Interview with Cyrus Adkisson of Etheria at DEVCON1 in London

Transcript

so right now I am with Cyrus the athelia guy who is building a decentralized virtual world on his cerium so Cyrus can you introduce yourself my name is Cyrus Adkison I built atheria I'm originally from Kentucky in the United States I'm just a hacker enthusiast for blockchain technologies and virtual worlds so what is a tedium atheria is a decentralized virtual world it's a 33 by 33 map of hexagons 457 of which are purchasable land tiles that can be farmed for blocks which are like Lego bricks and then you can place those

around build whatever you want build a shack build an animal build a tree you can color the color the bricks and make whatever you want on your tile okay so first what's the advantage of building a virtual world on this idiom well it is the blockchain cannot be censored it cannot be taken down by government or by malicious actors it will always be there and that it really is a powerful thing to think about that the things I build on my tile will outlive me that's kind of speaks for itself in terms of importance and power so essentially what

is the blockchain restoring it is storing the state of each tile on it cydia breath well storing the state of the entire map in a way it knows the elevation of each tile whether it's below sea level or whether it's higher and it goes from Beach to grassland to Hills to mountains I thought about making some distinction between those types of lands but really they're all the same they just look different in my graphical representation which by the way because the state of the world is stored in the blockchain of the blockchain is open anybody can build their own graphical interpretation of the world I just happen to build my own so that people could see it what was the question what is this what is the

blockchain early story okay it's it's storing what block what blocks you have and when I say blocks I mean bricks like Lego bricks the story in which blocks you have there are I believe 20 different types maybe 18 so there's like the column that's 8 hi there's the beam that's 8 across there's the stair step so there's 18 of those so it each brick is what type of tile it is the x y&z of the key hex so for the column for instance the key hex is the bottom one and then there's 7 on top of that and then what color that block is so it's really only 5 bytes of data per block and then as you place your blocks

the the contract determines the rest of the occupation so there's only 5 bytes in that one key hex for the column the 8 high column and then the the contract knows that the other 7 on top of it are also occupied right so it doesn't have to store as much data it figures that out as it goes what's the difference between a dial and a block a tile is imagine the map and you got water and you got land those are tiles blocks are the Lego bricks that you place on top of the tiles so the tiles are like the world and the blocks are components by which users can build something in the

world that's right can users buy and sell tiles they can and it's an interesting thought when I when I built the world the first time I created this offer system where I owned a tile and people can give me offers on that tile they can offer me to e3 whatever and the contract had to keep track of what offers were coming in it had to allow the owner to accept an offer reject an offer it had to allow the person making the offer to retract it it had to hold the value of the offer in the contract and it got really complicated and then it dawned on me one day that why not just provide one method that's that that could be called

by the owner of the tile saying give this tile to someone else and then outside of atheria there could be a smart contract some D trustless contract that would allow that transaction happened so I just moved all that logic outside and it became way easier way simpler to to program yeah it's like modular design right like so you have the contract which only state stores the owner of each tile and then you how the owner will be determined can be remain outside in our other other contracts so my fundamental question is why does it tile have value when atheria can be infinitely well it's a network

effect if you fork atheria and no one else is using it how much fun is that if if the original atheria has all four hundred fifty seven tiles sold which it does not go to ethereal worldcom atheria dot world to get them then that's but that's more fun because you get to see what people are building next to you and it becomes a living world rather than just a fork that's some software that nobody uses okay and who can free new tiles I mean can you create new land or new sea atheria is static I can superimpose other ethereal contracts on top of it

and ask the user base to use this new contract and they probably would because all I have to do is change the address and that how to page and people would probably just do it but the previous versions of atheria will always continue to live on and they can choose to work in those worlds that they want to now to answer your question can more land be created yes I could I could redraw the map in in future versions of atheria but I've decided that if I do that which is really a question I don't know if I will that the ownership should never be diluted if I create four times the number of tiles I think the current owners should get four times as many tiles because I don't want to dilute

them that I see them as investors in the early I will never create new on owned land and so so you decided like like the power to create new land currently rests completely with you do you think that this would be distributed like you could have a token or something and the owners of token could decide whether the new land should be created or not well in the in the new versions of atheria that I created I I carried over ownership so if you owned a tile in version 1.0 you own that tile in version 1.1 but like I said it's it's up to the users whether

they want to stick with the old atheria or move to a new superimposed version that I created because they all live on forever I can't take them down nobody can take them down they're just gonna be on the blockchain forever so it's really up to the community whether they want to follow my superimpositions heck somebody else you could create your own super imposition of a theory if you could get users to use it more power to you and did you suppose that the future versions of it here will all be on the iam blockchain or you will use some other system to store the data and DM blockchain only to have hashes or state routes of material if their aim is really revolutionary and I found it very

easy to use the people who built aetherium are just amazing but a virtual world contains a lot of information if if technologies come along may be attached to aetherium maybe aside from aetherium but I don't see that happening that could hold more data than I could I was I was pretty limited in what I could do with atheria when I built it but if they were technologies could hold more data and maybe faster block times or things like that I would be interested in that but I don't see that happening I mean I think the etherion people are at the cutting edge of what is possible yeah I didn't I didn't mean the question

to go in the direction of an alternative blockchain that competes with it but rather like there are many projects that are thinking of using ipfs as a data store and then hashing all the data into a merkel root and that goes into aetherium and so you have two systems one for handling big data and one for handling just the consensus on the data that you need so do you think a future architecture would be like that well the storage of data is a limiting factor but really it's the processing of that data that became the more critical limiting factor and ipfs doesn't solve that problem so for instance as you

place blocks on your tile in atheria each subsequent block that you place has to check the previous blocks and it it does three checks one is the new block you're placing inside your tile to does it conflict with any other tiles you've placed and three does it stack like it should either on the ground or another block after about 30 or 40 blocks you start to run out of gas that it because the 41st block has to go back through and check all the previous 40 to find out if there any conflicts whether they can stack and etc ipfs wouldn't help in that sense because ipfs doesn't do any computation it's just a storage vehicle so I asked Vitalik a little while ago

why the gas limit is so low per block and he says it has to do with if if the gas limit were higher you might have delays and block propagation if you increased from PI million to say 10x of pi million you might have block times that go from 17 seconds to 30 seconds or 40 seconds and nobody wants that so then you run into consensus and other other issues pop up I've I don't think on that level but I trust them that there are issues with it so essentially so essentially okay like some technology did are you aware of technologies for

provable computation I'm not I'm sure people are working on that I haven't seen it okay cool so what's the what's the linkage between ethelia and virtual reality is there a link well I would love to explore theoria with a virtual reality helmet on my graphical representation that I built is just a OpenGL in the browser using three.js but if somebody built a world maybe maybe even my graphical representation could be explored with a virtual reality helmet on I would love to see that what what kinds of you things have people built in each area building is challenging in

theory it's all command line based and you really I mean I I find it easiest to get a piece of paper with a grid on it and start drawing what I'm what I'm gonna build I built a horse with a little fence around that people might have seen that on Twitter it had no head because I ran out of gas someone else built a really cool log cabin that had white white bricks for smoke coming out of the top of the chimney in an earlier version of atheria which unfortunately I had to get rid of somebody had placed a couple of blocks around their tile so people people have experimented but it is it's not easy it's not easy one thing I've been thinking about is creating a builder where off chain someone could go into atheria drag and drop blocks around

change the colors and you know make it really easy for them and then at the end of their editing session it would just show them all the commands they need to execute to make that happen that's something I may develop in the future okay so that's et does the world of Tyria have any physics and how how does it work the only real physics is that blocks can't occupy the same space and the new blocks have to stack either on the ground or on other blocks in I don't know if I should admit this but later on in development I realized that what you could do is place a block place

another one on top of it and then just remove the one underneath and and the second block would float in midair and I thought about how to fix that and there's it's kind of a hard computational problem because what if you have a column a beam and another column and you take this column away well this beam is still okay because its resting on this column doing that kind of computation inside the etherion blockchain would be difficult cost more gas and I just decided to leave it as it was so if people want to build floating structures then you know that's that's on on them in theory like ethelia could have physics but physics would need a lot of computation which needs a lot of gas and that makes it impractical that's

right for the most part so what what features are you thinking of adding next well when I first thought about atheria I wanted to be a game and I had an idea to add a threat on the board or more multiple threats but for instance barbarian that would go around from tile to tile and destroy stuff and it would be on the tile owners to build defenses walls or towers cannons whatever and but then you then you reach the point of how good are the defenses that this person is built how do you assess those defenses one way would be to do it

computationally again not really that practical how how could the blockchain or any computation you write on the blockchain determine how good of a wall somebody built or or a cannon or whatever the the other thing the cross of mind was would be to do voting let tile owners vote on other tiles and assess them for how good they are maybe majors up and down voting thumbs up thumbs down that looks like it has good defenses thumbs up it doesn't comes down the problem with that is civil attacks someone could buy a bunch of different tiles under different names and/or under different accounts and then just about all their own tiles that they might not even have to place bricks at all to have

really good defense scores and I really couldn't think of a way around that so in the end I just left it as a vanity building game that seemed like the the safest most practical path to follow at this stage anyway so I are you thinking of really developing ethelia into a large virtual world or is it like a hobby project it was mostly a hobby project an experiment I don't rule it out if I have ideas then I'll definitely pursue those but for right now I'm happy with this the way it is the state of it and I hope people build some stuff in it more than they have but I think some

technology development in the development I think some technology developments need to happen before it becomes a full-fledged fun game to play so so finally we'd like to just have your thoughts on the Fermi paradox and and virtual realities so can you explain to us what is the Fermi paradox okay so the Fermi paradox says that there are billions of stars out there and there are billions of planets orbiting these stars and yet with all of that you would think there'd be intelligent life and we haven't heard any of it how come we have not heard any alien species one of the

solutions to the Fermi paradox is that aliens have progressed in their advancement technological advancement past the real world and it makes sense if you stop and think about it the these awesomeness of the regular world is static over time I mean it might fluctuate a little bit but it's generally static the virtual worlds are getting better and better and better probably at an exponential rate if you think into the future if you're living in a virtual world you're going to safer your experiences are going to be more amazing you might be able to walk around the surface of Pluto all kinds of experiences would be incredible and less expensive so if if every advanced

society eventually goes into virtual reality and gets rid of real reality and they stop caring about the outside world maybe that's why we haven't heard from any Anglian species yeah I mean I mean it's like it's like we build cities and cities are so nice that we don't really care about the jungle anymore you know even they'd be used to live in the jungle maybe the aliens are living in their own City which is a virtual city and they don't care about the real universe anymore I mean virtual worlds are very powerful I'm a recovering World of Warcraft addict and I can tell you that for many people the their possessions their friendships

relationships their goals are more important to them in a virtual world than they are outside and it gets really powerful when you stop and think about people can switch identities let's say that you're born physically disabled in the real world well in World of Warcraft no one cares all they care about is your utility to them in the game and how far you can help them progress or whether they like you as a friend or or whatever they don't care what kind of family you're built into how much money you have there's an equality to virtual worlds if you can change your identity it's really powerful really powerful it's not hard to understand how a lot of people choose to live in virtual worlds

rather than the real one so where can our viewers discover more about hysteria build their first horse I would say go to atheria dot world and there's a couple of links there one is just my overview of what it is then there's the how-to page of how to get started building something and then obviously the Explorer the map Explorer so you can see what I built and what other people have built it was great chatting with you Cyrus appreciate it