Tom Ding & Dominic Williams: DFINITY and the Quest for a Decentralized Cloud (Episode 157)

Transcript

everyone we're looking to hire a part-time Communications Manager to join the epicenter team you can get more information about that position at epicenter TV slash apply so if you're interested in learning more about that if you have think you have what it takes go to that website and you'll find the job description and the instructions on how to apply for our Communications Manager position thanks this episode of epicenter is brought to you by Jax Jax is the user-friendly wallet that works across all your devices and handles both

Bitcoin and ether go to J a double x EO and embrace the future of cryptocurrency wallet and by the legend nos the hardware wallet which sets the new standard and security and usability get it today at ledger wallet common and use the African epicenter to get 10% off your order hi welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the technologies projects and starts driving decentralization and the global blockchain revolution my name is sebastian Cuchillo and my name is Brian De Palma and great we're here today with Tom ding and Dominic Williams they are CEO and president / cofounders of string labs now Tom's actually been a guest on this show before a long time

ago at the time he was the CEO of a company called coin fi which were sort of doing you're managing crowd sales back then quite ahead of its time I think now this has boomed a lot so and Dominic we've been wanting to get on for a long time as well he was working on on stable coin concepts already I guess also maybe two years ago or something like that so thanks so much for coming on guys pleasure to be here see you mind running us through maybe both of you guys how did you first get involved in the blockchain cryptocurrency space and how did that what was the journey to get to a string string Labs so yes I got a into Bitcoin probably

about late 2013 Bitcoin price was or I said early 2013 become price was like $80 or something ignore that for a while and then saw the white paper like a lot of people and then kind of realized this is or something into it so my first journey into it was looking from the perspective of what are the interesting kind of crowdfunding kind of a model that can revolution that traditional crowdfunding models now that was a bit of time and quantify and then also did as another more interesting kind of side project watching University which at the time started a kind of first in-person developer education program it's really kind of nonprofits community program but

it really helped blue strap I think some of the community and awareness around watching technology have like 300 or 400 graduates out of that program a lot of people out of that program still pretty active I think in the industry but later on I think what's gets for me more interesting was how could the new kind of decentralized technology could change some of the very fundamental way how business can be can be done and that kind of lead a lot of a discussion later on was Dominic and you know I think it's really interesting to me was starting with things like mirror assets how could you create digital assets in the decentralized fashion completely essentially fashion that kind of started if you're anyway

string labs we started with mirror assets and move on later on to the definitive project which is a new decentralized network that we're going to talk about today well I'm a long time sort of hacker entrepreneur with interests in distributed computing I actually first came across some of the ideas behind Bitcoin in a paper called be money by Wade I and I think is 1998 or 1999 and I was using his crypto plus plus library to create a certificate system and I read the paper thought is very interesting was very busy with an

online storage startup actually and then sort of 2011 I launched this kids game which grew enormous Lee ended up with three million users and through that I did a lot of work on distributed systems scalable application servers I worked with a database called Cassandra in fact we had which is a scalable database used by Netflix now we had the first complex production sort of implementation of of that contributed various code to it so and it was during that time you know I was thinking I mean

Cassandra in some ways is it just is it a centralized database anyways right you know you add these servers to whenever you want to increase the computational capacity and the storage capacity of your cluster you just add a new server to the databases gossip network so I was already thinking you know how far can this be taken and and then you know Bitcoin sort of crashed its way back into the common consciousness in a major way in April 2013 and I think partly because I was primed from Wade eyes thing partly because I was you know into distributed systems in a big way

I kind of I was looking for something else to do and I just very quickly became completely consumed by decentralized protocols and trading crypto tokens and you know just took over my life and Here I am today it's fascinating that you you mentioned where dice be money a lot of people don't really you know think that there were any decentralized distributed currencies before Bitcoin but this one is sort of a weird predecessor that actually Satoshi reference when creating Bitcoin that board a lot of the same principles as Bitcoin so I encourage anyone who's interested in that to go read up about B money so let's uh let's let's talk about

string Lampson tell us about the company and what you guys are trying to achieve yeah so I guess we positioned three laps really as a kind of incubator and kind of rocket launcher if you will for many differents essentialist opportunity if you think about a layer of opportunity within the decentralized space there's obviously the very fundamental problems we're trying to address like scalability privacy and etc business and app tations the very network layer on top of that you have many common needs that's a lot of businesses and decentralized startups or constructs we need for example stable currency identities arbitration etc etc I think we we kind of position string

Labs as a general incubator and investors and developer self of trading post in-house and external projects to launch project at these different layers which is quite a unique model it's a venture backed but most of the projects we create when it gets to certain maturity it wasn't pushed to certain stage they will have they will have their own independent existence and which is one of the very nice thing about these into the project they are independent protocols are not necessary controlled by any a certain orientations so we're going to be uniquely benefiting from this venture backing with stable financial stability but also the ability to create a neutral and impendent protocols I'm curious that you you know you say you're venture-backed company and that's

definitely one position to have as opposed to you know relying on a crowd sale why do you think so many other companies or other projects in this space are going towards the crowd sale route rather than you know going in the direction that you've taken which is to raise capital we kind of by the way I prefer the term donation which kind of more precisely reflect the nature of the process but anyway I think the difference I guess part of that I think we're quite lucky we have some really good visionary backers including like IDG amino Capital Busha Capital which is I think was the first 50 million dollar dedicated fund from the much younger

probably the first in the world but I think with these kind of a venture backing which treats a more stable structure because in general there's a there's a kind of fallacy or concern of you Russian too quickly into the donation face a hey everyone please donate before the product even reach a certain certain state I mean they're not the nation's the nation's does not sound at all like a good description of what's going on with that I think at the moment in the market it's probably not true but you know the right way to look at this is that foundation look I mean you know the whole point about a decentralized

network is that there isn't it doesn't depend upon some organization or individual right so once you've created that Network you know it's fundamentally dependent on a decentralized community of independent miners right so you know it's possible to create a not-for-profit sort of tax-exempt foundation right and someone like xud Switzerland and it's possible for that thing to collect donations right and then take those donations to develop the technology and it's also possible for that foundation to recommend when the technology is ready that people who've donated to the foundation and otherwise contributed to

the birth of the projects allocated you know some reward in the Genesis block but actually you know the foundation it's not even in the power of the foundation to issue tokens to people because all it can do is recommend something to the miners right it's ultimately you know whatever Genesis block a Foundation recommends it's ultimately up to the miners to adopt the recommendation and you know make that real I mean I can see why one phrases that of course to avoid legal liabilities and stuff like that but it does not at all sound like accurate description or doesn't although all sound like it describes motivations of

both the people who donate slash invest in these projects nor the people creating them that's true okay they're giving money because of the expectation of a financial return which is not a donation well I mean I think you know people will take different approaches and you know I think we'll probably exemplify a slightly different approach you know I think tokens should be designed very much to enable participation and you know I think there are some kind of slightly shady things that go on in the industry you know frankly at the moment and you know we would not want to follow that path I would encourage other people not to follow that path you know I think

it's true that there are a lot of people who would like to you know make money or gain resources through launching these systems and that's fine and that's fair enough but you know the exact process by which that is done is very very important and you know we shouldn't be encouraging FOMO based pump-and-dump speculative kind of coin ventures right you know yeah totally let's let's go back to the affinity so what are you trying to accomplish here with with Tiffany what's the project gonna look like and what kind of difference is it going to make in the blockchain space

so Definity is in a position as an extension to the etherium ecosystem that's governed using a kind of decentralized intelligence called the blockchain nervous system and it introduces a lot of new crypto and decentralized Network protocols that have been sort of in the works since 2014 firstly with a project called pebble and then later with with Definity and you know these protocols are very interesting they introduce some completely new properties with specific regards to scalability you know we want

to create an infinite decentralized cloud that can eventually host you know big public infrastructures like Twitter Gmail uber even even web search and as well as you know financial exchanges and various other business applications all of the crypto and the protocols you know would deliberately not patenting anything it's all open source so you know it could be back ported into aetherium you know so the main distinction ultimately is you know governed versus own governed so you mentioned something I could be centralized Twitter or some of the

centralized search now my understanding I guess is with here iam I'm not sure if that's really an objective to get to that kind of level but if it's more the objective to have you know sort of this core logic of distributed applications in there and a lot of other things take place elsewhere so is that other differentiation as well that you guys are trying to put sort of entire full applications on the chain whereas through applications might be more of a bit of a hybrid so yeah I think that probably is a distinguishing factor currently I'm not sure if he'll stay a distinguishing factor so Definity was you know begun with this specific aim of being able to host that kind of stuff

and creating this you know infinite decentralized cloud and I think because of the history of aetherium you know there is a there's a sort of concept out there that it should only be used for high value for douchery applications and that wherever necessary you know wherever it needs to you know be linked to storage for example you know some large file then the large file should reside in ipfs you know that we certainly you know we don't share that vision right now you know we want to produce enough for the decentralized cloud which can store data and perform any number of computations as necessary

and the research work was begun with a basic requirement that all designs worked on a network of a million-plus computers or clients because you know if you look at the Google cloud or the amp or the Microsoft cloud for example in both cases they have more than a million servers so you know we wanted to make sure that you know we could work with any number of computers and furthermore as as you add you know more computation power in the form of new mining clients that the overall storage capacity and computational capacity of the network increased well that's interesting

there's there's other projects recently we had on Greg Meredith of scenario and that project also seems to be taking a similar approach for all of the components of the text sack or built into the same architecture when you look at the way applications of traditional applications are built today all of the components whether they be storage logic and database are typically not part of the same stack you may you may have sort of recommend recommended stacks or stacks that become adopted by the community like for instance PHP MySQL or nodejs MongoDB that sort of thing and then storage you know can be

decentralized sorry it can be distributed unless cloud architecture isn't like that it seems to be contrary to the way that traditional applications are built in a way that we have at it you know the best interoperability is possible can you go into detail or sort of explained the design rationale behind why Definity is chosen to build everything into one core system because I personally see that as some sort of a weakness and of course yeah so it's first of all yeah we're very different to scenario and scenario you know as I think it's you know I'd like to hear more about how exactly

they're going to credit scalable system and secondly you know they've also got this kind of stack of you know social networking layers and things like that which would derive from a system that's certainly not a virtual machine so you know first of all Definity is just trying to produce a tamper-proof virtual machine right a scalable tamper-proof virtual machine but you know tamper-proof virtual machine and we're not producing directly at least you know any any kind of foundational layers on top of that for people or just the definitive project is just focused on the production of this virtual machine so stepping back for a moment and asking what does that mean well you

know if you big Bitcoin Satoshi's invention was actually from my perspective the introduction the introduction of something called a state full of decentralized protocol right so--but BitTorrent is a decentralized protocol right but it doesn't remember state so you know if I send a file to you over BitTorrent it doesn't make any difference to everyone else Bitcoin was different because you know it produces this virtual ledger right and if I put a freely spendable Bitcoin on to that virtual ledger and then you know Sebastian you spend that Bitcoin on the

virtual ledger well Tom now can't spend that Bitcoin right so that means that the state of that virtual ledger has been remembered which is why we call it a decentralized sorry a stateful decentralized protocol now Bitcoin produced a virtual ledger aetherium moved the game on and produced a virtual machine a virtual computer if you like a tamper-proof virtual computer and this is a very interesting thing because we can install soft software on it that runs exactly as you'd expect and if you want autonomously and independently from humans which provides a lot of very

interesting properties so you know we Definity is a stateful decentralized protocol that produces a tamper-proof virtual machine but it introduces the extra attribute that the virtual machine is scalable let's take a short break to talk about Jax Jax is a multi coin wallet created by the people at the central now in the past if he had a whole bunch of cryptocurrencies it was a pain to handle them you either had to leave them on an exchange which was insecure or you had to have all these different wallets which was a hassle fortunately now with Jax knows medieval days of darkness misery and suffering

are over Jack supports multiple cryptocurrencies and new ones are being added but it's not just storing cryptocurrency so you can do with Jax but you can also exchange them directly from with inside the wallet thanks to their shape shift integration and since there's only one seed Jax makes it super easy to backup and sync to your other devices Jax works with Windows Mac OS Linux Android iOS and has browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome so go to Jack Co that's J a double x io to download the wallet and get started today we'd like to thank Jax for the support of epicenter now you mentioned even this K level of course that is sort of this you know

Holy Grail in the whole block chain space so can you talk about what does that look like how does Definity accomplish that you know there are there are many dimensions to the design of Definity and you know one of the we introduced a bunch of principles and we you know many of them traditional computer science principles into into into the design so we like to separate concerns so you know our designs typically separate you know civil resistance consensus validation storage so that you can and we tried to couple

them so you can they can be addressed in an optimal way but at the core of Definity I suppose is an observation about the importance of randomness they're all decentralized networks and and also high level advanced high level systems ultimately depend on incorruptible unlimited level unpredictable source of randomness and we introduced this thing called thrush or relay which you know is the ultimate incarnation of that so you know you could look at Bitcoin for example and proof-of-work and say really you know

proof-of-work casting aside the civil resistance requirements for a moment is really a random number generator you know you have this big huge network of mining clients and they all want to produce blocks so Bitcoin has them race to solve a current puzzle which can only be solved by brute force with solutions appearing in a plus on distribution and whoever solves the puzzle the current puzzle first is assigned as a temporary leader and they can they can distribute a block to be appended to the current chain you know now you know there are some issues with that with

respect to designing high performance networks in particular the Poisson distribution you know whereby you don't know how long it will take for a block to be produced is is very problematic so you know if you ever look at the blockage you know this block explores with Bitcoin you'll see that you know sometimes you you got a new block 20 seconds after the previous block and other times it'll take hours right that's the Poisson distribution it takes a random amount of time to produce a block so you know that's quite a expensive and difficult way to produce randomness we apply cryptography in a novel way to produce randomness and not

only can this randomness only be produced on the agreement of large parts of the network but the randomness that is produced is unfortunate fillable and unpredictable and using the properties of this randomness we can do a variety of things and there's actually a number of different high level chain consensus protocols or chain agreement protocols that can be used but perhaps more importantly for us we can hang scalable validation layers off the random sequence of values so we have a technique called validation towers and

these are arranged into a thing called a validation tree which is a bit like does does her validation what a Merkel tree does although the individual nodes can be --have a synchronous you know can operate at different speeds over the network and this provide makes it possible for us to create a single digest of all the state stored for example on shards across the network and that system only really works if you have this incorruptible our manipulable unpredictable source of randomness so I watched this talk and this is a bit of a tangent on the topic but I think it's really interesting I was just talk by

Tim ahankhah who's one of the people that works with you at string labs who describes of different ways that we can generate randomness and specifically how we can generate random lists and it decentralized way and one of the things that he mentions and I'd like to get your thoughts on this is as specifically as you as you as you pointed out is that the the proof of work system Alec arisen is gen is is meant to generate some sort of a random of randomness and if we had this decentralized true random number generator is there any is there any potential there to develop new types of consensus models that can work in a

decentralized way as sort of this proof of work does but you know doesn't have some of the flaws of proof of work and proof of stake absolutely so one way to see the importance of randomness is to look at Bitcoin and to imagine conversely that it couldn't produce randomness so we'd see some problems emerging straight away firstly if you knew in advance who is going to mine the next block you'd be able to dose that a dose that target right if you could you know did I mean I'm obviously big coins become mining has become very centralized and it's a

bunch of pools but let's just imagine in fact it was more decentralized as it was meant to me and that somehow you'd stripped the IP addresses of the important miners out of the p2p Network if you knew which miner was going to mine each block in advance you might be able to dust them if if those if there were higher-level systems depending on that and you knew an advanced who is going to mine a block well if if an adversary controlled a sequence of blocks he might be able to you know perform some manipulation on financial markets or something like that by censorship or some other strategy in addition to that you know be very difficult to decide how to fairly

distribute the mining amongst the participants and in fact even worse you know if it was manipulable you know one miner might be able to and this is the kind of problem that you know would stop something like NXT working you know one miner would be able to choose what transactions to put into a block say to you know modify the random value that it created and this would and if this influenced which was going to be that who was going to be the next miner to produce the next block well you know you might be able to sort of anniversary you might be able to take control of mining and just influence the path taken so that it was always his own you know

clients they were creating blocks so it's very important that it's not possible to manipulate randomness and you know in the case of Bitcoin you know you have to solve these puzzles so pretty much the only way you can do that is if you have the mining power and and you can only solve those puzzles by having this mining machinery were away and and it's the probability that you'll solve the puzzle first is proportional or approximately proportional so the amount of mining power that you have deployed so you know randomness and it's absolutely fundamental to decentralize networking and as it happens also as it turns out

high-level systems too so you know with the threshold relay system we sort of strengthen a lot of properties while also removing the need to produce random numbers in a Poisson distribution and because this randomness is deterministic and unfold and I manipulable and so on it actually becomes relatively straightforward to create consensus protocols on top of it just a quick thing I'll just say something quickly which is that I'll talk about consensus protocols but strictly speaking it's a common misunderstanding can the world consensus actually is applied to traditional distributed

computing protocols which allow all the participants to decide a result and then move on blockchain is actually a probabilistic which is slightly different and they they're kind of eventually consistent so something like Bitcoin is better described as something you know Byzantine fault tolerant eventually consistent log right and an agreement is kind of iterative in it you know it becomes stronger over time so it's more of an a kind of agreement protocol than a consensus protocol but of course I'll use the word consensus from now so you mentioned mining now you know again people no understand Bitcoin mining in in Definity does that look what's what's the sort of

connection here would I also mean I'm gonna be able to spin up my machine and if I control one percent of the mining power I am gonna get one percent of the reward is there a block reward or get to mine one percent of the block is there as a similar thing it's not too dissimilar I mean in Definity we require mining clients to firstly to create a mining identity and very approximately we look at these identities as representing competent you know some fixed amount of computational resource okay so you create a mining identity by making a

deposit of definitive so in that sense it's a bit like proof of stake but because we imagine each a density or require each a density to have some amount of computational resource the deposits you make to credit mining identity are always the same right so you know if you look at something like Casper you know people make something akin to a mining identity by depositing stake and that stake can be varying sizes so you know a big whale could come along and create an enormous you know Aidid that would mine an enormous proportion of the blocks so in Definity first of all each mining identity which is like a you know public

key is expected to supply a certain amount of computational resource and consequently the deposit required to create an identity is the same at any one time it varies a bit set on this governance system but that that's the first thing then once that mining identity has been joined to the network and begins to participate in mining there's a thing called a unique state copy ID which is another new bit of crypto we're introducing which requires the mining identity to constantly report on a uniquely encrypted copy of state

that it manages and and this is done in such a way that we can be sure that each identity has this copy unique copy of the state because we need to manage replication okay and it's done in such a way that that we can be sure that the state that it's reporting on okay is it just coming from some centralized state pool right there isn't just some like big you know mega server in the sky that is actually maintaining this state and and the identity know whoever controls the mining against it's just you know forwarding queries to it so yeah it's a kind of combination so

you know you could look at that as a bit like proof you know unique state copies are a bit like proof of performance so it's a kind of funny hybrid really in that sense you know the identities are created by depositing some steak and affinities but the amount of steak that you deposit is always the same because the responsibilities of that identity will be the same as the responsibilities that the other identities and respect to computational resource and then there's this thing called unique state copy IDs which kind of holds the mining identity - it's part of the bargain and forces it to constantly prove that it's maintained this unique copy of the state you guys mention you hear him before and to me it

sounds like this is you know a fully alternative protocol - here I'm gonna be an alternative public blockchain that sounds like it's gonna have some powerful benefits today's magic where it is neuron and you you are Oh N ed over let's talk Bitcoin calm to sign in enter the magic word and claim your part of the listener award can you explain though because you've also talked about how it's going to be complimentary and sort of an extension like how this is not just a competition and sort of an

attempt to create you know the follow-on to here iam just as if you try to create the successor to a Bitcoin in a way so I think the the first thing to remember is that you know we don't believe in patience and it's an open source project so all of our crypto and protocols could potentially be backwashed into a theorem so you know and in fact you know we want to maintain the maximum level of compatibility possible with aetherium so for example our UVM is slightly different but the most part is the same and you know rather than going off and trying to create our own virtual machine we're just going to fund that assists etherion projects so you know potentially a theorem can take

all of our technology the main difference is governance so I mean in terms of market position there's a few things actually and I think it's probably truly are more obsessed about scalability than aetherium there are some things that come with that I mean arguably you could say we favor consistency slightly more than a theorem does and theorem White's favorite availability slightly more than we do so there are some you know differences in vision I think at the network level but the main you know distinction factor is is this governance and some other features that provide interoperability between private and public chains which reflects the needs of some of our partners so you know we

see ourselves extending you know extending theorem and providing you know an addressing a different segment of the market you know there are people out there that want the code to be law and you know there are lots of benefits to the coders lore approach but there are also people out there that what a government system you know that can reverse hacks like the DAO and things like that more easily specifically the business community really wants that because you know if you're a big company and you want to put you know a large amount of money into tokens or in a virtual computer and maybe you know build systems on that virtual computer that become crucial to your organization

right well you know you don't want to find one wait you know wake up one day and find out that your developer has made a mistake when they designed the software all the small contracts and some hacker has corrupted and corrupted it and put it into a unrecoverable state or and you know there's nothing you can do about it or even worse you know he's stolen tens of millions of dollars worth of tokens and the only answer is that you can use the block Explorer to follow them around the blockchain right so you know a lot of businesses you know will happily make the coders law contingent upon some higher level governance AI and you know

for them that's a you know a better alternative so I think you know it's not so much about producing a better aetherium as extending the etherium ecosystem and so people have a choice some people who want the code is law systems can go to the theorem and people who want govern systems can go Definity yes so I I'm really happy you bring this topic up governance is something that we've been asking people about pretty much anytime somebody comes on her project because I think at this point it's abundantly clear that this is a massive need even if you look at Bitcoin right there there's a huge disagreement about what direction they should go in and there's no way of resolving those

agreements and then again we're here we've seen the same thing and it seems like a lot of the new protocols that are coming out are taking you know this seriously and trying to do things in this direction so I'm a curious can you run us through what the mechanics of Definity governance system look like so you know we've got this thing called the blockchain nervous system and the blockchain nervous system has a privileged access to the virtual machine so inside the virtual machine you've got these things called op codes which which are a bit like assembly instructions

right so you know in when you're coding and C you know that compiles down to a bunch of assembly instructions that you know executes you know that the CPU executes right and you know on aetherium you have you know a language like slit at solidity and that compiles down to these off codes which run directly on the EVM the etherium virtual machine so we've you know extended the theorem virtual machine to add some new privileged instructions which can do things like you know freeze contracts redistribute tokens even run arbitrary code to you know reorganize things and the blockchain nervous system has is the

only you know system on the platform has access to these off codes otherwise it'd be chaos obviously and so you know it's like a sort of super user on Linux or something right it can you know freeze bad contracts it can redistribute tokens it can run arbitrary code to reorganize things that also you know have access to those special opcodes and the system runs you know like as follows you know people can submit proposals to the Bloch a nervous system you have to pay a fee and affinities to stop it

being spammed there are different kinds of proposals you know some are very technical such as let's upgrade the protocol to this and others more related to to governance for example you know how much should it should it cost right now how much how I should be deposited to create a mining identity given the current value of two finishes for example and decisions on proposals are made using a distributed version of liquid democracy okay so individuals can create neurons okay you create on your own by

depositing to finishes it's a bit like proof of stake and you can only get those two finishes back by dissolving than your own which takes three months say you have a big incentive to make sure that the blockchain nervous system doesn't make stupid decisions because your two finishes might fall in value right you can't get them out quickly it takes three months to dissolve on your own once you've created in your own you have to install some client software which which I mean loosely you can think of it like sort of for mining or something you have to install some client software on your laptop or desktop or whatever it is configure it

with the delegate key and this client software behaves as follows firstly you can configure it with a follow list which is the addresses of other neurons that you follow on different topics okay so let's imagine that a highly technical proposal comes into the blockchain nervous system in respect to upgrading the blockchain nervous system protocol the client software running obviously on the edges of the network would detect this proposal and display it okay in the in the technical tab and it would wait for a default amount of time to allow the

controller of the neurone to vote on that proposal now if it's a very technical proposal it might be the only a small proportion of the people who whole you know have neurons would feel qualified to vote on those who under proposal so after default amount of time that the neuron client software will go to the follow list for technical topics right and it will say right has the first neuron identified by its address in the list voted if so follow if not back off if it's backed off after a short while it will come back has either

of the first two neurons in the follow list voted okay the second neuron in the following list has voted so just follow the vote of that neuron right so you know it's kind of synchronous and non-deterministic and eventually the blood chain nervous systems that have distributed brain if you like will cascade to a decision obviously over time you know the follow lists get better for example you might be particularly impressed by somebody on reddit who happens to advertise the address of their neurone and you might configure that address into your neurons follow list right and the nice thing

about a decision I mean the nice thing about the system is obviously one hand it captures the expertise within the community right but on the other hand nobody can know how these decisions are made it is completely a pain which is why we call it a paid liquid democracy because the follow lists exist on the edges of the network right and there's no way of capturing what those follow nests are and this is very very important because for example let's say you know tom was you know the most you know given given this follow graph amongst the neurons on some topic tom was the most influential person in the community well there's none of problems I mean firstly somebody

might seep realize this and seek to kidnap Tom or extorting or influence him or more likely you know if some controversial decision was made that upset a regulator for example you know somebody might try and sue him or you know some government agency you know might might seek to you know do something bad but as it is you can't see how the brain makes its decisions no there's a lot of this I think that's that's very exciting and it's one of the I mean liquid democracy right maybe some people can relate to it a little bit in in the existing political system right today we we kind of wrote for somebody maybe to become a member of parliament

and then they just make whatever all the decisions as is kind of a delegate and and this in a way is it's almost a more fine-grained way of creating delegates where you can say you know foreign policy I'm gonna follow this person on you know on this other policy I'm gonna follow this other person so I mean that's very exciting now one question you call this an AI why an AI it doesn't sound like AI mean it's it's more like existing democracy than in AI it sounds like to me well you know you know to some extent it's it's an easy way of explaining what it is but there are some

differences between normal liquid democracy and sunny major differences between the blodger nervous system and you know traditional democracy so you know rather than just a simple delegate democracy what we have is you know sort of dynamic trust graph I suppose where you know the you know I could follow you you could follow Tom and so on ad infinitum right and these you know there's a graph of follow relationships that is not only dynamic in the sense people can change it all the time but the way that you know it comes to decisions is very much

non-deterministic and and dependent on timing and things like that so the dynamism is important too because the system improves its ability to make decisions over time as people update those follow relationships so you know it's not like a traditional piece of artificial intelligence like a neuron network or a Bayesian classifier but actually those things completely different to a brain as well so in some in some senses you know we've got to kind of distributed wisdom of the crowds process through you know this very dynamic algorithmic system of you know neurons following each other so I mean

arguably you know we've got more of a claims to be an artificial intelligence than in a Bayesian classifier and you're on that one let's take a break to talk about the ledger nano s the new flagship hardware wallet by Leger I'll let let your CEO and couch avec tell you all about how simple to nano s makes it to securely store all your private keys The Legend of nano s is our latest generation hardware wallet this is a multi currency Hardware wallet it has a screen and buttons to manage everything on screen you can generate a new seed restore seed or set up your pin on the device your seed will never be exposed to the host computer on the nano voice you have different apps you have

the Bitcoin app you have the a theorem app and you have the Fido u2f app for strong authentication and for instance with Google Dropbox or github you can manage your crypto currencies with the ledger wallet be going chrome app or the little wallet is serum chrome app with the Nano s all your Bitcoin and ECM addresses are derived from one unique seed with one seed you can have in the same time Bitcoin the serum is your classic balances and also if your restore your seed you will also recover all the keys associated to other apps such as Fido u 2f s SH G B G so it's very simple just one seed and multiple applications the

Nano s sets the new standard in hardware wallet security and usability you can get yours today at ledger wallet comm and when you do be sure to use the offer code epicenter to get 10% off your first order we'd like to thank ledger for their support of epicenter so let's dive into the economics of Definity and specifically with regards to the two neurons talk about the different tokens that will be part of Definity you know there's a base token which is Definity and they can be used as fuel for computation as ether is in ethereum they can be used as deposits to create neurons and by the way there's a like I

said of for mining reward for neurons and you receive this discounted by the proportion of proposals you didn't vote on so you know you would get a pro rata reward for your neurone depending on how many to finishes you deposit it into it and the voting power of than your own obviously will be proportional to the defenders too and you know if you miss half the votes then you only get half the thought mining reward u del y z-- get that's the second use and the third use is you can create a mining identity so you know the finishes of best thought of as participation tokens you can you know you know the most I suppose like

you know an end user would use them just to pay for computation but they also play crucial roles in helping the network function either through its ability to make decisions upgrade itself you know reverse mitigate misuse or all through you know people being able to add new computing resources to the network to make it give it more capacity so talk about how these tokens will be distributed or are they mine or whether the sort of monetary characteristics of Definity tokens so we've got two kinds of mining one is the thought mining so people who hold your owns will be issued you do finishes and people that are

mining the network in the traditional sense yeah by adding a computational resource will receive definitive - so you've got like you know three three different uses feuless computation creating blockchain nervous system neurons that enable you to participate in governance in a form of thought mining that can also only new to finishes and mining the network in the traditional traditional sense by adding computational extra computational resource which again ends you more definitive yeah so I just want to think we talked about a scalability point the the technology itself we talked about the nervous

system I think I'm noticing worst missioning is the private public integration so the one way we treat we design I think tinfinity very differently from many of the other kind of blushing companies is we see we don't necessarily see private chain or publishing as one way against the other people don't have to make hard choice to complete primate chain and be isolated and silo from the rest of the public services or am I going complete public chain or exposing all my internal business internals now they can have a hybrid we see a very similar paradigm through the internet when you have the internet you have the land as well you don't lose your land right you still maintain your VPN or land but use the Internet as a common meeting points you

use common protocol like HTTP email Twitter or whatever as a common medium plain 4G service we see a very similar paradigm emergent for the mass adoption of watch-chain or trust the computing is that there will be lots of common sources identities arbitration etc these are the basic building blocks and especially when we're talking about more complex system like stable currency it's not like every every single company which wanted to use the dot dot blotting has to be their own stable currency it would much rather prefer using an existing solution for example the five project were working on or it could be there some kind of common bank coin color coin they'd like to adopt and they can just

reuse that service and Definity provide a way to integrate that to so you can have a internal a private Tiffany instance or a consortium definite in Stinson your smart contract you have a little declaration it allows you call into the public Definity service so all the different private can can connect to each other and use common blocks I think that's kind of worth mentioning how way people think about I'm starting to get a better idea of how this works then so what you're describing is services that would be built on the public chain and you mentioned if user like you could have an identity system you could have a stable currency you may have other services and in your on your private chains that you deploy with permission

nones nodes known nodes you simply include sort of as you would in a program like in a regular application exactly libraries to that external publicly there's more than a library though it's a more than library I think traditional library of course is a static library a piece of cold whereas here we're talking about a network right we're talking about a API of network okay which is way more house so can you can you describe them and perhaps what kind of use cases you see for that I mean I can think of some but I don't know what what types of use cases you envision for this sort of you know private blockchain also using a public blockchain service

yeah I guess the most common use case I think we talked about a lot is supply chain system and the weirdest thing about supply chain system it involves many different pieces right obviously in a supply chain system you probably wanted to use ident identity imagine a semi-open kind of trade financing a supply chain system of manufacture of hundreds and thousands vendors each of them you before the enroll into your system you might want to do certain the identity or reputation check that's database from the database but that's network or public service exist on a public chain you call into that chain valid identity next up someone is in your network you want to do some sort of trade financing and you would need to move the money around

well money exists probably maybe as a stable currency on unab watching you probably want to use ether or Definity as underlying token volatility so that's the next thing you want to use then you know the sun's an action happens it's discrete where's my goods or there's some quality problems you probably want to call into a public arbitration system that resolves specializing for example in cross-border disputes we have a network of attorneys lawyers arbitrators who are providing these services you could imagine a chain of these services being being calling this throughout the lifecycle something like that and none of that services perfectly you know makes sense I guess to to retrace for internally necessarily so that that's very that's really interesting and how I

like that approach you know III think that currently a lot of companies and startups building blockchain infrastructure or are sort of torn between joining the private blockchain doing in a public blockchain we see banks doing pox on aetherium others doing pox on private blockchains and there's there's there's obviously a lot of value using a public blockchain and there's a lot of value using a probably blockchain and having this this hybrid approach or this sort of dependent one dependent on the other approaches I think as a concept really really powerful however from your point of view it requires it does depend upon those source services that you build on

Definity I'm I'm not sure if you would build them or if you know community members would build them but those those services need to have there needs to be some kind of network effect behind them like if you have an identity system it needs to be widely adopted if you have a stable currency it needs to be widely adopted for you know I couldn't sort him of I don't know some supply chain consortium around fisheries or something like that to adopt that how do you plan to to get there how do you plan to you know bring you get to some sort of massive adoption around these public services for all of this other than you know private stuff to be enabled well I mean just just quickly as well I mean what's the

question directly through through you know business partnerships there's a lot of businesses that you know would like to use public blockchain if you want to call it that think about it more like you know decentralize computers but they'd like to use public blockchain facilities sometimes just to link you know business clients who want to have private chains and other times to you know help them build a private chain or cost-effectively or faster and make it more powerful and by link it into public systems so they're you know from its well-known that we're working with Boston Consulting Group digital ventures

for example you know we speak to a lot of international companies through that for instance and so there's that there's a lot of demand for this stuff out there and you know you know Definity isn't just myopically focused on the business space at all by any means but we you know do have you know strong links to business and do you want to kind of help them build out this ecosystem right and you know currently you know there's I mean you know my kind of opinion of bank chains is you know they're just banks are very worried about you know

blockchain so they're jumping up and down saying we've got blockchain and it's not not really going to you know it'll help them optimize their systems but it's not the future the future is to have you know the future really rests in the court of open public systems and you know private systems will hang off those and they'll be able to communicate with each other through these public systems so build on public services like you know in supply chain we talk to arbitration and density and stable coins and you know maybe there's haulage Network so people can even you know get goods delivered cheaply and it's it's a very interesting business paradigm because you know as tom says you know in

the past we've been have always been able to build software by you know incorporating linking in pre-existing software libraries and in the future people will be able to sort of build live business ecosystems by building on existing ecosystems as though they were kind of components you know so that you know for example that could be this network of truck drivers right that will deliver things and you'd create some kind of supply chain system you're thinking hey I'd love to add some functionality to this supply chain systems so that I get these goods delivered automatically if that's what the sender wants right now you can just link it into this haulage system on the

public network and that's immensely powerful you know and a very very attractive model for the business community especially when you're talking about you know the kind of like high-end large companies that would like to leverage you know functionality for things like supply chain right now with affinity so what's what's the business model here when it comes to maybe string labs and or Definity I mean you might you guys mentioned that there would be definitely token so it's the idea that you know you guys would own maybe some of this token and then you know if the

network takes off - token gain some value that kind of model or are you planning to develop services or applications on top of it can you share anything about what directions you guys are going yeah so I think it's a bit of both so if it's in Definity you know the foundation will there will be a certain early contributor pool they're open many people including string laps will be part of the contributor pool so there is a certain token recommendation that the foundation will recommend say okay you know here's your own computer pool in addition to the donation donate donors it will be these pieces that's part of that the other part of main part of the

string last model is to create businesses and commercial service around the edge right if you think about the the system that we create a protocol we create are at its core but there will be a lot of peripheral services around decentralized protocol for example and that these definitely network there will be people who need to provide private chikaine hosting and provisioning configurations there will be certain business partnerships and creating these common services that we talked about right so there are a number of z-series that I think string labs will will specialize it or even more simply mining right yeah my name yeah exactly I mean in addition I think the other interesting thing is since string labs

kind of has lots of expertise in buting these lower level Network protocols there's also additional services like five we probably won't have time to cover that today but there will be additional these kind of common services that's how we could viewed and around five obviously there will it have its own ecosystem I guess from Lee I was kind of generally think of us ourselves very much as an ecosystem butor we viewed open protocols and we provide services around its hedge okay great so what what's the timeline here when is Definity going to launch so you know we just recently incorporated not-for-profit foundation in new Zurich and I think it's the first such

foundation to get full tax exempt status and you know obviously you know string labs has been you know providing money to get that made and there have been some founders who put some fanzine and you know but wants to you know raise additional funds but actually in the in the first instance probably they'll just be a kind of like seed fund or for the foundation because it takes a while to scale out operations and then you know may do another funder later on you know once technology has been released and people have had the chance to evaluate things like threshold relay

and see how it works out in the wild but time you know the timeline it may be that the seed funder actually happens this year and that this main funder will happen sort of in in the spring of next year but we haven't absolutely decided yet but and I mean you know we're not trying to push it as well like some kind of big we're kind of slightly alarmed by some of these crowd cells we're not trying to push it as some big thing we'd sort of recommend actually that yeah it will be public obviously yes everyone has a who's interested has a chance to make donations and get recommended for the finishes but we sort of recommend in the first instance that you know only people

that are really interested in for example running your owns or creating mining identities actually make donations and get in or actually people that have got interested in building on top of the network so we expect there'll be some you know donations coming in from you know people that wouldn't normally get involved in these kind of things and so he wouldn't you know we would still encourage people not to speculate on it and you know the seed the seed donations around will probably only raised like a million Swiss francs and value possibly a bit more but there abouts

and then once the we've got these three releases copper zinc tungsten scheduled at the moment the copper release will have a kind of threshold real a very high performance chain consensus protocol hanging off that and the blockchain nervous system and and the copper prototype will be released before the main donations around and then that will be followed by zinc which is interoperability and tungsten which is the simplified version of our scaling systems so yeah I mean you know keep keep keep I spend and the will be you know a public announcement and a website and so on probably in the

not-too-distant future but you know it's gonna the first seed rounds did we capture a million dollars and you know all these things it's you know it's it's a very risky investment and it would prefer people just to get in who actually want to participate in the network through for mining and the blockchain nervous system or you know come to compute mining or actually building on the network at this stage if people want to get involved in Definity and while you guys are building should they wait until that comes out there is just something they can do today and I mean you guys are not on the open source here right so for example contributing code isn't something that's possible at

this point well you can you know you can come and work for us right and you know at the moment were you know trying to build out you know always that's what everyone is but you know well always wanting to work with great engineers and you know that can come from anywhere in the stack I mean of course we you know particularly interested in people who've got low level systems programming skills crypto skills protocol skills but you know there's there's also other lots of other components to the system you know people who are wizards in writing small contracts and interfaces and things like that so you know I'd invite anybody

that's interested to contact string labs and also the foundation will you know be appearing on the web soon and people could also contact the foundation to get involved for examples and you know kind of like you know freelance contributor and you know the a lot of the reason we haven't and there is actually some of our stuff is libation people just don't people just don't know what it is but you know we're using this thing could have be less threshold signatures and you know there's a library out there by going Japan and we're the reason that all this BLS thrush our signature stuff has appeared in it recently so I mean we we do actually have open source out there's just no knows what's related to us and

what's not I'll see you guys you guys are open sourcing stuff but hiding under some kinda pan yeah I mean yeah we're an open source company right and you know we don't really believe in patents and so I mean it's not actually an intentional thing at all you know it's just there's just been so much to do and just getting it all together and you know I think it as a project we much rather you know make sure that we release something that I mean the crypto by the way other people can use it's great but the you know that's why would you know we're only doing a kind of seed fund for the foundation now we'd we'd we'd like people who want to get involved and donate to actually be able to have a fully functioning client with

fresh or relay that they can and they can actually play with it and see how performs and create a neurone and things like that so that we don't have be in a position of trying to you know convince people of what we might be able to produce we just want to show people say cool Tom and Dominic thanks so much for coming on it was great talking with you guys and it's exciting to hear where the projects is going I think a lot of these new blockchains new protocols that are coming out are really pushing the boundaries you're gonna be very interesting to see what happens there and and you're certainly one of them that really seems to be at the very edge of what's possible and what can be done so thanks so much for your work and

we're very thrilled to see where it goes and hopefully also have you back on at some point if I we mention it briefly but that's a very exciting project as well so hopefully once you want once Definity is launched we can also look at at covering that so thanks so much guys yeah thank you very much for having us on yeah it's been great and thanks so much for listeners as well we are part of the list so click on that also you can find this show and any other shows on lesser quicken.com and of course you can download and listen to the show in any podcast application or watch the videos on youtube.com slash episode ok cool thanks so much and we look forward to being back next