Sam Williams: Arweave – Bringing Permanence to the Web #341

Transcript

this is epicenter episode 341 with guest Sam Williams hi welcome to epicenter my name is sebastian futuro today our guest is Sam Williams Sam is the co-founder and CEO of are we for their company that is building the infrastructure layer for what they call the perma web so our weave has developed a system for data storage which makes it economically sustainable and feasible to store data for centuries they figured out the data

storage system that allows you to have highly available low latency data storage while maintaining an incentive model where miners will store user's data forever projects like our weave are really fascinating because they conjure up at least for me the contra a lot of the same enthusiasm and excitement that I had in the early days of the web there's something very freeing and liberating about the idea of being able to publish content to a decentralized permissionless censorship resistant platform and I think in the early days of the web like in the 90s and even the late 80s this is kind of what people had

for a vision of the Internet and as things have aggregated to large social platforms that has somewhat been eroded and so are we've kind of brings back that original vision of the web now of course there's something inherently political about this because it brings up these concepts of transparency and accountability the flagship application for our weave is this thing they call the perma web which is a global decentralized and community owned web where anyone can contribute and in the perma web once data is stored there it remains there forever it can never be altered or deleted and of course this brings up all kinds of ethical and philosophical quest

about the permanence of information to whom it should be applied and how it operates in the framework of concepts like the right to be forgotten which exists in Europe so if you want to get a glimpse of what the perma web looks like you can go to their website and here you can explore a list of sample applications that have been built on top of our weave so there's things like URL shorteners a blog an email service there's even a service that allows you to you know create a screenshot of a tweet so that sort of effectively never gets deleted and what's interesting is you can also build defy applications on our weave so all of these defy

applications like say Eunice WAP for example that have a front end and that front end exists on a server you could conceivably build that front end on our weave so you have effectively unstoppable defy applications I think that's really really empowering so just after our conversation with Sam Fidelia and I had a brief one-on-one conversation to recap the interview gather our thoughts about what we think of the project and where we think things might be going you can hear this conversation by signing up to our sub stack newsletter that's epicenter rocks slash sub stack if you already subscribe to the weekly newsletter that we send

out with every episode you'll have to sign up for this separate mailing list and we might move the newsletter to sub stack at some point but for now we just kind of want to experiment with this platform and see what we can do with it the idea is for us to release these short debrief conversations with every new episode they're gonna be free for the foreseeable future perhaps at some point we'll consider making them part of some subscriber bundle but for now we just want to experiment here get your feedback and see how we can create something valuable in addition to the podcast interviews a bit of extra housekeeping I mentioned last week that we were hosting a meet-up that's happening this week on Thursday the 28th

of May it is at noon pacific 3 p.m. 9 p.m. Central European Time you can come and just have a chat with us all the hosts will be there and we'd be happy to get to talk to you and see how you're doing especially in this time of crisis and you can register for that at Epic enter dot rocks slash virtual Meetup and we'll send you all the details calendar invites zoom links etc more housekeeping I am really excited to be moderating a fireside chat with Dani Rhine via theme foundation and Joe Lubin of consensus that's next week at the main net conference on June 2nd you can register to get your tickets at main net

dot events and I'm also moderating a panel on the topic of freedom versus Civic Duty's that's happening at the web 3 forum from June 8th to June 10th it's part of the cog X conference organized by fabric ventures and check out these panelists we have Yaya fanucci adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security Harry Halpin CEO of NIMH technologies Liz Steinem Gura CEO of least Authority and cory doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation tickets are free for epicenter listeners and the link to register is in the show notes one last thing before we go to the

interview thank you to all of you who have left an Apple podcast review I didn't think it was as easy as asking but I guess that's what works because in the last couple of weeks we've received you know several reviews per week sometimes several per day and they're just so fun to read some are very touching others are just funny I've been posting them on Twitter and so thanks to everybody who left the review if you haven't done so already please take two minutes and leave an apple podcast review just go to epicenter dot Rock slash Apple let us know how long you've been listening what you've learned what were your favorite episodes or memorable moments and it really helps us boost our

visibility and attract more people to the podcast and as a thank you for doing that I will send you a discount code for a hundred sent off a keep key hardware wallet just email me it's the best and epicenter that TV and let me know that you have left us a review and I'll send you that discount code lots of you have done so already and so I hope your keep keys are on the way and with that here's our interview with Sam Williams we're here with Sam Williams Sam thanks for joining us thanks for having me so tell us a bit about yourself and how you got involved in space I was doing a a PhD in computer science studying distributed systems I was building an operating system that

you could essentially take out the components of the machine that it was running on while he was on and the idea was that you should at least be able to maintain some level of continued operation of that machine so it was really kind of hardware fault tolerance is what we like to call it and this was interesting it's in the space of decentralized systems that are tolerant to very large mass of failure and then I had this idea for what later became a leaf which is kind of the same ideas of using decentralization to achieve fault tolerance of well it was computation and then I kind of switched to data storage because we realized that actually there's much more interesting and important I think for like the world to be able to make sure that we can keep

our data storage systems online rather than necessarily compute which is actually probably less important this operating system you were working on was like a system OS like you would have on this on a computer or on a cluster of servers some other yeah exactly so it was built using technique that they started working on in about 2007 2008 called multi kernels the idea was that you would take a single machine and you would split it up into what you essentially treated as many many machines inside a single network so each core or each thread would be treated independently and the idea was that this would allow operating systems to scale to the point that they could easily handle like having 500 cores inside a

single box but as you need the hardware never really emerged for that like at the time they thought that this was going to be here in ten years or something just didn't happen at all but the techniques they produced I realized were interesting from the point of view of having massive fault tolerance why do you think that storage is more interesting in this setting well designs don't compute can be redone most of the time like you can take inputs and you can transform them to the same outputs it doesn't really seem like such a an important area relative to data storage which is that you know if we lose access to pieces of information about the past or perhaps there verifiability then they're just gone

there is no way to reverse that transition what happened to the PhD did you finish a toy that's still on hold I built this operating system and I figured I just needed maybe like two months to write up the thesis itself and at that point the idea for a leaf was taking shape and I thought well I could start this RV's project like four days a week or something like that and use one day a week to finish my thesis and of course that didn't happen at all it has like negative numbers of three days since the moment I started on the project properly and consequently it kind of stalled from the operating system perspective but then I got back in touch with my PhD supervisor about a year ago now I think and we basically agreed to just shift the the topic of

the PhD thesis to alby's actually so now I'm just trying to find some time to turn the are we've yellow paper into like a PhD thesis and then I'll submit that is the idea I in fact this afternoon I'm supposed to be sending an email to stop myself being a unenrolled from the system for being a PhD student for too long but yes so that's kind of where that ended up quit good luck oh thank you yeah in terms of how I got into blockchain or really is peer-to-peer systems I think blockchain is kind of an interesting evolution along that line but it's not the starting point by any means it was back with BitTorrent you know in like 2003 to 2005 that period was really fascinating I mean we had this which is essentially

a decentralized incentive mechanism go from pretty much zero to transferring at its peak about 30 to 35 percent of all of the Internet traffic and there was a built-in mechanism design inside Vuitton that allowed people or rather encouraged people just what something of value for something else they was valuable this whole idea of optimistic tip attack so that was I think the first time we saw that kind of p2p mechanism design at scale you see that was very exciting and then was around 2011-2012 or something I first encountered Bitcoin I don't remember by the year but I remember by the price it's like around three cents and then I remember it

passing parity with the dollar and finding that to be like a very very hard concept to understand I mean how can this magic internet money there was basically an experiment be worth more than the US dollar and then I mined some I took part in the cerium I co way back at the beginning with some of the tokens I'd mind in my university dorm room where I didn't have to pay for electricity and then I guess I just kind of been watching the space ever since then so I'd like to go back to BitTorrent for a little bit because rhetoric is something that I used a lot and I still used once in a while I mean although not so much anymore but many of us have used BitTorrent to some degree I've kind of understood conceptually how it works but there's a lot of components

there that I never really fully understood but you know for our listeners perhaps it would be helpful to understand like what BitTorrent did that was so unique in terms of you know peer-to-peer file-sharing but also this incentive mechanism of that I think a lot of people don't recognize existed within BitTorrent it's pretty basic and that's one of the things they're so elegant about the protocol you take a file you split it into a number of chunks and then everyone can join this network and there's some kind of tracker that tells you where everyone else is and then you just say I have these pieces of information and I would like these pieces of information that's what's happening at the technical level but at an economic or a mechanism design perspective there's this mechanism that

we call optimistic tipped attack which basically says I'm going to speak to four people at once and three of those people I'm going to only give data to them the data that they're asking for when they have given data to me but with that fourths lock someone can come to me and say I'm looking for this piece of data and I'll just try giving it to them it's kind of level of optimism this idea that maybe if I do something nice something nice will happen to me in return that the this is an extremely basic system and the Nash equilibrium that arises from it is that everyone is sharing data with everyone else all the time it's extraordinarily effective there are these incentive mechanisms that were enforced by Turin search engines effectively where to be a member

of this kind of privileged group of people that would have access to these torrent files knew they would be tracking the amount of data you were ceding to the network and there was like this whole reputation thing about and I have a friend who's still like very much into this ecosystem and like he has these seed boxes that are running all the time so that his reputation on these platforms remains you know like Ida you know where he has like a high ratio basically it's similar to some of the concepts that we you know and understand from the blockchain space only they they're all centralized like they're all built on you know these like centralized infrastructure is like on these basically these websites or and like

even the trackers are files that are stored on systems what are were some of the lessons that you took from that and brought into our weave there's two layers of incentive design going on there so the base layer there's really just is optimistic tit-for-tat thing that happens in a completely decentralized way so I join the network and I can start generating peer scores with other people and that doesn't require a tracker like you can do this with you through the DHT extension for bit heart yeah with the magnet links yeah exactly but then on top of that yeah you get these these tracker websites that basically make cross swarm here reputations so I can upload something on one turn and then get a greater score for downloading on another that kind of thing

and yeah these are kind of like quasi centralized or at least and here's a fair to call it a distributed system but not a decentralized system something like that but in terms of how this has affected our weave the key place is in a data distribution mechanism which really is optimistic TIFF attack very close to as the way it was formulated in BitTorrent in the beginning but there's something in that that is really elegant that I don't think people in blockchain pays so much attention to and I think it's really valuable is this idea that actually if we do things based on social reputation like that we can keep scores off chain which means that it requires zero synchronization in order to maintain this kind of social value score for each of the participants in the

network and that means that there's no consensus and so they subsequently no scalability limit which is you know the exact opposite of the effect you get with like a traditional blockchain where every node in the network has to come to consensus about every state transition and including you know peer reputation transitions so yeah I think that's really powerful and it's a very interesting area so let's talk about you know storage on the Internet in your white paper you actually say that you estimate that 98% of content is deleted off the internet every 20 years how did you arrive at this figure this wasn't our research there are lots of people doing research into I guess the sustainability of the web there should

be a reference that you can follow to find the citation for it I think that the fact that the poll Internet Early's the links on the internet basically wipes every 20 years is pretty astonishing but maybe equally scary is the fact that around a third of links changed the content fundamentally or removed the content completely within just three months of the creation of that that information and this is according to a study that was done based on links created on Twitter so if things people are sharing on social media it's really impressive that it is changing at that kind of rate do you think that a hundred percent of the content produced on the Internet should be stored forever no definitely not we think they're down there are certain

classes of information that should be permanent things like knowledge records of history web applications in a lot of cases and things that really shouldn't be things like instant messenger chats these kinds of private communications between individuals that are built for ephemeral to be ephemeral essentially and I actually think that this is face for a kind of where you call like a a sister network to are we've there does the exact opposite thing something that enforces that a piece of information is not going to be available in the future and we spent a lot of time thinking about how you might achieve this I don't think you can truly enforce that the information is not available but what you can do is provide potentially some kind of insurance against information becoming public after certain period of

time like a blockchain snapchat potentially I mean how you go about building those economic mechanisms is not completely clear to us yet at least but I think there's space for it so a problem that we really identified is that basically data storage as it exists today is kind of gravy Cola like Schrodinger's data storage so basically you put a piece of information onto a hard drive and it might be there in 15 years it also might be gone and so you don't really have any way to express intentionality about that you really just have to kind of hope or you know make lots and lots of replications but then all of your systems for managing those replications are typically centralized and not really very reliable but also the data might just disappear and so we thought that

given that information is the new oil of the economy being able to be intentional about how long that information is around for should be an extremely valuable thing and that's why we got started on that we've in the first place I think there's a really interesting philosophical question here about what constitutes information that should exist that we think should exist forever and you know I think we can make some pretty clear assumptions about what the majority of people think that might be so government communications might be one of those things anytime a government official speaks up or where there's like a policy decision or this sort of thing perhaps even the entirety of like press publications you know could fall into that category of things that we want to

exist in the permanent record and then on the other end of course you have things like chats and things like that that you one could decide that they don't want that to exist forever and you know there's tools that allow you do that like things like signal there's all this mushy stuff in the middle that it's unclear right let's take one example Twitter I think there are people who think that Twitter is some sort of an historical record of like human conversation and that every single tweet and you know that's ever existed should be kept and recorded in fact there's a lot of Twitter bots that do this just this right they capture and retweet things that have been deleted so that they remain in the in the permanent record and other people who think that that's not the case like I know I was

talking with Evan Vanessa a couple months ago about this very thing where you know I noticed there's one of his old tweets that got deleted it's like yeah I have a script it deletes my old tweets every month or something like that and so should we be approaching the question from the point of view of the body of information or more about what is the importance of information for society or like the class of information that is contained in that body so it could be things like storing all the tweets of like Donald Trump over but not necessarily the tweets of like you know Joe everybody how do we approach this stuff it sits in the middle this is a really interesting philosophical question you're absolutely right personally I take it practical approach to this which is that okay so if you tweet something and you

have say 2,000 followers then you've just broadcasted that piece of information probably to I don't know the eventual count might be 20,000 30,000 50,000 people realistically you've done that knowingly and I mean it's just not practical to expect to be able to remove that piece of information from the information space after you've voluntarily done that the line that people will eventually end up drawing is something like if you're saying it publicly to a very large number of people you don't really have the expectation that the statement can be withdrawn because fundamentally that's not the world we live in data likes to copy yourself or or rather humans like to copy information that they find interesting it's it can't really be helped so are we've doesn't really change that what it does is it it

provides a level of assurance and is particularly well for information that people wouldn't necessarily want to propagate today so if Donald Trump says something outrageous on Twitter there are many people that want to tell other people about that thing immediately right now and so it spreads around the information space very rapidly and many many copies of that piece of information are generated but there might be other things about perhaps I don't know a Wikipedia page about some kind of social club in Berlin in the 1930s or something like this that isn't necessarily very very valuable information to people today but for some reason in the distant future that could become extremely useful knowledge like perhaps the members of this club in order to do

something interesting and so the are weave allows us to kind of deal with that set of data whether but not necessarily of extremely high social replication factor frankly today but in the future will be very valuable and it allows us to have assurances about that data being available we don't have to go very far back in history to remember a time in which like this problem didn't exist you know like all of us are you know in our 30s I think we grew up pre-internet and I think for a lot of people who went through that transition of like no permanence or basically no permanence to like permanence of all information ever created this sort of social norms or creating information creating content

and haven't you know quite taken hold within like that generation of people I think if you look at like the younger generation that those who are born after 2000 for instance those people will have totally different assumptions about how their information and how the data that they create gets propagated in these sort of the assumptions that they have around that content perhaps being permanent we very different from say ours or our parents right I think that's fair to say I mean it's not that people expect that the content is permanent it's that they expect that they will lose the ability to delete it they're just not quite the same concept our weave is literal permanence you could also argue that the problem has existed

just in different forms and in a in lesser form that perhaps affected fewer people before the birth of the internet but it was still there like if we went to a stadium or a park or some public space and we shouted something very loudly we lose the ability to enforce that no one can write down what it was that was said and then publish it somewhere else or tell someone else that we said it and really this is fundamentally a formulation of the same problem it's just in a slightly lesser form of perhaps just non-technical form that's extreme when things go viral they are distributed too far logics then then he would ever expect it in the 80s had you gone to like a football stadium and said something really loudly if you don't go

viral for that the European Union has taken a pretty hefty stance on the right to be forgotten a couple of years ago the sious impact are we've at all it impacts are we fetch the same extended impacts any kind of blockchain in fact quite possibly less so without you because we realized that you know right of beginning we're talking about permanent storage of a large mass of information and the miners the nodes in the network subsequently should have the strong capabilities for choosing what information they want to take part in storing and what information they don't want to take part in story so essentially what the network is doing at a base level is encoding an incentive a permanent incentive to recall a piece of data and then people come along and they

essentially claim that incentive by replicate the data but nobody is enforced nobody is selected by the network to store any specific piece of content the especially makes it remarkably gdpr compliant for a blockchain like system because it essentially means that if you have some kind of gdpr problem then you just don't take Hardin's during that data and the legal system you know miners are data stores and so they are responsible for the data that they store they must adhere to all of the local laws or the jurisdictions in which they operate the law creates this disincentive to take part in storing information that other people don't want you to store within appropriate bounds anyway and the RV's protocol just kind of allows minors to make those choices for themselves

essentially so on a practical level how would you expect - to make those choices so basically say i and and we will get into the weeds of how the protocol works just after this but say i request something be stored and do you expect the miners to look exactly at the thing that i want to be stored and determine whether this is clearly something that should be stored forever or should not be stored forever or might fall somewhere in between and then I might decide after the fact that I do actually want for this to be forgotten despite the fact that I didn't at the time that I click the save on our weave button they can do a number of things and we expected they'll sort of form cabal's

at the basic level they can say scan this this document that I consent does it match on any of these kind of filters that I'm applying and we expect over time those fields are gonna get more and more complex we won't just be scanning for words or anything like this they will probably be doing a I backed computation on top of the data we've been given to try and understand what it is that it that data contains so this is the kind of the first layer the second is that just like if it's a recognizable piece of data say an mp3 or something I mean this is this is a system that's been around since the mid-2000s or something is highly affirmed I forgot what they call it some kind of hash gun or something basically the music industry can just make massive lists of sha-256 hash is

the files they don't want people to store because they contain copyrighted material and then - can just load these hashes and then you can you know immediately nostril that data so that's pretty simple and the third mechanism is you can just say okay any transaction that matches these transaction IDs so you just have a massive list of transaction IDs or any transactions from these wallets or any transactions that follow some set pattern of behavior in the network so kind of distribution so the tokens that we use to fund these wallets for example came from this source or something like that can also be blocked so we don't expect individual miners will do this we expect they'll kind of band together in the same sort of architecture that you see in the ad

blocking list communities right well we've essentially got this decentralized group of communities that propose different rules for what should or should not be blocked from your web browser while you're pressing around the web we basically expect - we'll do the same thing and they'll almost become like political parties I expect eventually let's dive into the protocol because I think in order to actually get into the we've seen more we kind of need to explain what the weave is you have said several times now the are chain block weave which is this thing from a blockchain what is a weave um how is different from a blockchain the basic principle we've taken is that you memorize the state of the network into headers that with a single block you can use to join the network so you

have to download that block from someone that you trust and you can do sort of partial assessment of the proof of work along that chain as well to work out how much it would cost as a minimum to create that chain but other than that you can start taking part in the processing of new transactions in the chain without access to any of the prior data and then you have this incentive that basically says ok so them the larger the amount of prior data from the network you can prove you have access to on demand the higher the likelihood you have of receiving a reward in the network and with our we've to point out now not just a higher the likelihood but also actually slightly the higher the rewards you get when you do get a reward this is basically a pretty simple consensus rule there says ok when I'm

mining a new block based on a derivative of the hash of the last block calculate a random byte from the network and provide me with a proof that you have access to that byte so in order to do that in the same way that the bittern does everything's loaded into chunks so you transfer the chunk and then we also create a merkel proof that says this chunk of this ID is verifiably a component of this transaction and this transaction is a component of this block and this block is a component of this block wave and then you bundle all of that up along with the new block data and you send it to everyone else everyone else can verify it because where they have access to a block hash list so a list of the header hashes of every other block in the network and

also the index of essentially the byte offset at that time step in the progression of the network and then they can essentially take your proof they can verify it and they can validate that you had access to that piece of information and then they can accept the new block give you the reward and the network continues let's talk about the new block for a minute this is the thing that's used to store data how big would you expect a block to be they can be enormous really but I think the limit to a block size is 2 to the power 256 bytes now with our wave 2.0 that's because you don't really have to transfer that much data around what you need to transfer to everyone in the network is the transaction header which says ok there

exists the data set for which the merkel route is x and then as long as i won't agree about this then we can generate the merkel route of transactions which is essentially just kind of like a another tree on top of the other tree probably and then from that we can generate the route of the transaction set and so from this like very large set of transactions we can create just one kind of route and then everyone can agree on this and writes it into the network if I want to block from you would I get the entire block or would you give me like a piece of the block so you wouldn't get blocks at all that's not the way you would do it instead you would say give me the book header and then you would say ok now give me a transaction header and now also you just

go around asking for chunks from those transactions and then you fill it in that way the idea of like downloading a block is kind of a way too big or this could be way too big how did the economics of this work so basically say I want something on the internet stored forever how do I pay for this is there some sort of stay trend or does this vision bank on the storage becoming cheaper indefinitely we basically realized that as storage declined a cost decline which is pretty regular it's extremely regular actually you can essentially get a series for costs the tends towards a single value so if you take the summation of the declining cost then you get a single value for the cost of storage then that's pretty interesting but obviously the the question there is well how

sustainable is that model I mean does the price of storage decline forever and so we looked at the history which says that over the last 50 years the cost of storage is declined at a rate of about thirty point five percent every year on average and indeed if you go back further than that so if you stopped thinking about sort of magnetic hard drives and you look at like what were the storage mediums before this how dense were they and how long did for example a piece of parchment last this kind of thing you actually see that this pattern extrapolates over like millennia so we see that in the past has been extremely well sustained and then we say it well okay just because it happen in the past doesn't mean is going to happen in the future what are the things we would expect to see if it was going to

stop so there's two fundamental components so if you want to understand this property you first have to understand what we call PD BB so cost for storing a gigabyte for a single block or for an hour PGP H and this is a derivative of the data size of a storage medium the cost and also the the length of time the storage medium is active before it starts to fail and if you take these factors you can basically work out that you know there's some cost X to the storage of a piece of information for some time period so the key factors that change their substantially are the data density and the data reliability and so we looked at data density okay so in practice we are somewhere around the 1

times 10 to the power 13 or 14 bits per cubic centimeter range and then you look at where what's the theoretical maximum data density something like 1 times 10 to the power 68 so that's interesting so if we were to continue towards that theoretical maximum data density at the current rate which is pretty aggressive it seems like 30.5% how longs it take and it takes four hundred and thirty seven years from the present point or actually that was when we wrote the paper last year I think it kisses 436 years now so that's an interesting component and then you look at the other site which is data reliability from where we are now how much stretch is there in making data storage more

reliable and we see that well when you're storing in RVs everything is immutable it's permanent right you never have to delete anything which is a fundamentally different game from a hardware perspective than storing rewritable media because basically all of our storage media at the moment is based on the idea of the you should take a bit and you should be able to flip that bit backwards and forwards and subsequently the sensible way to do this is with electrons but of course electrons they do all sorts of stuff at the quantum level they kind of move around and slightly unpredictable ways did they're just not a very firm storage media so if you were going to make a truly permanent storage media something for example akin to I guess like Asics that you saw in the Bitcoin world then

actually you would stop doing it with electrons you would start encoding in graphite or something like this and then you could make structures the lasted for millennia trivially so that's kind of interesting so it's harder to work out what the absolute bound is on data reliability but we see that there's even more stretch there than there is in data density it looks like we are very very very far off from a technical level reaching these limits then the final question you have to ask yourself is well is there some reason that this might not happen like yes you can do it that doesn't mean people are going to do it and we take the approach that so much of the economy is becoming about information processing and information in general the likelihood that humans don't have an incentive from the the

normal economy not to serve the art week but just ended the general workings of society to continually increase the efficiency of these systems is extremely low and consequently yes we think that they are extraordinary likely to keep doing this for a very long period of time there's another component to this this has okay fine we think is declining at a rate around thirty point five percent but just to be safe let's set the the basic expectation in the network itself to zero point five percent and as long as we stay about 0.5 percent we gain interest in terms of storage purchasing power for a year and that means that even if for some reason the rate of storage cost decline was to stop decreasing then you've got funds there

to pay for 200 years worth of storage up front that's the argument for poner data storage without okay so the short answer just to make sure that I actually got this as I pay for the storage once when I actually requested right yes you contribute to an endowment okay and then the miners can choose to store this piece of data for me in some sort of block do miners have to store the entire block uh is it a yes-no yes-no yes-no thing or do I can I say I would like to store section 1 through 17 of this block and then 25 through at the end exactly yes they can store in a chunk basis so everybody is taking part in the consensus of

transaction headers and block headers and in one component and now everybody is doing that so everyone is having access to each one of those components but there there's another kind of another system that is happening basically where people are uploading chunks to the network and then people are just asking for chunks that they want to store in a very similar way to bedrock okay and now now say I want to record something from a block what do I do so you ask someone in the network and if they have the chunk to give it to you free of charge of this well the optimistic tip attack mechanism so it looks from their point of view like it's free of charge but only free of charge in the same way that

downloading a bit torrent file was free of charge it wasn't really you're exchanging something of value it's just that thing of value to you wasn't that big a deal to lose you know your bandwidth of your computer yes so you you find the chunk and you download it from the network of swapping bandwidth with the person what's the level of replication that our weave incorporates within its infrastructure right so one of the interesting things about the way the incentives in the system work is we don't say let's take 30 people and give them copies of the data we don't actually think that works very well for a number of reasons we can get into in a bit but instead what we do is we say everybody has an incentive to

make sure that they have access to the data and that's not to store the data per se but to make sure that they have access to it so they can recall it on demand when someone asks them for it and consequently in the current network I think the replication rate is 98% or something like that it's basically complete almost everyone is touring almost everything apart from kind of level of churn in the network so new people joining they have to download stuff so this is around 98% that means I guess yeah we have about 500 nodes so with a hint you know quite a few hundreds of copies of a piece of information so when you say 98% replication that means that a single piece of data is replicated at least once or yes yes at

least once could also must much greater than that so there's 98% replication of the entire data set on every node and there's 500 nodes so we're looking at almost 500 replicas of the pieces of data essentially okay interesting but we don't expect it to stay at this kind of replication level it'll drop substantially lower than that in this within bounds of the system so I'm still interested in attacks on the system if you want I mean you've got this optimistic petit four Tet in place so is there a way that I can ddos the system by asking for data over and over again and I know that then three out of four times this would be given to

someone else but can I basically block the other people from receiving data who also don't have any reputation yet as who kind of like an eclipse attack I guess you could say yeah well I mean it gets his security properties from BitTorrent and there were many many attempts to do that kind of thing there and it just didn't work in practice so I would say no but it would be interesting to try like it does come down to implementation details in those kinds of things this is one of the things that we focusing this year on decentralizing about the protocol so the moment is like Bitcoin in that it's only one client for the network we don't think that that's how protocol should work that means that the rules of that individual client and

that bugs of that individual client determine the behavior of the entire network that just simply isn't the way it should work we should design protocols that are secure and robust and then there should be developers that come along and build implementations of those protocols and the bugs in those implementations should not affect the protocol at a core level so yeah we're working with a few groups now to build out those separate implementations and then hopefully if something like that were to come up it might affect one client but it wouldn't affect all of the clients and that's the important part yeah that's that's super interesting so you said earlier that the reputation is stored not globally but locally right so basically I would know about the reputation of the people I am in contact

with so how does that work so you call it the wildfire mechanic right well that's actually like the first agent in a broader game an adaptive interacting incentive agent game but yes it's it's an implementation of alternative attack broadly so basically I would store data on the people I regularly interact with and say whenever Sam asks me for something he never sends anything back so we see I would I would dodge you you know I would talk you points exactly yes yeah already you you deprioritize me okay so I would you prioritize you and then if you ask me something I would just not send it to you right or I would just be really far

down on your cue and I might never get to responding to my request and then people who'd join the network afresh they would be equally far down the pure they would join above you I'm not necessarily know you get a kind of grace period with the current implementation of the agent although actually it's a multi agent game now in the same way that so BitTorrent doesn't enforce the rules about which ranking algorithm you use for other members of the game and that that's really interesting because it means that you can have multiple implementations of different games playing on the same field if you like so I could rank you guys in one way and then you guys choose to rank me in a different way and that

has yet very very interesting mechanism design effects it essentially creates a game of generating games and one of the things we've been we've been looking at building a proof for over the last year is this idea that if we all have a bias like if we all know that there is some social good out there so for example yeah the system we know only points you is in our weave you can run a adjunct ipfs node on your machine and then when you do this it means that you expose the information that you've got inside our we've also inside ipfs this is a valuable thing for the network to be doing but there's no direct incentive for it and so we essentially see that when you have these interacting incentive agents there is an incentive

for you guys to incentivize me to run this ipfs node because we're only incentivized around the value of the network right and you might not necessarily want to do it yourself but you definitely do have a desire to express that I should do it and that means that you have a desire to build agents that slightly tip me so rank me slightly higher for exposing his behavior and consequently what happens over a long enough time line appears to be and we have simulations for this that are pretty robust and show it least in practice but we like a kind of theoretical proof that over time you tend towards pro-social behavior in evolving environment which is really fascinating mechanism designed to have

in so basically we all start to incentivize each other to incentivize others to express useful behaviors even when the the environment and the network finds itself in is shifting all the time so perhaps we find that I don't know link latency for some reason increases dramatically now might change the way that the structure of the network should work but there's robust mechanisms in there to mean to make sure that people yet adapt their agents to cover that kind of eventualities so that's really cool when we think of like the periods of decades or centuries that'll be very important so this this game of incentivizing each other to engage in these games tends to to consolidate and to I mean at the end

essentially there would there would be sort of a mechanism that would emerge as like the optimal pro-social mechanism or would you anticipate for there to be always like these competing mechanisms for ranking I think that so in the theoretical simulation where the environment doesn't change you reach a fixed point you reach a point at which there is the optimum agent but that's not really the way the world works so the environment is always slightly shifting there are different features that the customers want this kind of thing as a consequence of that we don't think that it moves was a fixed point we think it actually oscillates towards the most optimal solution for the current environment one thing we have observed is that if the environment moves too

fast you actually remove this ability to have consensus though the really fascinating thing about this kind of mechanism of design problem is that it requires zero global consensus in order to have the mechanisms themselves change so when we look a Bitcoin for example we see that like you know the block size limit has been a major major problem everybody knows that one megabyte is to not not as efficient way to run the network but no one can really agree on what it should be and in order to change it requires global consensus so if we were to change the mechanism of the game everyone has to agree on playing the new game or we split when we start paying two games at once in different fields and different like disconnected universes but with this adaptive

mechanism design approach you can basically have people yes changing independently of one another and then slowly over time annealing towards a single solution which is very powerful we think super fascinating what do you allow me to recap just what I understood from the protocol because I think it's it's it's super complex and it's different than a typical blockchain right so our weave is there to store data the right to minor block is begotten to me by the fact that I can recall a piece of an arbitrary prior block you incentivize the fact that people store whole blocks by kind of allowing them to my new blocks and

get the block reward for the new blocks based on how many of the old blocks they have sold so they see if I have stored a large chunk of the old blocks then I'm eligible to mine many new blocks whereas if I only hold like a couple of the old blocks I am NOT but if I had hold for instance if I heard rarer blocks then my chances of being able to mine a new block again increased right yes probably the only thing I would add to that is that it's not just a block reward per se it's also a take from an endowment structure so when you pay to add a piece of information to the network it's not like Bitcoin where the fee goes directly to the miner that generates that block the approximately twenty percent thirty

maybe sixteen percent though the fee goes to the person that generates that block but the rest goes into this endowment which the miners take from indefinitely over time as a supplement to the traditional block reward that you would get in in Bitcoin like system let's go into that in a second but just one last question on the mechanism itself so basically the require block the the block that I need to prove I have in order to be able to mine a new block what if no one actually has it what what what if it's genuinely disappeared from from the hour we've right um then you use option two or option three so there's a mechanism that you can use to derive alternate chunks that you would want to yes submit as a

proof of access but when you do that you increase the proof-of-work difficulty by one each time oh by one means essentially doubling it each time so it gets harder and harder yes so there is a mechanism in place to deal with that eventualities we were to ever occur okay but I mean in the current setting where 98% of our notes actually store our data it's it doesn't it's not really necessary right exactly let's talk about the endowment and the token economics of the AR talkin so how does that work so I know that there were 55 million AR tokens that were minted at the get-go yes so what happened to those and I know there's more tokens being minted for block rewards where do they

go that's them okay so of the initial 55 million I think something like 70% are now in the hands of the community yeah token holders that essentially purchased them we we hold the other components there well there's also some in there for the team and a few other things but like that's broad distribution the the other 11 million yeah it gets printed in the way that's very similar to Bitcoin per block is basically a kind of subsidy during the period of which the network is gaining momentum and and this is they said we don't we don't have this kind of strange carving mechanic that the Bitcoin has this is something that I could just

desperate to ask Satoshi if they were to ever come forward like why make it so that uh-huh yeah the the number of tokens that have printed halves every four years whatever it is instead of having a smoothly declining curve like markets really like certainty and they get terrified around things like well the inflation rate is going to half tomorrow what's that going to mean to the price yeah so that's something I really I would really love to know what motivated that design choice but anyway in our we use a smoothly declining curve so there are none of these kind of harping of it in terms of the the token dynamics when you want to store a piece of information you have to have a wallet that has a greater balance than the cost of storing the piece of information that

you like store forever you signing transaction you dispatcher to the network the miner the true generates the block gets to take some very small portion of this as a kind of incentive for including that transaction in the block at all is if you don't have that they just they can continually take from the endowment or from the block reward without actually including new transactions so there has to be a little nudge there to get them to include transactions first of all that is the rest goes into this endowment pool which has these mechanics the declining cost of storage leading to essentially interest in storage purchasing power of that over time and then - take from that at such a rate that the principle is never declining so never removed but they're paying for the storage of old data through the interest

on top of it and and they can take from that pool yes once for every plot okay and how is it determined how much I have to pay for storing an arbitrary piece of data does it depend on the the size of the data yes absolutely yeah that's the critical and is it centrally determined or is it something that the miners can set themselves well with - consider everything themselves at some level yes in this case they there are consensus rules for defining how that should be agreed amongst the miners so one of the things I've thought a lot about in terms of these decentralized data storage networks whether it's ipfs or sia and/or are weave is storage availability in the context of a well

it's a decentralized storage availability in context where individuals own less and less personal storage so you know if if you if you take it step back for a moment we want to have decentralized storage that is massively distributed where there's no central point of failure you you would you would want that storage network to be made up of a large number of individuals providing storage to the network but the reality is that increasingly people don't have storage capacity in their homes I mean people are using things like Dropbox or Google Drive to do a majority of their cloud storage I mean whereas you know five to ten years ago lots of people had these

hard drives in their houses to backup files and this sort of thing and you know I still have that but most people I know don't have hard drives in their homes and embedded devices also are basically you can't use them for this sort of thing so what do you expect the are weave Network to look like in the future who will be the participants and do you think that there will be professionalization around providing storage to the network you know like like we have mining companies right that are professional miners or like Ren a sick pharmacy et cetera and you know how would we ensure like what are the mechanisms that are in place to ensure that there isn't like a large portion of that storage that's captured

by company like Google for instance or even a state actor how do we ensure decentralization in this context okay lots of interesting questions there the last one first I think we we enjoy this through the protocol so you can't necessarily stop centralization okay I'm not a strong believer that block chains are true generators of decentralization over long enough periods of time just doesn't actually seem to me like that's what happens and the reason for that is we just can't crack this one CPU one vote already from one human one vote in a decentralized trustless Network problem and so naturally I think we're always going to end up with centralization of some form when you have an economic reward and an

economic cost to the behavior because then people are going to find the economies of scale basic they're setting up larger and larger rigs and this is somewhat disappointing but it doesn't have to be the end of the world because we can set up the rules of the protocol itself so that even if there is kind of quasi centralization of network yes there are still guarantees about how that should function from the users point of view and that's what I think is powerful about these things so so that's my point of view on that one I think this idea that you picked up on that well people basically aren't storing their data locally anymore that's absolutely right I think one of the areas where the a leaf approach really disagrees with this ear file coin

approach is that we just don't see that there's mountains and mountains of unused hard drive space out there in consumer devices that we can easily attach to this network that allows people to have decentralized and fast and reliable access to their data that is stored on someone else's machine I don't think that that's a reasonable assessment of how the infrastructure of the internet works to expect that that would happen and I also think that if it was possible to get greater economies of scale for data storage by using a kind of decentralized cloud approach essentially the hen Amazon would have done this a very long time ago Amazon would just let you rent out your hard drive space and they would do it in a an

essentially controlled manner it would be much more efficient from that point of view and they would be making a lot of profit from it but it just doesn't strike me that this actually quite how the world works like the economics we can't like we've spent quite a while looking at them we can't get the numbers to add up well we think decentralized storage is valuable for is allowing you to do things that you simply couldn't do before and in the case of our weaves that store data forever and you you get extreme benefits from this immutability of the business model so everyone can come along to this business model over time they can trust is never going to change because it's not a single centralized party that's controlling it yet and consequently is just much more reliable and robust that's something

that decentralization offers that I don't think you can easily mimic in the centralized world because if Amazon were to offer a permanent information storage class where you can't see my equites on my podcast at leas a supposedly permanent storage offering you would have to trust that in 50 years time Amazon still gonna offer that same product in an unmodified fashion I think that's really unlikely but with the decentralized protocol you can do that you know HTTP 1.1 works just the same now as it did when it was first released and tcp/ip v4 and so on the incentives in our we've dependent on people using the network so you know if if I'm the only person left in the world

using our weave what are the incentives for not that I think that what will happen but like if there's one person left using the system say in like 50 years from now it's forgotten right like and nobody no one is using it anymore what is the incentive for all the miners to continue storing the data there and basically like fulfilling the contract of the endowment the way to make it just say ok I'm gonna show off for this hard work nobody cares about this thing anymore right so I think from a technical perspective the key thing is that assuming the value stays constant you don't need new users to upload more data but it is a currency and so it's value is backed by perception and so yeah there is that question and I think

the answer to is actually quite simple it's just social reward in the same way that you know we we back archives now in fact there's a pretty large decentralized archiving community in the world that just stores information from the internet because they think is valuable and they put on their hard drives yeah for the sake of prosperity for the future so I think that you know if that financial reward ever were to not be enticing to people anymore people would just fall back on that social reward and we actually already seen miners in the network talking about this a lot of the miners they they don't care so much about the the financial reward of the thing but they're kind of in love with the mission and they just want to run a node because they want to replicate this data and they want to be

part of this this project to permanently store all of humanity's useful knowledge and history I think that the the mission is is something that's you know incredibly like useful and valuable and like it's something that I I could stand behind in terms of I do want to go back to you know briefly what you talked about SIA and and ipfs I mean we just talked to David auric eyes were recording this last night and I I asked them this very question the first time we interviewed him I think it's also similar for something like space mesh right that makes use of hard drive space to for like a roof of some sort of like consensus mechanism or a hero best coin

right like all of these all these proof of storage type systems and their their answer I think is we expect professionalization to emerge and for like professional actors to enter the space and it like they don't think that a future is one where like there are billions of people with like hard drives in their homes powering this this network of storage and I think that that's probably inevitable also I mean we've seen this already in Bitcoin right like mining is not like a hobbyists game anymore it is a professional game I'm not really sure where I'm going with this but yeah I think I think it's inevitable that these things happen in a very complex economic game when there

are multiple actors and like money at stake yeah fishhook I mean I think frankly like we don't we don't see ourselves as competitors to see you or fire point particularly because they're working on temporary storage when working on permanent storage I actually think that it's it could be very valuable if we could provide people with the ability to yes door temporary data inside CRO file coin from an AR we've um web app that'd be great like as we spoke about right in the beginning we don't think everything should be permanent so it'd be great if you can make applications that interact with as for permanent applications that interact with temporary storage same with block stack their idea of having links kind of or and solid pot Tim

berners-lee's think that it's kind of like on that edge of crypto where everyone is sort of vaguely aware of it but no one has actually looked into what it's doing and no one can see anything that works with it in practice but yeah these these ideas where you have like private decentralized data pots where the user owns their data that's that's a great thing to have and it would be really cool if you could or rather would because you can yes if you would build our web applications interacts with those kind of data storage systems where homeless just doesn't make sense but the application should be permanently stored like this is something we're very happy about the idea of and there there's another component to your kind of question which was about I

TFS and maybe Skynet now vs file Coyne and SIA right and this is something that I think is kind of confused a lot in the in the crypto community is that there are actually very different products see it and file corner just about storing data like connecting you with someone out there that will store your piece of data for you where is kinda and an IP FS much closer to traditional content distribution networks and they're doing like entirely different things they actually think there's there's some very interesting areas where we could work with ipfs or Skynet if the data routing ever became fast enough yeah to essentially in bed with our we've been providing a CDN on top of that data

storage layer that'd be great hmm one thing I was also thinking about when when preparing for this is in terms of our weaves the product that you're building and like what you're providing is as far as product it's the ability to store things forever right whereas like you write like saya saya and and an IP FS is like ipfs is more of a content distribution network where SCOTUS ayahs meant to be more like a like a decentralized Dropbox type of thing but the underlying commodity that all of these systems use is is data storage I think it would be interesting if all these projects got together and somehow figure it out how to create a single you know system where

basically all of these user facing applications that sit on top rely on the same data storage mechanism instead of having like siloed data storage mechanisms for different applications there's having like one big decentralized data storage mechanism where like you're benefiting from like the compounding size of these different networks and then building applications on top I don't know if that's like the right way to look at it so this thesis that we work with in the company that founded our we've is along these lines that information is the most valuable things humans have now and we've we've explored the space of how to store more information cheaper very well and there are enormous efficiencies there and it

created a massive amount of value what we haven't oh and the same with moving data around so that's the you know first is the data storage revolution we went from like storing one megabyte of data in something that was the size of a house - who's - hurry 16 terabytes of data in something there's like a small part of my laptop so that creates enormous transfer value and then another thing you can do with data is you can move it around that was the internet and that created it would be very hard to quantify but just staggering amounts of value our thesis is that there are essentially other ways that you can manipulate data that are along the lines of the length of time it should be around in the world and we're just

trying to fill one of those holes and I think that that could unlock in almost amounts of value but also that it's necessarily kind of slightly dissociated from this temporary or at least ephemeral storage world like they are quite different things that's not to say that the the protocols can't interact but I don't think they they will just be kind of drop-in replacements for another I guess because they just focus on fundamentally different things I think like you're building a poem web app that you want to I don't know store yes do large videos or something that then you might consider putting them in IP FS or in file coins something that'd be great and it makes a lot of sense because the file probably doesn't have to be around

forever but of course if you're building some kind of app inside ipfs Lee needs to store record or something for a very long period of time then you should probably store it on a leaf so they can okay they can interoperate on that sort of level but I think it's it's not like the commodity underneath is the same it's almost that that's the very point that is not the commodity of permanent data storage is different from the commodity of temporary data storage and when we eventually get to it the commodity of ephemeral data storage so let's talk about the hole that you are trying to fill so basically let's talk about the use cases that you are addressing it's our we've a storage chain that should interlink with other block chains we expect applications to

be build on top of our we for what kind of information do you expect to be stored in the weave there's different time periods right there's like the very immediate time period we we can see that we're very obviously useful to crypto projects so we're now working with a kind of scalability chain in order to store backups of their entire chain because it's part of their model that you don't necessarily have to store that stuff but users are now asking them particularly in the dphi space but what if I want records of every single transaction that's been through my chain so they are just offloading that to our weave where there's permanent and sustainable economics to handle that kind of storage but in the longer run we see ourselves fulfilling some kind of role that is

somewhere between an archive and an Internet this place that humans go to put pieces of information that they want to be around for exceedingly long periods of time whether that's knowledge whether it's records of history or whether it's personal memoirs already anything like this if you need it to be around for a long period we expect that our weave is the place that you'll want to go to store it but this is like you know 10 15 year time horizon so I probably should have asked this earlier and the in the protocol section but what's what's the block time so what's the proper two minutes two minutes okay on average although we think we can speed that up now with always 2.0 we changed the proof of access mechanism so that the amount of

data we have to transfer when you when you produce one of these proofs is much much smaller and so now we think we can compress the block time okay so I mean there's a way no problem in on smart contract chains the data availability problem right do you think we've can help with solving that partially I mean people often mistake our weave for a solution to the data availability and we have like a basic solution to it but it's not perfect for all situations so you can use our we visit data availability layer it's very simple you just use a special transaction type that requires all of the data in the transaction to be distributed to everyone in the network and then once that's happens there's permanent

incentive to recall that data so it's just going to be available there's an extraordinary high degree of likelihood but that's not the kind of hyper scalable stuff that our weave is focused on instead we we permanently store an incentive to recall the data and that's that's not quite a solution to the same thing and so that means that as long as the user has actually uploaded it in a responsible way then it will be there and if they haven't then you know will be it's not magic so so let's talk a little bit about the business how many people on your team where are you based and what is the business model here for are we first things first besides the team we're about 15 people internally but we have this approach where we see so we

look back like the history of protocols before crypto when we were starting our weave and we saw that this is very clear patent the protocols are generally made by small numbers of people actually sometimes as low as 1 but the the kind of average seemed around like 2.2 people something like that they weren't enormous teams and we think that's because protocols are essentially valuable in proportion to their simplicity because with a protocol you want more and more and more people to plug into it and more people are gonna plug in if it's simpler to build an implementation if it's easier to put inside their product so you get this this very simple function that basically just tells you well the easier it is for someone to integrate or to create a new

implementation of the higher the likelihood that they're going to be yeah actually do that and subsequently though the more integrations you get so we've seen simplicity of the protocol as like a pretty core function right from the beginning is how it's going to be kept team size fairly constrained the whole way along so we've been about you know 10 to 15 for the last it's a year to 18 months or something at this point and we don't we don't have plans to massively expand that instead what we're trying to do is put more capital out into the ecosystem where developers can pick up the are weave network and build applications on top of it and we essentially just want to provide the kick-starting capital to allow people to do that and that kind of neatly brings

us on to what the business model is which is also pretty simple as the company that founded alby's we just have a big pool of tokens and we have a big pool of fiat our game and our purely selfish economic game is to say okay so if we take this fiat and we deploy it say we spend $10,000 can we increase the value of the tokens that we have the the sum value of those tokens by more than $10,000 and if we should but that's just profit and so we should do it and this has this amazing by-product that even though this is kind of selfish behavior and we think that you know one of the things that the crypto economic community has kind of to be perfectly decided and kind of highlights it I guess in people's minds

we are selfishly incentivized to grow the size of the our weave community and network and make the network yourself more and more valuable so we just prevent my sister doing that and we do so by investing in community projects can you tell us a little bit about the community prod projects that give you're invested in them basically the kind of products that are built on top of the are weave right sure earning has all sorts of things there's things like simple blogging platforms to file uploading tools the basic T like allow you to store simple file you have on your desktop forever to things like decentralized ownerless that essentially forums for social spaces that are

governed by code these have really fascinating properties it's as if you could have a kind of website or a community where we agree upfront what the rules are going to be and so we don't need moderators and there's no power games associated with that so the rethink that'll be extremely powerful eventually as well people are basically building all kinds of services from stuff that's just a drop-in replacement for a web to service but provides the user with the certainty that the model is not going to change under their feet and the de centrally they're not exploiting their data and so on so forth two entirely new kinds of things that you just couldn't build on the centralized web in any form I'm like super excited about these all these applications personally I've been on

this quest for the last two years or so - like detach myself from things like cloud storage and things like that's like I run my own cloud basically like here in my house and backed up in different places and stuff like that but then I'm also hosting my own website my own blog a lot of my own kind of personal publishing stuff and I see this as sort of an extension of that quest to like detach myself from cloud services where like hey I could like have my blog on are we for example and it would stay there forever and like I don't ever have to you know think about do I have to back this up or something it's just there like I've there's been so many things I've written over the years that I've lost right because like I've lost the password to some tumblr account or

something like that right I think this like you know very attractive as a product proposition so what do you hope to achieve in the next coming years well the coming years are all about bootstrapping adoption so finding the areas where opponent information storage is most useful to people most quickly and so one of those areas isn't hype critter right where for example like if you have a defy application right you have a smart contract on aetherium and then you have a UI and the UI is really stored on something like Amazon s3 this is kind of crazy because it means you know your crypto kitties if for some reason the s3 bucket yeah it someone stops paying for it is unavailable something like that well now you just have this mark contract that says that X

address has Y number associated with it which is not nearly as valuable as the UI itself that was sitting on top of it so if you store the UI on our we then you get this the entire package is just as permanent as the networks that are running it which we think is very powerful so we see a lot of people moving from yet centralized storage of NFT s or centralized storage of defy UI's to putting those things on top of our weave and sort of at the larger scale inside crypto to simply moving chains inside the our weak network this isn't the kind of short term in the crypto space but we also see adoption amongst the archiving communities

because well that technology hasn't changed for like in some cases you know hundreds of years the techniques are pretty much the same and we can offer them sense of something that is fundamentally different that has a coherent sustainable economic model behind it and so that's that's pretty exciting also yeah I mean there's there's really like a whole bunch of different vectors one of the ones I'm personally most excited about is this idea of allowing for a free and open source web so one of the protocol specific problems that it seems to have led to societal level issues that are now playing out is the incentive model around web 2 which is like hidden under layers and layers and layers of yes interpretation and subjective very social stuff but the

fundamental situation is if I create a HTTP request and I send it to a server that you own and you then do some computation and you send me back a result you Kirt costs because of my usage so at a technical level this is sort of just a paired with this interesting social phenomena which was that as the web developed everybody decided that everything should basically be free so now we have this competing sort of set of facts and says okay everything's gonna be free but also my usage is costing you money and consequently basically everything on the web had to be a commercial entity of some kind and worse it had to be a commercial entity where the user was not going to pay for

their usage and subsequently the user themselves had to be commoditized and the way that that sort of played out was in what we now call I guess surveillance capitalism or in the ad tech industry this idea that basically we just can modify your future purchasing habits or voting habits or access to your personal information information about you that's pretty sensitive and we package this up as a product when we sell it to other people and that is how we fund this entire ecosystem as a result of this very very basic protocol decision that says I asked you for data you perform computation and you respond with data so we think that essentially the reason that an open source ecosystem did not

emerge on the web is exactly because of that so if I build something fun on the weekend right kind of hobby project and I launch it my and I put it on a domain name I have this this terrible problem that more users equals more expenditure for me and that pushes me to monetize whereas with our weave I say ok I put the application I built out into V essentially the free information space I pay once and it's very you know one cent per megabyte something like this so I Betty I barely notice the cost and that's it I'm done like my my expenditure related to this application is over if I don't want to ever update again and that means that other people can come to that application forever and

they're essentially you know they're paying with their own bandwidth for the cost that they're occurring incurring on the infrastructure yeah and they're not charging the developers so the developer doesn't have to monetize they can just build an application because they are they're passionate about it and they wanted to exist in the world and we essentially see that this enables people to build open-source web applications for the first time really weren't possible previously so yeah there's also something I'm really excited about for the next few years I think those incentives are just like fundamentally different than the web 2 world I think this is a fantastic closing statement thank you so much for coming on the show thanks for joining us

thanks for having me is great 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 epicenter TV slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen while you 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 to be behind the show and we're always happy to read them well thanks so much and we look forward to

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