ZKPodcast: Vlad and Gav go head-to-head on blockchain governance

Transcript

[Music] welcome to zero knowledge a podcast where we explore the latest in blockchain technology and the decentralized web the show is hosted by me Anna and me Fredrik [Music] in this episode we get to sit down and mostly listen while Gavin Vlad Duke it out over the details of blockchain governance this week's sponsor is trail of bits trail of bits is hosting an

event called Empire hacking in New York City on December 12th hear from the best and brightest in blockchain security at this special one day conference topics include transaction privacy security usability and smart contract testing find out more details including talk abstracts and information about the trainings that they're gonna be offering at blog trail of bits comm PS these guys have made an extra effort to keep this event affordable it's only two dollars to go so you might want to check it out and one more thing last week we announced that we were starting a patreon well I'm happy to say it's live if you go visit patreon.com slash zero-knowledge you can donate to the podcast and help

us keep making this content so now here's the debate between gas and Vlad [Music] we're sitting here at the web 3 summit we are sitting down with Vlad and Gavin after they've just gotten off a pretty exciting panel discussion about governance hi guys alright Gavin we've already had you on the podcast I feel like you need no introduction and actually if anyone needs to wants to find out I suppose they can listen back sure but flat it's the first time you're on here so maybe we can start with you

tell us a little bit about how you got into this space well I got into the boxing space when I was a Bitcoin er became Bitcoin er in 2013 and I got into like the etherium space in 2014 in April well I met everyone at the Toronto of the coin Expo cool what did you do at the theorem foundation oh well I'm a contractor I do research I do research approve of steak on sharding on proof on cassettes the protocols and more recently you've been doing a lot of research around governance yeah that's right you know I'm super the more the tech research progresses the more concern I would get

about tech governance you know I don't want to build anything that I regret later and so governance is like part of that effort because I think that it could all go horribly wrong so as I just mentioned we are you guys just had a conversation on a panel about this topic and there was some really interesting debates that came out of that I think to kick this off this conversation about governance I think it would be really good for us to define what governance means to each of you what is governance governance is about like the decisions decision-making processes like norms and other institutions for coordination that we use to govern or make you know like determine the future of our shared common resources like for example the

protocol definition so I'd say governance is what changes a multi-party system into a moral person and by that what I mean is that if you have many different actors that for whatever reason find themselves in some sort of entanglement governments governance I should say is what is the glue that binds them into a single decision-making economic actor it's what keeps people together and able to cohesively make decisions with a single voice do we think that's really possible to have this we do it all the time tell us how well I mean by coordinating

over how we use our shared resources like and you know for like for example we do protocol upgrades and those involve a bunch of you know developers making changes to software repositories and a bunch of people installing software from those repositories and then to software upgrade like King in and this is all coordinated with a bunch of different mechanisms like blog posts and the ah devs called and the eeap's process in the theory community but every watching community does it in a different way so I would say there's lots of ways how communication happens between the members of this multi partite system but the specific means by which they as a

whole make an act upon their decision and this this is an important distinction here there can be ways of making a decision but if those ways are not tied to the enactment of that decision then it's largely irrelevant it just becomes a communication rather than an action so governance is the framework such that these this multi-party the set of actors of economic actors usually can indeed come together and and actors so what do you believe the purpose of governance is well the sharing of common words let's talk about well so in some way it's the maintenance and like upgrading of common goods in blotching

specifically watching protocols have certain assumptions that needs to be guaranteed by governance and if they fail to be guaranteed then they're gonna experience certain failures from which governance must be used to recover whenever there is a chain of bug that's discovered in the protocol like when you have to collectively fix it any any kind of collective decision on shared resources within the scope what we call governance that's the definition but what's the purpose the purpose is the management of the shared resources well it depends actually because governance does what it wants for the most part there's some stuff in blotching governance that we're definitely gonna need to do like upgrades dealing with bit rot bugs just like maintenance that is like necessary just for the public good to exist and then there's all sorts

of stuff that we are like not sure if we want to do so I will tell you that the purpose of governance specifically is to ensure that on the first hand the system on which it is governing stays cohesive stays whole and on the second hand ensures that in its external circumstances which is basically to say the other systems with which it finds itself in general competition it should be as it should win that competition should be as successful as it can in that competition it should not sink into irrelevance and I think it's it's helpful to take an analogy to the real world here with countries so nation states in nature's

they obviously have their own governance ones that don't have much of a governance tend to be fairly dysfunctional and some grounds of other nation states well and indeed there's yeah there can be some meddling going on there and the countries are in natural economic competition with each other be it over balance of payments or simply over things like you know brain drain since that you know with it's the success and then and living standards of its parts of its population I think it would be not unreasonable to say that to characterize good government and therefore good governance by and large as a making sure that a country doesn't

kind of split in two yeah most governments like the UK is a very notable one here with Northern Ireland and brexit with a you know their current prime minister Theresa May basically stating no Prime Minister no leader of this country could possibly go with a plan that sees the country split in two and on the other hand in order for their for the nation state to to do economically well which basically means prior GDP generally implying higher standards of living now of course there is there are other sort of potential concerns like Gini index and so forth but if we take it at the very sort of basic level where I think the analogy works reasonably well and then we're

really just talking about how much money does the country have as a whole bringing it back a little bit to the blockchain space and what you're saying to have with governance needs a way to enact its decisions and that's not something that we've had in aetherium Vlad do you agree that that's something that we that is desirable out of Governors system well I mean I would I would say that we absolutely do have in aetherium governance with an ability to enact decisions I mean people we install the software that is put out by the all devs and the all des has a lot of legitimacy and I think like I say if there were critical bug found that they would be able to you know assume

essentially emergency response roles and people would enact their decisions although there would be a lot of scrutiny if you know they would definitely lose a lot of credit if they put anything sneaky in there but I think for the most part yeah the governance absolutely does have their like requisite legitimacy that people will implement the decisions that it makes when we're talking about non-controversial tech changes so I think I think that really doesn't kind of answer the question so I think there's this notion of legitimacy which i think is is a bit of a red herring but that certainly has little to do with the notion that the decision-making mechanism which I think in a theorem isn't defined at all should itself lead

to binding enactment of the decisions that it makes which I think also doesn't exist in a theorem at all and I think we can see the the etherium while it has a more functional connection between the two I think that's accidental and basically by virtue of it having a single leader that most participants in the ecosystem can rally around I don't think the same is true with Bitcoin I think Bitcoin has almost exactly the same characteristics as a theory and it has core developers it has miners it has a sort of a set of the ecosystem that really care enthusiasts but it doesn't have that single leader that's where that's where it differs and what we see is complete dysfunction and it's government so I think the only thing that that changes between Bitcoin is the fact that it has

this this this leading figure I mean I don't know I don't regard Bitcoin governance is being dysfunctional I regard it as functioning exactly as intended which is not necessarily making everyone very happy but it is what they said for a long time that they were gonna do and you know a Bitcoin core has this culture of like you know no contagious heart Forks and they've been really doubling down and consistent on that over the years and I think that that like a lot of the crisis of the legitimacy of Bitcoin governance the way that I'd think about it which is like what led to Bitcoin cash forming and the big blockers rebelling you know doesn't have to do with like the fact that people disagree about you know this discovering stuff and so maybe

there's more the loss of legitimacy was greater and Bitcoin because they didn't have a leader but I think Bitcoin governance works and is effective I think that there are relatively clear decision-making processes at certain levels in aetherium right I mean I think there's relatively clear decision-making processes in terms of who has pushed access to every github repo for the core repos every core repo has some kind of process that the way like someone has like there's some people were well defined to have push rights when you own a node you have decisions about what software you run and those are like real decisions and we have like the etherium foundation owning the trademark and like when they decide like not to write a

letter that threatens people for using the theorem trademark that's also a very real decision now the thing that isn't so defined is how these are all coordinated right there's no single mechanism that we all agree is going to coordinate all these decisions isn't that what governance is how we coordinated governance doesn't mean that we have to have a single signal that we all follow well I think I think that's exactly what governance does mean like I think if a country is badly governed it will split and then disintegrate in many different countries and the original country will no longer exist well I mean I would say if if a country's badly governed its government would suffer a crisis of legitimacy and that may lead to its splitting up but there's you know

just because we're making collective decisions doesn't mean that we agree on the criteria by which we're making those decisions like the whole rough consensus model in some ways that we don't agree but we can tell when the discourse has kind of settled down and when there's like no one screeching like maybe you can go hide yeah so I think this rough consensus is also a red herring I think it's basically trying to say that we don't have governance and we don't have our if we don't have effective governance which is which but I take to mean we as the collective whole don't have an effective way of making decisions which we all should adhere to I mean I would say that we don't have for everything a pro that we can delegate our collective decision-making to in order to like save

on the political discourse and coordination that we always have recourse to to make decisions I almost it almost sounds often like when you see a rough consensus or when we had an interview with Hudson and he kind of talked about how he'd sometimes do a call-out of like who agrees he doesn't agree and he'd be sort of like murmurings and it would be decree by Hudson like he'd kind of like gauge this very like wishy-washy response from the group and then say yes okay I guess I guess we're cool to do this and no one said no so then they did it and say no there's a very different story but is that really what one person says no it's a different story yeah I think that is I

think that I think that might be rough consensus in action I mean a Hudson I think is very very mindful of his role and of his responsibilities and his position and so I absolutely plays and I think that like it is his role to like you know play this like rough game as well the thing is he at least on our podcast and in other presentations has stated that he doesn't really want to have that role who does right we're very thankful thank you taking he's taking responsibility mm-hm for making that decision oh no he's taking responsibility for interpreting people's lack of objection which i think is rough but also I think

that like it would be a mistake to think that we can remove this responsibility from humans and to put it into process so it shouldn't be just Hudson it shouldn't be just Hudson but it definitely can't be a program so that's that's just such bollocks like the whole point of like rim of ensuring that systems continue to work as their design as they were designed to do for doing like long term correct operation is to define things in terms of process our entire civilization is built on writing processes and adhering to them why because it means that the humans who are actually doing the mechanistic work doing the work ministering don't allow their own

opinions to change what the outcome is and that's critical because when you have someone like Hudson who's looked at looked up to as the guy who basically records the feelings of the Deaf call if he is opinionated and I'm not saying he is I'm sure for the moment hoods doing a great job if he is opinionated then he could as the sort of chairman he could alter or miscommunicate or misdirect what had actually happened and that's massively problematic that's why we have processes I don't disagree at all but like the processes that we have our processes by which people can make changes to the way that the systems work we have governance processes that allow us to make changes to software because

we don't have the ability to just build software that will like work and mean then like automated way forever we have we we we can't the reason why we can't just use a process is because we don't have a process that can check whether Hudson's doing a good job or that can check whether there is rough consensus well we do I mean this is what markets are for this is what futhark e so designed to give this is what economic games are designed like it's so that the correct the processes is more of a meta process but a well-defined meta process that means that regardless of the specific opinions of the people involved the ultimate outcome because of this process is beneficial to imprint cippolini the market structure needs to

be governed like we can't leave all governance questions to market forces I feel like it's kind of hand wavy at best I mean there's actually cases where we know that that will lead to suboptimal equilibriums yes so I'm not putting forward markets can can do everything what I'm saying is that processes are not fundamentally limited to things that cannot adapt we can make processes that do adapt and can adapt a lot better than saying vague hand wavy let's not bother with process too much let's just kind of get along with humans doing basically what they want and hope for the best I mean I think that like you know I think like the correct place is somewhere in between where you have like humans and processes in the loop

basically so the things that we can't write programs to detect humans can provide so one like the first sort of naive I guess approach of of this and that's been tried and failed in some cases is to to simulate Hudson is to say that instead of having this person that makes judgments we do a coin vote and say everyone that has coins they can vote on what their opinion is and then we can gauge what the opinion is based on that what's the problem with that mom so the only way to make that kind of like rough consensus is to do unanimous going voting or near unanimous Coen Brody with a really high threshold and there's there's a number of problems with that but the first my first thought is Oh voting isn't just by itself

equivalent to or substitute for rough consensus if you have a really high threshold then it gets closer but there's a bunch of problems with coin voting in my opinion and the main one is that it disenfranchises a lot of stakeholders that are affected by the decisions of watching governance because people are not affected by the decisions of watching governance and proportion to their coin Holdings because there's all sorts of impact that block chains are gonna have beyond impacting the price of coins and I think that like you know we need to like try to come up with governance processes that represent as many people as possible and going with coin voting I think mostly because it's the natural easy thing to implement is jumping for a solution at a great cost too soon you just said unanimous coin vote can just define what that is how is

that different from regular coin so like in like coin voting normally there's like thresholds like how many coins have to show up and how many them need to say yes for like something to pass a unanimous I mean like no knows like there shouldn't be any knows and so if you have a unanimous voting then you know that everyone who has a coin is represented because if they didn't like the decision they could lock it so everyone has to say yes yes animus voting is yeah it's not very practical people normally think because anyone can block anything but it guarantees that everyone's represented but even if you vote no you're still represented by your no because your interests just whose vote is counted that doesn't mean that your interest is borne out by the result but I didn't mean represented meaning like that your voters counted so you

mean all you mean is everyone who owns even a Satoshi of Bitcoin should be able to prevent Bitcoin from Nellore would know I mean I would say like that that that's the safest model it's not the most live like you won't ever return any decisions that are contentious it won't ever return any yes decisions at all so sorry perhaps equivalent to Bitcoin yeah and that's what your voting system isn't a voting system at all well rough consensus ends up kind of being somewhat like that right because like if a small a small number of people or screeching can stop progress which i think is a useless governance you know that's super it so that's that's the first time I've ever heard rough governance defined that

way that that is if like voice is a very few could stop a process completely yeah I mean you see it born out but it's just interesting to hear it it's really cool because in some way means that like controversial things don't get through but nothing to I mean is that not just a huge attack vector on the entire it's my sister it's it's it but it's an attack vector that let's use block things it's different but what if you have one that lets you pass things what if there's someone in the group that is not really on the side of the network and sort of just wants to screw everybody up so they can screech loud and stop everything so here's but here's the question what if what if what if the majority wants to

screw the minority over this is the trade-off right like if you make it if you create a system where a minority can't block stuff then they can get screwed by the majority I would disagree with that I think that's a completely false argument so if you make a system whereby the majority can make decisions over the the desires of the minority and these systems exist all the time right state nation states have it all the time when you do an election and someone gets voted in probably about half of the country sometimes more than usually maybe voted against that the specific platform of that person got elected on it's fine it turns out it's fine the same happens in corporate governance it turns out it's fine

the reason it's finding countries is that basically people tend to move to the middle ground apart from instances where you know every 50 years or so some hard right guy hits in and half of the people leave the country the reason it's fine in corporate governance is simply because you can sell your shares if you believe that the leader current leadership is is awful and it's the same reason why it's fine in token networks as long as you add in the ability to any changes to the network the yes votes the votes in favor of the change have to have a period by which that their votes are basically locked in the tokens behind their votes are locked in a period where they're no votes the ones who didn't want the change can sell and move move to a different network and

as long as the decision is only after the decision is taken at some point after a selling period that it basically means that the no votes can never be screwed by the yes votes I don't think that the voters are the only people are getting screwed here I think that we're really talking about like stakeholders who may not have votes or coins and I think you know but I think it's like you know really questionable the idea that you can exit because the block teams have Network effects and there's only so many choices of major block chains that most users realistic we have access to and so they can't necessarily go and use something else just because they disagree okay so this seems to be governance that is trying to favor the interests of the participants in a

system that have no accountable stake in the system and that find themselves unable to move to any other system now I would say that it's a pretty bad thing to optimize for it seems like a very realistic outcome that like we're gonna be making decisions that affect users we can't leave like as like blockchain governance I really don't see which uses they are and you could as a simple example let's say PIPA is this new social platform on aetherium if everyone starts using that like those users will not hold coins they will and now with the latest thing they have in place they're actually given some ether to be able to pay for gas to participate in the system so they have no real holdings but they still have all their data and

the social app on on earth areum if you know some process is put in place that adversely effects these people they can't really take people with them unless they fork the network and then you have to deal with all the that means I think in a more sensible setup we're forking is not the most serious thing ever and you need to gather up miners to support you et cetera that's fine but in this world where you know now to secure my fork I need you know this mining farm behind it to not be attacked by this very mining pole that now we're into like weird territory okay so this comes down to the question I guess should

users have a veto right over network management and I would say no I don't think anyone should have a veto right over a network management I don't think anyone should have control or driving power either well I thought I thought didn't you just say that if you own one set off you have Bitcoin you should be able to block anything like that fine I'm not I'm not advocating for unanimous governance unanimous voting or you nor even like super high levels of content consensus like I need to contentious hard Forks hmm okay I mean it sounded like you did earlier but no no I just think it's safe it's not really live it's safe it's very safe it's very safe to use unanimous voting okay so you'd agree it's useless I agree it's not practical what if we what if because we

could even go back to that though cuz I think the original question was what do you think of coin voting we were talking about unanimous coin voting but what about non-unanimous coin fighting i mean it is like you know if you're gonna do voting like for the most part people go with non-unanimous systems because that useful and and and usually it's like a hassle to think about like what the thresholds are have have to be who shows up what the threshold is I don't like voting too much I like signaling I like people being represented without being counted because I think that if you try to count people you're gonna count people too little or failed to count

people or count people too much and so you know I I think the best place for voting in blockchain governance is to get different stakeholder groups to signal their opinions what I don't like is the idea that we're gonna have a single mechanism that we all agree we're gonna follow because I think see that as like a centralized point of failure yeah okay so I mean I can see this as I understand that your point is is pretty much simply that schisms are fine that keeping keeping the country together is actually overstated and that it's there shouldn't be any particular mechanism in order to ensure that the nation-state stays whole it's more like we kind of want to stay together and we want to prevent breakups because they're a pain

in the butt to deal with but there are pain in the butt that we can handle in some circumstances and so you know for some mistakes sometimes like we should understand that like we you know might be willing to put a stake in the ground you like you know I'm gonna split off from all of you if you don't go with me on this yeah like a collective way hopefully because if you do it alone it's not very credible so I think that so just to be clear I disagree completely that this is a viable thing for blockchains today I think I think that really doesn't need to be a very clear way of ensuring the blockchain stays together and if it doesn't then governance has failed but I would agree that in the future when we have a means by which schisms can happen in a

cooperative manner from the beginning essentially a way of the no vote is basically saying we will be bound to losing our assets and everything on this network everything to do with us will be bound to not having those assets there now this becomes hugely contemplated with a smart contract so it's probably only viable for pure asset networks and we will automatically move ourselves onto a new network with a new name and a new ticker symbol and all of our assets on there and in principle you can do this I mean you know it's kind of off into the technical future probably like five ten years from now leaving the cost just too high it's just like too much of a pain for us to do this right now

manually so what happens is something like ether classic right that's that's what we're capable of at the moment and I think it's basically I mean eat the classic split off because there was a bunch of people that just weren't happy with the etherium leadership and they felt they could do a better job on their own they were unhappy with the I mean there was a few factors one of which was the philosophy of the of the of decision-making decision-makers so they disagreed on a philosophical level but I think they also disagreed with just generally having to follow these particular set of decision makers and they preferred to sort of set up their own leadership with their own in air quotes here governance yeah I mean I don't entirely disagree with that but I

but I think that you know there's you know took both right he took both like the narrative and the disgruntled people who wanted to establish an alternative governance like software governments you know to make it happen right because you need it like you know the Bitcoin the big blocker is tried to split off from Bitcoin core a number of times but it took a bunch of coordination and like eventually somehow like Bitcoin cash happen I'm Bitcoin gold oh yeah that's not really considered to be alicorn infinity yeah right very much less credible and like you know but I think like this is a very natural thing and I

don't think you know as much as I don't like theorem classic and what they represent I think the forking mechanism is something that is good for botching governance so I think keeping things together is good for the thing and good for the stakeholders and I think that the job of governance and I said earlier you know governance is there to keep keep of the hole a hole yeah avoid it from avoiding the pieces from falling apart part of that is part of how you do that is finding compromise and a government a good governance system one that's gonna work long term is one that can has finding compromise sort of baked into it in some sense and I don't mean setting up a process whereby you know a

compromise to a compromise creator is selected and they create a company that obviously that won't work but there are game theoretic mechanisms by which we can increase the likelihood that a decision can be made that nobody on the network or sufficiently few people on the network to create a fork and not behind and I think when we start thinking about things in these terms rather than it should just for quite this agreement is a lot better I mean I think I think legitimacy is what you're looking for Gavin legitimacy is enough to prevent forking and it's almost all it does it's like it's just like it means that we've like agreed to do something in this like collective way I like to go with a particular like normal

process okay so if what you mean by legitimacy is is simply finding a course of action such that nobody is such that a sufficient majority is happy backing it well the people who find a legitimate well a sufficient majority so the thing is in my in the instance that I gave there may be a minority that doesn't back it that doesn't back this compromise that still wants their thing but they don't consider that the network effects as such all the hassle factor is such that they're not going to veto it yeah totally they would sell say no yeah they would vote against it they only take them elsewhere yeah so in my opinion they still think it's legitimate they might disagree they might even question the

legitimacy and want people to or they might even want people to rally around an alternative but until there's sufficient common knowledge that we will rally around an alternative or that we will deal Ajith Imai something it doesn't end up leading to a split like there's a bunch of work after you're upset to getting a split you know you you become upset with a hub Bitcoin core governs Bitcoin and then you'd find out that other people are upset too and then over many over a super long time you try to coordinate with them to create an alternative to Bitcoin core it's it takes a lot more than disagreeing or causing you know or vetoing something to to D legitimize something or to create a

legitimate alternative yes so the issue is that these veto wield is basically everybody in the notion that you know no coin voting or no voting mechanism at all no specific process based voting mechanism can never lead to a change without one hand an amiss yes votes well that basically means that these these V every no vote is a veto vote and therefore you can never have this option of well I vote against it but it will go forward any because it's to hassle too much hassle for me to actually start my own chain if I vote against it at all in your model that you've that you've just suggested then it won't go forward there's no way of making it will go forward yeah

although what you can do is question the legitimacy of that unanimous voting system and try to get everyone to agree to stop using it and instead let's use one with a lower voting threshold so that we can get decisions through and how did you make that decision well through a political process and I don't think that the political process is structured enough for me to tell you here here are the steps by which you can convince everyone to drop the system and use another one I agree do you think that it would be better if that political process were codified no I think you can I think we can use some tools for communicating and signaling better but I think that like that process is highly unstructured and complicated I want to dig into a little

bit a thing that in gaps last episode we touched on for just like a minute and that is the separation of like technical governance versus meatspace governance and before we started recording we discovered like a third thing a little bit in between which is like technical like online governance but still off chain so with technical governance I typically mean the mechanisms on chain that let you you know add track and act possibly you know enforce decisions but we've seen like from the etherium governance system that the meatspace governance and sort of the EIP that this sort of in-between thing like you said

for simple technical upgrades it works seems to work fine and we can reach some decisions we can make stuff happen but for more contentious things it basically leads to inaction but my question is where to utilize specifically since I've talked to canva about this already where do you see the role for this sort of technical on chain governance versus technical like off chain governance versus where do we just still need to have meatspace politics well I think that even with technical on chain governance there will be meat space politics behind the scenes as the people with the say have to coordinate around what decisions are gonna make and so it's not like the meat space politics

is gonna go away in any case the question is more about what should be in scope on chain and often and for like my own personal point of view right now is that like given our current ability to do things with smart contracts and the maturity of the smart contracts tack that like we should absolutely minimize the amount that is on chain or relying on that stack because the our highest stakes resources the blockchain and you know trying to govern that first with are like super nascent so our contract stack I think is not the correct way to take baby steps from small experiments to big ones but kind of more philosophically like you know longer

term the question is what can we automate and what can't we automate and that it has to do with what programs we can write and what what we can write programs to solve and I am NOT optimistic that we're ever going to be able to automate governance of the blockchain because I think that it's gonna because I think governance is not just a technical issue I think there's gonna be discussions about topics like for example fund recovery which are not technical discussions for most they're mostly like questions about like governance and the relationship you know and the processes by which we make decisions and you know what we what kind of decisions we even want to make

collectively and and but for now like let me say that there are things that are governed on chain fundamentally that I think will continue to be there namely for example the time stamps I don't think there's any way to get the time stamp governance off the chain and I fortunate you know there's there there's a few other things today in a theory I'm like the gas limit which I think I've actually I find it terrifying but the miners can just raise the gas limited time it's that's something that's come up before and it's sort of at the benevolence of the miners that the network isn't crashing because or that it's that or by the you know or by

their mistake that the that it's getting too big too quick you know you know but uh so far it seems like people have played really nice politics around the block size but so like and substrate there is a mechanism to you know provide the runtime in a you know binary formats web assembly that can run cross-platform and so you can store that on chain and then you can have you know some some voting system whatever system you want around how to upgrade that so clearly like that is just like a mechanical improvement rather than you know we trust that the developers correctly implement all of this on their nodes and

you know everyone all the miners upgrade etcetera thorough you can just do this mechanical thing it's like an automatic upgrade mechanism like I upgrade a software upgrade publishing and upgrade Mac yeah so if you wanted to model like the etherium governance system in substrate you would just give all the core devs votes each and then if it's unanimous vote an oracle that to give you the new software for like the latest releases for all the implementations don't ya there wouldn't be one way to do it as well yeah cuz like right now they don't have votes and they don't vote and so you may have a different outcome but would never would never lie the Oracle was Hudson I mean so you know that's

that's actually pretty much the software that I wrote with the upgrading to the upgrading contract so each of the dev teams could basically state this is our latest release and then they could use that in order to grab their clients could use that in order to grab the latest release in upgrade but then you just say that Hudson was the was actually the sort of source of truth and the dev teams weren't no no I didn't mean that the Oracle was Hudson I was like a hypothetical I think we've touched on this but we haven't really dug into it that is like who are the stakeholders actually who do you define as a stakeholder I basically think of anyone

who is impacted by blocking governance decisions as a stakeholder okay so the US government is fairly heavily impacted by blockchain yes and so I think that they're a stakeholder that is significantly potentially potentially significant impacted by bockting technology and they should be very much aware of what's going on oh no but this isn't about awareness this is about governance so if I should be able to veto no no no no I'm not saying that any anyone who's impacted by blocking efforts to be able to veto decisions I'm tonight so the second part of this I guess then is who are the stakeholders and do we care about that particular stakeholder in our governance process I think that like you know we should seek to represent all stakeholders but we also need to acknowledge that there are trade-offs

between the interests of stakeholder groups and then there's not not everyone is going to be a winner on every decision and that it's going to be contentious sometimes because people don't necessarily agree and a lot of them but a lot of the times for now we're still early days a lot of people who are affected by the decisions don't even show up and don't know what their interests are and that makes it quite relatively challenging because it's very likely that stakeholders who are gonna show up tomorrow aren't being represented today and are gonna be upset with decisions we make today at least if governance is a you know at least at least if we make decisions that have the service precedence and have consequences don't align so I believe that nobody is born into a blockchain and as an unable

to leave that ecosystem and therefore I believe that there is no reason to state that users should have users who hold no tokens therefore no stake in that system should have any ability to decide on the future of that so as a Facebook user I should not be able to tell Mark Zuckerberg how to run his company my influence as a Facebook user over Facebook is the ability to not you Facebook games like I don't think that people found that very satisfying I mean

like I don't think that like gdpr would really even exist if say for example Facebook and all these different companies instead decided look our users get to govern to how we use their data and the reason why we have gdpr is because like they like you know like in like least like a bunch of europeans decided that they wanted to have more control of the data and in a way that Facebook wasn't granting them and I think that the fact that you can't opt out was one of the main drivers behind this regulation I would contend that you can opt out you merely do not use Facebook I mean that's much harder and less practical than I think you make it seem it's much easier to not use Facebook than to leave your nation-state

but it's a lot harder than to not hang out with like one person you don't like or to opt out of a social arrangement that you're not a fan of you may also you can opt out of Facebook but you have no impact on how it will impact the larger society yeah but how it impacts the larger society is not my business to be changing right I I believe in individual freedoms and I believe that my individual freedom runs as far as myself and my security it does not run as far as dictating how Vlad should use his information and whether Mark Zuckerberg should be able to give him targeted advertising of course but we do have like some extent to which social media

and which block chains now are gonna be part of like a public comments that like are not just of anyone's property but are you know affect many stakeholders and have many well in the in the case of like corporations they have many owners in the case of block chains like you know we do coin voting they're gonna have many owners more we're gonna have you know this is like it's not really just about private property it's not I think that like there's the shared property situation that like all these governance problems are about so I think that comparing blockchains to nation-states is

romantic but also flawed I think blockchains are much better compared to corporations and that's why I think that a corporate governance model works perfectly well I think that like you know that's very questionable I like definitely would not like to see all of the blocks all the applications on the blockchain being governed indirectly by corporate governance model well I think a lot of people want to build organizations that don't follow a corporate governance model and anything that governs the blockchain governs all the applications on the watching so I'm perfectly happy with gaps and even blockchains building their own non corporate governance based governance model I think there'll be all sorts of

interesting experiments going on there but if we're coming down to what is governance and what is good governance then I believe that at the moment for most block chains which are economic systems with a token that is traded on a market and with users that have a perfectly easy ability to move between systems then good governance is more or less the same as corporate governance yeah I mean I really question the ease of transition I think that network effects are real I think that's probably you know why you want to keep the corporation together so much is because the you know they're there are gonna be like a few major block chains and there's not gonna be that I don't think there's meet that many I don't think you have that many choices you know you have

basically like a whole bunch of really illiquid coins and most of them are really really terribly illiquid and only a few of them are that useful you know it doesn't take long to figure out what block chains people are actually using sure but I think in the case of bad governance but enough to make a significant proportion of its user base one to move elsewhere and some would say that Facebook you know in terms of how it uses its users data may well be and place this sort of bad governance with block chains we can fork the blockchain I mean open source block chains yes and I think that that is totally totally Hubbs but doesn't mean that we need to that we can just like reduce or think about watching governance as corporate

governance because like there's a lot of the governance principles that like go nor like that are like useful for governing common that are you know going to help maintain the legitimacy and stop the splitting of these watchings so so for example if you like if you think that stopping splitting is a good thing and that you might make users upset by doing something so I guess what you're saying is you think that the corporate governance by itself will do what's good for the users to stop sweating by and large yes because it's ultimately in the interests of the corporation to have users and make users happy but there's that barrier to entry and they're gonna push the users to that discomfort level where they're just at the edge they're not enough to just screwing them enough to get the value out but just not so

much that they're willing to leave perhaps but there's no at least current block chains of block chains in my sort of in the standard sort of cryptocurrency model with low barriers to holding tokens will just mean that users that have you know significant economic power can become token holders and can influence the governance in a way that you know benefits them yeah but all the other users won't if a sufficiently large amount of users in terms of their economic weighting want to alter a blockchain in order to make it better for them than they will they will just buy tokens but they should be forced to buy tokens but they may not have the money to buy tokens I mean the there's a parallel distribution of wealth outside and inside the blockchain space like there's a lot of people who are looking to blockchain as a source of

emancipation or you know freedom from like oppression but they don't have a lot of money so yeah in principle those users can can if they gather together and it turns out where they can form a consensus they only need to do it once in order to move on to a new blockchain that doesn't have the higher powers and their distribution and that said I still I would still contend that block chains can have internal mechanisms that alters the distribution of capital such that users that are actually useful like can be recognized as being useful can have capital redistributed to them within the chains environment they start becoming as Wales there's ever be a whale though Gavin this is what I want to ask a

question about so you're talking about stakeholders only as coin holders or token holders but I also know that there's been discussion around those who contribute versus those who don't the speculators versus the people were actually building the thing do you see a distinction between that no coin holders still contribute they contribute capital yeah I think that like there's there different kinds of participants you know I think I think coin holders contribute to some extent but I certainly don't ever want to answer to coin holders or work for coin holders or you know for the lab associated with a blockchain that's owned by coin holders you know I think it's like not my I think coin holders are like you know an

equal part of the community I don't think that they are particularly special relative to say any other stakeholder interest group who isn't a stakeholder who isn't a stakeholder that's a good question if you use my definition is pretty hard to find someone who's ever yeah so like they're not even born supplies might be sneakers yeah exactly that's why that's the issue with this definition is the butterfly right now but the more immediate of a stakeholder you are them you know them like right the more you should be able to influence the direction right the more you're

gonna be concerned with the direction and the more that you're incentivized to become a participant what's the difference between a participant and a stakeholder a participant actually engages in behavior to try to influence blockchain governance outcomes and how do they do that without a specified process in place for example by participating politics coordinating to form consensus to fork like to me that's very much participating watching governance and very much didn't require that they have a process they just need I mean in some way if everything is information it's all process all the way down but that doesn't mean that there is like a single process that they use it's to do politics they've got all sorts of

different processes with it so you think it's fine to fork it's there's no real need of governance no I think they know to tell you things together no I'm compromise no because I think that there because forking is hard we we need to have and because porking actually has costs and because we do want to all be together having legitimate governance that doesn't split as a desirable thing and I think everyone wants this and I think people are willing to accept outcomes that they don't want in order to be together which is why I think that the governance mechanism needs to have more than just the consent / opt-in as a source of legitimacy I think he needs to have significantly more I because I think people don't want to leave do you

think this is actually mostly to you because I think I know your answer but do you think that theory of governance is okay or do you think it's broken I think it's okay I mean if those are the two options I think that like it's Syrian governance needs a lot of work I think it's very nascent I don't think it's broken I don't think we should give up I don't think we should think that it is beyond repair if there's anything wrong with it I think that like I just think it's nascent and immature I think that there's a lot of issues that we're gonna run into in the future that we haven't run into yet and that we therefore don't have the ability to deal with and we can see a lot easier shoes coming and I

think we should have and need to have a lot of conversation and governance weed out both in level of like you know politics and participation and like existing governance trustees and I think we need probably to establish new governance proce disease so I think there's a lot of work to do but I don't think it's broken I think there's still I have lots of hope for theorum governance what percentage do you give it present rate so you know I I give the participants in governance a very high score relative to the observers I find that the like a level like the people participating on like a more of like a

polo politics and shitposting level are doing a much poorer job than people participating day to day on the ground floor like on the eeap's and the olives and stuff like that Gavin even though I didn't give you the chance to weigh in I now want to actually hear your take cerium governance as it stands okay or broken so I would sort of echo Vlad I think that many of the people on the floor well intentioned I think some of them are misguided I think there's some uncertainty and fear that is that is circulating and and that largely comes from like some naivety and it's a shame that that we have people in relatively

substantial positions of authority because processes were not in place and they've just happened to have this Authority dumped on them and they they're not necessarily their most well informed and and canny people to be able to handle this weight of responsibility but that said I think I think people on the floor do tend to be well intentioned and I think it's massively unfortunate that the governance at this point basically seems to boil down to the desire of one or two key people in the ecosystem not wanting to be not wanting to feel unpopular on social media I think social media has way too much of a

grip on the ability or lack thereof to make decisions and I think that a set of processes away from this you know terrible social media gaming that we're seeing would you know would substantially improve governance and by this I don't necessarily mean that we're going to come to decisions that I personally like but we will at least come to some decisions and there will be a means of tracing why and who voted or you know at least why those decisions were made the way that they were there will be a process to feel hard done by rather than just a nebulous vacuum of voices to to get annoyed and upset with

I would say yeah like for thorium in particular I think it's doing fine but what I'm worried about especially going forward is that we'll get into a place where inaction is the default and we just can't get anything done and I think that's fueled in part by why you what you're just saying that like even I like when I'm on door coordinate call it's like I might have a like weak opinion on something but I'm not gonna say that because I will one get trolled everywhere and - it's like I don't care that much about it like yeah yeah that I think this would be better but I'm not gonna raise my voice because

you know maybe someone actually has a strong opinion and knows more than me so I think like all of this together sort of just yields like no results that's like what happened in Prague pal where everyone's like yeah some sounds like a good deal like good presentation thank you very much why nots but it's a lot of work do we need to do this work I don't know and then it's just nothing happened of it yeah but we also have no notion that just cuz something hasn't happened doesn't mean it won't happen in the future like there's no there's never any time at which court have says we'll never table this we'll never see it we'll never see this again on the agenda you know so it could always come back

like for sure there's no Poe has snow done but it seems like it will I mean I don't see why they wouldn't keep bringing it up but I think you know I think that the definitely this gridlock is a very real outcome and this is one of the reasons why I think like you know contentious Hart Forks are awesome and we and there are like hills that we should be willing to do contentious Hart Forks on what role does transparency you have in a governance system like yeah was just saying a little bit before it's like it's it's if there's a transparent process and I can see what the votes are and I can see who to be pissed off at in some ways I'm more likely to accept this and just this guy and then keep going with your

life whereas if it's completely opaque then I don't know what's going on maybe I don't feel represented at all etc so what what is the role of transparency in governance well it's complicated for a couple of reasons one of them is that okay when people are when people can be held to account for the decisions they make they make different decisions and if and and so like for example when you do of paper ballot voting versus voting with when you can tell who's voting it's much easier to capture a system where you can tell when your food was voting it's much easier to write some contracts that buy people's votes if they can if they do it with a digital signature on a public blockchain then if they're counted in a paper ballot so depending on the so

privacy is useful for accountability which sounds like a good thing but it's also a downside because it means that you can more easily coerce the system transparency can improve the legitimacy of our governance process institution it can degrade it it depends on what's being seen by who you know like do you and I think that like let's say for example let's talk about politics quality is a big part of governance should all of the political conversations that we have a public I think people will pretty immediately see that no should the votes of the legislature be public people feel a little more strongly they yes so I think it really depends and I think that like

different parts of the governance like system are gonna require different privacy for the participants because of their adversarial settings and because the fact that they have political opponents that are going to put pressure on them and so they have to do you know practical political organization and sometimes you don't want to share your opinion also because it's embarrassing and or uninformed and you know like having to share every dumb question you've asked is like I mean I mean I certainly don't want to do that and so I think radical transparency usually doesn't sufficiently well account for the adversarial context I think some transparency I mean is necessary for

explain ability and people love explain ability and it's really important that we can explain the governance decision but I don't think there's a simple answer and furthermore I think that actually it's there's little you just say that there's this argument that aren't in governance is more transparent and I think that like in some way that seems true because it's published on the sensitive resistant Network everyone gets to see it but we like if we just need if we need to broadcast stuff like we're quite good at broadcasting stuff usually the transparency isn't around people not being willing to broadcast stuff or sorry not being able to broadcast stuff it's more about to like the question of whether or not that left the decision

that we've made so I think that you know you could be transparent off chains sort of saying it's really possible if that's the decision so I'll just counter that with I disagree completely I think everything certainly with the last point I think I think you're right in terms of the frame of the first point I think there's some some reason there that to think that you know knowing the identities of the voters is a complicated question it has advantages and disadvantages it's probably important to know the identities of the voters when those voters are our delegates so if you're voting for a council or a board of

directors or some some kind of delegated body that is voting on behalf of its of its other nominators or the more pluralistic nominators then it's very important to know which door they walked through because yeah as a as an AMA as someone who nominated them you need to know that they're voting in your in your favor so to speak however I think it's a no brainer that in terms of the process and in terms of the execution of that process about the process itself and and its execution for making the decision that should absolutely be transparent and whatever means necessary should be

used in order to make it transparent now we have a really good invention for making processes well defined it's called computers and we have a really good way of making sure that those processes are followed exactly and it's called running on a computer so I think that given that we have this massive world computer called you know smart contracts aetherium the blockchain whatever you want to whatever name you want to give it we should be using this in order to make sure that our processes are transparent and that they are executed transparently I mean if we if we had processes that we

could encode in software that we agreed on you know then I'd be much closer to agreeing with you but the thing is that like we don't have processes that we can encode in software that we agree on that we use for governance we have informal processes where and we're like you know the decisions are made through lots of you know discussion and forums that I don't think I would be comforting in a smart contract okay so you put the eeap's process in a smart contract there I mean I did I wrote the yellow paper council smart contract which pretty much did exactly that I think it's great to have processes written up in non-negotiable ways and executed correctly I don't know

I mean I think that fewer people will use it than people use github and use the eeap's today I think that's just the UI issue you just do a go do I to the person to this to interacting with it yeah maybe III I wonder though if more generally we're gonna be able to do a lot of the governance stuff on chain because I just think that this in our contract stack is immature and has access to less IO than is available on the internet or to humans okay so if we're talking practicalities like in principle it's a great idea we just need to be able to build it sure but you know that's that's our job as builders like I'm busy on this case so I but if the if we agree that yes processes should be

placed on chain and should be executed transparently then it's just the case of getting the software up to the stack that's mature enough to be able to do this and then IO and Oracle's and all the rest of it that that a deployed entrusted to gnome you know so so so he Suzie I bro roped in the i/o and the Oracles and the rest of it I agree but before that I was kind of disagreeing because I don't see the stack as including the dispute resolution in the i/o and that kind of more I see as like trust and human more like human layer as a poet is less automated okay so I mean I'm perfect the app for implementing sophisticated processes that operate transparently right now well-defined with Oracle's

with whatever requirements that you need to actually execute those processes and if it includes Oracle's absolutely like fear as the Oracles need to be done yeah but they know there's gonna be decisions as to what values going to those Oracle's I have enough chain and aren't kind of the yeah but it's all about moving it to the to the edges of the graph right so the Oracle's provide the data and at the edges of the graph what you want to do is automate and make transparent as much of that as possible and just because you don't have the Oracles in place doesn't mean that you can't I start on the automation be transparent I think automation and transparency are a great thing when we know how to automate things well I think what I'm concerned about is that we will choose something that we can automate

that's like much worse than a less automated solution that we have now or that less automate solution that we can come up with I'm concerned that we're gonna push the automation thing to a point where we're gonna have it do things that we don't intend an automated way making decisions that we don't agree with and aren't happy with and so it's a you know if I if I believed that we could run write a program for governance if I believed that like there was a governance process that like I could write down in a computer program that we should follow I was like a thing if I thought that was possible I think I would be on the same page but I really questioned I really wonder whether governance can ever be done with a

process in like Peter science terms I think it's a social thing right I think people need to talk to each other I think do politics and and and have you know this kind of multi-stakeholder like scenario like like like governance regime where people who are very much not programs are represented so I absolutely agree that should be communication between participants I just think that the means of making a decision should be clear and transparent and transparently excuse no but but don't you think that people will make a decision anyways through this extra protocol political public debate process and then just

push or maybe private debate maybe in a telegram channels together and then they'll like push the decision through the public mechanism so like the decision will actually happen in closed doors or in public outside of the mechanism that is programmed to make the decision well this is you push the decision through this Oh Tarek now right I mean that's really somehow the government's often work that's how the vote that are voting like usually always work yeah actually makes the blockchain doesn't make where the decision is made is a purely philosophical point the point the critical thing is what enacts the decision and what factors lead up to that enactment right are those is that enactment and the factors will be up to it transparent or not okay but but the

but the in then and the transparency the enactment and the transparency of the decision are two completely different things and we were talking a bit about this as if we're talking about that transparency the decision the whole time so I would say enactment and the decision should be the same thing but critically it doesn't matter whether I decide to vote for or against some contentious hard fork at home in bed while I'm just thinking on my own while I'm reading an article when I'm chatting to you when I'm in a telegram channel with private is irrelevant what what what chemical processes go on my brain the critical thing is the thing that leads to the change or lack thereof should be well documented at the point when it leaves the person's brain okay should it be well document but it there

should be like a single one that everyone sees it should be like our well da human to Singleton process so it's why you say a transparently executed well understood well defined strictly defined process that everybody can check make sure was indeed and acted correctly yeah I mean it's consensus we're doing senses without formal unique a decision making processes that we all agree on we need to wrap up here because we are already over time and I'm not sure we can actually get this under an hour but we'll we'll see where it ends up definitely cut it's been a very interesting talk and sitting here listening to this I wish it

could go on for much longer it sounds like we're in rough consensus it sounds like they're I mean there is some some things that we can agree on and and like we need to build more it's like one conclusion that I drew from this like you're saying the tools we have the processes that we have our nation's we need to improve both the processes make sure that we encode them actually and like try to work towards something that is more transparent I think we all want that but then like you said the tools are also nascent so we need to get off our asses and actually write code but

like you know don't adopt the process just because you can encode it you know it's a oftentimes easier to go with a program that you can write then one that you have to think about for a bunch of time before you write it you know and so I think like it's really easy to jump to the jump the punch so I think that what I took from the last paragraph of this little chapter was that we could probably agree that with sufficiently good tools and software then it's perfectly fine to have governance process on chain we may not have a particularly mature software stack right

now we may not have a perfect process in play for government for governance but I think the main disagreement I don't think there's a disagreement on the end goal I think the main disagreement that I see is at what point of development of software stack Oracle's ecosystem and process is good enough to move from this nebulous hand-wavy ill-defined and often defaulting to inaction lack of government governance I would

say to a warm day an unchain process that's well defined I totally agree but I think there's one more thing that we disagree on which is how much is possible with the tech stack even if it were to be fully fleshed out like even if we were the protec stack were you perfect I bet my estimation of what we could do with it for governance and for these you know what I see is like social issues is like you know probably more conservative so with that thank you guys so much for sitting down with us and having this chat thank you for having us here yeah thanks so much it was fun to our listeners thanks for listening thanks for listening

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