EB138 – Sergio Lerner: How RSK Will Bring Smart Contracts To Bitcoin

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter Bitcoin has brought you by high. me protect yourself against hackers and Safeguard your identity online with a first class VPN go to high. me/ epicenter and sign up for a free account today and by Jax Jax is a user-friendly wallet that works across all your devices and handles both Bitcoin and ether go to jx. and embrace the future of cryptocurrency wallets hi welcome to epicenter Bitcoin

the show which talks about the Technologies projects and startups driving decentralization and the global cryptocurrency Revolution my name is saso and my name is Brian faan crane we're here today with s learner uh he is a as a bigcoin developer some people may know him from some of his blog posts wrote this blog post about sort of the the original coins of Satoshi that got a lot of attention he was also uh one of the people hired by the Bitcoin Foundation to do security audits of the code so once he was working there and and today he is one of the founders of of rootstock which I'm sure many have heard of which is essentially bringing a smart contract functionality similar to ethereum to the Bitcoin Network so I'm

super excited to have you on don't say here thank you Brian and Sebastian to host this show yeah I know and and and thanks for your your work now we talked briefly before the show about sort of how you got involved in Bitcoin can you can you tell us a story like what was the original sort of your way into this space and Community well first of all uh my background is on computer security so when I when I uh learned about Bitcoin I was completely uh surprised by this this was fantastic for me and uh I started doing what I what I do I starting reading the code trying to find any kind

of vulnerability and I remember having spent a lot of time researching and trying to understand the system because it it seemed to me that was perfect and I I dedicated so much time that actually I started I I found a couple of vulnerabilities and uh and one of them was very very fun and very uh interesting that allowed uh the attacker to shoot down the whole Bitcoin Network and it was this this was 2012 I think and uh and I I I I sent an email to the the Bitcoin development team uh at that time and they they were really really uh heard my my what I had

to say and they fixed it and that's why I I get involved and I started started to become a kind of a auditor of the Bitcoin code and going after each each of the changes of the code every month I I took some time to to to to audit and from time to time I I I found some something interesting and but what I I spent a year working for Bitcoin without even having a single Bitcoin myself I was helping the community I was helping uh but I did not have Bitcoin so I it was 2013 that I wanted to invest but I knew that there was some missing part of the history of Bitcoin that was the first

year so what was happening the first year where were the those all those conss that had been M and and that was important for me to be a to to feel sure that I could invest so I I started researching about that and I found out that uh there was a pattern that later I called the Satoshi pattern which linked all most of these uh coin bases the the generation of new coins and it it uh it seems that it all those coins belong to a single entity so I uh I I I had a lot of arguments in the in the forums about this uh a lot of people uh told me I was completely wrong but when I presented the evidence in my blog uh it was so

clear that I had like 35,000 visits in a single day and uh and and my blog had had no more than 10 visits in a day so for me that's that was at tarnishing and that week I I I got a very interesting call from the key key people on the Bitcoin community and one of the calls was from Wes casarez was was he was the CEO of sapple wallet and he told me come to my office I want to to talk with you and I went to talk with him it was very interesting talk but after 15 minutes he said okay you have to come with me to San Jose to the this bit conference you have to be part of this you have to tell everyone you have to tell what you

know and I said he he told me I pay for everything I pay for the I I he gave me his his own uh hotel room and and and and and plane tickets and I invite you everything and because I knew him for very very few time very short time I said no and the other day he called me again and say are you coming and I say okay I'm going this is this is it so I went to the the the conference and it it was amazing and also it was funny because I was sitting in in the in tables there with other people and and then people started talking about me uh about the the the research I did I no one knew how how I looked so I said hey

it's me it's me so it was funny and we danc on the on the stage with the Peter shm that we were all so excited at those times and for the first time in my life I felt I was part of fting uh I'm completely agnostic to everything so this was the first time I say okay this is a place where I can develop myself and I can feel to be to be part of a a movement so it was a very interesting uh time for me cool yeah that's that's fascinating and do you still do that to to look at all the Bitcoin changes bips to see if there's any kind of new vulnerabilities or security

yes I'm not as often as I used to uh the last vulnerability that I I I uh found was uh a couple of months ago and uh it was not uh critical but it was interesting uh so I I do it not not as often as I as I like to but uh rsk have me uh completely focus on this platform 25 hours a day I sleep thinking about rsk and I get up thinking about rsk and that's a that's my my current uh project now cool so uh then let's let's get into that so tell us uh how did you get the idea for rsk for root stock um well the the idea of creating a smart contract platform was actually uh

before Ro it was a it was in uh 2012 2013 and because of my uh University tessis was on peer-to-peer poker uh I wanted to to create this system where one kind could create applications distributed applications to play uh peer-to-peer pocker in a completely Fair uh way so I created a prototype which was called Qui coin which was a t in complete uh platform um but the only applications that I built was application for for playing poker so that that was an uh I Tred to convince everyone that that was the future but you know I was so focused on on on on on playing uh so that I

didn't see the financial implications the enormous uh Financial possibilities of having a a smart contract platform and so then ethereum came up uh and and with all these uh interesting new ideas of uh use cases and I decided that I wanted to be uh part of this uh this endeavor I I wanted to create smart contract platforms so uh last year uh I I had the the this opportunity to to meet the right people uh in the right time and one of them was Diego uer alivar which which is uh one of the founding members of the Latin American Bitcoin uh movement uh so uh and and another great people here in buenosaires

so we decided that that this was the right moment to create a smart contract platform specifically for Bitcoin to add value to bitcoin and and and uh and also to bring balance to the force we we were seeing that in the ecosystem there was a lot of arguments between uh Industries miners uh uh core developers and we wanted to create something that we could make everyone to be part of and still to be to be a Bitcoin project essentially a Bitcoin project because we we we we believe in Bitcoins so that that was my next question then with all of the with all of the uh I guess um um well what

we've seen lately lack of governance uh the ability for the Bitcoin Community to sort of come together around certain very important decisions why did you feel it would be uh how did how did you think you would achieve um such a thing in in such a divided Community because in in rsk we are trying to have every uh um participant have a stake in the in the platform every participant to be to be part of in the governance model so we we are adding a proof of stake for uh people who have uh actual Bitcoins in our platform to be able to vote miners are able to vote and we also have a Federation of renowned uh

industry companies that will vote on protocol changes and uh full notes also will vote using uh a new protocol um to to allow them to to prove that they they owned a copy of the the blockchain so we are trying to change that we are trying to show uh that this is this can be done so obviously this is um uh something that uh we are we very excited about but I hope we can we can um um make this goal reality so um that's that's very interesting do you think in the future maybe do you have an expectation that if

this works out with root stock that maybe uh Bitcoin would start using some of the same ways to decide on protocol changes and upgrades uh I'm not sure if Bitcoin is going to change it stos it sence and and it's that's that's correct I mean Bitcoins uh it's been built to be Eternal it's been built to be uh uh uh very hard to change and that's okay that's the Bitcoin we want it to be we want Bitcoin to be strong the strongest as possible uh and the the decentralized as possible possible but by giving an example of how we can we can get all the parties in a in agreement I think we will lower the uh the fights in Bitcoin

Community we will make the Bitcoin Community more fond of each other because of uh seeing the the the example in Roo in in rsk so it's more by showing an example it's not that something that we want B bco to change I think that we can show a different way of doing the things so you talked before that when you you first got interested in smart contract and toing complete cryptocurrency uh you had the use case of of gaming gambling in mind uh what what is today what are the use cases and areas that excite you today that you think rootstock is going to

address well the the the the thing that put us together the whole group of Founders here in in in in rsk it's Prov that we think that the smart contract platform essentially provides Financial inclusion the possibility to to transact at a lower uh lower fees and uh and really to allow people to be their own bank using smart wallets so essentially because we live in a in the underdeveloped country and we've we've seen that uh there are billions of people that do not have access to bank accounts or they don't even Trust Banks anymore uh because of the different defaults we have here in Argentina so we

see this platform essentially as a mean to bring uh Financial inclusion to people and that's that's our main uh goal and we we are working with the integrators in in Latin America that are bringing financial institutions to create micro Landing platforms uh to create uh smart wallets and uh I I think this will be the the main use case of of course I'm very excited about anything that the the future uh that the the the the great thinkers of uh of new applications or distributed autonomous organizations but we think that there is a um essentially a a a use case for financial inclusion that it's greater

than any other um future uh idea yeah that that's fantastic and I think it it's it's really interesting that a project such as rootstock is coming from uh buer rather than you know some European country or the United States and and that gives it definitely a different uh Viewpoint from from where the technology is being developed so uh yeah these these sort of use cases are definitely not the same as you know what perhaps the ethereum team are thinking of or some other uh platform being developed here uh in the developed World um so let's get into some of the technical aspects of rootstock can you give us a high level overview and then we'll we'll come down into the different uh layers of the stack but give us a high level overview of what roock looks

like technically okay so rooto uh is basically a smart contract platform that relies on three pillars uh one of the pillars is that we are doing merch mining so we are using Bitcoin uh hashing power the Bitcoin mining Network to secure our own blockchain and at the same time we are providing the Bitcoin miners a new Revenue stream so they can uh withstand uh the Bitcoin cing and they can get more uh rewards from the the work they do and you you know that merge mining is a technique where the Bitcoin miners use the same Hardware they are using for

mining bitcoins and with the same cost uh to m a different cryptocurrency in this case the r uh platform uh the second pillar is that we are doing we are using Bitcoin as the native currency so we are not creating a new speculative currency and that's very important for us because we we don't want to compete with Bitcoin we think that the stronger Bitcoin is the stronger the RK platform will be so to create to to use Bitcoin in our platform we need a way to exchange Bitcoins between the Bitcoin platform the Bitcoin blockchain and the the rsk blockchain and that system is name it's called two-way Peg and there

are several ways actually to to implement a a two a peg one is the side chain concept that was developed by blockstream and the other is uh the drive chain concept that was developed by pul torque and the third one is basically having uh set of notaries that have um uh custody of the funds that are transferred to the r platform and what we have actually created is anhd system that combines all the three parts so in the rooto side we have a side chain in the Bitcoin side we have a mix a mixture of uh Federation and uh and a drive chain which allows uh Miners and a set

of renowned parties to have this compound custody of the Bitcoins that are transferred to the to the rooto platform but uh this uh this Federation has no Authority nor no way of uh uh of uh making you of an aoriz use of the Bitcoins that are transferred to the Bitcoin platform to the sorry to the airscape platform because uh this works like in the airscape platform there is a contract uh it's smart contract which we call the bridge Master which orchestrates the creation of Bitcoin transactions and the Bitcoin uh the the the Federation only

has to take these transactions sign them and put them in the Bitcoin Network so they have no authority to create their own transactions but at the same time we are uh working with the some of the most important Bitcoin uh uh companies such as uh ewallets and exchanges so we are pretty sure that we will get uh a very very high level of uh security for the the custody of the Bitcoins that are transferred to the r SK platform in a very few weeks we'll have a press release where we will announce which are the parties which are the companies that uh are taking part of this uh of this

Federation oh and uh the the third pillar of the rooto platform that I didn't mention is that we are creating a high volume very scalable blockchain so we will we will be able to to rise the transaction per second to probably 300 transaction per second and and we allow this by uh trading off a little bit of decentralization uh for for scalability so Bitcoin is essentially fully decentralized and we are maybe in the middle between comp super scalable blockchain and as and a complete decentralized blockchain let's take a short break to

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feeling of peace and satisfaction like having tea with the Dalai Lama we would like to thank k. me for their support of epicenter Bitcoin okay that that's super fascinating so rsk essentially is is it the first the first real project right that's uh pursuing the this original s chains Vision at this point is that correct yeah yeah it's that's correct um I think Paul Tor is also working on a project that will be um implemented as a drive chain and but I I think we will be the first to use this technology and and can you talk a little

bit because with with Bitcoin uh I remember with the side chains things there was a lot of talk that you know a hard Fork is needed in order to you know have a proper two-way peeg but then there is this kind of intermediary solution or intermediate solution where you have a a federation uh a Federated Peg um how do you view that so would would rootstock uh use a Federated Peg for and how important would it be to make those protocol changes down the line um I think it's it's very important for the for the project to be able to move from the Federated Peg to the the fully uh autonomous Peg and uh We've created a new uh

Bitcoin Improvement proposal which is uh open and online and we've uh we are working on the implementation of the proposal and this proposal uh creates a new OP code to be able to create a drive chain on the Bitcoin side so we are using uh an idea that we call Progressive decentralization which is basically that no system no consensus system no blockchain can go from completely centralized control to fully decentralized control there there should be intermediate steps to go from one point to the other to get assurance that the network is uh uh performing as desire so basically this new OP code uh allows to to move uh from a Federated

peg into a a system where the miners vote uh this is not a boat sorry this is a algorithmic boat it's a It's actually an acknowledge system where the miners are are allowed to um um algorith algorithmically vote to release Bitcoin funds um obeyed by the uh the smart contract uh breach in the rsk blockchain so basically we start with a full Federation and we move into a system where the number of uh algorithmic votes by the Federation is reduced and the number of algorith

votes by the miners are is increased and this is a dynamic balance so if uh if any time the number of uh miners engag in merch mining the rsk network goes down automatically the number of of algorithm algorithmic votes the Federation uh has to assign its uh increases so uh at at the end of the of the uh the this period we hope that we have full engagement of the Bitcoin miners in merch mining so before we get into Mining and scalability to refresh everyone's memory and including mine can you sort of explain the difference between a Federated Peg and a fully decentralized

Peg and how both of those work in in reality in in a real use case so a feated peg it's a it's a system where basically the there is a set of notaries we have a multi signature and so so to send Bitcoins to the um rsk blockchain you basically send them to what we call an exit address the exit address is at one of the address of the uh federator so automatically when you send funds to this address you can create an spb proof on the rsk side that allows you to convert those uh those Bitcoins that were locked in the

federator federator address into Bitcoins living in the root stock in the rsk blockchain so basically moving funds from Bitcoin to rsk is automatically the other way around moving funds from rsk into Bitcoin requires the collaboration of the federator and how it this perform is that basically the whole system works on chain so there is a smart contract that is the bridge Master which holds uh a Bitcoin wallet and controls all the and spend transaction outputs that were part of uh the transfer to the exit

addresses so basically this contract creates a transaction this transaction is broadcast to the to the federator by using a uh a log message on a on the on the smart contract platform the federator receive this transaction they send signatures as onchain messages to the uh Bridge Master the bridge Master combines all these messages all these signatures into a a fully uh signed transaction and then this transaction is also um broadcast uh using a log uh op code uh in the in the rsk blockchain and any user including of course the

federator take this transaction and put this transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain so essentially the the this set of notaries the Federation they cannot choose which uh output to spend they cannot choose which uh the destination address where the funds have to be transfer it's all being orchestrated by a smart contract if they wish to cheat they will have to create a fully offchain uh automated system to create made transactions out of the system but this this of course is not going to be uh possible because these are the Federation have a reputation that they

protect they are part of the Bitcoin industry and how will these federator be picked uh so let's let's maybe talk about the governance Model A little bit how will you choose these federator and how will they get be renewed uh I guess on some sort of annual basis or something like that okay so we are choosing the federator to be the the most important companies in the Bitcoin ecosystem and again this will be uh in a press release very soon but uh we aim to have at least several federator from each continent uh from each geography so this is not something local to any country so this has to be a federator of a very very uh important companies all

over the world so we have we already have companies in the US in Europe in Africa in South America in Asia and these are the the some of the most uh well-known exchanges so this this uh federator They al they already have uh security policies they already have Auditors security Auditors so it's not that anyone can become a federator to become a federation you have to meet certain uh policies procedural policies and security policies so these companies already have these policies on place to protect the private keys that allow them

to control the multi signature today's magic word is roots r o o TS head over Leto bitcoin.com to sign in enter the magic word and claim your part of the listener [Music] reward you mentioned scalability before uh and that uh root stock was uh was more scalable can you talk a little bit about like how does that work and you know what's the limiting factor that's keeping it to 300 transactions at this time okay there are two limiting factors in scalability one is storage

essentially the the main the most important factor is storage the question is how many nodes how many full nodes do you wish to have how many full noes it's enough to have a decentralized network so some people would say that uh 5,000 noes is enough some people would say that 100 nodes is if it's enough if they are distributed all over the world and and there is no single party controlling them so Bitcoin has approximately 5,000 uh full nodes and if we get to the point with where we have 1,000 notes full notes then we are okay we we don't want to be as decentralized as Bitcoin but we are we want to be pretty decentralized

so essentially we are asking full no to have more powerful uh computers and more storage as a Bitcoin uh from the technical point of view uh there are several things you have to change from the uh transaction processing to be able to create uh uh to scale basically what we are doing now uh not for the first release but for the second release is that we are partitioning the transactions in a block into non-overlapping sets so basically we can uh process the transaction in parallel if you compare this to uh uh ethereum for example ethereum serialize all the transactions

so if two transactions actually interact with the same uh contract basically those transaction cannot be separated and so we have a a system for separating transactions uh as um if if they don't interact with each other so we are able to parallelize the processing and the execution at the same time we are creating a a new VM which is uh which has it has a just in time compiler so essentially we can process more instructions per second and that's another step towards uh scalability and probably the last step uh that helps scalability is having uh probabilistic verification on fraud proofs and that's

a still another important step that we are working on and um also this is something that other blockchains also do is that another another thing that prevents you from scaling is that when you create a new Full node and you want to enter the network you you you want to download the the full history and our blockchain and other blockchains too allow to download only the state the current state of Network and you can ask the federator for a signed checkpoint so that you can make sure that that State uh is a it's a state that you you can trust uh until you start getting the

information the historic information uh so you can basically start from one point and at the same time download historic information and this is uh very similar to what Bitcoin is doing with the pring the prining uh system cool interesting now I presume or would there ever be a scenario where one would want several different root stock uh root stocks tied to bitcoin or or should will there always be sort of you know Bitcoin and then there's one root stock uh chain uh this this uh this is something I I I I've thought many times of what

would be the main blockchains that will survive on block on the on the long run which which are the basic needs uh of for blockchains and I think that of course the storage value and Bitcoin is essentially the the main important the most important a smart contracts it's becoming uh of uh greater importance as as time passes but also Anonymous transaction and private transactions uh private contracts is something that will uh rise uh uh a lot I I I'm very very interested in seeing what happens with the Set cach uh suus project so I think that that can be one of the uh second side chains to

bitcoin a completely Anonymous cryptocurrency that can be also uh completely Anonymous system for Bitcoin to become uh Anonymous sorry and I I see that uh this uh these two side chains uh uh anonymous anonymous transactions and smart contracts are the main the main ones but I I I I also see some others competing and that's that's that's fine I mean the the the Bitcoin Improvement proposal we are we are um proposing is allows any number of side chains or drive chains to be to be developed so we want to see collaboration we want to see uh most more of these projects and we

also are very very open to collaboration with the theum and with Dash and some any project there is a lot to learn there is I I really think there is no competition at this stage of the ecosystem uh basically we all want uh the blockchain to be as secure as possible we don't want security incidents as the the dowel or anything we want uh people to believe this is a technology that is going to change the world let's talk about ethereum in a second you mentioned the term drive chain CHS a few times if I understood correctly can you explain what's the difference between a drive chain and a side

chain well a a side chain is a system where essentially one blockchain evaluates the consensus system of another blockchain basically one one blockchain has to understand spb proofs of another blockchains in order to accept uh uh an uh a set of an spb proof which basically contains a transaction and a set of confirmation heers as as proof of that some transaction has happened in in another blockchain uh but when you implement a side chain uh combined with a merge mining system basically you don't get you don't get more security as basically letting letting the

miners acknowledge this that this transaction has happen on the other blockchain so basically in the in if you are going to implement a uh a scen where you are going to do merch mining then essentially basically what you can do is uh allow miners to vote but this is an algorithmic vote this is not a human vote uh on the state of the other blockchain so M miners basically pass information between one blockchain and the other blockchain so uh this is uh this is essential essentially uh miners uh vote on the on the coinbase addresses uh and they uh if there is a

majority of uh of uh these tax in the coin B in the coinbase um coinbase Fields they they uh unlock Bitcoins I don't know if if I was uh uh precise enough but you can you can take a look at the Bitcoin Improvement proposal in our uh in our uh G Cab repository okay great great yeah uh just what what number is that well we have not presented yet to the Bitcoin Community because we are working on the implementation so it it has a I I will send the the link so you can publish that great yeah so we'll put that in the in the show notes so you mentioned ethereum before and of course that's the

first thing that will come to the mind of many people when they hear about OT stock when they hear about smart contracts um in particular I'm curious about the virtual machine so so I rootstock also has a virtual machine ethereum has the ethereum virtual machine the evm like how are those two different or similar well uh at the first release we are fully compatible with the etherum BM we actually have taken uh part of the etherum BM in a very very uh interesting project which is called etherum J um uh so we basically took the VM so we can be fully compatible with ethereum

so uh in the first release by the end of the year you will be able to basically take an ethereum application and run it on the rooto on the rsk blockchain and this is important for us because we want to give uh ethum developers um another platform so they can test their applications and they can develop their Solutions and uh from that from from that point on we are creating our own improvements to the evm basically we are creating a new VM and doing a d Dynamic retargeting of AVM op codes into our new VM so basically you will be able to run ethereum applications and also uh we

will have we will provide our own tool chain for developing application on the the the native VM but at at this point compatibility is veryimportant for us okay and and so why would so let's say an ethereum developer who's building smart contracts in solidity uh why would he choose root stock as opposed to ethereum is is there an advantage in your opinion in using root stock longterm or ethereum yeah there there's uh as as I see it there are several advantages in different areas from the technical perspective we are working very very hard on scalability and we know that

vitalic is also working on sharding and other other different techniques uh we believe that our our approach is better for scalability but we will see this is healthy competition and from another perspective we have a very very different security model and I think uh having this Federation that also create check points is a stronger security guarantee and because we are uh uh selling this platform to financial institutions and Banks we have to give them certain guarantees that essentially eum cannot we have to give them for example our the Federation guarantees that the Federation is going to check is

going to do this checkpointing of uh of uh periodic blocks so uh from the point of view of uh uh the use cases that we want to be see implement it we need a stronger security model as we are trying to provide okay and also I wanted to ask uh so what is what is the the the currency that powers uh root stock like you know with ether with ethereum we have ether and is there is there an equivalent in root stock well it's Bitcoin essentially when you transfer satosi to a platform you get more decimal digits but essentially it's a it's it's Bitcoin so essentially you pay

for fees in Bitcoin and miners take their fees on bitcoin also okay and so then in that case I guess my next question is so with ethereum uh a lot of the network effect uh I think around ethereum came from the crowd sale and the prospect that you know this would become a huge thing and that those who bought ether may be able to sell ether uh down the line at a profit um G capitalizing on on on those gains uh and with something like rootstock where you don't have that initial uh that initial hype I guess around around that currency um what makes you think what makes you confident that people would use rootstock as opposed to ethereum or would sort of onboard massively on this

platform first of all most of the people that are going to use the smart Contra platform are not the people who bought ethereum on the first place so the people who are really going to benefit from uh the the r platform are people who have probably never heard about crypto currency so so uh I I see that when it comes to the real world use cases we will have a certain Advantage there to to really see people uh using our platform for for for Real uh use cases that can benefit uh uh real people in our countries um so of course if you have invested in in the crow sale of

ethereum you will you will be completely uh Pro etherum uh but but we have seen many companies that have invested in in ether and they see us not as a competition but as a second uh possibility something happens to eum something goes wrong and we know that that can happen because every cryptocurrency at this point is just a massive experiment uh so they can have a second opportunity to develop their business so most of the people have welcomed the existence of a fully compatible uh platform uh for for for development of their uh ethereum Solutions so we recently did a podcast

with uh with Arthur Brightman and we talked a bit about the Dow hack and about evm and solidity and and he made some very interesting points essentially sort of blaming at least to some extent what happened there uh on on the solidity language itself and on the kind of security uh you know the security provided by evm and solidity what's your view on that okay there there are several several things that uh went wrong is you cannot put the blame on on on just one thing uh for example the solid language hides the fact that when

you are transferring you are actually making a call and so that's one thing that solidity solidity could could improve um but also a EV evm layer uh essentially there is a there there is no recommended way that you can send either without making a call so uh so I I think there should be a send call that essentially sends either making sure there is no side effect and that's a that's a flaw of the of the evm that we we have corrected and but essentially I I think that uh in the

hype was uh made investors to be a little blind I mean we when we are developing a a distributed autonomous organization the first massive uh Dow and that you are working with a new language with a new kind of uh surface ATT are face like game theoretic attacks and also with a new platform you cannot rely on a single security audit and that was something that people should know there should be several security audits for this kind of projects and a lot of people has to be involved and if you think about what ethum did when they did the first release they hired three companies to do the security they they

hired least Authority they hired coins spec and and I think they also hired djabou and the three companies were given the same tasks to audit the codebase and to audit the design so I think that that is the right approach that the Dow creators should have and I I I also blame the investors because uh I uh you don't you you cannot just blindly invest in in in in piece of code and res and resign to all your uh legal uh uh Recon say uh I don't know the English word for that your own uh legal defenses just because uh for the hype yeah I think I tend to agree with

with what you said there and I also uh U touching on what Brian said earlier and and Arthur's uh remarks uh do you think that uh using a a very basic language basically essentially derived from JavaScript like solidity uh rather than some more higher level languages like cck or some of these other ones uh domain specific languages do you think that that would uh be something that should be implemented in these smart contract platforms or are languages like cility suitable uh at this stage the the base layer of uh of the evm allows you to implement any kind of compiler for domain specific languages

and it's up to researchers it's up to people to implement them so what we have now is a general language uh which is solidity which uh it's still very immature and uh but it's the best we have so uh what what what I think is that having a general proposed language does not mean that anyone is able to create a smart contract and we we have to to to to trust um people with a security background to write these smart contracts it's not just that anyone can write smart contract it's a different different security model it's a different platform it's completely different what has been developed until

today so even if this looks like Hab script but but it's not because it's typed so it's if it looks like Hab script that doesn't mean that anyone should jump and start uh writing contracts that handle millions of uh of dollars let's take a short break to talk about Jax Jax is a cryptocurrency wallet designed by the people at D Central maybe you've been thinking of ether but haven't gotten around to it because he didn't know what wallet to use which one is easy which one is secure Etc well there's an easy way now and that way it's ja Jax easily and securely stores both Bitcoins and ether not only does it store those currencies you can convert them right in the app so the with built-in shape shift integration you can

for instance transfer Bitcoin into the wallet and directly convert it into ether or vice versa and since there's only one seed it's easy to back up and it's easy to sync Jax has wallets for literally every platform device for Mac Windows Linux iOS Android or extension wallet for Chrome and Firefox ja is made by the people of the Central and they have a proven track record of Awesomeness in 2013 they created crypto kit that was the very first browser extension Bitcoin wallet at the time and the way to think about ja is that it's crypto kit on steroids if there was doping controls for cryptocurrency wallets Jax would be illegal highly illegal legal fortunately they're not

and the great thing too about the decentral team is just they keep putting out new features and new features for Jack and it just keeps getting better and better at a at a disturbing Pace I would like to add so go to ja.io that's jxx doio to download your wallet and you'll understand what it's like to use a Next Generation cryptocurrency wallet we would like to thank Jacks for their support of EP Center so what where is roock at at the moment like when is it going to launch how far is the development uh the development is running very uh fast here we have uh I don't know if you see that but we have the group of programmers just behind me

um um working here in buenosaires and uh the the road map is that in September we will have the first public test net but the launch of the platform will be on December so we will have from September to December to do security audits external security audits to improve several areas to test to to um to do whatever is needed to make sure that the platform is ready for for lunchtime and if we detect anything uh that uh doesn't give us enough confidence then we will postpone the lunch date so uh we will We want to make sure that uh rooto is launched with uh

when it's fully secured so talking about root root stock the company what's the business model here uh rsk uh which is the company developing the the blockchain uh earns uh 20% of the fees that uh users pay so this is a paper use model and we have to use this this model because we we there's no perine so uh this is just uh so we will win we will earn we will uh fulfill our our project if the platform is used by people so um that's that's our aim we want to see a huge volume of transactions uh huge volume of people benefiting from our platform and that's

how we will earn uh our salaries okay great so presumably rsk you know is going to be open source of course right so uh your idea would then be a little bit like with ethereum right they they put all this money into develop sour court and then deployed it and people had the same sort of thinking but what if just somebody else comes along you know Forks it deploys it separately so you you have the kind of same expectation that because you know you're the ones developing it you're setting up all the uh merged mining setup Etc that you know that's the one that would be used and not some other rsk

type so I don't believe that that will happen because what's the incentive for that I mean um essentially we are relying on the on the Bitcoin miners for doing merch mining so why why would merch the the the Bitcoin miners with the we are which are part of the RTO which are which are part of this platform and can and can take a part of a decision making of This platform uh start merch mining a completely uh clone of our platform uh for no reason I mean we are giving them uh 80% of the the revenue so uh how uh we are only keeping enough uh for

us to to fulfill our view and uh and to to keep on improving to keep on uh in uh working for the platform to be to be to have more value so I don't see that happening and at the same time it it was very hard and it's very important for us to have this uh Federation it's uh I I don't think other companies can can be in a position to to to bring together the the main companies of the Bitcoin ecosystem uh in the same table uh and and and as we have done so moving on then uh in the in the white paper you mentioned the upcoming happing uh which is the block reward having uh and the

impacts that that could have on on bitcoin can you talk to us about some of you know what are your opinions on uh what we should see happen in a couple of days now oh I'm very very positive uh that current the with the current price of Bitcoin uh there won't be any uh miners uh uh dropping uh the mining business uh and I I see Bitcoin very strong now so I I don't think that any any any anything's going to any bad is going to happen with the hubing on the contrary I think that uh that uh the Bitcoin price will go up but one of the the the the aims of our project was to give more value to bitcoin so in the future hings there will be more use

cases there will be more uh because of Bitcoin is uh it's limited at the current state in the number of transactions per second that can be handled we want this to the Bitcoin uh unit of account to be able to handle 100 payments per second thousand payments per second and uh and this will bring a lot of value to bitcoin and a lot of income to miners so we are uh confident that in the future hings uh rsk will have a a important role to maintain their their um their possibility to keep on mining yeah I agree it's been it's been quite fortunate now for the Bitcoin price to just sort of like pick up uh

shortly before uh the happening I think if I gone the other way around it might it could have looked quite differently and and I know we did the podcast before which was quite a while ago where we were sort of running through the scenarios you know what happens now the the price drops especially uh you know lots of money become unprofitable drop off how could one attack it but I I also think that's actually doesn't look too likely at the moment at least that's my uh feeling uh so so to end briefly on one topic you're based in brenos Iris the all of root stock is based in brenos Iris um can you talk a little bit about

what's going on with Bitcoin cryptocurrency blockchain in in South America in general and in Argentina in particular well uh I'm going to talk about my uh view because um uh um I've participa in the the different conference in South America but one of the co-founders of R which is Diego H he's actually one of the founders of Bitcoin in in many of these countries he he's one of the main promoters so I I think Diego is a great person to talk more about that but what I see uh especially in Argentina is that we have we have no trust in Banks we we have a history of capital controls that do not

allow people to to move their own money uh have have numerous stories of people trying to to to to move their own money from from from their own accounts having trouble doing that so I think that Bitcoin has has shown uh a lot of people people he that there is a there is a way to escape that uh that that uh that uh that uh controls that basically uh uh restrict the freedom of people so uh I I see that uh that that has uh given a lot of adoption but now that I think of R SK I think that uh uh there is lot more to lot more space to

go and uh Diego is working with with the with the poor people uh here in Argentina uh in Pilot programs to allow cryptocurrency of small communities uh to be used and I think that's a great place to start to start seeing what the people requirements people necessities and see how cryptocurrency can help them yeah I I wanted to ask about the transaction volume is do we see a lot of Bitcoin payments for example in in Argentina I know there was once in New York Times article that said that lots of people in Argentina are using it you know Freelancers working abroad and they're getting paid like that uh is that something that's a picking up or

where do you see that uh it's it's very difficult from a individual perspective if you are not in the in top of an organization to to measure the number of transactions uh I move in a circle of people where where all everyone uses Bitcoin for for for everyday things like paying uh lunch to or or anything so for me using Bitcoin is a day-to-day experience but it's very hard to me for uh talking about about uh the the whole uh the country probably there is no use of Bitcoin outside buenos so uh my experience uh with Bitcoin is does not represent the the use of Bitcoin in in

the in the full country but in beros areus is there like a whole range in Palma where you are r of places are accepted and there are yes yes hotels also use uh Bitcoins to to allow you to pay yeah okay excellent well um Serio thanks so much for coming on it was it was a great pleasure talking with you and it was fascinating learning about rsk I think this is a extremely exciting project and I I can't wait to see how it turns out and to see what kind of impact it will have thank you Brian and thank you Sebastian it was a pleasure to talk to you and uh just uh call me whenever you want to uh keep on this uh exciting

conversations sure we we'll have you back on uh perhaps in a few months when the when the platform's out and ready and we start seeing use cases come coming up uh where can people find you read up of course we have links to all this in the show description but where can people find rootstock information about rootstock the white paper all that stuff mhm all the information is on rsk doco which is our new website and um there's there's a couple of white papers there and we will be uh presenting new white papers about different Technologies of the platform uh as soon as we uh do the the public uh the public uh test net the first public test net we are preparing for that point so stay tun to to to the the rsk sk. co website

please excellent yeah and we have links to that in the white paper and of course uh in the show not so thanks so much epison Bitcoin is part of the LTB Network let of Bitcoin Network so you can find this show and other shows at leof bitcoin.com um yeah we put out new episodes every Monday you can get it on iOS Android and of course videos on youtube.com/ epicenter Bitcoin and if you would like you can also leave us a iTunes review and uh and send us an email at show epis bitcoin.com and then we'll we'll send you one of those t-shirts so thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week [Music] [Music]