ZKPodcast: So long 2019! What's next?

Transcript

[Music] welcome to zero knowledge a podcast where we talk about the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web the show is hosted by me Anna and me Fredrik all right we made it to fell and of 2019 yeah it's it's been a big year yeah weird to think about you all may have noticed we have a new jingle it's similar to our older jingle but we've

been meeting for a while to just create a much shorter version of this and I hope you like it I hear that changing the intro music to a podcast can be very controversial so I would love to hear what people think and hope you'll let us know if you do like it thanks to Henrik who put that together he's the original composer on our music and he's also somebody who does video work at the summit and yeah he's really really good so for this episode what our idea is is to do a little bit of a wrap-up of 2019 we can talk a little bit about the podcast itself something we don't usually do on this podcast and share a few ideas about what we're

excited about in 2020 what we're doing in 2020 there's a lot of things on the horizon that we want to share and so I'm kind of excited to do this episode with you yeah be interesting and like I said it's it's been a big year and there's a lot to look forward to in 2020 so I think yeah let's dive into it and talk about what has happened and and what will happen so how about as a start let's talk about the podcast itself so just a little recap on what's happened with the podcast something that you know we've noticed over the past few months is a shift from being maybe more of a blockchain focused podcast where we

would like explore ecosystems or the blockchain 101 topics and we we've moved towards the zero knowledge research side of things and that is one of the reasons why we've you know just changed the intro text as well to better reflect that I think what's cool is that that happened really naturally when we started this podcast there just wasn't that much zero knowledge topic stuff to talk about that we thought would be interesting for a large audience yeah and I mean we've we've said this before but the title of the podcast itself is sort of just a joke and there was not really an intention to be zero knowledge proof focused but in some parts because of the title we we started moving more towards

that and I'm very happy we have because it's it's a very interesting topic I think what we might be able to talk about now is a little bit of like what happened with the podcast this year what were some of the guests that came on you know what did we tackle so Fredrik I want to ask you first what if you could pick like I don't know two three podcasts from the year that really stand out to you what would those be yeah it's interesting because like there's something that's obviously like personally interesting to me which if I if I had to highlight that and highlight just the people rather than necessarily what we talked about it would be Dan Bonet and Nigel smart it's

just refreshing to see like really hardcore crypto people it's like I've been working on this for 30 years and like these are the lessons and I those are fascinating conversations to me but if we just look at what what's been popular I mean Shawn BOE has obviously been popular I would put him in the hardcore cryptography crowd even though he hasn't been working with it for 30 years although he's been working with it for a while just he's not as that he's not really but I don't think he I'm not even sure if he is thirty years old but he's also like a person that's in between that but in between these two worlds were he for sure like noses

foundational stuff he knows crypto but also knows the New World and the decentralized rolled and how to apply all this stuff so that's I think that was fascinating conversation - what what other otherwise has been popular among people is obviously defy knees - and like basically talking about what people believe will be coming in the next couple of years and I am really interested and fascinated by that but because that's also like my day job I don't get as much out of it personally I like the episodes where I'm stepping out of that well

since this is I mean zero-knowledge podcast your knowledge summit I'm you know the projects I do around zero knowledge have become my full-time job in the last year a lot of the zero knowledge topics were very interesting to me if I was to highlight a few episodes I would also put Dan Bonet in there I thought my the episode that I did with Ellie Ben Sasse on we had we had stark where on early on in the year and then we had them again or I had I I did an interview with Ellie in one was at September personally I loved that interview because he kind of was able to share why math is exciting for him like as a non mathematician I don't know

exactly what I expected but I didn't expect such such a cool picture to be painted so I really liked that episode I really liked I really liked the Shan Bo episode as well because I thought it was a combo of like intense math but then also that story of like what happens when you discover that like in math that you've worked on or you know something that you find incredibly valuable that's based on math actually has a vulnerability what do you do what do you go through I thought that was cool it seems to be these these stories that combine math and emotion that I like a lot I also really liked so I another one that I really liked doing was the post Devcon

catch up with Tarun James and Georgio's those are those are three people I think James I met in 2018 but Tarun and Georgio's are people that I've kind of come into contact more this year and I really liked that conversation I liked hearing those perspectives so that was also another highlight for me I think one thing that I wanted to talk about was like people did notice like there's a few episodes that I just mentioned where Frederick you weren't on there and I thought it might be good to share with the audience why you weren't on those episodes yeah because they were curious yeah and so I there's you know a lot of changes in 2019 for me I mean first and foremost probably I've become a father and have a

little girl and and that is taking up all evenings at least makes it a little bit harder to find recording times than everything else and we did our best to kind of keep it as smooth as possible like you still were able to come on a few of these episodes and I just want to say thanks for doing that because I know it was there's a lot of juggling at that time yeah it still is to some degree like this is an ongoing process for it the next 18 years so we'll see how that goes but I mean there's obviously a lot of other changes in 2019 too I think it's it's like my role my day job has changed quite a lot as polka-dot gets closer to launch it's always

obviously busier times as well but it's also like generally more more busy for a variety of reasons so even though I don't have in as much time for the podcast as I used to for for several whom these reasons I think I've learned a ton over the Commerce of these conversations over the past year and especially as my time gets scarce or I also get less time to do things like read papers or look at reddit and get caught up on the latest project so for me this this podcast is also a large opportunity to to learn new stuff and what's out there as long as I do that

then I'm I'm always game I think for me it's less about bringing info to me and more like a pretty proactive exploration I mean I just I didn't study math so like I'm actually I may be interested yeah I think for you you're learning like new paradigms for me I'm like learning an entirely new space including like the personalities that live in that space and how people interact and how industry and academia interacts there's like a lot of very cool insights that I'm getting from from doing this so yeah maybe just to wrap this up there was you know I kind of said this at the summit at the last year knowledge summit but originally we had this podcast being like 95%

blockchain maybe 5% zero knowledge topics I'd say it's now moved to about 60% zero knowledge topics and 40% non zero knowledge topics I'd love to in the new year also start exploring things like like other computer science concepts that could be applied in this space but with people who might actually be a little bit outside it because I feel like every time we've taken steps out I've gotten far more insight into where it lives in the larger on the larger map of like technology and that's been helpful to you know to kind of keep certain ideas in check or like to

understand like certain things are revolutionary and certain things are actually repetitions or you know old problems that have been solved before and there might be some good insights to take from those previous examples yeah I think for me I would want to move more towards cryptography and privacy in general and sort of the focus being decentralization more than like blockchain because even a parody we say that we work on what three technologies not block taint technologies because there's there's a lot more that is interesting than just block chains and expanding to other areas of computer

science cryptography fits perfectly in that so I think that's that's a good way to go and I agree like the more you expand outside you also learn where something is coming from I think it has also helped improve like my meter is that what you call it like pick like scene you know you often will hear projects presenting something is like totally new so exciting but if you can understand what the problem is and the larger context of that problem you've sometimes realized that like a the solution may have already existed and it's more ported from somewhere else or be the solution presented isn't that

good and has actually been disproven previously and so this I think is very common in like a you know an emerging technology space there's there's been a boom there's a lot of cool ideas but yeah I've really enjoyed being able to see through some of those things yeah I think that's an interesting side effect to of not there isn't enough knowledge share in this industry of decentralization so sometimes you go read a paper and they present a completely new novel way to secure a side chain or whatever whatever the thing is and I read it and I go well that's just this thing and I don't blame

the the authors because probably they didn't know about this thing but it's it's it's kind of interesting to see how this kind of lack of information flows to some degree is also causing some of these problems that people reinventing the same things over and over again I do hope I actually hope one of the things I do like about making this a podcast and not just like a personal interview because like we could have gone around and just interviewed over a hundred people for kicks but I think the fact that we share it is cool because then hopefully other people can also hear some of that and anyone who's come along for a while with us and has basically learned with us you might like they're also going to be able to take some of these insights and maybe

be able to see through some of these you know less than inspiring proposals you know all right what's the coolest thing this is a question for you what's the coolest thing do you think in terms of like tech that you've seen emerge this year and this can be zero knowledge or anything well anything do you centralize let's not go crazy I don't want to hear it's like oh it's foldable phones it was so much better than mine [Laughter] the coolest thing I mean I think even though I don't think it's actually

practically useable yet to a large degree all of the insane innovation around both trustless zero knowledge proof structures like by trust those I mean it doesn't require a trusted setup and these Universal trusted setups I think those two spaces have moved forward so fast and it's really cool like if we actually have a really good Universal trusted setup that like the whole world participates in running and we all you know get our common reference strings from this one

thing then and that would be pretty I get solves a lot of problems but even like it on the flip side of that if we move fast enough in the non trusted set up space that maybe we don't need it or all and we can do amazing things without having that overhead so sort of seeing these two worlds battle it out kind of for top spot and most practical solution as as interesting and the reason I say it's probably not usable yet is like we we don't actually know what it is we don't know how usable it is we do like these proofs haven't really stood the test of time and an implementation yet so it's or remains to be seen how viable

they are but and it's really cool tech and it's cool that it's been moving so fast I wonder it's so funny because like I feel like we're so deep in the zero knowledge space but is there anything outside of zero knowledge that's like exciting to you for me 2019 has just been a year of implementation like in the blockchain space at least where I haven't seen any major new stuff come out like he's too settled it's roadmap no new research has just been like trying to get to something that works for for parody we've just been hands down working on stuff we haven't really been inventing new stuff all year just trying to implement and get to a launch that sort of what I see from most other

projects as well as just like trucking along trying to write the code necessary so in a weird way like I don't see much innovation from industry this year and I see much more of the innovation from that academia because they're they're not burdened by implementation it sort of seems like there was this early period where people could just you know really focus on the research and big ideas kind of brainstorming but now it's really a time where people have to deliver yeah yeah cool so the things that I saw happen in 2019 in the zero-knowledge space who so what I want to talk about next is in the different use cases and stuff like that but there

were some fantastic improvements and new protocols released this year so one protocol that actually I think has really redefined the way we think about it and you just mentioned it Frederick was Sonic's so Sonic's provides this Universal trusted set up concept and from Sonics we've seen the you know development of kind of improvement protocols like plonk and Marlin and something new that I think Justin just released called flunk and so I guess we're gonna get variations on these words like also turbo plonk and all sorts of things like that we've also seen the concept of super Sonics darks I think that's another word for it and also what Shawn Bo's doing at hit with Halo there was a protocol called

fractals which I have not really explored enough I'd have to say sexy has been used or pieces of sexy have been used in these really novel ways by different projects and so I think even though sexy I think I believe came out in 2018 also something worth paying attention to Stark's released their deep fry protocol which is like their fry is a mechanism that they use to get what is it it's like to get the polynomial into a form that the Starks can use and deep-fry as a not as a improvement on that but yeah for me I think the big highlight was the emergence of a number of new use cases so we are very familiar with zero knowledge for privacy but now we

actually see some like live examples of zero knowledge proof for scaling or some sort of compression we also see zero knowledge proof acting as replacing verification sort of or certification in certain setups we're also seeing about very emerging space which is like zero knowledge proof for interoperability so this is kind of like a place that you know we've been doing some brainstorming about all right so I mean zero knowledge proof for privacy I think the biggest things would be mixers and you know the act like the upgrades in Z cache what they've been working on it's a lot of optimization but also you know super super exciting actually I guess a side

note like something that did occur this year was the findings that the original Z cache set up hadn't been as secure as originally thought of and I think maybe this makes people I think a little bit deeper about zero knowledge proof sure privacy and sort of maybe highlighted that like even though this is very exciting there's still some uncharted territory and some unknowns yeah with the ZK mixers tornado cache I believe is a zero knowledge proof mixer I remember with Howard whoo we did a presentation at web 3 in it through that I actually learned some of the issues of doing mixers on aetherium where there's still some ways for the participants to be

kind of identified at least sort of on the on and off ramp of the mixer itself but but still very interesting work all right a second one was zero knowledge proof for scaling so this I think the most exciting the most well-known example of this would be the zk roll-up construction which is something that barry white hat and the matter guys have been working a lot on I heard that like loop ring I think just released an actual live version of this we actually had matter labs on at some point to speak about it so this was really cool but this idea of zero knowledge proof for scaling you can also see this in you know what stark wares doing pushing the use of Starks in order

to provide this validity proof in a dex context so in these cases actually it doesn't matter whether or not the data the underlying data is private in fact it might actually be optimal for that to be auditable the idea here is more that in the check-in points with the main chain the zero knowledge proof replaces a plasma like structure it like it just proves that the data underneath is correct and unchangeable after it's been yea proven and and when when you really think of like this compression side of things I think some of the work that file coin has been exploring we talked with Ariel Gabby's own and one been a this year about that and I'll link to all of these episodes in the show notes if you want to find out more and there's

also Kota kotas doing recursive recursive zero knowledge proof recursive ZK snarks so then on this sort of enterprise level or like the I don't know the the real-world use cases this idea of zero knowledge proof as providing verification or certification has emerged at least to me as like a big use case so one cool property of zero knowledge proof is that they actually can provide something called selective disclosure so that means they can disclose you know a property of a secret without other features of a secret in the example that we talked about on the Kadett episode it was something like like say airplanes are being checked and

every airplane needs to have a certain check happen and certain characteristics need to have been satisfied you could potentially run approve proving that those conditions had been satisfied but not reveal any other information about what that plane is where it's been the models the place etc and normally you'd you know probably be using a third-party certification entity and here you could actually do it just with a zero knowledge proof I not really interesting of course these are these do still seem very much in like brainstorming phase also with our episode that we did with centrifuge we used their they're also exploring using zero knowledge proves for verification

or certification so those are two episodes you can listen to that go a bit deeper into that that was very cool and yeah and the last example that I sort of mentioned before was the zero knowledge proof for interoperability so super emerging and and really in this case you see zero knowledge proof being used in all these different ways to provide interoperability or help provide interoperability I should say really it's not that they're the the main driver it's more like optimizations through using zero knowledge proof my favorite example of this was the sell o lightest light client where they use zero knowledge proof so they were they do recursive layer one recursion zero knowledge proof in order to create a lighter light client which could I think

in therefore what they want to do they want it to run on mobile or something it's interesting because like it's a very small part of cell of larger offering but I really like that I liked that little finding and I thought it was such a novel new use case I would say we're going to see much more of that in 2020 as people get better understanding I was era knowledge proofs like it's the the whole ZK space when we talk about blockchain and decentralization has been very focused on privacy but there is this other scalability aspect of it that isn't touched on as often and then in the cell case it's purely a scalability thing and it's it has this other interesting property of if it fails it's

not a critical failure there's a fault I yeah and the fallback is what the world looks like today so it's it's just purely and an improvement whereas so I think there's there's many other of these cases there's ZK sync that's proposed now we're like kind of a similar idea using zero nought wrooth to scale the syncing process you could basically send someone in an entire state tree and then prove that that is the correct state tree to have at this height of the blockchain and you don't need to do anything else you don't need to process all of the Boxter to sync or

do whatever else and yeah I think there there's some a lot of fascinating like smaller applications where you use it as part of a protocol either for privacy or for scalability and where where the failure mode is not you know the whole world burns down but the failure mode is yeah we fall back to this other strategy I mean I'd love to live in a world I'd like to see a world where zreknarf proofs do power a lot of very important and like large-scale projects past blockchain I think that would be so cool but I also like what it feels like right now is there's just so much research and there's so few people who know how to read this research that like vetting of

this research is still work in progress and I think I think certain things aren't quite ready for from mainstream adoption yeah and that's sort of what I was saying earlier as well as like because it hasn't seen the test of time and implementation yet really I personally wouldn't really rely on and as as a thing that's definitely gonna work people should still build stuff with it people should still experiments but it's it's hard to say that like now this is like the thing and it's you should build a blockchain you know kind of Z cache like right where your entire token depends on this proof being correct and if it's not then your token is worthless

and and sort of going to that level I'd only be comfortable doing that with existing construction that Z cache has now like I wouldn't use any of these new ones to build a blockchain what's right now it feels a bit too risky it's interesting I was actually doing thing where it's like you there's a certain baseline like the protocols have been around long enough used enough those are sort of the things that are more likely to be recommended for these cases before but the more experimental stuff well cool you kind of keep you keep an eye on but don't necessarily share or don't necessarily put into action actually something else that's been cool is like

the etherium foundations focus on zero knowledge stuff like they have a whole team focused on this stuff which is been really nice to interact with that as well I'm still I'm still not totally clear on how the how zero knowledge will work internally to aetherium I know how like projects are working with aetherium and zero knowledge but that's gonna be interesting to see how that gets incorporated yeah I don't know either I assume it's just sort of speculative kind of going we think more like this is an interesting research space we should try to do something here or like try to dig in to see what can be used here for the before the protocol itself alright

so what in 2019 do you think fell flat I don't know actually so I can tell you what annoyed me I don't know if I'd say fell flat and I know this is gonna make me very unpopular but I have already tweeted it memes are boring there I said it ok now maybe I should add some context obviously memes are funny and memes are fun and being fun is awesome and I totally like that I think though sometimes if you look on Twitter and you look at some of the kind of meme work

it's so it's just so noisy and it's so distracting and it's repetitive and not they're not actually trying to come up with original jokes it's just the same stuff yeah besides it feels like you're laughing in that way that like it's kind of forced you're like I don't like that I don't know I don't want it I don't really want to I don't want it rain on anyone's parade I keep having fun let's try to be a little more creative yeah and I know what you mean [Music] it's like we've we've devolved into only having this one form of expression and it's like we can do other stuff too we

can be funny in other ways too yeah yeah I think it's also the problem that I see is in part also it's just used as a tool to attack without like with having that kind of ability to go back and say oh it's new it was just a joke it's like yeah but you're still attacking someone just like it's funny because I think what we're both actually talking about our gifts but like specifically gifts like I actually have never been a huge fan I'm gonna keep saying gift - I know it's wrong but I said gift - actually yeah it's English okay another thing I'm curious to hear what you think about

defy and the branding of defy I think did it really it definitely took off this year I don't know if it was named this year I'd be curious to hear who came up with that D Phi yeah I don't know I mean it's a super easy contraction decentralized finances defy it like it's easy but I don't know if anyone can can claim they invented that term I've recently heard someone refer to it as defi which was very strange anyway what do you think of defy yeah I mean I wouldn't say fell flat but it's definitely hyped to a weird degree and

in a weird way where people are like oh yeah defy is the coolest and now we have 160 million dollar dollars locked in this contracts like why is that a good thing like what have you gotten out of that what's the point of all of this it's sort of like a regular average Joe hyping up what Wall Street companies doing it's like why do you care like why does this affect you so so like I think defy super importance like a stable coin is a foundational thing to we'll have a currency in a blockchain I think and like there may be other constructions in the future but there are many aspects of defy that I think are critical to this ecosystem but not

in and of themselves it's not oh now we have this and everything is great like you also need everything else on top you need people using it like it's just it's just a tool and we shouldn't hype up like just the tool like we should do something with the tools I also I was surprised when like in the exploration of defy how simple a lot of these constructions are when you really look at them they're there they're not super sophisticated financial construction no by no means and there's no like super innovative you know kind of reputation marketplace ideas being implemented or anything like that it's just over

clatter I sation and a lot of and even like a lot of these the ideas they're kind of wreaths they're rebranded using different language but a lot of the concepts are from the 70s like their economic concepts from a certain moment in the development of the stock market and in the moment of Finance the financial industry these ideas were being floated and tested and now they're sort of being ported from that old finance to today's blockchain yeah absolutely it's a hundred percent porting existing financial instruments to a blockchain context yeah it's funny because I thought of like during the ico time you had scams that were taken from the 1890s at the beginning of stock

market when it was completely array like unregulated and ported to today in the ico boom and now we're seeing sort of 1970s being ported to defy so maybe the next cool term that comes out will reflect something from the 90s all right let's talk a little bit about 2020 what do you see on the horizon I know for you there is mega things coming yeah polka dot launch is the front center of my 2020 that will be an interesting process I mean we've learned quite a lot from launching Kusama and

like what the sort of launch milestones will look like and what the process looks like and how to make this a good experience so like taking a lot of those lessons and applying them as we started launching polka dot now very soon so this is all like very internally focused and and like for me it's also like not only launch but building a company and kind of scaling a team and a bunch of other stuff like as you started having something in production and launching something there's a whole other set of requirements to you can't just be sort of coding you need to be running stuff you need to have pager duty and all of

these other things that the company hasn't previously been been set up to do and so there's a lot of change just company structure wise ideally in a decentralized world none of this exists in the company and it's a community driven effort but I don't think we're there yet so it's sort of building up structures to tie it over until we can get to that point with the community but otherwise I mean I'm really looking forward to the Stanford blocked in conference and that's always a highlight in my year I think it's a great conference that that is like picking the cream of the crop in terms of like papers presented and new concepts and then I'm looking forward to

see how like there's it's not only polkadot launching there's a ton of different projects launching I'm super excited to see how that turns out which ones can launch which ones can't all of this certain large stuff that we've been talking about that has come out is going to start getting proven start getting put into systems and like how is that gonna pan out I'm really excited to see like we had this episode with Nigel smart that I mentioned and he was talking about all these new MPC constructions I wonder if MPC is going to start becoming a bigger thing in blockchain like so far we've you know used their own knowledge booths for privacy but we can use MPC for privacy too and like they are getting

more and more powerful as well so you know will they start competing I don't know there there's a lot of interesting stuff there for sure so what about there's one kind of thing that just came out this month and was somewhat controversial how'd it like how does open aetherium factor into your 2020 what are you thinking on that level yeah it's interesting to me that it got so controversial because it's sort of we're we're really just saying we've been working on this codebase for a long time as a sole contributor essentially we have gotten a lots of individual contributors kind of joining on a flyby basis but we never really managed to amass like a real contributor base to

the codebase so it's really largely been the company responsible for maintenance of what used to be the parity theory inclined and it's obviously not gonna work like that it's it's sort of like it's unsustainable it's ah yeah it's not sustainable and and to me this is completely obvious right we kind of went back like this is several months ago when we started planning this we kind of said it what can we do to make sure that this codebase lives forever that we can try to make it a thing where multiple companies or multiple you know entities contribute to this codebase and I wouldn't say that we've completely

settled on a path forward but we put out this blog post saying there might be some sort of dowel involved for either incentivization or at the very least just to manage the license because that's a controversial thing too that a lot of people don't like GPL for some reason and they want something else which is also odd to me because we live in this open-source blockchain world where everything is open and for why is free software a bad thing all of a sudden so I know that that's like a whole secondary weirdness to me and why people oppose free software so we we kind of just said okay we're gonna do some kind of structure and we're gonna try to bring in more contributors in a more organized fashion so we'll move the

codebase out we'll change the license we'll try to actually get all of these other contributors like et Cie like gnosis like P way like people who are willing to dedicate engineers and try to get them on board it onto the codebase and and try to make that happen as open aetherium and people really hated that mostly because it's their the I can sort of understand it because the general impression is that parody got a bunch of money to maintain this client and now we're saying we're not going to do it anymore people just don't have a concept of time scale and how much things actually costs but I think that's it I think if we're successful that will blow

over and if we're not successful then the codebase is sort of dead anyway and all this doesn't really matter so I this is sort of the narrative that I can kind of see online which is something a lot along the lines of like there's old wounds in the original separation between parody and aetherium parody built this amazing technology maintained it for free but maybe that wasn't necessarily clear to the to anyone in the community also because this was during a time that price was increasing so like people's personal fortunes were actually on the up and so there was you know a sense like who cares about how it's getting maintained or who cares

about who pays for that and then a few years later yes does this grant a lot of people seem to think that that was for ongoing development on eath one and I think parodies perspective there is that it was not and so this seems to be a little bit at the heart of some of the argumentation around like why parody would walk away for sure and that's like we've tried to address all these things and in at length in various formats and I but people will see what they want to see but I think that's fine so I mean going back to like what to do in 2020 the focus for me is like throughout q1 try

to onboard these new developers we roughly have like six devs that are willing to or like from different organizations that are willing to step up and say okay I'm going to work on this full-time so onboarding success is a not small task and this will like moving the whole thing will take time too because we need to move CI we need to move release management and like figure out how to do all these things in a way that it's not centrally managed by parently so there's a lot of a lot of legwork to do to even get to a point where this lives in a different way po let alone have a

successful contributor rubinius so I think this takes up at least all of q1 and then we'll see in q2 who's like how successful lattice and where it goes from there but I think this is a good a good portion of 20 to 120 will be just trying to onboard new developers and making open if they're in a successful project that has sustainable contributor base and it's there's a lot of question to like how would this work if there's still no real funding model well there's actually like some thought put into how to create a funding model but even without that the organizations that are

stepping up to the plate have a self interest in seeing it maintained so someone like etc' labs who runs e.t.c e.t.c is almost entirely dependent on on the parity theory inclined today is obviously within their interests to see that open aetherium is a successful product for dtc community so it's sort of driven by self-interest rather than monetary reward and they have other resources of an income that they can pay developers with but you know this might still not be sustainable really long term but I think it's a step in the right direction at least it's definitely

gonna be I mean it's kind of new territory and and I think it's so specific to like the decentralized space the need to do to make these moves I don't know if you had any other models or anything you were thinking of in the construction of this I mean I I don't know any examples in the past of this set up I mean there's a lot of lessons to be learned from the general opus or space I mean Linux is entirely a product maintained by companies with self interest rights it has its small individual contributors as well but it's largely a multiple organization effort to make sure that Linux actually works

but yeah I mean it I don't think there's any real precedent in the blockchain space it's sort of you could argue that that Bitcoin is at least less centrally developed than something like there isn't a Bitcoin foundation with Bitcoin foundation paid developers too who are maintaining the software so it's a little bit more multiple players but it's still like maintained by people who got rich off Bitcoin so it's not like they need salaries and I don't know of any other blockchain that has gotten to the point that you know there are there's a need to involve

multiple organizations and maintenance of the node itself so far like all block chains are new enough that they're either paid by the coin itself or like the ICO or whatever they had or VC funding so we just haven't gotten to that point yet but you know this is there is ample precedent in the general open-source space but maybe it's the first case and in blockchain world where we're trying this and we'll see how it goes so what's upcoming for you in 2020 so in the coming year I really have four main projects that have gelled which I'm excited about and

I mean who knows maybe as time goes on I add to this but I feel like okay actually I feel like my entire life has been a series of like expanding the number of projects I do and then reducing the number of projects that I do and I feel like I'm in a place of reduction in a way but also solidification so these four projects that I'm working on is one is the podcast one is the summit and I actually can announce that the next zero knowledge summit is gonna happen on March 31st in Berlin please put that in your calendars if you're into it I am doing something called the zero knowledge validator which I kind of announced or mentioned on the episode we did with duckie a few weeks ago this validator is currently validating on

networks and the idea of it is find a way to interact with all of these networks and use these funds to champion zero-knowledge research and that will involve like work shopping and working quite closely with the with the network developers to understand what's possible in terms of zero knowledge and then acting as a bridge a little bit to the zero knowledge research community and so this is kind of an experiment it's this idea of like a validator with purpose and yeah and I'm excited to see what's gonna happen with that it's like a new space to explore we're working with bison trails on that and it's myself and wil Harborne who are doing the zero knowledge validator the last thing I'm doing and this is actually the first time I speak about this publicly is

something that I'm really excited about one of our previous guests Dan Bonet and I are actually putting together a snarks MOOC MOOC this massive online open course so he and I are going to have create we're actually in the process of creating a 10-ish module snark video series that will be hopefully an amazing resource for people who want to get more into the space I'm super excited about it it's still very much in development but in the new year that's something that I will be though I would then I'll be working on and I think that could also be like I think of that as sort of the

first of hopefully more pieces of content being created around zero knowledge that that I get involved in I'm pretty pumped it's a lot of stuff too but it is very interesting stuff I mean there's there's no lack of stuff to do in this space either it's kind of it's fascinating so yes I think to wrap up it's been a huge year there's so much on the horizon it's been a big year a lot of work and even more work to come in 2020 but it's exciting do you feel excited or exhausted right now right now a little bit exhausted but mostly because of Twitter drama there's there's a meme that you know Elon Musk should by

fortnight and delete it or you know one must should buy X and delete it you all must should buy Twitter and delete it for sure yeah yeah I guess that's our word to our listeners get off Twitter yeah do something productive for frick sake all right yeah so I think just as a sign off to our listeners some of you may have noticed we did announce this on previous episodes we have a feedback form that I that we've put together the idea there is we can collect ideas about future episodes you can give us feedback about what you liked about this podcast what you think we should do different as mentioned very curious to hear what you think of the new jingle I'm really I

like it I think it's I think it's really nice to see some evolution I feel like it's kind of more Pro and it's a little more Spacey no so I think that's that's it so then I guess do you have anything else you want to say no looking forward to 2020 and I'll see all of you there yeah and so then to our listeners for listening thanks for listening [Music]