Juan Benet: Protocol Labs – IPFS, Filecoin and the Vision for a Decentralized Web (Part 2 of 2) #368

Transcript

[Music] hi I'm Ze 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 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 and if you're new to the podcast be sure to subscribe on Apple podcasts Spotify or wherever you listen today our guest is Juan Benet and this

is part two of our two-part interview with Juan so if you haven't heard part one I would definitely recommend you go back to last week's episode that's episode 367 to get the full conversation part one focused on ipfs and part two is focused in On fcoin and Here Brian and Federica went deep with Juan into the intricacies and complexities of that project so of course they discussed the high level and long-term vision of the project the technical underpinnings of how filecoin works the role and influence of miners on the protocol its proximity to the ethereum project and how it's in been inspired by the ethereum project and its structure how it was designed and the complexities of Designing systems at this scale the filecoin Foundation projects and use

cases being built on filecoin and so much more I really enjoyed this conversation I think Juan is such a thoughtful thinker in the space and getting an update on this project which we had first talked about 5 years ago was definitely due what's great is to learn about the ecosystem that is forming around this technology stack so Juan talks about an ecosystem of investors that are interested in projects that are built on F coin and I'm really looking forward to the day where the filecoin ipfs stack is a viable alternative to the azur and aws's and Googles of the world for building production apps and given how things are evolving I don't think that that future is as far off as we think it might be anyway if you're building websites today

you're probably using one of the big cloud providers and there's a good chance you're using Wordpress I mean it powers like 80% of the websites on the internet I've built a lot of Wordpress websites and one of the most frustrating things has always been devops well thankfully the folks over at cpanel have built the WordPress toolkit for cpanel which 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 but if you want to learn more right now you can go to epicenter.bg ations about algorand if you want to learn more about that you can go to

alar.com epicenter but I'll tell you more later on for now here's our conversation with Juan Benet now let's talk about fcoin fcoin is is the incentive layer that kind of brings it all together what happens under the hood say I am someone who wants to um retrieve some content that I know is somewhere out there so basically what would happen whom would I pay who incentive devised by what what are the crypto economics going on here yeah I got it yeah so so basically you're saying hey like let's walk through kind of like the the life cycle of data and kind of like follow it and and and so on uh yeah so maybe let's start with I'll describe three so first let's think about adding capacity to the network then adding storage so you know a client

hiring uh hiring a minor to add some data and then the third is a another client kind of retrieving some data that exists there so in the first case U of A minor that has sort to provide and it walks up to the network and pledges certain amount of sectors and and a pledge is a commitment to the network that you're going to store a certain amount of you're going to add a certain amount of capacity and you're going to produce some proofs for that capacity and you also have to kind of because this is related to consensus you have to have something at stake here you have to there's certain conditions in which there might be certain kinds of attacks you could play uh so so that includes kind of a a deposit of of file coin so a miner adds storage to the network so

adds some actual capacity then gets a random seed from the network to store uh some data and kind of or to produce a a a to kind of seal a what is right now an empty sector Source it's just you know capacity uh and this is a you know kind of a sector today is 32 gigabytes and then you know there'll be kind of variable size sectors in the future and whatnot you know a miner might walk in with say a terabyte or something like that you you divide that terabyte into you know 32 gigabyte segments uh and you now you know seal all of these segments and the sealing process in involves doing a proof of replication that you actually have that capacity to provide to the network and as a minor you kind of have now signed up with the network to for this this capacity in addition

the minor kind of sets a an Ask price which is how much their storage is going to uh go for uh when clients kind of are going to hire that storage uh what it'll go for right now there's sort of a global ask price so a minor most of the use cases miners kind of have one price and that it in the future we anticipate we we want to have a a flexible and fluid ask model where miners can have can give you many different kind of prices for different tiers of storage and all that kind of stuff um but for now sort of like a very simple one price for for all the storage so that point kind of the minor has you know committed to the network to to sort of this and now other parties can can view it so now Along Comes a user a client and says okay great like I want to store uh this

data and so the data you know they can just add it with various different kinds of tools so they can first add it to ipfs and get a a hash or they can add it with a filecoin with like the Lotus client which is kind of like the one of the main FAL implementations or a bunch of other tools that that speak these protocols like textile powergate or slate which is a consumer oriented application there's a bunch of different kinds of things and now that the stor has been added you can now hire you can now kind of create a deal to hire a minor to back this back this back up this data and that deal is sort of a a relationship between a client and a a single client and a single minor and a single piece of data so it's kind of like the the unit of of agreement and as

a as a client you probably want to do this with multiple minors because you want to replicate your data with multiple different parties and uh and so you now send your data over to you know you find these miners in the network by you can do this a number of ways you can either enumerate them from the blockchain you can find them in a block Explorer there's a bunch of tools that can show you um what Miners and what as prices they have and so you select which minor you want and you could be maybe price sensitive but you might also take into account other important details about the minor so for example their kind of like reliability there's different kind of kinds of features about the minor that get tracked by the blockchain and can sort of give you a score right now there's there's no emerging score that

you know everybody's using yet but you could bu build these kind of like credit rating style uh numbers for minor so they become kind of like a very simple way of selecting miners uh but you know client right now chooses a minor and sends their data over to the sour provider once the sour provider receives it they the deal is uh completed and the minor publishes the deal into the network there's a bunch of operations that happen underneath the hood uh in order to like actually make that make that work there's kind of some preparation of the data that has to happen in order to make it easy to prove uh and so on and definitely the different sizes of the data really matter right so if you're sending a little bit of data say a few megabyte you know a few kilobytes or megabytes that's going to be that kind of

distribution is very different than if you're sending gigabytes or terabytes and so for example in the smaller scales that just you know it's a very simple protocol where right away you know can just send send the data over and make the deal and whatnot as a user this is completely hidden from you you know the client and the minor are doing this the software is doing this under under the hood but the users themselves don't have to be exposed to all of this going on under the hood it's kind of like a like a Bitcoin transaction or an ethereum transaction there's a lot going on happening under the hood for a transaction to like move to a certain place get validated executed and whatnot but all of this kind of hidden from from the actual users and but by default this is not encrypted right the

data that it's up to the clients to to decide on the encryption structure so so by default the data sort of gets pseudo encrypted is it's not encrypted in a in the we don't call it encryption because that implies a uh that it is hidden from the world there's a lot of data that's public and so you you need to allow people to to store data that that is in the clear so that public data can be can be used but most you know power gate and other and other tools and so on just encrypt all the data ahead of time so you know if you're storing an application data and so on you encrypt it first and then you you send it to the to the world think about it as like the client software gives the minor what they want the world to see and so if you want the world to see a public data set

then you then you should give it the clear if you want them to have a uh an encrypted thing you can do that we we've also CH thought about moving to a world where the data itself anyway is stored in model analogous to encryption it's not exactly encryption but it's analogous to it and the the data itself is dispersed and so on and it's a that it's provable and what not but uh We've considered kind of doing public data sets by by using either convergent encryption or or encryption where like the public key is like you know sorry the encryption key is is just zeros or something like that but it doesn't necessarily benefit I think it's it becomes very useful to be very clear about where when there's encryption and when there isn't and so so far like that's that's been the the structure that we've we followed because there is

this important utility of being able to have these public publicly viewable data sets but yeah the tooling itself you know theault to you know if you're adding data you know user oriented tooling just defaults you're encrypting all of it uh but but yeah now that you've given the data to to the minor like they publish a deal into the network and the miners now schedules that deal and that data to be sealed into a sector and and uh the there's a scheduling piece here because when you hire a minor you're hiring for them you know for some amount of data and they have to pack that into a sector and a sector has a fixed size right so they kind of miners collect a bunch of pieces from a lot of parties and then they take all of that assemble it into a sector and seal it all together so you know think of it kind of like the mental

model is think of a large storage container so think of like a like a normal you know one of those shipping containers that you see on like ships and so on and so your your stuff could be the whole container or it could be smaller than that and uh or if you have bigger stuff then it gets like partitioned off into multiple multiple search containers and yeah definitely if you if you for example want to send larger amounts of data if you want to send terabytes or pedabytes then sending it over the Internet is probably a bad idea because it'll take you a very very long time uh and instead at that point you want to if if you are at that scale what people end up doing is you know contact the minor uh and you figure out which miners you want to go for and you

contact them and you initiate a deal but you now have to ship them the data physically and that means like you send out send them a drive and then they get the drive they verify that they actually got the data and they um they plug it in and this a very important piece because the you know vast amounts of data in the world are moved around this way they're not moved around over the Internet it it's moved entirely off the internet through physical media medium uh so packaging uh is one of the main main Avenues but many large clouds also provide the support where they'll they'll you know send you know I think like Amazon does this where they they can you can schedule a truck to come to your business and like get a bunch of drives and send them to Glacier

right it's like you have to fill that use case once you hit exabytes of storage and like the large amounts of data you you have to allow people to have this offline first oriented way of moving around data which which is really cool because it means that you can not only move large amounts of data but it means you can you can start moving things in in ways that are like less expected by parties kind of trying to predictive predictively figure out all the parties that have whenever you don't rely on Crossing certain borders on the Internet it's kind of like a really useful useful feature because it also means you can be for example partition tolerant right so this is isn't the case today because Fon has one blockchain um and you can think of it as kind of like one single singular region but in the future as scalable chains arrive and

this is kind of where Falin is headed being able to split split into different consensus regions that map to different regions of geographically so that you can be partition tolerant so that you can continue to make deals and serve stuff and so on while while you're partitioned from the rest of the world because partitions in the internet are pretty frequent so they already you know if if your data stored in a minor and and you can still talk to them doesn't matter that you can't talk to the rest of the network you can still get your data from the minor um that's an entirely offchain oriented transaction yeah so let's let's say I I have a bunch of dat and uh I you know fed is the minor and I've now shipped her you know some big pile of data and now basically be you know I mean some level the the thing you describing right

there is actually this kind of you know direct transaction or like direct connection right between me who wants to store the data and you know her who's the minor so filecoin what does it add in this scenario is it is it basically that she has to put up some collateral and then the Fon Network enforces that she actually does store it in the long run and then also that there's this kind of like guarantee that you know other people can retrieve the data and again she has to kind of like guarantee that level of service exactly yeah so all what you described and those are you know really critical components because uh you know today people trust the big clouds because of that reputation and and because you can trust them to continue

storing your data right many smaller think of it kind of like the hotel and Airbnb world where before rbnb came on you totally could go and stay in random people's houses but the idea that you could like how do you find them how do you trust them where's the guarantee that they're you're actually going to be able to you're actually going to have a place when you get there and people are going to receive you and you you don't have good pictures of places or uh you know how how do you guarantee good behavior that like they aren't going to you know steal yourself in the middle of the night or something uh all of that before BNB was really hard to to establish um it definitely happened right like there were a lot of people traveling around this way but it was a way smaller amount of of parties and there was a lot more risk to it so when

Airbnb came in and created a Marketplace that standardized the entire flow and standardized what it meant to be on the supply side and standardize what it meant to be on the on the demand side and build a bunch of tooling to add some amount of reputation systems to it and some amount of verifiability around the pictures and and whatnot it just sort of cleaned up the entire market and and and greatly expanded its potential suddenly tons of places uh could be online right so if you have a bunch of storage and you want to kind of sell it online how how do you go about doing that similar to you know if you have a spare room how do you go about selling a night in that room without a Marketplace and so that's you know one of the really critical components is you need a Marketplace to standardized and create a protocol for how um all of

these interactions are supposed to happen and you solve a bunch of hard problems in that kind of really add a lot of value like you know the guaranteeing that the storage is going to be there in the long term like that's a really critical component in any kind of storage relationship having a a network that's large enough to accommodate a large use right so if if it was you know if you were kind of browsing around individual websites and you know you hear about somebody having like 10 terabytes or like you know one PAB right like well should I store my data with this this group or should I just go to Amazon that's a very simple choice but if you insert set s of dealing with one large Network and you can sort of expect the same kind of quality of service across it or you know some amount of variability between it

between it but you have a standardized protocol for it then you're totally able to to trust a lot of service providers that can come into that to that marketplace right so it's a it's really about kind of providing a way for the vast amount of Supply out there to come together and aggregate into one Marketplace that then clients can do business with 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

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WordPress today I would really encourage you to check this out because it'll make your life so much easier to learn more about the WordPress toolkit for cpanel and be informed when it comes out go to epicenter.com support of the podcast so the Airbnb system kind of evolved gradually right so basically they have a customer support hotline and if something goes wrong you call them and basically worst case they give you your money back and you go look for you know a physical Hotel wherever you're stranded so in a way designing a decentralized network is fundamentally different in that it's kind of important to get parameters right from the get-go and there's a lot of parameters I mean pertaining to you know the the staking

and the slashing and you know liveness guarantees and so on how did you go about designing those economics great question so one part is just figuring out what mechanisms do you need and a lot of that is thinking about the the interactions and the flows between parties and what are the value flows that are happening what guarantees you need to establish think through many many kinds of layers of a of potential attacks that might be possible what are the assumptions all over the place you want to minimize any kind of trust and make the transactions themselves verifiable and so that map to things like producing proofs of replication so that you can you can guarantee that the storage is actually there and it map through things like an ongoing proof of

SpaceTime that you where you can verify that the stuff is Not only was there initially but continues to be there uh over time and in map to mechanisms like what are the Fe structures and the pun Ms that need to be the fees and punishments for bad behavior in the network right so if a minor loses data or or things like that and one part of this was designing first you think about all these value flows you think about the mechanisms then you start thinking about what are the possible fee not only fee structures but value flow some things have to be proportional in certain ways some things have to be um at least a certain amount some things have to be markets and kind of set by various different parties together certain things have to be estimators on network activity so there's a there's really a very large

amount of of space here and and a ton of parameters the way we went know about this is a large combination of of analysis on individual mechanisms themselves and then couplings of mechanisms and you know and so on further plus then a whole crypto economics effort to build using both simulation and and kind of like larger scale analysis Frameworks for figuring out the fee structures that would yield good results meaning one part of this is thinking deeply through the problems and coming up with actual analytical Expressions that tell you what the V structure space has to be so you figure out all the constraints between these systems systems of of of

components and mechanisms and you kind of narrow down the space of possibility so that gives you some kind of operating range but that doesn't guarantee that it's going to work it just kind of gives you some sense of what the constraints have to be uh from there some amount is also putting it into engineering and and development and actually running it live so uh we did we did a number of large scale Network tests with uh Min miners to figure out what kind of operating parameters were workable and a number of these things uh you know theory is one thing practice is something very different uh and and you know you learn a lot by actually putting things directly in use but you know one big area of this was a large simulation Endeavor that we that we undertook to figure out what a bunch of the different mechanism parameters have to be in order

to yield yield good results and this is kind of a very large effort with with a lot of people uh both uh within and outside of PL so this is this includes various different teams within PL but also a number of external collaborators in uh academic environments and and um a really awesome group called block science who been super super helpful in building a lot of the doing some of the simulation and and Analysis and you know number of research groups that we collaborate with for many years on different parts of the protocol and so you end up with like a a large mechanism design space and a bunch of parameters that you then have to make sure play nice and this is probably one of the biggest hurdles for not just for Falin but for the entire web 3 space it is extremely difficult to build these kinds of larger scale systems that do

something more complex because the state space blows up exponentially and and kind of like what the what the parameter space that you have to search through really becomes very very large and a lot of it is you can easily end up with mechanisms that are that are too fragile where maybe the operating range that you have is actually quite small but um some other mechanism couples with it in a weird way and it's kind of like causes this this space to oscillate in a weird way and maybe kind of like actually breaks things so so it part of the part of the output is like once you do a bunch of this analysis and simulation you end up realizing that some mechanisms actually have to change so not only do you not only is about parameter setting sometimes you end up CH having to change mechanisms to arrive at a much better more stable

construction because simulation just showed you both both either sometimes just directly an analysis or simulation shows you that this is actually like a bad system design because it is too too likely to like you know most of the cases that you check are are failures or uh it it is maybe it is not um maybe it's kind of fragile I don't know if you're familiar with kind of like the fragility versus anti fragility way of analyzing systems where some systems are fragile once you kind of push them in certain ways they they will tend to and and push them out of their sort of normal comfort zone they'll they'll um they'll tend to break other systems kind of respond uh more naturally to kind of those stresses and kind of recover from those stresses better so that that kind

of lens of fragility versus antifragility you can you can apply to this and and in your analysis simulation you'll you'll be able to kind of distinguish what which mechanisms tend to be fragile and and kind of remove them because fragile mechanisms will lead to um I talk about vors and will lead to you know they might work for now but once somebody changes something then you might get into a bad state or actually you think it it work but there's an embedded hidden assumption somewhere that you never expected and suddenly that actually doesn't work so it's a highly complex Endeavor to build an economy like this uh I mean I think something like the like ethereum is similar in that when you think about all of the different mechanisms that are at play and the gas structure and so on in and in ethereum's case a lot of this

kind of evolved over time and parameters were set and improved upon over many months and that kind of scaled with usage and even kind of like the gas model is is kind of going into a into a a major reworking with you know EIP 15 I think it's 1559 and that you know in ethereum's case ethereum was able to ship in it with a with a much smaller amount of usage and then over time scale uh we weren't we unfortunately did not have that luxury like right away because we're kind of now in 20 is supposed to in in 2015 there's a lot more attention in in the space as a whole and in in applications like pathin so therefore just from day one we're going to get a much larger scale of usage so we we had to get a lot more right from the get-go which was definitely a harder larger bar

but it made it you know we we now ended up with a much more robust thing one of the cool things is like we actually shipped Shi EIP 15559 like that's the gas model that we use uh and it actually works really well it just leads to certain kind of really fast Bas fee spikes that you know Food For Thought for anybody working on this area of gas modeling and so on really really good structure but uh leads to kind of like some spikes that make some people really unhappy and it's easy to kind of run up the Bas fee so we are getting a lot of data I think will be helpful for the ethereum community as well but anyway there's like a large complex space one of our outputs on on this is that this is an area where uh a lot of tools need to be made so we had to build a bunch of

internal tooling to you know all kinds of tools to analyze things in parts or as a whole system and kind of like simulation Frameworks to be able to model this kind of economic system and this is an area where we definitely want to go back to this and and think about what kind of tooling would be really broadly usable by a large number of of groups to to really kind of you know kind of analyzing in depth how most of these economics mechanisms should work but also what what's more important than analysis I think is helping generate them so I think this is where this this whole web3 world is at a at a juncture similar to where um I think chip manufacturing was when it transitioned

from kind of like human design to computer designed chips where the constraint space got so big and and the and the the difficulty problem kind of scaled to the point where people needed to write soft where to do all of the chip layout and um and solve a bunch of problems that previously you know they were they expected humans to solve but now computers have to solve just because of the magnitude I think we're definitely well in that space where now most crypto economies that are are going to see major usage really should be should have mechanisms that are designed and checked in great part by by programs and the tooling is just not there and does not exist for any of us and that is a huge area of of improvement that I think if we had really robust tooling we could shave months to years off of the

development of every major project out there and all of the scalability improvements that are going to come in to a lot of the projects that are out there now so it's a kind of a really open you know if any listener out there is is uh interested in these kinds of topics and has been looking for a project or something like that I think building really really good tooling for protocol designers here is greatly needed and that's something that we are kind of exploring as well as to you know if we were kind of doing this from scratch what are the kinds of tools that we would have wanted to have and what are the kinds of tools that we want for know future versions of filecoin and and other protocols and and whatnot um and how might we we build those so either somebody else will go out there and build this or or will have to so ideally

somebody else will do it and we won't have to do it because then we can just use your thing and that would be amazing so please do that otherwise uh we'll we'll probably end up building something here uh at some point because there's a lot of utility to be had in in making it way easier to to build these systems we we're kind of hitting the limit of what teams of humans can do it's just way too complex and I think today you can probably probably the attack space on contracts on ethereum is so big that uh there are probably tons of exploits at the moment that are possible because of the combinations of contracts that are not explored because we just don't have the tools to explore them meaning the the again the combinatory explotion is so big that humans can't be expected to

figure this out and and so now we really need kind of systems to help us find those and close those vulnerabilities before somebody kind of builds this tooling for for bad uh and then kind of you know exploits it but that would still mean that basically you would have to specify the intended Behavior right so basically kind of like uh in formal verification where you kind of have to specify what you expect the business logic of the thing to be and building tooling for how we think about expected Behavior I mean basically it's it's kind of like recursive problem no uh yes and no in that today when people go on design protocols they usually do it in their heads and on maybe paper and they kind of write on a notebook and uh you know

then later they'll go and transcribe that into a GitHub issue and we'll or in some other markdown document and uh and you'll get a bunch of kind of paper protocol stuff and then at some point uh people will after many rounds of iteration and and review people will then turn that and start writing it into some implementation sometimes it's prototypes that test the validity of something before you you do any kind of like hard engineering work for the real kind of production use many times it's just you know go straight to the production use and like start building it into the main client which you know that's going to be way slow probably way slower but because you know you're going to find protocal problems in and pay the big cost of putting it into the main thing and then after all of that you know

hopefully you've gone through enough rans of analysis in the in the paper stages and if you're dealing with economics enough rant of you know kind of larger scale framework analysis and simulation to to really know that the mechanisms are right and then you're going to like put it into production and use it and then hope for the best and and like you know over time kind of find problems and fix them and that's kind of like the state of the industry and I think that uh most of these protols are big enough that you have dozens to hundreds of people working on them and maintaining the protocol space in one head is just not a thing you can do anymore so what I'm kind of talking about is you need people to start working in software from the get-go you need people to when they're designing the protocol at the very

beginning you can greatly reduce the iteration Cycles by doing very kind of straightforward modeling work that will kind of show that some mechanism is just not tractable or kind of won't fit with some other components or would um will not kind of function so so it is something close to formal verification or kind of like the you know t plus style form of verification or something like that but but I think it's it's it's got to be just dramatically easier I think most formal verification languages and systems are way too complex for this use case this has to be as simple as writing an expression in kind of observable or something like that where you have a a kind of full system designed somewhere and you're designing parts of the protocol and it's a very

kind of individual researcher oriented and individual developer oriented tool that enables you to kind of add components to the protocol but but it's not just one protocol it's it's rather like you you can think of a bunch of different versions possible versions of the protocol with different kind of mechanisms and you can test against all of these different combinations and you can think through which ones end up yielding better results and if you can kind of couple that with simulation and kind of model checking across the the whole thing then you can greatly in the speed of of building something as complex as ethereum and vcoin and so on and and I think right now you know kind of back in the day the software industry face a similar C transition between writing software and tests versus the entire continuous integration system

that we have now so today you write code and you can not only write tests and unit test for you're you're part of the application and whatnot and kind of larger integration tests but it is in Industry Norm that all of that is going to get tested through a very wide battery of tests across many different kind of infrastructures before it gets deployed and and once it passes all of these uh performance requirements then it will actually kind of ship right so if you've seen kind of the uh dashboard performance dashboards for Chrome or Firefox that'll give you a sense of every single line of code gets tested across a a really gargantuan amount of tests that tests all kinds of things and if you introduce accidentally a you know performance hits somewhere everyone will

know like you'll see like all kinds of charts show you that this is this is going bad and software has moved to this kind of design space and Engineering space because that was a way to make the development of these kinds of large infrastructure projects so much faster right so something like Chrome or Firefox has hundreds of people developing on it you can't do that in without that kind of tooling and that kind of testing infrastructure in place so that's what I think is necessary for these protocols going forward we need that kind of the analogous version of that kind of testing infrastructure which is not just the software at this point it's really the mechanism design has to be included in it because there's just way too much for individual researchers to be able to handle the the larger complexity and and if you think that you know many ethereum developers out there um and I'm saying

ethereum developers because I think this is kind of like the the kind of like largest smart contract platform out there with widest use um but this probably applies to most blockchains many developers out there uh kind of approach writing a contract simply and they just kind of you know if they're if they're they write their solidity contract and then they think about how what explo there might be in that one and there's a bunch of tooling that helps you think about how to improve it and so on and maybe check some important cases you know few groups actually think through what are all the other mechanisms available to an ethereum contract what other ethereum contracts are out there and how is my contract going to get exploited by one of those out there right so on my accidentally creating a thing where somebody with flash loan capabilities is going to destroy the entire mechanism I just

built or or not right and hey today is Flash loans tomorrow it's like some other completely different thing and so you need a you need a whole software cicd type version thing but for the entire mechanism design space our friends over at algorand are starting an office hour Series so every week or two alaran will bring together their team partners and Community together for a live discussion intended to provide you with all the answers and resources you need towards building useful meaningful blockchain applications by joining office hours you'll learn how to get started with command line tools and use the SDK and rest apis to help you build applications for use cases like crowdfunding asset tokenization Supply Chain management and gaming applications each office hour will start with a theme for example

smart contracts or writing contracts in Python followed by an open Q&A and chat so if you're building on a blockchain call that has unfeasibly high or unpredictable transaction fees and doesn't provide you the speed you need or if you work at a large Enterprise or financial institution and are interested in learning how to build applications that can integrate with your current 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 enter for developer resources and information about their next office hours we'd like to thank aland for their support of the podcast I mean the the thing that like this topic where it really struck me was that well this's this book called I mean book it's it's kind of like a compilation of

satoshi's writing I think it's called The Book of Satoshi so some guy went through you know all of the old Bitcoin talk and like all of the kind of things Satoshi had written and kind of like organized it compile it and it's really cool to read and one of the things that really struck me when I was reading the thing was that you know Satoshi as far as We Know right he didn't anticipate like as6 and he didn't anticipate mining pools and you know Bitcoin is such a simple economic design you can can hardly make a simple economic design for like a cryptocurrency and then even with such a simple design it seems like there was these you know major unintended consequences that have kind of worked out fine but you know they seem to not have been predictable or you know you

know in retrospec if we can see yeah of course this was going to happen but like so if then if you think of like more complex systems like you know pretty much most cryptocurrency since then and you know especially things like filecoin but you know even ethereum right where you have like different pricing for up codes every proof of stake thing yeah I I think you're totally right right this is such a hard problem and such an important problem to get right and you know probably also you're going to have to have some you know some level of of ability to respond actually that's the question I I want to bring up here briefly is how does governance work in in the filecoin network yeah great question so maybe I'll address the kind of like a because of the flow of the conversation I'll address the smaller case of you know how

do you respond to problems and then kind of from the broader governance question so audio respond to problems is a really key thing for blockchains and blockchains that don't address this directly and try to have a lot of value will not end well in our case the Falcon Community has sort of formed a set of so first of all there's the the parties running the network are uh there's a lot of miners that are maintaining the the blockchain and we actually have a really good distribution of power so many other blockchains are super centralized and in our case we have a much better kind of distribution overall uh with the power than than many other networks out there so there's a lot more kind of miners in the that contribute to say half the power or 75% of the power then in a lot of lot of other systems that's one

important thing because it prevents many kinds of attacks being exploited very quickly you know there's a number of network operators that are that have you know number of communication channels set up um and ready for uh for problems and there's a number of developers both you across various different organizations and companies that are pretty familiar with you know there's four implementations there's one main one that that most people uh run today but there's a few others that are joining very soon and a lot of those Developers kind of in the weeds of a lot of this plus there's a few other miners that have development shops associated with them so there's a number of developers that those miners have as well there's kind of like this group of oper Network operators and this group of developers and there's organizations that have set up on Call rotations for The Operators and the developers to be

able to address problems should they emerge so if there's kind of some problem and it requires addressing very quickly then then we can figure out what the problem is as a as a community describe what the patch needs to be discuss it on GitHub whether it is fully publicly if it's not kind of an an exploit that's going to if it's kind of like a natural problem or a well-known thing or privately if it's a a thing where it's there kind of an exploit that's potentially wor you know kind of exploit worthy or something like that and then kind of arrive at what a potential patch might look like and number of people look at it and then kind of gets agreed upon and then shipped out in in a release and then that's a release of the code and then at that point kind of network operators in number of the miners look at that

release download the code upgrade their own set you know if they agree with it they um they download the code upgrade and and kind of go from there and there are kind of upgrades that are just software only and then there are uh chain upgrades so chain upgrades require kind of a state transition and that state transitions are slower unfortunately and harder we had it as a requirement for for uh Space Race to go through a number of really hard State transitions in very shortterm Cycles to kind of help bootstrap the community uh activity around this this kind of work so that the community kind of got used to making important chain State upgrades quickly because if some major problem uh emerges you need the community to be able to respond to that kind of stuff

fast and you know in the normal setting of you know Cloud infrastructure where there's one company running things or maybe two or something like that coordination there is can be could be faster you know in in a world with many other stakeholders it could be slower in our case we think that we're responding to things as fast if not faster than um than other other kind of more you know traditionally centralized systems because we've taken on the work of of thinking about this as a goal for the network and many Miners and developers are aligned against that problem and we have kind of Emergency Response protocols that we've set them in place for for this uh you know thankfully we haven't had to deal with anything anything major I mean knock and wood and all that kind of stuff many many other networks uh even by our age had already

kind of encountered a bunch of problems uh we've had a number of important improvements and changes that need to happen quickly but nothing kind of super major we will eventually right so every every blockchain goes through very large uh kind of destabilizing hard problems you know ethereum had many there's so many blockchains that that encountered these Ty of problems it's just the nature of software and then nature of these these systems so the the best thing is like a lot of preventative measures plus a lot of kind of fast response measures to be able to kind of solve the solve the problem so it's kind of like the how does the path Network as a community respond to these these kinds of issues and um and you know it's it's been really awesome to see the the response in general from many different groups like individual I'm thinking of

like individual minors and individual developers in different communities that have helped find bugs or helped uh come up with patches or submitted things and ship releases and so on broader question of how does governance work um that's a we here we borrowed a ton from ethereum because we reviewed a lot of different systems and a lot of chains and and their approaches I mean we're super close to in general a lot of our community is shared with the etherum community we sort of feel very tightly knit and and and collaborate a lot but we sort of saw a really pragmatic feel and and and really kind of successful pragmatic structure to the ethereum government Le structure where you it's kind of RFC inspired so you have like the normal eips and so on and you have kind of like this you know strong idea of rough consensus and running code and

you have good principles set in with the community that you are going to improve things and you are going to improve implementations uh pretty frequently and quickly and you are going to come up with a bunch of standards and and so on and so we kind of borrowed a lot from that uh and and so we saw it as a really good place to mirror a lot of like the really good good lessons and so we we borrowed the Improvement proposal structure which again kind of comes from Bitcoin and bitn as well and and standard RFC style inspired thing so there are fcoin Improvement proposals and there say you know anybody can submit a fcoin Improvement proposal and then there's you know a set of implementations and implementers that review those proposals and kind of are in charge of deciding whether to implement them into their

implementations but that that isn't doesn't necessarily mean a decision of like they decide that an important change needs to land it's more of that's more of a leaving it up to the community thing because you have the standard structure that happens in all blockchains where developers might say x but if miners don't agree then it doesn't matter people are going to are going to run something else and so you have that natural governance structure that that emerges where you have like these two groups of parties groups of developers and groups of miners that have to sort of it's kind of like a bamal system where like both parties have to both groups have to agree with a change before it it lands so fips tend to be discussed a lot but by Miners and developers and so on often this starts in slack there's like a fon Community

slack and people end up discussing various different Avenues of of a problem uh and there's all kinds of discussion threads that happen there then from there it translates into a GitHub FIP and once it's in a FIP uh people will then go and discuss it there and then from there it'll get discussed in we have kind of a a weekly developer conversation that kind of goes through those fips and talks about which ones are slated for or implementation and not and and whatnot and then from there it gets scheduled into releases and then from there minor kind of you know voice you know by that point if if if anybody if any large group of Miners and so on don't want to change we have already been voice and it likely isn't going to get implemented because implementors are not going to start implementing something if it's not going to get

accepted and so you have like this very kind of like rough consensus and running code feel to the whole thing it is not very formalized intentionally and we thought that that was like a very good decision from ethereum relative to a lot of other groups because it made it very easy for urgent things to happen quickly that are kind of like non-controversial and and it gave the community a lot of voice for things that are important and should be taken slower and so so that's kind of like an important kind of mapping that we thought was useful and valuable now in the long term we do think that unchain governance systems are really valuable and really interesting and fcoin May end up with some onchain governance structures in the future the community in general is

pretty interested in these kinds of things but we haven't we didn't want to kind of couple all of that risk as well into an already kind of like highly complex system and so we'll once some of these hunching governance systems get more fleshed out and tested and and work out then the Falcon Community will probably you know it'sit valuable toop one it well there's also a foundation uh there the Falon Foundation uh which is taking on a lot of programs in the community um and will help Steward the long-term there's a lot of things that you need a kind of like entity uh in the kind of normal human world to to do and and to help Steward in in a blockchain uh environment and that's what the

foundation is going to do long term and so for cabs is transitioning a bunch of programs over to to the foundation to to run there the foundation is planning a bunch of other things uh and that are really interesting and really cool and really exciting and B as and ntity have been kind of given some talks lately and we'll luckily have a much larger um voice in in the coming coming weeks by the way highly recommend you you meet those folks uh really brilliant uh people involved with with um with the foundation a number number of avenues both they have there like really sell amazing Advisory board that has a ton of amazing people in in uh within crypto and in Internet civil liberties space like a number of people from efff and also a uh you highly recommend Marta

belter is like one of the main people that kind of took on building the the plat Foundation howly recommend chatting with her uh and then there's a number of operators that are kind of like running the the foundation so they'll kind of help build out a number of important programs and help steer some of the kind of development groups and committees and whatnot but you know kind of a lot of the principles go back to you kind of rough consensus in running code and and kind of like the will of what is like the will of the community so you can probably expect a lot of the standard tooling that emerges with systems like this like polling tools and and whatnot like being able to pull miners by minor power or by um certainly toking Holdings that are useful developers and like one of the things we want to do is be able to pull application developers so if you

have a bunch of application developers and hearing what they have to say is really really key and so we we've kind of sketched out some pulling tools that have like these different constituencies and so you can kind of get a sense of people think about certain kinds of community decisions and whatnot but you know it's kind of early days a lot of this still happening in slack and GitHub and and kind of like the normal channels over time as as the network gets bigger and a lot more happens with it will'll kind of bring in a lot of the the tooling and systems that that other other groups have so you were talking about the application developers and I think this is one of the things that I would really still like to talk about so um there's actually a number of projects building on top of fcoin can you talk about those

for a bit yeah totally and so there's a a a lot of different groups and they're coming from you know some groups are you know kind of came to fcoin from ipfs and and a number of them are kind of newly newly jumping into fcoin I'll maybe mention so maybe say there's a kind of like set of larger developers that have kind of existing applications that are now starting to use fcoin uh and then there's a whole wave of new developers that are building on pcin as like their totally new applications and think that's also really exciting so maybe I'll I'll talk a little bit about both so in one end of the spectrum there's you know kind of uh think of actually there's one use case which I think is super compelling and and and really

important is one of our you know my favorite uh application applications to ppcoin uh this is a a an application called Starling and Starling is a system and framework for preserving really important and valuable cultural heritage data and so that means there are some extremely important data sets out there for that have extremely important cultural value to groups of people where you really want to make sure that data stays around and you want to make that verifiable and you want you want to be able to verify that that data is being kept around you want to verify how many there are a lot of copies around the world that data is not going to get lost and you also want to verify

that that data has not been tampered with over time it's extremely critical that that data has not been tampered over time and some of the kind of some of this kind of data is you know kind of important archives of documents and media and testimonials of important conflicts in history and so there's a the the stting group uh has been working with number of other groups including the the sh foundation and a number of other you know Stanford University and a number of other groups to build out a you know an application that uses bcoin to back up this incredibly culturally important cultural testimonial data that's super important and valuable and one of the reasons that you know they they really sell fcoin and found it really interesting and and

really important for the use case was that verifiability being able to verify that the data is being kept around and who's keeping it around and being able to verify that it hasn't been tampered with is such a critical component in in all of this that uh that that that became kind of like an important kind of user in use case and so that's been also extremely humbling for for me and for a number of number of us uh working on fcoin to see such an important use case right away for kind of having a significant impact uh on the world so we'll see kind of where that heads but that's a that's a super valuable application in use case uh other users are there's a number of dap developers that are moving around their front ends that are right now you know hosted on already kind of addressed on ipfs but backed up by either themselves or or or

other or other structures and are now starting to move it over to pcoin uh there's one range of applications around video that's super exciting where this is kind of coupling with so there a few uh experiments here that I that I think are really really cool but but I'll mention one in particular which is a combination of Falone and life pier where you can now kind know like drag and drop in a video to this web page and it will get moved over to the life pier network get transcoded into all of the right important formats for the web and then all of that will get put into filecoin and then stored and distributed through filecoin so you have kind of like an in to end video distribution thing you know working with Falco and Life beer you know today and like that's

like a super super cool um use case uh there's people working on live video so on one part it's doing video distribution using Prof lip of live video think of streaming uh streaming use case and then take the as the video is getting generated once once the kind of live stream is is over storing the whole thing uh and on Falon for the long term so then you're able to kind of view the view the log of the view that video stream later on it's kind of some of the uh video oriented use cases that I I think are are pretty cool then there's a bunch of kind of defi oriented things going on where you know kind of the a lot a lot of the applications that people are building right now and tools

are for the whole mining community so there's not only do you have applications that are using Fon for something else but Falin itself requires some tools and applications built for for some functioning kind of like with etherum there's a number of um applications there so some of these include ways and structures for you know creating better organizational structures and financial structures for Mining and so one example is you very standard defi loan oriented stuff where you have a bridge from plco to ethereum um and then you can do a bunch of like loan oriented stuff and then back back to bcoin so miners can borrow bcoin in order to use it for collaterals uh but then also um structures where you can have contracts um for financing the

development of mining operations right so turns out mining operations in the larger scales are pretty involved in never you know if you want to maintain a bunch of really high Quality Storage in in a facility and whatnot then you're able to kind of start creating some of the organizational structures and raise funding either by selling some of your cash flows or things like that and this is happening in defi in ethereum right so there's examples of this and this is groups are exploring different Avenues of for doing this in kind of in this in this part another area that I don't think this is out yet but um uh is a pretty interesting thing is starting to think about cloud storage itself and and being able to sell capacity in the future as think of being able so so any kind of important commodity in the world has got important financial industry

around it so think of like being able to have oil and then have a bunch of different kinds of um financial instruments associated with oil around it so because we're commoditizing because p is commoditizing this digital storage on on the cloud people are building kind of structures where you could potentially start doing the same same kind of financial instruments for cloud storage uh on on blockchain so so that that I think will take some time to to get going and and kick off because it requires a bunch of exploration around what structures are needed and what not but imagine having the kind of predictability that you that you get out of other Commodities uh but you get that in kind of the digital store space so that that would be this a whole kind of

like interesting world because if that's happening with filecoin then that'll push that that kind of activity about storage media to potentially happen as well and so that's a whole Falon starting to affect the the storage media Market as you were describing earlier um in in some kind of important ways building a bunch of different kinds of uh systems around Falin there's a set of use cases there and then there's you know a whole category of new applications that you know there's been a number of hackathons already where people are building a bunch of really cool things from games to Social Network they're probably like 15 or 20 different social networks that I saw this hackathon built uh using fcoin like different you know things like Twitter

things like um more more Facebook Newsfeed and Friends style things and messaging things and so on um that are getting kind of experimented with I think those things will take more time to really develop and flesh out into something that that a lot of people can use but already a a lot of people are experimenting with and building these things kind of from scratch on top and that's that's super cool and then there's a yeah even in that class there were there were a number of people doing this kind of live streaming work and and video oriented work there's another really cool one which is this amazing use case around machine learning computation around data so people store data in the clear on fcoin and then they can they have this other tooling that they can then ship uh comput so if this Falon

minor is like equipped with this additional protocol then you can ship computation to that minor and they'll run it over the data set they have and then prod give you the results and all of that is hooked up in you know the standard python tooling so you can have like your normal you know normal data science toolkit and then you just import a few things in your normal flow in like your notebook structure and now you can both store data to filecoin but also kind of like ship computation to the nodes that are storing it and so that's kind of like specific miners that are doing this um because not all minor are going to be able to you know automatically do this this is kind of an additional protocol that they have to run but that's kind of like a like a a really cool example of what's going to happen once you start adding a lot of

important data that you can compute on and data has this kind of gravity element to it which where it's way easier to ship the computation to the data than the other way around like you you want to move the competition to data do it there and then kind of take the results elsewhere so we think that this kind of comp Computing over data St on fcoin is is going to be a big thing in the long term and so we're starting to see the the beginning versions of this and beginning use cases of people experimenting with stuff I think those protocols probably take a while to to flush out into something super scalable but already like you can store large amounts of data and compute with it really easily and really cheaply uh and those are some of the cool applications um out there there's also just the idea of using the storage itself right so

separate from application building various different groups are looking at using Alin data you know the raw data storage and so on and that's pretty I probably can't talk about any of the groups that I know about right now that are considering in the larger scale spot and I think one of the important things here is any kind of major groups are going to be experimenting the network is super new like it just launched the cycles for any kind of large petabyte scale usage are in the many think of like Enterprise SC time scales where they're going to be experimenting with with stuff for quite a while and then they're going to kind of make a any kind of public uh switch or whatever and so we those are going to be exciting and and and what not but those are probably more a story for for the future but there's already some interesting Pilots

that are forming and uh some pretty cool public data uses that that I that's kind of like more where my heart is where a lot of the reasons why I started ipfs in the first place were around making it way cheaper and easier to back up vast amounts of important scientific data that's open access that anybody can use and can compute with you know like versioning data sets and all that kind of stuff and all of that is finally then finally I have a I can point to an Network that has vast amount of capacity to back up you know the world's most important scientific data and kind of provide it super cheaply to for people to use and download and and compute with um and that's certainly there now so now I think like the next important milestone in that journey is is now

starting to work with a number of groups to start adding a ton of those important data sets over into um to fcoin I mention one one more which I think is pretty cool is uh I'm starting to see people doing pay-per-view videos uh and so you can do like video distri you start the video and do video distribution entirely through filecoin and you can do like payment Channel pay-per-view stuff and so that's also pretty cool I mean it's not super safe in that if you get the decription key you can probably share it out and and whatnot but a lot of the times this is more about friction than than getting it super secure so so that's already kind of kind of cool cool yeah I mean it's great to see just how much there's going on and how this ecosystem blossoming so there's one one other topic we wanted to touch on

because you know before the podcast we had we had briefly talked about it with you and and you mentioned already there kind of two angles a blockchain scalability topic right and you know on the one hand it would be interesting to hear kind of like your faults on how Fon is going to scale as a blockchain but then also you know what are your faults on kind of blockchain scalability Topic in general and specifically you know what are your thoughts on like E2 and you know I think as we were as we recording this actually I think like today or something like that the the threshold the posit threshold for E2 is has been crossed so you know this is like finally now imminent that you know the first steps towards the you know the full E2 yeah so um can we go back to this I just realized that I wanted to add one

important bit for the community on on applications can I add that now and then and then go back to this one really important part of the ecosystem that's that's growing right now very strongly is this kind of whole life cycle of development of the hackathons and then people taking those hack hacks and then going into accelerators and then getting of those kind of people that kind of continue on to build build businesses end up getting investment so so one of the really important signals in any kind of platform like this is how many developers really care about this or trying trying it out and experimenting with it and then how many of those actually build not not just hacks but then go on to build applications and then get investment and then coupled with that is like how many investors in the in the in the space are kind of

investing uh so that's that's something I think is super cool about pin is it's super early right now and already there's been a bunch of hackathons a bunch of groups out of that going into accelerators and then from accelerators there's funds forming entirely to build and invest in the fcoin ecosystem and so they're they're now not just investors in general but there are funds emerging that are just investing in Fon applications and so it's a a really exciting and positive time for people to get involved like people that are kind of like maybe in between things or or have an application that already used cpfs and was maybe maybe a good uh good trajectory for for fcoin it's a super vibrant ecosystem at the moment and it's kind of blossoming and growing a lot and there's a lot of interest from other developers and from the whole kind of

development support cycle of Grants and and Investments and so on happening at the moment so there's probably a bunch of projects that are getting built today and in the next few months that are going to be hitting say 3 to 9 months from now so because usually kind of a lot of these applications take a take a while to kind of get built out go out there and then get users and and so on so a lot of the cool things that are happening at the moment uh will probably end up uh kind of being a whole wave of of apps uh say six six to nine months from now and uh yeah so highly encourage people to kind of get involved and one really great area for where we hadn't really seen this happening elsewhere but our slack turned out to be a a uh Super Active environment where I think there's

you many I don't know how many thousands of different people are there in different groups and there's all kinds of um activities around hackathons and again accelerators and and whatnot all happening in the in the same space and so it's a pretty active environment it's kind of similar to the to the world of different Discord servers in in ethereum community so highly recommend people come and and hang out and and check it out so the scalability question is super critical and important for the entire space uh this is something that I see as the biggest hurdle to Broad scale adoption in in web 3 so I think I I kind of think tend to think about it as the consensus bottleneck so today there's just a ton of transactions I want to go through a a really tiny amount of bandwidth and most applications that consider using blockchains just run into

this bottleneck and and have to start doing all kinds of crazy um offchain protocols or side chains or all kinds of really contortions of their application to make it work in the blockchain model and and so of course this has you know been a topic for discussion for a long time A lot of people are on it there's a lot of people trying to build much more scalable blockchain systems and you know I would put at the head of the pack there ethereum and ethereum 2 you know the the entire scalability uh effort in ethereum 2 is you know the furthest along from from any that I've uh that I've seen and and um and I think the one that's tackling larger questions more seriously so I think it's a really kind of a really critical project to to watch and and help out and and kind of help

succeed and so yeah it's it's awesome that you know we kind of just cross the threshold and and uh you know the beacon chain is is is happening and now we're going to get to to go towards the all the sharding and and so on I think that in the long term though if you kind of like zoom out for a moment and you think about Computing infrastructure in general and you think about the kind of how much data gets generated again is in the order of zettabytes how much of that is useful to store probably right now in the you know tens to hundreds of exabytes that's again growing exponentially of that you know some fraction of it is application data that requires really fast basically consistency times where people are used to chatting on a on an app typing something pressing enter getting to the other person and getting persisted into

long-term storage and never losing that and they're used to kind of operations on social network websites that you know they click a bunch of buttons and all of that gets persisted somewhere building an application platform that can support that kind of a scale of use is not only non-trivial but will require solving a bunch of challenges for for web3 so in some cases you can segment some of the operations to be client side only and and if you can do that that's that's great but there's a lot of operation that has to be whole network oriented and when you hit any kind of real usage you're going to run against this limit this kind of consensus oriented limit and sure you can try to do a bunch of stuff off chain but you end up having now two problems because a whole part of

your application has to live on a blockchain and then there's another part of the application that's on the client side and kind of a user interface and there's another part of the application that has to live somewhere in between some other offchain protocol that's custom and that I think is like not the way to go at all I think that for web3 to succeed in the long term in general we have to hit a system that can hit millions of transactions per second and can get pretty good consistency and by that I mean you know subsec style commits where somebody can like type A Thing presenter and close the application like you know in in kind of human scale like within seconds and know that all of that was stored safely somewhere and someone's going to be the

other users is going to be able to get that and see that and the application is going to remember their settings and whatnot and doing that for billions of users in a crypto native sort of way it's going to require that we have this like consistency structure built in right so for applications where it's really just between an individual and a group of people that's where things like there's like these things called threads which are part of the textile stack in in in the apus and Falon ecosystems where you can sort of model a lot of your updates into your application and into kind of like a threat of operations so think of us having a chat stream or us sharing some documents with each other having kind of like a a Google doc style experience and modeling all of

those changes in that kind of thread and shipping all those updates to each other and to kind of some uh to Fon to store and back up in the long term and also being able to to kind of pull that out of there and kind of use it so so there's a bunch of applications where that will work but that kind of consistency is does not require super hard rigorous kind of network intermediation right so we can do it like a Google doc style thing if we if we have a protocol that kind of can see the updates and I can see my updates you can see your updates we can both sign them and all we need is the log of operations to reconstruct the whole thing that's easy and that's kind of you don't have to build a custom offchain thing for that you can use textile

threads and and be done and so that you can now model in think of kind of like a normal web developer experience without kind of thinking of any complex web3 crypto stuff and have some very simple Primitives and very simple data model that just works for developers and they don't have to think about it a lot and like that's you know kind of working now but as soon as you have something where you need some kind of important business logic that users can't change and it requires some kind of like Network operation that's where where you have to now suddenly put this into a blockchain or into a network of other off blockchain but important validator type roles and I think that's that's what I think in the future is going to be entirely blockchains it just has to be

scalable systems and and again I really think that that kind of there there is so much need for that kind of a transactional model that we are going to need to build systems that can scale to millions of transactions per second and clear very quickly and I think the way that we're going to get there is by building consens systems that can Shard over time as they get used in certain regions of the world but where they're really mapped they're not kind of just generic shards across right now I think like the the ethereum two shards are going to be you I think like 1,24 shards or something like that maybe 2,000 something I don't remember what the last number is um but they're all going to be the same and they're all going to be Global and I really think that if people start modeling these charts as being related to Regions you can do a couple

things one is you can speed up the the consensus time because it means you can you can go way faster in one region so doing consensus in one continent is way faster than around the whole planet uh is a speed of light issue right like the Earth is pretty big so like you got to wait a certain amount of time for propagation of the uh of information if you reduce the size and say you create a region in a part of the world then that looks pretty different and you can keep subdividing this right so if there's a lot of usage in one region you can keep going down into a city scale or you can go all the way down into kind of a data center scale and of course your security maps to that right so definitely in the smaller scales you're going to be at higher risk but you're you're stamping

your way up into kind of the consensus hierarchy I think that's one one important component and this geographical split also gives you partition tolerance right so you can imagine one country or one continent losing access to the rest of the internet and so maybe it's not the all they can't see or observe all transactions outside of their sphere but you can still get consistent transactions within that continent or that country or that City so I think that that uh blockchain systems have to move into that into that realm uh the other component that I think is is really key here is to start sharting in an application oriented way so one of the really key things about Computing in in history has been being able to recognize that a lot of the access patterns to data and computation use

case oriented are specific kind of where a lot of the kind of the reason rights for an application or important transactions happen if you start modeling your system to match the application you use you get a bunch of performance gains so I sort of expect that we'll end up having application specific shards or application domain and Industry specific shards that have different parameter tweaks for those use cases so certain use cases don't require super hard consistency right away they are fine with eventual consistency and there are other use cases where consistency is super critical but they don't have to move as fast and so being able to tune your ction there and being able to be on on a on a sh that operates one way versus another it's kind of like a really really um key piece here I think like the way that this is going to

end up playing out is that eventually we're going to split up the consensus protocol part like linearized ability from all of the smart contract part and we're going to build one layer that's just around getting linearizability in this very kind of hierarchical generic way that's super super scalable and then we're going to build systems that can do the interpretation of what got linearized and the computation of what that output is as a second layer and so I think like that's already starting to happen with ethereum right so the beon chain is one important step in that direction you have you know one important hierarchy split there where one of the the main the beacon chain is just around maintaining like the the global consensus security and not

necessarily doing the competition in the chards but I think it has to go like I think this is going to end up getting separated out where many different Protocols are going to be homed in one consensus layer we just haven't figured out what that has to be nobody really knows the parameter space yet that is going to succeed there but I I just think right now blockchain systems are dramatically way too complicated and they're not going to stand the test of time this way I think they're going to split uh I think they're going to have layers of them ripped up in the same way that when you think about the tcpip stack DCP and IP are first of all two different protocols that together are helped by a whole protocol soup you know alphabet soup type set of other protocols many of whom like have changed a lot over over time in in in history

and a lot there's a lot of flows that don't even use CCP anymore use Quick and all kinds of systems and even when you look at IP itself it has emerged changed a lot and has all kinds of like in between layer layer things so I think taking another path of the entire blockchain system with an ietf sty style view of decomposition of protocols and really getting at the core problem and building one protocol that solves one problem extremely well and that's it is what's going to lead to the things that are going to stand you know many decades and they're going to give us the scalability we need so like those are like kind of my thoughts on where the BL scalability can go but uh yeah Happ to like dig into any any of those pieces further yeah I mean then thanks so much

for joining us uh ju it was like you know so awesome to like catch up and like have this you know just the complexity and the richness of everything happening around filecoin and and prod collaps is amazing and yeah I think you know we're just at the beginning right now with the blockchain being live for a few months and you know people building new applications so yeah we're super excited to see how this is going to play out and kind of the impact is going to have in the coming years so thanks so much for joining us yeah thank you so much for having me it's been a a really awesome uh to get to chat about all all these topics with you really enjoy talking about all these different areas so so really appreciate the chance chance to do it and yeah really really

fun conversation thank you thank you for joining us on this week's episode we release new episodes every week you can find And subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts and if you have a Google home or Alexa device you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast go to to Epic center.tv subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen and while you're there be sure to sign up for the newsletter so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released if you want to interact with us guests or other podcast listeners you can follow us on Twitter and please leave us a review on iTunes it helps people find the show and we're always happy to read them so thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week

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