be you know for example their light node will be randomly sortationed into an into an ability to contribute to the next block and this is transmitted widely through the network so everybody knows that this is like a censorship CR list initiated as light nodes by random sortation so you're just running a very very light thing in your wallet and as long as you hold it you're you're eligible to be randomly sorted in and

you propose a transaction and Float a mini block that that then goes around through the network so there are many ideas for how one could do this with very light plans but the The Meta idea here is that we should look deeply to how we can tap the very edges of the network to contribute to this censorship resistance rather than only you know a few valid and also or the center who I think the other thing that is missed in all this discussion is you know we're you know flashbots thinks a lot about for example how to not let the network centralize because there is no natural drift to decentralization there's only a drift to centralization

how how can we enshrine the drift to decentralization is something we should think about much more consciously rather than only making it at best neutral you know a central network is obviously as good as a decentralized network in every objective metric and is better in some ways and this can't be the way so we can't keep patching more and more and more so I think that's a bigger issue that we all have to deal with is how to enshrine decentralization if we think it's a valid principle if we think that is sufficient for one node to run everything we don't need to worry about it so I actually agree with everything you said it wasn't very much trolling maybe just not the legal analysis and again I'm not a lawyer this is not legal

actually I agree with the uh the uh Phil's position on the legal thing in in the fundamental way that we are all you know we are not living in a matter of us we are living in a physical Universe in physical nation states and we're dual citizens at best between this nation and some other like ethereum matter verse so we have to comply to the loss of where we are living and I think the the best way to counter all these things is to actually build systems which move more agency to the edges okay so here's an interesting interesting Troll and again I'm not a lawyer so please this is not legal advice for you all but like this is when I actually agree with everything you said and I think we're going to end up

in the same place as the internet right like and ultimately the way that nation states look at this kind of stuff when it comes to government security are like what are the choke points what can we hit and what are the costs right and they want to get the benefit they need and like they won't compromise on that but also at as little cost as possible so if there was no ability to send through Google if that didn't work yes they would be knocking on the fiber provider's door there's no doubt there in my mind but because that would be much more costly and detrimental to like cooperation they don't do that and I think that's exactly what we're going to see in blockchains like they will they will look at it and be sane about this kind of stuff and and and that's basically the outcome we're going to see

again not legal advice yeah yeah so that's exactly in my thesis that means that they will be able to censor the value flow and people who subject themselves to say that hey I'm not part of this country I'm in some metaverse they are free to do value exchange with whoever they want through this network whose information flow is unrestricted but value flow will have choke points and get restricted that's so maybe we should have the validators all being run by bontag Marquee and you know Deacon Spartan more and on validators would always be fun again not the position of flashbots but my own personal opinion thank you guys so much for participating

in this planet it was uh super interesting and uh Illuminating and I wish you all a really good evening I hope none of you are super jet lagged still so uh go home sleep and we'll see you tomorrow at Defcon [Music] I hope I didn't troll you too hard