Juan Benet: Protocol Labs – IPFS, Filecoin and the Vision for a Decentralized Web (Part 1 of 2) #367

Transcript

this is epicenter episode 367 with guest Juan [Music] Benet hi I'm Sebastian C and you're listening to epicenter the podcast where we interview crypto Founders Builders and thought leaders on this show we dive deep to learn how things work at a technical level and we fly high to understand understand Visionary Concepts and long-term trends if you like epicenter the best way to support us is to leave a review on Apple podcast and if you're on a Mac or iOS device the easiest way to do that is to go to epicenter.bg

today our guest is Juan Benet he is the founder and CEO of protocol Labs of course that's the organization that's behind the ipfs project and file coin now longtime listeners of the show will remember our interview with Juan which was about 5 years ago it was on episode 100 and I remember recording that interview and being so inspired by the idea of ipfs first by this concept of a fully decentralized always available content and file storage platform but also the notion of flipping the client server model on its head and rather than thinking of content as hosted on a

server with an address you address that content directly by its hash and of course ipfs also has built-in versioning at the time all these ideas were very new and I think that they've contributed a lot to how we think about decentralized storage and in some ways they've set standards for decentralized cloud storage infrastructure and the functions that we expect from them of course ipfs has been immensely valuable to the ecosystem as one of the building blocks for web 3 and defi is an integral part of many projects in the space but ivfs was just one part of the broader stack and the economic model had yet to

be built and that of course is filecoin since we recorded our last interview there was of course the fcoin Ico that project was built out and is now live so Juan is back on the show to give us an update and it was such an important conversation and there was so many things to cover that we're releasing it as a two-part episode part one will focus on ipfs and the vision for a fully decentralized cloud storage infrastructure and part two which is coming out next week will focus more on filecoin a little bit of housekeeping as you know I'm part of the Adan team that's the association for the development of digital assets we had the president Sim on a couple of weeks ago

to talk about the upcoming MAA regulation in Europe and then is hosting a free webinar where you can learn all about the French crypto regulatory framework France is a great place to live and it's a great place to run a business in fact I live here I started companies here as well and the French regulatory framework is very favorable to crypto startups there are over a 100 established crypto companies in France and many of them have benefited from the Ico Visa that is issued by the French financial markets Authority so if you want to join that webinar and learn how to build a thriving crypto business in friends it's happening on December 8th and you can register for free by going to epicenter.bg

well the WordPress toolkit for C panel is a tool that makes it easy for developers to manage their WordPress infrastructure I'll tell you a little bit more about that during the interview and a couple weeks ago our friend an algorand hosted a great webinar to help developers build sophisticated defi apps I hope you enjoyed it if you like that I think you'll love their after hour Series where blockchain developers can meet with their team and members of the community for informal conversations about aland I'll also tell you a little bit more about that later on but for now here is part one of our conversation with Juan Benet hi and we're here with Juan Ben he's the founder of protocol labs and of file coin and of ipfs and this is the

second time we have gone on he's actually been on before on episode 100 so a long time ago so it's about five years ago and back then we spoke about ipfs and we spoke about Fon as well I mean the white paper was out and you know the kind of vision of file con exists it and actually I remember this was it was an awesome episode it was like one of my favorite episodes and we ended up at some point we ended up having like being short an episode and then I think we rebroadcast the episode we have one so but now we have him on again and you know long time has passed and file coins actually live and there's been a huge amount of progress and this kind of this new burgeoning ecosystem arising there so yeah we're really

excited to have qu on and dive into filecoin and yeah what's going on there so thanks so much for joining us hey thank you so much for having me uh last time was a blast one of my favorite conversations ever so uh really excited for uh for today and uh yeah looking forward to that cool awesome one of the things I remember when we spoke last time you spoke quite a bit about Bell labs and kind of like how that organization has inspired you in terms of like how you're approaching protocol apps and you know now a lot of time has passed and like you know protoc collabs has grown a lot too so I'm curious like how has that played out and you know how have you kind of continued pursuing this idea of and this model of B

apps you know it's been uh a huge inspiration for uh for us and for a number of people that that um that work at protoc laabs UH to kind of create a a an organization that can do research and development for foundational technology um in the long term uh it is is a thing to Aspire to I mean you know building something of the nature of of the labs is like a multi- deade project you know the kind of that kind of institution takes 20 30 years to build we we think that we are uh on the path to creating a really important lab uh for the world and I think we've been doing um pretty significant research and development across a variety of topics and we think

that that we're kind of on a good trajectory but you know very very very far away from anything to something as amazing as asow of course but you know it's been a very important inspiration for how we've structured the organization and how we think about uh hiring and how we think about goal setting and uh the structuring of problems and you know if you think about going from fundamental scientific development all the way to you know prototyping um you know getting to a to an important result then taking that result and uh thinking about what kind of Technology can be built with it um to then prototyping the technology getting through multiple cycle cycles of development before you can reach

something remotely close to product and then from there kind of building a thing and and and shipping into the world kind of innovating is a long kind of cycle of of going through and iterating through through those uh through that Pipeline and we've structured protocol Labs as an organization to to take that um kind of from a first principles perspective like think about carefully think about every stage of development with every piece of technology that we're working on and think about all the different artifacts that are made along the way and try to make those open source so think of um things like the ideas that feed into the research uh get getting documenting all of that and putting it into an easily

accessible uh medium then you know the actual results uh making sure to publish all of those then from those results going to um you know intermediate uh prototypes and so on open sourcing all the code for those and then um once you actually get into into building out a system like making that um a Dependable piece of technology and so that's something that that we think we're doing that uh definitely other labs from the past didn't do which is Embrace open source fully and and build things that where every single intermediate stage of research and development is is usable by by other people you know one of the important things that any of these kinds of important Labs end up having to do is be able to innovate a multiple front fronts at once uh because the Innovation Cycles are quite long you know that they

take on the order of 3 to 10 years on each individual piece of technology you um you want to be able to kind of innovate on multiple fronts at the same time and so that means you have to get extremely good at Road mapping across all of these different problems and think about resource allocation against that and who's going to work on what problem and for what duration and then think about um then like what projects and problems you're building and kind of getting to over time so all of that has been a you know phenomenal um challenge for us and we've can uh you know now have worked on many projects that uh that are kind of getting in these different stages of development from you starting we started with ipfs and then

from there um took pieces of ipfs and and pulled them out and made them into their own projects things like lip2p and ipld and and others and uh then build filecoin and then in the road to that ended up working on other projects like Dand uh and so on so and on the way there's been research done as well on The Primitives and the pieces of of tech um so that means a bunch of libraries got built uh papers got written a lot of collaborations with other groups so there's there's a lot of kind of broader ecosystem development in the entire pipeline that that uh we've been super thrilled to be able to do and and like that's been probably the most fun part

of all of this for many of us has been you know getting to being able to do all all those different pieces and I mean the contributions that you guys have made to the ecosystem I mean uh they are foundational to a large extent what I wonder is um how do you bridge the gap between running a Research Foundation and running a company because I mean those two are very different beasts right so yes and no and that I think most important Labs of the type of a Labs things like the labs itself Xerox SRI and so on where and you know even today things like X and deep mind and

Google brain and and so on a lot of these systems are corporate Labs they're corporate research Labs they're not academic labs and there's a very important difference that happens when you can do research in an organization that can also do development and Engineering which is that you actually get to take the Innovation all the way from idea to building a thing and getting the thing used by people um and seeing all the problems you're going to run into and then do all the whole Innovation cycle in one in one institution which is you know so much very important work gets done in Academia that is very difficult to translate into into technology that uh people use because it ends up being kind of far removed from uh from users and so

there's a lot of work in in Academia that because universities traditionally are very far away removed kind of intentionally set up that way removed from industry and removed from from development a lot of important work gets stuck just in the in the idea phas and just in the kind of important results facee but not actually getting to technology and so from that perspective I think you have to get these corporate labs to work and they have to in a sense be straddling the world between research and development and be in in you know in the past it's been sort of a corporate structure I don't know that that that a company per se is the best structure for it but but I think neither is Academia and so there's there's a gap in between

here and there's not that many institutions that that have survived long enough to kind of create a a class of entities for them and so yeah it definitely is a a struggle I think what one of the things you're you're getting at is when you're building a company you have to be very focused on kind of shorter term oriented goals and thinking about product development and um business goals and all that kind of stuff and that can come in significant conflict with long-term research oriented goals and so you have to uh you have to get extremely good at at understanding the priorities and why you invest deeply in something and why that longer term oriented view is going to is going to be very successful for the organization longterm one of the things that helps us is protocal Labs itself as

an institution as a company um is very Mission oriented and there's a very strong uh Mission our mission is to drive breakthroughs in computer science Drive breakthroughs in Computing technology in general en and that's a um a a thing that uh you know everybody who works at at PL has a strong sense that that's what PL is about and so that helps everybody kind of straddle that boundary and in being able to navigate that that whole Spectrum from research to development to you know actually building a business because if you to really innovate and to really push a breakthrough it's not enough to build kind of a product that's kind of in the margin and iterative you have to do something fundamentally important fundament

that pushes the envelope in some in some way and at the same time it's not enough to come up with an idea and tell the world about it you actually in know a breakthrough technology it's not really a breakthrough until it has actually gotten adopted by the broader uh world and so you know you can think about and theorize all kinds of things but if you haven't had a result that has transformed how the rest of the world operates hasn't really been a bre breakthrough yet and uh you know it's funny because bout itself had a a very strong uh kind of meme about this they used to describe it as you haven't innovated until you've sold it and the idea was an innovation is not really an

innovation until the fundamental Improvement and result has been put into a product and sold into a market and if you haven't done that then the Innovation hasn't really happened yet and so having a a very strong sense that that whole pipeline like to to Really Advance technology to really push science forward you have to think of the whole thing as an integrated system and and not really kind of introduce a bunch of boundaries that that that are kind of really fuzzy in reality and to understand how to do the whole Pipeline and you get good at that that's kind of um that's The Sweet Spot and again we are in the early days of something of building an institution like that PL is about 6 years old now and we're you know it's a baby relative to any of the

important labs to to think about in the world and so uh maybe some you know we aspire to become a good institution like that someday and you know with a lot of luck and a lot of hard work we'll get there but uh but yeah we we hope for that I've been building WordPress websites for over 10 years and the most frustrating thing has always been devops I'm talking about deployment maintenance backups and database management I've lost so many hours of sleep doing WordPress infrastructure management if you've been building websites for as long as I have you're definitely familiar with cpanel they've been providing web hosting management software for 25 years well they have a new product it's called the WordPress toolkit for cpanel and I've been given an opportunity to try it out it's really

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about the WordPress toolkit for cpanel and be informed when it comes out go to epicenter.com we'd like to thank cpanel for their support of the podcast so you mentioned the mission and the way you phrased it was like breakthroughs in like computer science and of course in the in the crypto space often people you know talk about Mission and you know if related to ideas of like decentralization or maybe some sort of like sovereignty for individuals so like so how like how do you look at the protocol last Vision like to what and like is it or can you explain like is it

breakthroughs in computer science is there elsewhere or like how is the intersection with the cryptospace yeah um and I sorry I miss spoke a little bit I it's breaking in driving breakthrough in Computing technology and so and the idea there is is uh is that it's both the science and the technology you have to do both the science of coming up with new results but also you have to go and build them into thing and the way that this fits into the web 3 world for us is that in this time period in you know 2020 and probably for the last five to 10 years web 3.0 what is now called Web 3.0 which includes kind of all the web 3 sorry all the crypto space plus the kind of ipfs D web area of things this whole important

development that's happening is a really critical part of computing um and from our perspective driving breaks in this area is one of the highest leverages that we could be doing uh you know in the world because the kinds of technologies that are being put in place are upgrading the computational fabric that we all use right so if you think about the applications that we use day day today and you think about the rights and properties that these these applications have and and the systems that we build um use and so on and you think about the utility that crypto brings and the entire web World brings uh to the table like that verifiability making sure that when we enter into transaction or when when contract executes and so on uh all of

those interactions are verifiable and correct and so on and you're not just taking it on trust and on faith from other entities that's a fundamental Computing technology Improvement and I think in general this gets misunderstood or or uh sold short by kind of the broader Computing world uh they tend to look at crypto and web 3 as oh it's you know it's weird and like decentralization is weird and crypto's weird and like oh it's just about money and whatnot but what's really going on is uh the infrastructure layers of the internet are we're figuring out how to introduce verifiability and rights into those layers and putting in place systems that can automatically scale with the right incentive structures and getting that right is probably going to

be one of the most important transition periods for for the internet and the web in in in the last 20 years and probably for the next you know 10 15 and so this is kind of why working in this area is is kind of important for us it's also a little bit incidental uh when I started protocal Labs I was already working on ipfs and so on so it sort of Follow that pathway but we ended up uh discovering just so many different super rich areas for computing uh it's not just files and distribution of information it's there's all kinds of important Primitives being explored here from New economies and new Financial structures for organizing um people and organizing work and new legal

structures and new legal components for for uh for how might you build groups of people and group like uh yeah how do you organize entity all the whole Dow space for example and or or uh you know crypto first crypto native uh organizations is incredibly interesting and it tends to be talked about much more than experimented with and so I really think we need to experiment a lot more and try a lot more things um probably more than we than we talk about it but uh but I think it's one of the most important uh things going on it's it's really software eating uh the economy software eating law um and when you kind of put those things together the and you think

of the leverage that Computing gives you it's an extremely uh there's a bunch of extremely powerful Primitives that being played with right now that are probably going to Define how humans operate for the next 15 20 years um and it's a lot of a lot of that is getting getting kind of yeah tinkered with today so it's kind of like the personal computer tinkering that was happening you know a decade or so before uh personal computers became kind of like the hot thing on the market so for us it's like uh it's really kind of an amazing uh field to be in because it's so rich there's so many different areas to to kind of so many different threats to pull on and uh so many different possibilities that that could be uh could be turn out to be really

important I think probably the um the hard part is some some degree of priorization and focus so you can actually you know work on in specific kind of discrete projects for the timeline that they need and you don't get spread too th right so uh there's so much going on that it's very easy to kind of acquire a very large Fringe of work and kind of make progress incrementally on all of it but but it feels like you're going really slow because there's just uh your energy and effort is being divided across across that large Fringe um so the way that we kind of navigate that is plant specific Flags uh on specific kind of Milestones being able to achieve certain kinds of goals and then working against those those goals and focusing on them somewhat

sequentially so at protocol Labs you're continuously pushing boundaries and you're doing that as a sole founder so basically in my experience it helps enormously to have someone to bounce ideas off off and have someone equally committed um to the same thing um so being being the Visionary it's it's actually pretty exhausting so um having someone to run with makes it a lot easier because you don't you don't you end up second guessing yourself a lot right so basically having someone who's equally crazy helps how has that worked out for you because you're currently doing this alone I mean not alone I mean you have a team but yeah as as a soul

founder yeah uh great question I mean for for me specifically you know proc collapse as a team is incredibly brilliant and hardworking so I get to work with a ton of amazingly brilliant people who are having a ton of ideas and you know in terms of of vision for the long term maybe in the early days like in the first couple of years uh a lot of it was kind of shaped by me but now um we've kind of set set up the right structure such that the range of projects that we're making and the range of ideas that we're pursuing and and all of that kind of stuff uh are being driven by by the team as a whole right and so like that's been phenomenal a really important transition for any

organization is to identify the spots where uh whoever started the organization or or or the leadership in general is um you don't want to be overly reliant on any leader and so you got to like spot those single points of failure and like remove them and so for us has been uh thinking of ways to help kind of foster projects that that other people are coming up with and other people people are having ideas for and and so on so a lot of filecoin today is the product of like the actual technology within it and the kind of side projects uh that that kind of help build filecoin um is a product of a lot lot of other people and so really you know I get to work with with super brilliant people who are kind of helping shape that Vision probably my role is

Shifting more towards uh and and maybe maybe not as much in the next couple of years but but really kind of further out like maybe thinking years ahead um is going to turn much more into looking further ahead and and kind of thinking about kind of ranges of fields to work work towards and how to how to build the organizational structures to to kind of yield that kind of really good R&D that across across a variety of things we also have kind of like a creative structure here where we think about individual projects right now that the way that we sort of organize ourselves is that there are individual projects and those projects have a project lead and the Project Lead sort of defines the vision for that project in that year right so there's like a larger stretch

of of work that we're going after over say a decade like larger scale goals like that and then project leads and the team in the project sort of get to figure out what what are the important goals in that year to achieve and and so on and that becomes kind of pretty scalable and it's a really good really good setup but now I think part of what you're getting at is uh Building Systems like this building companies building larger projects is an extremely difficult Endeavor and and when people try try to do it uh alone you can get into all kinds of like difficult challenges and it super definitely helps a lot to have other people to kind of bounce ideas with around with and and all that kind of stuff uh for me I think it's been uh because protolabs is so I don't know unique's probably the wrong

word because everyone everyone can e easily say that their project is super unique um it's more Pro CL is so different in in its goal set in terms of really trying to do something very long-term oriented very R&D focused and at the same time have short-term oriented success with specific projects like that that is kind of a pretty um you have to it's quite difficult to kind of I think find many people or you know several people that together could have been super aligned over you know 10 10 years or so to to kind of Follow that path so I think for me it's been an advantage to be to be a a solo founder because I don't have to

argue with myself uh about like like the the kind of the trajectory there though though I think um I think being being uh it definitely made a bunch of things challenging in certain periods of time where you know I became very much a bottleneck or a or a point of failure for all kinds of important development for the organization and so I think getting extremely good at identifying you know this advice for Sol Founders especially but for really all founders and and all leaders uh of organizations it's um really kind of spotting where where you have your unique contributions that maybe right now are really nice and really useful but will quickly become uh bottlenecks and problems uh and kind of

staying trying to stay ahead of that so that you can then build that into the rest of the organization and kind of either build systems against that or recruit for it most of the times the challenge becomes build a team that's better than you in every way right so at every kind of scale of organization like when you began a single person or a small team or even when you're like 50 or 100 you know that one of your biggest challenges is going to be how do you take that team and in say a year or two years make it dramatically better at everything everything you're doing you need to get better at it and so that means finding other people who are better than you and a bunch of different vectors and so at that point is when you can start specializing right so you

might not get people that are you know maybe as have as much breath or or as generalist as maybe the the smaller team needs to be but on the whole the whole system kind of gets dramatically better at at tackling most challenges that you'll face so that's kind of how we've dealt with it cool yeah know I'm excited to see you know what else you guys will all produce because you know as as you both pointed out there's been already quite a few different things our friends over at aland are starting an office hour Series so every week or two will bring together their team partners and Community together for a live discussion intended to provide you with all the answers and resources

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technology stack or whether you have no blockchain experience at all and just looking to take the first step into learning something new alaran could be the right solution for you to learn more visit alan.com epicenter for developer resources and information about their next office hours we'd like to thank Al Garand for their support of the podcast I would say let's dive a bit into the meat of our conversation and you know we want to focus a lot on filecoin now of course filecoin is very much also related to ipfs so I don't know if you if you have to give kind of like an introduction of like what is filecoin I don't know maybe does it make sense to first start with like what is ipfs or like how how do you tackle kind of that question we've gotten good at

describing fileo without having to assume that you know what IPS is so but maybe I'll describe both for just for the audience here so um ipfs it signs for the interplanetary file system and it's a protocol to make the web peer-to-peer it the goal there is to use content addressing to address and move around all the content in the web so that means files websites all kinds of media instead of using HTTP which is a location Orient Ed protocol um moving to using ipfs which is a Content addressed oriented protocol so that means hash link everything or use name systems that map to Hash links um so you can distribute everything with the same kind

of Integrity that the blockchains or get have right so you you get to turn individual websites into the same kind having the same kind of Integrity as as G or or blockchains and so on right and and maybe maybe I can briefly explain like an example that might make this easy to understand right where we seeing ipfs used here today so you know as an example right like in Cosmos uh you have like nonchain governance systems and then people make proposals and then people often like link to like you know the voting takes place on the blockchain but then often you link to some kind of document right that describes the proposal in more detail and that's always always hosted an ipfs and of course that means because

the link defines exactly the document like anybody can host it and anybody can kind of like surf that document so you don't have the single point of failure there and also the link that's on chain you know exactly defines the document so you you don't have to trust someone you know if if you put a simple URL you trust whoever is hosting that website and they could potentially give you something else and then you're reading something else and you're voting on so ipfs is like you know perfect solution for this problem yeah and we and we um we think that the whole way that we move information around right now is is is pretty broken because this location addressing makes information too Dynamic and too liable to change or or disappear

right so if you see a URL like a normal URL um you have no guarantee that what lies behind that URL is the same thing that you you know the person who sent you the link intended you to to look at and you have no guarantee that it's going to be stable at all right and so having at least the the ability to uh create immutable structures for information uh is of a really critical component for computing and then beyond that you can you can then build Dynamic systems and dynamic applications on top of that immutable kind uh log of log of versions so yeah again it's it's very uh kind of git inspired and and blockchain inspired and and that's kind of the the way that FS as a project has come to you know help out with all kinds of information distribution uh but one of

the key parts of the protocol that it didn't uh address is uh you know how do you and this is an intentional division how do you get people to store the content uh in the long term right so as a protocol IP is pretty General uh it just says if you are willing to move around the content then you do and it sort of um leaves it up to the user into a different layer to decide why you're moving the content and that's pretty important because people could have tons of reasons for doing this it could be altruistic I or it could be you know I want you to look at my data so I'm totally willing to serve it to you or there's like together uh forming around keeping some important data sets or some important public data around or you could you know

pay people in Euros or dollar dollars or whatever and you know that was that was important to separate out from another really important component of a system like this which is building a cryptocurrency powered storage Network and so that's where Fon comes in and connects it's you know now once you have the content addressed by ipfs then path point is is a protocol for uh you know incentivizing the long-term storage and distribution of that content so you can pay for it with a cryptocurrency called fcoin and uh and you can the protocol system is meant to be this two-sided marketplace where on one side parties

are bringing in storage and and and distribution of the data uh and so these are the miners the minor are coming online and providing a lot of storage facilities and and so on and on the side are the the clients that want to hire that storage and want to pay people to to distribute the content and so fcoin solves the this kind of Market problem by using a currency as a med change and you know a whole host of protocols to verify the Integrity of the data long term uh get to you know High reliability create the kind of sets of incentive structures to achieve High reliability in the long term you know verify the that uh that miners are continuing to store all the data and all that kind of

stuff so right now for example every 24 hours all the data storage is proved so you can tell immediately if somebody stop stop storing something so you can immediately recover data right so people come online into the protocol take their data Maybe Store you know a few different copies and you can immediately you know over it overnight at any point in time detect if if uh people have stop storing that data and then kind of move to repair that that missing copy or you story with somebody else and and so on and you know the protocol itself has very strong incentive structures to you know greatly incentivize miners to continue keeping keeping all the data around in the long term and honoring those deals you get into this is kind of the verifiability property that I was

talking about before uh if you today wanted to store data longterm in the network you um you know outside of the crypto space you can hope for the best and hope that ALCS are going to keep it or you hope that um you can set up you know an arrangement with uh one of the big cloud providers and that you're going to keep paying them uh you know hopefully and and that link is going to survive but if either your bank account or your credit card stop paying that link will um or you know uh people stop wanting to store that that data that link will go away and so it's an important thing to to establish into a network that you can build a a network where you can set up very long-term oriented deals for persisting super

valuable super important data in the long term and that that only requires cryptocurrency it doesn't require a bank account doesn't require a credit card doesn't require you to be doesn't even require you to be a human right so you can think of programs themselves hiring storage on their their um for whatever it is they're trying to do right and so you can think of smart contracts as being able to use this storage platform so we'll talk about what happens under the hood of fireone in a bit um but basically zooming out um a little bit um fcoin is its own blockchain very much like ethereum but it's kind of a single use kind of network for storing and distributing content so how does that change the

architecture when looking at the differences between a general computation blockchain and um something that is made for a very specific use case yeah um yeah great question I mean I think you know today when you build a blockchain You're Building you know all of the consensus machinery and you're building transaction machinery and you have a currency and so on so it is it is definitely a super set of Bitcoin right so you can use fcoin for everything you could use Bitcoin for and and more but you can't do like general purpose contracts yet that is intended for the long term so it is pretty important it's pretty clear now that we need a pretty generic contract system even in the world of just kind of thinking about uh

file storage because you want to enable users to create many uh kinds of structures for their for either on the client side when they're trying to hire H Storage or on the on the minor side think of different kinds of financial instruments being created or or um economic Arrangements between Miners and and uh and their communities and so on um and also think about all the applications that people are going to want to build and want to map against the storage so we're definitely thinking of the whole application stack um but we are much more Conn activity oriented than most blockchains right I think right today we have a lot of islands being formed that are sort of a

consequence of the fact that you know blockchain formats are different and consensus uh there's a lot of experimentation with consensus and that ends up yielding different all these different blockchains that don't speak to each other that much and that has yielded a world where you need to create an entirely different set of pro projects and protocols to sort of interconnect them right it is totally what was going on in the internet before um before the internet itself was was coming online which is people were experimenting a lot with networks and they were building different networks and there were a lot of specific protocols built and a lot of different wires even and different device devices to to speak to each other and so on and

you ended up with like a you know this is about a decade of work where tons of people ended up with many different computer networks around the world that didn't really talk to other uh and so people end up having multiple Terminals and then people had to go through the work of interconnecting the whole thing and creating the internet and we're about to kind of hit that stage right there's already kind of a few projects that are that are doing this but what I what I think is more uh likely to happen here is that we're going to end up unbundling M many of the blockchains themselves and separating the layers I think today it is surprisingly difficult to build an entire system that has very few assumptions and and very little Reliance on other systems and manages to build a a solid uh crypto economy

meaning you know kind of the original intention for Falin was that it was just going to uh work on top of ethereum and was going to you know for for a period of time we we explored doing this where we could just write entirely on top of ethereum one and either have a set of contracts within the chain and then separately having kind of like a virtual chain on top but we ended up in a in a in a world of struggle because a the the throughput would be ended up out calculations just exceeded ethereum's total bandwidth and like that's you know one problem kind of hard problem to deal with uh and then another problem was that it was very easy to come up with structures where if you have one system writing on another system like that you could start messing with the economy in

one layer to affect the economy in the second layer and it was very difficult to create structures that were resistant against that and we didn't find really good ways of doing that so you know kind of to put it in term of today imagine that you can figure out a way to exploit a network like or a near C20 token or something and then you take a huge flash loan with eth to to do that and then suddenly like it's very easy to kind of manipulate the incentive structures and mechanisms within one one network writing on another and so you have like this crazy combinatoric explosion of mechanisms when when everything is kind of in the same in the same medium so kind of in the for you know kind of in order to kind Sur Mount these problems and kind of look ahead we ended up

having to build our own entire chain like an our layer one chain from from scratch and you know that was a super useful thing for us because we end up being able to optimize the hell out of all kinds of things for the use case uh but it's also super wasteful right because who needs another layer one blockchain right like there's way too many of them and especially when when we think ahead in the future like there's going to be all kinds of scalability improvements that are going to arrive and you don't want 50 different teams building 50 different scalable blockchains you want one or three teams building like really robust systems and getting a ton of input and and help from a ton of other groups and you want to arrive at a

dramatically better better you know protocol that way another way to put it is like you don't want 50 different internets you want one internet kind of by definition so I sort of expect that over time Fon and lot of other blockchains will unbundle and and end up with like a different kind of layering but that's probably many many years out because there's a lot of tech that needs to improve and a lot of protocols that need to be built to address those problems I mentioned which is how do you get scalability across this wide array of systems and how do you decouple the mechanisms such that you can have high certainty that you can isolate the the economic effects of one and you aren't accidentally kind of bundling in bundling them into others but in the meantime that means there's a lot of

work to do to have a whole contract platform on Vin which is kind of like ongoing work that that will land in the future Plus build Bridges to every other you know every other major blockchain we we want to be able to have make it easy for contracts on ethereum to hire Falin storage like directly and natively within ethereum without having to think about having to have an application outside that does anything complex right like ideally you want you just kind of call Falin within the the evm and so there will be a set of contracts within ethereum that then set things up such that the Falco Network can then operate in this and so that means there's a bridge there but now we have to do Bridges like across a whole bunch of different different networks and blockchains and yeah super wasteful but I think in the in the long term it's

good now because it lets all the teams kind of explore this this very rich design space figure out what the right structures are and there's going to be a very large period of convergence that's coming ahead where a lot of these tech stocks are going to merge and I think you know there'll definitely be a lot of random protocols that you know persist and continue right today you can you can still find Gopher websites right and like who uses gopher like almost nobody everybody is HTP right like that's two examples of Two And even those two were late stage hypertex systems there were a bunch of hypertex systems before that kind of led to the development of the web and so likewise here I think uh you know we ended up build building entire blockchain from scratch there's a lot of

important uh decisions that kind of led to it and a lot of utility that we got about it in the short term but but in the long term a lot of these systems will will end up converging I don't know if I answered your question I guess your question was like what what optimizations you get to and maybe I can describe some of that like uh we get to really make sure that like blocks are as full with the with the you know key component proofs that we need as possible and you know that we aren't rate limiting the growth of the network because it Al it's also carrying a bunch of transaction uh traffic for a lot of other things but you know it does have like a full you know full ability to you know have any transactions and F A currency can be can be used and can

already wrapped fcoin in ethereum so you can now move around fcoin ethereum as well and have it participate in a bunch of other defi use cases there and then makebe make its way back to uh to the fckin chain yeah I don't know if that's useful one other thing maybe that that was that is valuable is um we got to build this entire blockchain with kind of ipld Primitives from the GetGo which means it's very easy to move around ipfs itself so you can take the entire Falin blockchain and the state tree and the blocks and all of the artifacts and move them around ipfs and Traverse them with ipld as you would anything else and like that's a super super powerful primitive so a lot of magic that comes out of that that's probably not going to be apparent

for a lot of people for a while but that's kind of like a super super high utility thing that comes from our work in ipfs and our work of thinking through data structures there and saying hey when you're building a blockchain from scratch don't create a bunch of like random uh formats that are really hard to use and so on like try and make it definitely compact but but web first and make it easy for for compatibility with a bunch of other systems and so that's been maybe something useful that that dropped out of that cool now I think that was really cool to hear like some of you thinking around this yeah the filecoin blockchain now a related question here is I mean file coin okay it's a layer one chain as you point out but it's also so like a very different layer on chain right

because you have these miners that are storing uh you know storing data set and like Distributing serving data sets but you know normally you have maybe a minor or validator and they're all kind of doing the same thing but here you have you know you have different miners storing different data sets so like can you explain like what are the major differences in terms of like how the filecoin blockchain is sort of you know built and designed you know as a result of the the file storing function it performs versus you know other layer one blockchains yeah so I think maybe the biggest and most important piece is that the proof of work function is a you know proof of useful storage function as

opposed to uh you know normal hashing hash rate oriented uh work yeah this is like the one of the highest utility things here which is and and we really hope that other blockchains start doing this which is instead of using what is a super wasteful proof of work uh of just kind of like hashing a bunch of of random uh Randomness to kind of try and produce uh like you know the right value and kind of win the block and whatnot instead do a try to do you know do do useful work in that computation and there's a ton of protocols that have tried to do this in the past um it was kind of like a like a a big challenge for us to try and do it with by producing kind of as a byproduct have

that work function produce useful storage and that's one of the kind of really important differentiators where this as a layer one blockchain has you all of the work and effort that goes into maintaining the consensus of the protocol is there's a bunch of useful storage backing that helping back that consensus up uh there's also elements of kind of proof of stake here where it's kind of like a little bit of a mix of both uh we ended up with kind of like this uh sort of hybrid protocol where the kind of useful storage it sort of catches up over time and for a a section of the of the protocol is sort of uh the stake that miners have and might lose uh for kind of consensus attacks and and so on and this has been like a super super useful component because you know kind

of what what I think is the most important graph in the entire crypto space is the hash rate of Bitcoin I think like that is and has been kind of like this astonishing graph over time like I don't know what it is right now I'm going to look it up you know it's been it's always kind of astonishing to see just like the the ridiculous growth in the hash rat so this is this is like insane I don't know if this is true but this graph claims that we're like close to 150 EXA hashes per second it's an astonishing amount of hashes an astonishing amount of electricity and you know one of my favorite things to do is like plot this graph from up of all times from you know 20 2008 to now and just see like this insane exponential

that is totally Relentless right so you can one of the few things you can guarantee about the entire crypto space is that the Bitcoin hash rate you know in in a larger scale over the multiple years time scale is going to continue grow exponentially and it is super crazy and it's you know I don't know what uh what size comparison to a country it is now but you know last time I did this calculation which was I think like two or three years ago it was you know was surpassing Australia and like that's you know and it's grown exponentially since then so I don't know maybe it's like getting close to China or something like that like it's just an enormous amount of power that's going into one single process and the reason why I think this this uh this graph is so important is that it shows the the

tremendous power of an incentive structure and in here there's a very simple game where a lot of miners are competing with each other to win the next block and all they need to do is get a little bit more power than each other to increase their likelihood of winning the block and out of that very simple structure you end up producing this insane insanely huge and Powerful Computing Network and so this is what uh what Fon this kind of like one of the secret ingredients to well not secret but like totally obvious ingredients to filecoin which is you want to create this this structure with this kind of an incentive structure coup it to the block reward so that and this is where kind of like the proof of

useful work consensus comes in you have to like land all of that work in order to to do this at least in kind of like the original framings uh and you end up with like this you can produce this kind of amazing exponential growth for for the adding of resources to to a network right and so this is what you know what's kind of like behind popcoin F right now unfortunately like rate limited by the blockchain bandwidth so even though we just launched we're already now rate limited by like the growth of of the capacity of the network is now really limited by the the chain bandwidth and uh that that kind of sucks we got to get to scalability a lot sooner than I expected I mean it's a really great place to be like we just passed an exabyte uh and like that's a

staggering amount of scale uh like when you think about that kind of yeah so going back to kind of why this graph is so important uh when I first saw this graph and I saw the power behind it you know I kind of realized that you could use this kind of simple incentive structure to amass any kind of resource on a broader Network and then kind of then use that resource to provide some useful service and so that means you can do this to storage you can do this to Computing you can do this to bandwidth you can do this to a bunch of different things and so for for us it was one of the key components for filecoin design was you got you have to have this right incent this correct incentive structure where miners are competing with each other to add significant capacity to the network now

another whole other layer here was how do you turn that capacity into you know a very strong incentive to to store really valuable and useful data there's a whole world of other you know mechanisms I want want get into at the moment to really make sure that that's like actually useful valuable data versus kind of you know garbage data or something like that but uh yeah this is uh one of the maybe important components that differentiates Falon as a layer one blockchain is the use of you know proof of useful storage to to maintain the consensus and earn the block reward and get this you know Mass is like really large capacity of really large amount of of data for for them you know using to store all the all the stuff that we want on web 3 funny thing about scale here by our calculation most of web 3 storage is

you know a few pedabytes and so you know we can we can store all of that hundreds of times over and so now we have like this maximum amount of capacity and now like all of the interesting use case that that can fill it up and we can turn that capacity to go after uh kind of like more traditional web to oriented uh problems and businesses and so on where you know like like now now go and and and make this a really useful network not just for the web3 L lscape but for a bunch of applications that now can turn around and use super useful cheap storage can I ask about the differences in consensus mechanism between proof of work blockchains like a Bitcoin and E ethereum 1 and filecoin because I mean

so basically this is just a fairly random thought um but you were talking about how the hash rate of Bitcoin has gone up exponentially and I mean in part that is because um computation is getting cheaper but in the most part it's actually because people have just added resources to this and if you look at storage so basically if you look at computation we're pretty much at the limit of what is possible I mean obviously you can you can redesign circuits and so on but you know from a physics perspective and the mosfet is probably as small as it's going to be whereas if you look at storage you have so many orders of magnitude that you know you can you can still get to

building storage has gotten exponentially cheaper and will get exponentially cheaper for the foreseeable future does this have any repercussions on um on the fcoin blockchain consensus system well so there's a couple couple pieces here so one is the importance of the mechanism I think is is that you can convince a lot of people to add resources to One Network so I don't think that the Bitcoin hash rate has actually put a dent into accelerating mlaw for example like I like I think and you know morla is already you know we're we're at the very limits and now morla is about or or pseudo Mor not really morla is about

increasing continuing the cost reductions by getting you know many different chips to to talk to each other like many different kind of we're going towards par parallelism not kind of smaller and smaller transistor sizes and so the the kind of like scalability will come from better low-level ways of of computing in in in these paralyzable paralyzable systems right so things like gpus and tpus and all that kind of stuff is is is a I think kind of like where the frontier lies to your point you know when Bitcoin really picked off into gear you know it's exponential caught up with more with kind of like the normal Computing Improvement rate and then after that just followed it it didn't

really Push It Forward right so I think I don't think people working on bitcoin are helping fund Drive fundamental improvements what they may be doing is helping Drive fundamental improvements for basic design for hash rates which is like not the most useful thing in the world you know maybe useful but like not that useful so that's thing where if you if you change the incentive structure here where in order to get a you know an advantage over anybody else you really do provide something some like you know vastly useful resource then that can be that can be pretty pretty important and that's one of the kind of important design considerations so to to your question around like hey is the work on

filecoin going to push on storage and because storage is further away from the theoretical limits might we actually get get Miners and other groups pushing and advancing the state of-the-art in storage technology and would like it kind of be meaningful or it could po potentially present a risk like like you know what happens if somebody does this in secret and like you know gets like this breakthrough storage device that uh can outpace everybody else I think right now attacking any kind of consensus protocol by trying to find a lot more resources this way and then try trying to like turn that into a business is not like the kind of resources that you need is in the many billions of dollars of r& not only R&D but in in in doing like the

the scale of manufacturing to be able to like if you can come up with a breakthrough device that could store things at a you know maybe 10x or 100x Better Price Point than the rest of the industry as you you probably have invested billions of dollars into doing that and the only way you're going to get your billions of dollars out safely is by you can probably end up mining Falin with that or you're probably just going to sell it to everybody else with is most likely is that you're going to set up a storage media company and you're going to sell it to everybody and and the reason why I don't think it's going to any kind of um consensus attack is is really viable here is that by the time you get into the tens of billions of dollars of investment into something

like this marshalling that kind of resource and then betting it all on the fact that a consensus attack might net you a benefit like is super sketchy like there there is very few ways of trying to do a double spend with a large enough quantity of any cryptocurrency say Bitcoin or or anything like that and try to then somehow get away with it getting away with it includes having to clear those transactions into other currencies that are not tradable where other people are not going to find you and so on so that you know these kind consensus attacks at this scale is I think infeasible like it's straight up infeasible for for Humanity to to perform I think it is feasible when networks are a lot smaller if it if it

only takes a few million dollars to Mound these of consensus attacks totally that at that point it becomes viable and then you can trade you know using def rails into you know zcash or your favorite private token and and so on and kind of get away with it that way but you really need to cut down the cost of the attack to millions of dollars or tens of millions of most uh any anything larger than that and your risk profile just turns into hey make a business like become a useful minor or you know sell it to other miners like why not like that that's like a much safer path Pathway to to uh to success and you tend to find that like once you reach those higher amounts of capital in the world it tends to be pretty short-term oriented and pretty rational and and if the rational incentives line

up then you won't get like this irrational attack attack factor and and so the not outpacing like the like the investment amount to attack needs to not get too far away decoupled from the total value of the currency maybe maybe that's a good way of thinking about it s the random tangent I this really cool exploration and like one question question that kind of comes up for me so I mean it was interesting you brought up you know this like useful proof of work right because as as you pointed out right in the past that there were various ideas in that direction so this was like 2013 and like even earlier there was ideas like you know Prime coin where you would try to you know find new prime numbers and then the idea was like well this has like

some kind of utility uh as opposed to bitcoin but of course you still have the fact that like let's say Prime coin became like very valuable then maybe a lot of people would expend like a lot of energy into like finding new prime numbers and you know there may be some utility but it might be very much you know from a social perspective might be very much like out of line so I'm curious here you know already filecoin is actually very valuable right the price is very high and if you sort of took like the total supply of filecoin that will exist and you know the current price of fire coin then you're I think like number three on the market cap but that's sort of assuming so Falon has a very slow release rate it's not going to you know

has like a half life of six years plus the Baseline so we won't get to even you know half of that for the next six to eight years half of that Supply Plus you then have to think about in 6 to eight years where are all of those other currencies that you're kind of comparing against going to be right so look back to ethereum what was ethereum worth six years ago and it's like well zero and like it's worth like you know X now what is ethereum's growth rate going to be and then map it to that so like that's like the fair and other people right now are just like taking a supply because that's that's like a very easy competition to to yeah totally yeah totally accept your point yeah I mean that it's not so much my like I think the the the point I want to make or the

kind of question I have is you know is there going to be kind of like an alignment like I totally get like Fon will probably like increase the amount of investment potentially in like you know how to store files efficiently uh and distribute them and that seems to be like you know socially good thing but I'm wondering like you know do you think this is there like a risk that for example file con would be so successful that there would be like so much invested in that that is kind of like you more than socially optimal Oh you mean like um if the amount that's going into producing storage for the network greatly outpaced Humanity's need for that storage you're basically saying hey so what like there's like a lot of value

here and then suddenly the utility of having all of this storage is like not actually a useful to humanity and that's a market question so and and that's a really solid one because well a couple assumptions one is um you know what is the growth rate of human usage of data and like that's growing exponentially right like the data generated is like in the going to be in the zaby soon and uh we actually don't have enough storage to store it so most of the data in the world generated gets deleted you can maybe say most of the data in World generated doesn't need to be kept around but it is kind of one of these like almost you know classic business school style uh disruptive Innovations where you greatly reduce the cost of something and you you create a

you know great capacity of something and suddenly starts getting used in a bunch of ways that before was way too expensive to do so this happened to coal and a number of other other kinds of resources and so if we can you know we're very far away from you know one exite is a lot and like starts be being you know finally you know it's kind of amazing to hit one xite because that's like suddenly competitive with the large Cloud providers we we didn't kind of expect to be the here so fast like we sort of you know hey we had 100 pyes it's going to be awesome and like you we already had an exite and we're like oh oh wow like that's super fast awesome like that that's a really great result but we're still kind of really far away from a zaby a zaby is a lot and so um we

we are very far away from matching Humanity's consumption and Humanity's consumption is growing way more than our storage media is is capable of dealing with so I don't think we'll ever really have as much storage media as we really want to have and and because storage media is not just about storing bits right like you can store bits into all kinds of systems that might be really cheap like DNA and so on you want storage media that has certain kind of readwrite cost profile and and latency profile and so there's only so many hard drives and ssds in the world so part of what's going on with uh storage media is is that um St me is kind of far away from his fundamental limits not because you know people are working really fast

on having hit the limit but rather because we sort of stopped investing as much in hard drives so if you look at the the there's like this really cool graph similar to Mor law called Ker's law uh which tracks kind of like the the density of storage versus the the cost reductions right you can sort of see where it goes and it sort of tapered off in the last five or so years it's no longer growing exponentially and part of the reason for that is not that people are stopping to reach research storage media or have hit fundamental limits it's that people are transitioning from hard drives to other media so now a lot of the R&D budget in the world is going to ssds and Flash and a bunch of other storage media that is um faster in various ways you know or NV nvme and and

all this kind of this kind of stuff where it's different tiers of storage for different kinds of applications and it this gives you a different performance profile so different from chips where you can just focus on transistor out here like the you have multiple variables to optimize and so you end up with like different tiers and so I don't know when we'll hit the fundamental limits on on any of them but uh you know for now filecoin is sort of geared towards the hard drive SSD World a lot of miners are using ssds a lot of miners are using hard drives and that's kind of like a sweet spot in the future uh you know we already thought a lot about how to bring online like the ability to choose the storage media like when you're making a deal you're actually imagine being able to select I

want this on this type of storage media so that you can kind of get guarantees about the latency and so on for for retrieval and and all that kind of stuff but that's kind of like longer term work this it's hard enough already to get like the incentive structures to produce uh this output um that is going to getting verifiability on that other kind of search media will require a bunch of technological improvements but you know returning to your question like I don't think will'll ever really outpace Humanity's need for data storage the more data storage capacity we have we'll we'll be able to kind of like cut into all that data that we delete today and maybe someday we'll come up with more uses for data seage you know I think Bitcoin ends up being a waste because nobody can use this hash rate right like

this hash rate is totally wasted and so when you look at the Bitcoin Enterprise it's a lot of hashing machines doing nothing but dissipating energy and like that is horribly wasteful but if you can turn that kind of mechanism into producing a useful resource like that becomes uh I think pretty interesting and valuable and you know like you're saying as long as it doesn't kind of outpace the you know human demand like I think it's an important piece um one other point here is like this actually decoupled from the price of the token in an important way meaning it's a market uh at the end of the day like a Falin doesn't guarantee you a certain amount of storage it's miners are selling you storage at a price that they set and and so the the the Falon price kind of

floats there's a coupling and and a relation when it comes to the fee structures there a bunch of fee structures in the network that are denominated in filecoin and that kind of ends up producing a link there but it's not about kind of like the the total amount of storage or something like that cool so you mentioned a bunch of impacts right that filecoin has so first of all this aspect that okay you have maybe different type of verifiability you know this idea that okay machines could buy storage and then we have also hopefully the impact right the filecoin will be that storage would just become like much cheaper and maybe more abundant so if you if you kind of take you know those things together and let's assume that filecoin you know really succeeds at like a huge

scale in the next you know decade you know how will that change the world like what do you think are the most important impacts it will have yeah so I think you know kind of maybe I'll describe this in in uh short medium and long term right so in the short term already with you know fcoin today as you can use it now and with the capacity that it has now with the minor set that you have now you can start taking all of these web3 applications that right now link content uh to ipfs and so on and then back up all of them in in Falcon so you now have a fully crypto native web3 Native way of storing and distributing those applications so today a bunch of them end up using Amazon or or Azure and other systems behind the scenes uh in

order to pin their apps data right so so maybe the front end is decentralized but not fully there's a few applications out there that that do that are kind of fully decentralized that um that kind of like nobody is necessarily pinning other than kind of the community members and uh fre will'll probably jump in and talk about one in a moment and definitely there are other other sour networks in crypto that you know can of couple with IP and you can use them already but I think one of the the kind of important improvements here is you can now start addressing large amounts of data like really getting into pedabytes of stuff and use that in web three applications uh in a way that you couldn't really do before right so so today you can now build something like a social network and build it on tooling like you know

textil tooling I don't know if you're familiar with texile but it's like a really useful uh tooling for uh building web through applications and you can build a you know something like a social network or a video oriented website or something like that like a totally traditional consumer application uh type thing and deploy it in a fully Crypt native web through native way where the whole application like not just the front end but like the logic itself and all the data that users are going to generate all of that gets backed up and stored using crypto and that becomes that kind of opens the doors for a lot of things that up until now weren't really weren't really possible wen't really done that much where you know there's all this kind of

hybrid app stuff where some of it is on using blockchains a lot of it is still using the normal cloud and it creates this like really wonky lopsided structure because a bunch of the important facilities are still happening in the kind of lockdown cloud and it makes it creates this very large dependence on those development teams those development teams still have to run that infrastructure still have to exist still have to kind of like have a bank account connected to Amazon and ideally you want a system where the developer can build an application give it to the world and then users move their application storage and wherever they want and they can control where that where that storage goes right so both of most of your web experience a

world where developers don't have control over your individual data and can't decrypt it can't see it and so on but rather you control exactly where that gets stored and you control kind of the outcome in the long term of of that data and the application developers can move more towards building the UI and developing it and and shipping it out there but not really banking on creating a data Monopoly that then Becomes exploitative of the data right so like it's really kind of breaking that break breaking that paradigm you can make it possible because a lot of application developers never really want to go into storing people's data or or looking at it and kind of like trying to exploit using advertising or something like that they really just want to find a really good way to monetize building the

application itself so they can kind of continue doing so and ideally they don't want to pay any of the infrastructure costs that it takes to run an application most developers are forced into advertising because they end up accumulating in order to run the application they end up accumulating these huge infrastructure bills and so the way to pay these huge INF infrastructure bills and all of the engineering talent and effort that goes into maintaining the infrastructure which is you know sizable a number of people all of that then suddenly is like okay well you know advertising model like screw it let's do that when in reality like you could move more to a model closer to the app the kind of mobile app stores where there's a ton of apps that are just developed by by developers released into the world and

don't have any kind of long-term relationship between the developer and the user um and no kind of like data ownership problem there and so like that's one of the things that I think we can achieve in the short term is like start moving making it possible for application developers to build consumer oriented applications like social applications and video and all that kind of stuff that are fully web through native that can start pushing the kind of storage Frontier to a world where you know users can have full control of their data and kind of can direct where where it gets stored and so on and that's kind of like Poss now it's also possible to store large data Commons so this is kind of another neat use case where there's a

lot of public data out there that today gets uh somebody has to putli the bill for and somebody has to kind of agree to be the steward for and they have to sign up to either store themselves in their own infrastructure or hire a cloud to do and in reality it's a community oriented data set like there's a lot of people that care about it there a lot of people that want to store it or there's a lot of people that want to this thing to exist and are willing to pay for it but today the current infrastructure the of computing forces there to be an organization that kind of has to Ste the data ideally you can be in a world where you can just as an individual or an organization create or publish data and once you've published it that that's it like that's that's your the end of your

relationship with with the data or with a with a community and if people want to keep it around they can pay for it and they can pay kind of like a like a pool of resources can come together around against that data set so think of now building a sort of public record of really important data that that should be kept around by a lot of people and this could be different kinds of data sets or it could be all one big kind of public record you can now build data a data common that's really a common where people are contributing resources to keep it around by individually paying the the people that are actually kind of storing that data like the the miners and so on without having to go through a kind of an intermediary stored that that sort of is on the hook for maintaining

maintaining this data set so this a really important distinction because it means that you can have content address data that's on the network that nobody owns that anybody can use and like that's that's something that doesn't really exist today because most data has a URL and a URL means a domain and a domain means an authority and an authority means an entity a legally recognizable entity sort of owns the the data and and creating an Avenue for exabytes of data to be uh you know fully in the public domain and fully not owned by anybody like that that's something that I think wasn't really possible before and it's now possible today how people will use this uh uh will or how people what kind of data comments will

exist and what time scale we'll see like it always takes a a while to kind of move and rehome rehome data but that's one of the kind of like interesting and and useful useful things kind of more more midterm and long-term we really hope that you know first we can have a pretty significant an impact in in Shifting the the kind of like rights that people expect out of the Computing infrastructure so that means it should be possible to build applications where the data that you add to the network is really under controll by you and seen by you and and decrypted by the people that you choose and you don't have to worry about again developers or other parties uh spying on it uh but where you can sort of expect that most applications you use follow this Paradigm and today

that par Paradigm is not kind of exists here and there but it's a very small minority and a big part of the reason is the again kind of the that advertising model and and kind of like the current model of how data gets stored and so in the medium and long term it's going to take many years for us to get to this because there's all kinds of important devx improvements to be made and kind of markets to to win in and all that kind of stuff but uh if we can like have a significant impact into upgrading our Computing infrastructure such that most users in the world can sort of expect that when they use an application and they they type into their phone that the only people that are looking at that message are themselves and the people they intend to send that message

to or share that photo with or whatever like that would be a very important kind of contribution to the world but again it's like turns out to be incredibly difficult to achieve this and it's a lot about infrastructure a lot about applications and it's going to take a long time but you know the first step is making it possible sort of there now now winning in in all the important markets that's kind of like a longer longer time Horizon kind of question and then there's all kinds of like important use cases that uh like like we mentioned before like having programs that can hire storage for themselves and start that's kind of like a a very Green Field Avenue where we we really haven't seen where people are going to build with this kind of stuff but you can start thinking of full not just small contracts in kind of

today on ethereum and things like that but fully fledged applications that are entirely managed by Dows or aren't even managed by Dows with people they're just kind of just entirely programs or like small AIS that are running these things so imagine if decentralized was not run or maintained by humans but it was just kind of like a a protocol and a system that kind of had its own kind of algorithms for deciding when to store data and what to store where and all that kind of stuff and that you could sort of design maybe the rules of the protocol but then it becomes an important infrastructure layer and then you don't have to like you know you don't have to trust humans again to to maintain their their um the culture of the system in a certain way you can you can really turn into protocol kind of

like IP and require that the rules function in a certain way you know some of that kind of becomes possible if you can enable programs to hire vast amounts of storage on their own and like you know that's the sort of like what in the long term I think we can we can achieve I mean you can do it right now in smaller scales but it's going to require you to really kind of hit that scale that source of scales and so on is going to require a lot of bridges to other applications and and so on so I think like that's going to be a bunch of use cases that we can't really predict at the moment but you can maybe see glimpses of we kind of theorized many different kinds of applications that uh you might build that would be kind of self repc in some way or would hire

storage in their on their own and whatnot and it seems like a pretty exciting exciting field but this is the kind of stuff that once you build it you then discover all kinds of things that people are now doing with it that you then may not have expected good and bad it doesn't end here there's more to this conversation and you can hear it on epicenter premium as a premium subscriber you'll get access to a private RSS feed where you can hear the interview debrief and get enhanced features like like full episode transcripts and chapters which allow you to easily skip to specific sections of the interview you'll also get exclusive access to Roundtable conversations with epicenter hosts and bonus content we put out from time to time go to premium.

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