This is epicenter episode 475, fifth guests, Gary Lieberman and
Ted Blackman. Welcome to episode of the show
which talks about the Technologies projects and people
driving decentralization, and two blocks and Revolution.
I'm Brian Crane. And today, I'm speaking with Ted
Blackman, he's the CTO of the irbid foundation and also carry
Lieberman. He works at correspondent Elites
are a team. So, once again, we're going to
speak about herb it and but just be real.
Flee before we get into the podcast.
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to check it out. All right, so thanks so much
guys for coming on. It's a, it's great to do this
episode. Really looking forward to it.
Thanks for having me. Yeah, let's start with you.
Ted, tell us a little bit about yourself and sort of, like, how
you found your way to where you are at this point.
Sure. Yeah.
Well yes, as you mentioned I'm the CTO of the Urban Foundation.
I took over in this role about two months ago and for the five
years before that I was working at too long as a core Dev honor,
'but and so the first four years just writing code and then the
last year year and a half or so is also a managing a number of
people working on the colonel. And yes, I started working on
Urban full-time in 2017. I'd first heard of the project
in 2014, but didn't understand it.
And then in 2016, the docks were a lot better and I started
looking into them. And by that point I had had
enough varied experience, writing code at a lot of
different startups as a, as a founder and as a several and as
An employee at many others and I've been doing that for 10
years starting in 2006, my first term in college and it's very
sort of lucked out that I actually graduated considering
that. But yeah, so I've been working
stars for a long time. Seen a lot of different things
robotics distributed systems, web programming.
And the. So I had enough breath of
background to understand, why herb, it is interesting.
Technically not very much depth of background in that and that
much actually, it's a lot of learning about networking and
operating systems programming languages.
I've had to learn a lot of that, on the job working honor of it.
But but yeah, that was what interested me in the project
primarily was just I encountered it I looked at and thought this
gets a lot of stuff right that I've never seen gotten right
before in program, in a way that just just the basic ideas of
what it is, that you build a program out of how those
programs are situated, how they communicate with each other,
what they do, how the networking Works, how identity works are
the operating system works, all. This is so much cleaner than
anything else that I've ever seen.
And I still feel that way and it's why I'm still excited to
work on her butt. So, yeah.
So that's That's kind of my the recent part of my story and and
the and now at every foundation. So we've just switched gears to
doing a lot of core development in-house.
And so we're hiring a number of guys to we'd like we have hired
a number of people and we will be hiring some more to work on
to do more Court of. And so expanding the size of the
core Dev team that's to work on the urban OS itself, how the
different parts of it. And really to push it over the
hump to become a bulletproof consumer product.
Cool. Thanks so much for for that.
I want to start. I want to also kind of get into
something else briefly. So, you know, most of the
listeners of this podcast here in Champion talk about crypto.
We have done some orbit podcast before we did one in 2017 with
gaalan, which I listen to not long ago and it's still pretty
current. So we'll link to that in the
show. Show notes if people want to
check it out and then I think we did another one this year with
Josh Lehman of the orbit Foundation is executive
director, of third foundation. So there's like a little bit but
I still, I think most people writer but it's not easy to wrap
your head around and I think most people kind of still
struggle with that. So it would be great if you
could sort of describe for let's say for this kind of audience,
you know that kind of gets crypto that gets things around
that but maybe don't know about irbid.
Like what is orbit? It sure.
Yeah. Well I think for a crypto
audience, I would say, you know, the one of the foundational part
of the foundational ethos of crypto in general is not your
keys, not your coins, right? So you own your assets,
fundamentally through control of the private key. and one way to
think about herb, it is that we're extending that, not just
to money, but to all of computing, So you own your
computer with a private key, you own that computers identity on
the network with a private key. And and then you have full
control over that computer. So what data is stores with
programs, that runs how it communicates with whom it
communicates and and then I'll and then all those apps that you
install into it, the programs that you actually run on.
There are designed to run in a decentralized manner so there's
no Central server. No central point of failure.
No Central choke point and That this is.
So it's sort of one way to think about herb.
It is it's trying to build the same world that the rest of
crypto is trying to build and it's building all the pieces of
that world that aren't on chain because you don't actually want
to stick everything. All logic and all data onto a
bottom. It's not the right solution for
everything. It's the resolution for anything
where you need Byzantine fault tolerance.
Right. So you need a global consensus
on. Who owns what?
Even Global consensus on which, which transactions have been
performed right? For, you know, if you're
sharing, if you're all sharing the same computer like in
etherium, right? You're all sharing the same
computer. You just need a way to guarantee
that we all share that same computer State even if even if
it's adversarial. But that's only a subset of the
world of computing. And for everything else where
you don't want or need that kind of Byzantine fault tolerance.
That's where it comes in. So that's really I want to store
personal data. I want to use chat.
I want to do file sharing. I want to do video streaming for
any of those things. Yeah, you want, you want the
world that crypto is promising, but blockchains can't do it
individual applications. Can't do it very well because
the current stack wasn't designed for decentralized
world, the modern internet Unix, all these things, they were not
designed to be as or Multipolar decentralized system.
And so the, ER, B thesis the core of the urban thesis is that
which is actually older than blockchains But that thesis is
that fundamentally. Getting to a decentralized world
that same world that crypto promises is a technical problem
and it's a technical problem that needs to be solved by an
operating system that is designed from the ground up to
support peer-to-peer applications.
Thanks, I really appreciate how you explain that.
I think that's a, that's a very nice way of phrasing it and I do
think that hopefully works pretty well for, you know,
people coming from from a crypto go.
I hope. So, I've been trying for a
while, you know, Gary actually has his own way of describing it
that I don't mean to put you on the spot, but I've heard you
describe it very well. I actually don't know if it I
mean it could be explained better.
Probably, I don't know if it really needs to be elaborated on
necessarily. I mean, I think irbid kind of,
is designed as a unified system. So, in the context of, like, if
you're trying to organize your Digital Life, a lot of people do
this by, like only buying Apple products, for instance, or only
using, you know, Google Apps suite for all of their
productivity. And, you know, there's all these
ways that you can try to unify the system that you use.
So that everything you use kind of makes sense.
As with each other and I think part of the herb, it's tsys is
that things actually make much more sense.
If you have a system that works for everybody for all purposes,
that is truly a universal language that people can come to
consensus on without any compromises.
Yeah, that's so that's kind of like the idea of taste, you
know, Universal Computing, environment.
And I guess what ties in there is that whole bunch of stuff
that today, I guess don't happen at the operating system level of
do happen at the operating system level in orbit, right?
So like let's say something like authentication where as you know
today is okay, you want to sign into some application.
Then you can use like Google sign-in with Google, or you can
use signing of a poor and, but those are like separate separate
kind of ecosystems and they're not kind, not quite compatible.
Whereas, in irbid you have like over the ID and then, that is a
universal thing that anyone can access.
Yeah, that's right. And I mean, I think it's
actually fairly obvious in a case of like, it, hypothetical
world where there was only Urban, and, you know, Irvin had
no incumbant that it was trying to You against it would be kind
of obvious. I think that identity is
something that you only have one of, its kind of baked into the
word identity that you have one. And so a lot of things that
don't work properly in like the web to ecosystem and even web 3
actually. The reason why they're not quite
compatible is because the identities just aren't
compatible with each other. And so if you have a unified
identity system at a very early point in the stack, a lot of
problems just go away. They kind of, it's not even that
they're solving. Solved.
It's that. The preconditions for the
problems never even come about. Yeah, that's right.
Like most people don't know, for example, that IP and TCP, you
know, the protocols that the internet uses don't have any
concept of authentication or encryption.
Those have to be bolted on higher layers and because of
that, you get all kinds of issues.
You get a whole field of Ip, security, ipsec, DNS, security,
DNS SEC, right? Like these things basically
shouldn't exist, they should be in the network protocols.
But these numbers Protocols are 50 years old before anybody even
thought to use encryption. And before there were, when they
were maybe 10 people on the internet instead of billions.
So yeah. So whether it, those those
things are built in at every package, Is authenticated and
encrypted. One, one question, actually,
when Gary, and I were talking a little bit about the outlines,
and there's this question that I think is is good question to ask
right here. So, you know, herb it describes
itself as this clean slate. And, you know, you talked about
these, like, Global protocols like TCP and I IP, so can you
talk a little bit about, you know, how much of kind of the
existing internet? And Computing stack like, how
much does irbid like throw? Away and to what extent our
existing technology still being used in orbit.
Well, at a basic level with throws them all away.
And but it's not the that's not the whole story because despite
that, we know that orbit must exist in the present and be
useful for people in the present.
And so however it also has the capability of acting as a web
server to the old web and making web requests HTTP requests.
So this allows you to access it from your browser access it from
your phone. You know, have a serve Serve a
vlog for you racing. The studio app from Tyrell, lets
you post a blog post a blog using your Urban and even
they're working on. Adding a pay wall to that too.
So you can even take payments three orbit.
So it herb. It is not basically Urban's
Building A Whole New World unto itself, right?
So everything from machine code, programming language operating
system, kernel set of applications Network, Tikal
identity system all the but that new world can communicate to the
old world because that's can because that's very important in
practice. Cool, thanks for everything
that. Well, maybe we can go to Gary
Ossipee flea and maybe you can tell us a little bit about you.
And how did you get into urban what was the thing that captured
your attention when it came to irbid?
I don't think my background is particularly interesting, but I
was before, I mean I knew about her bit for a couple of years
before I got really into it and I underestimated it for a very
long time. I would say what got me really
into it was struggling with two things that I didn't quite
understand were related one was that I was trying to organize my
digital life in a way that really made sense to me and
optimize my workflows kind of just running on the Option that
I realized I'm much happier and much more productive in my
physical life when I'm well organized.
So, I should be able to apply that same logic digitally and
just coming up against multiple blockers everywhere, where it's
like, okay, to actually solve this problem.
It's like a full-time job for 10 people creating and maintaining
a system that actually does what I wanted to do.
So that was one thing and also just noticing on the other hand,
I mean, it was right after covid, just how dystopian web to
was it wasn't surprising to me at all that.
We had like this huge increase in like political violence and
transgression with the same time that everybody was stuck in
their houses with nothing but web to entertain them.
Like it seemed very clear that that was like an insanity
inducing situation and urban I think successfully made the case
that that was also a downstream from the same technological
problems that led to my my own inability to organize my digital
life in a way that was automated and made sense.
And so I gave her bit the benefit of the doubt enough that
maybe if I learn something about it and I spent quite a lot of
time learning it but I could kind of test the assumptions and
at least make a case for why it was or was not a waste of time
and by the time I was done and felt satisfied that I understood
it, I was totally Able to recreate the conditions that I
had before, where I was not complete orbit maximalist, I
can't even remember what it's like to believe that there's any
other possibility for the future computer.
Fairly common story actually. You know, there's this question.
I kind of wanted to get to at the end, but I think we should
get to it now. So, you know, we've talked
about, you know, if you've touched on earlier the bit like
what's different and, you know, you guys have both alluded a
little bit as to why you're excited about it, but if he, if
he now kind of think forward and imagine that irbid, you know,
really accomplishes. The things it's trying to
accomplish right like so it really I get so it's you know
fully realizes its ultimate potential.
What does that look like? How long does it take and what
does the world look like what's different for people in the way
they use technology in the way? They live their lives in the way
political systems work you know like what is what are the kind
of visions and ideas that you guys have around this?
I can start with a few things. So one is that I think you'll
end up with a lot more. Localism is one word and you end
up with a lot more subcultures that are sort of each of the
subcultures will be autonomous in a way that they aren't really
digitally autonomous at the moment.
If you're running a subreddit the subreddit might just get
shut down. All right, the mobs could have a
bad day and you know, And then you're not there anything and
that culture can be gone, you can have it to you know, via
Twitter poster and then big following and then put your foot
in your mouth one day and your account gets flagged by an AI.
And band and then years of work that you put into developing
that audience and, you know, sort of building a whole network
of personal connections based on that can just be blown away in
an instant by essentially mistake.
Alright. And so this is actually kind of
puts a damper on the ability for through subcultures to form and
so you end up with more of a monoculture, right?
So I think Trent from oh, Liam said you Facebook is 3 billion
users No culture and I really stuck with me.
So I think the, your son entirely sure there's some
right, but I think it's what we'll see is a lot more of those
a lot more subcultures that, that are able to flower more,
right there able to develop their own art, their own ways of
communicating. They may eventually physically
co-locate, they may do a Balaji Style Network State.
They may do something else, I think.
That's sort of digital, like the ability for people to
coordinate, collaborate online has been hamstrung by a lack of
ability to, for people to control their own software,
right? So you know, you're probably in
some signal group chats and not just signal scattered all over
the place, really, right? But for any one of those you
can't, you can't say, oh well let's let's Fork signal the
signal client, right? Like let's let's have it,
integrated something. Integrate of the calendar even
read something basic where there's just, no way to do that,
because that's its own world, right?
It's siloed, right? And so, basically, that's sort
of limitation where you kind of can't just arbitrarily extend
things. You can't arbitrarily get your
programs to work with each other.
That's a big cause of what well, Gary was saying he ran into, but
it also just prevents like, groups social groups and other
kinds of organizations from From being able to really make the
most out of network computers. So by so nervous for the flips,
the whole situation on its head because right now, you have to,
you have to go through some big Central server to do, almost
anything on the internet. And instead, this is no, you can
download an app into your irbid run at yourself, and you have
full control over that yourself. And then you and people, you
want to collaborate with have control over that, that small
Network. So it's much more bottom-up.
And so I think like, we're really not used to seeing
bottom-up organization digitally, but I think that what
it's going to look like mostly is yeah, better art more art
better. Like, I think more seamless
economic activity, right? Like people a lot more people,
starting small companies starting small, little
investment, coops starting local businesses, things like that.
I think that and getting local investment, right?
So, all sorts of things. Things that in all kinds of
different modes of interactivity that are very difficult to build
right now, right? So, you know, if there's an
interesting example of this which is an app called radio on
herba that was built a couple months ago and it's sort of like
a jukebox for video. So y'all get into this room.
You can set which videos playing and then Q another video and
then people can talk about it as it's going, right?
And you know it's not a not an earth-shattering application but
it's it's something new. That's something that you can't
build otherwise. And so it's just sort of one
little hint as as to what sorts of you can just have this.
Lots of different kinds of interactivity different.
Kinds of bottom-up, social organization that are infeasible
in the modern Computing setup. Yeah, and just one thing to add
to that, I think I've key importance is the idea that
within a unified system, a small-time app developer can
actually have a big impact because they are working within
the same language as the rest of the world, meaning to things in
terms of culture, there can be an application made between
friends in a group and not have this.
You know, this big hump to overcome to actually get it
usable between everybody. If I develop an app for just the
people in my friend group, It would be very easy in irbid
world to just have them download it and try it and use it and it
wouldn't necessarily have compatibility issues with the
rest of their Digital Life. And that also makes a lot of
sense in a business context. So if you're running a business
and you realize that you have a very lucrative small business
model and you're asking the question of what would it take
to franchise this business? Probably the answer to your
question, includes, you know, you need some kind of software.
And that you know, that captures the entire business logic of
your operation and this is in practice not possible for most
small businesses you have to overcome a significant financial
barrier to do that kind of thing.
But on a unified you know software ecosystem.
It actually becomes quite quite a reasonable proposition, I
wouldn't call it easy but it's much more accessible to Simply
capture the logic of the business within one program and
that I think would lead to exponential productivity gains
in pretty much any industry. Yeah, just to elaborate on that
a little bit. So there's One of the big
differences between writing code in turbot and writing code for
the normal internet is the distance between writing a toy
and writing a production application.
So normally in the normal Internet and mobile Computing, a
programmer can take a weekend and write a toy, right?
And that toy would be usable. It has the business logic,
right? This rib meat of the application
is there? But it's nowhere near something
that people could use, right? So you can't just sort of have
your friends use it. Have it work, have it be
something that is actually part of your lives in order to get to
that stage. You have to do a lot of devops.
You have to do you have to have some sort of authentication
system maybe a few with backups what happens if somebody forgets
their email address or whatever, right?
I mean you have to administer a bunch of servers.
So if the to have some sort of cloud infrastructure, you may
find yourself researching kubernetes Docker, right?
And there's this whole long list of tools that the modern
programmer has to be familiar with in order to actually deploy
an application to users, even if it's just a web page.
And so it's that that difference between the the meat of the
system and all the sort of rigmarole of a deployment that's
what brings in a ton of extra costs.
That makes it prohibitive to just say hey and we've got a few
friends here. Let's let's write a Slap that
does this thing that we needed to do.
And so this is this is true already, right?
So a good example of this is Now, Justin Murphy commission
somebody to write an app called page.
And it lets you copy some HTML into your orbit and serve it as
a web page because he just needed to serve some simple
stuff. So, he asked somebody to build
this forum. I think you paid him five
hundred dollars took a weekend and now that happens is I
installed on my rib. It works fine.
All right, so I was able to download this.
Run it myself. On my own herb right from $500
worth of work and that's that's a fairly unusual setup and we're
going to make that even better in the future.
So it will reduce that cost even further and that difference will
continue to increase. So that's I think one of the one
of the things that's most exciting from a developer
standpoint, it's like a you can about her is that you can write
something publish it literally in a weekend and it's real it's
already real. Yeah, I mean this is one of the
ways if I explain orbit that I also tend to emphasize is, you
know, if you are developing a new web application or some kind
of application is normal web that because you have these
additional things that, okay? Now I'm going to have to run
some infrastructure for it and the cloud and well, what does it
mean? I mean, I have to make like an
AWS account and now I have to pee Every month, and if there's
more users have to pay more. So now all of a sudden, I have
to run a business, right? And I have to have revenues to
do that, and maybe that means I have to run raise investment or
I have to charge people. And maybe I didn't want to do
that. I just wanted to create
something right that, like, people wanted to use and and in
irbid, you can kind of do that, right?
I could. Develop some simple application,
maybe people love it and it million people are going to run
it on there, you know, on their orbits.
And I don't have to do anything right after charge, anything and
the pay for any infrastructure. And I think that's just going to
be so attractive for developers. And it's going to like unleash
such a new class of applications.
People will build and people play around.
Round with and so much creativity, that becomes
possible when you not everything has to be connected.
If some business that you have to build, Yeah, I would say
generally there's a very large class of questions that begin
with. Why can't I just that turbot
allows you to adjust and, and shipping code to somebody's
computer is definitely one of them.
Why can't I just build an application?
You download it from me and run it.
Another one is why can't I just send you a file?
Why do I need Dropbox, right? These are these are just
questions that you only have to ask.
Because if the kind of insanity and Computing and Herby I think
Is kind of fundamentally trying to provide that sanity.
So let's talk a little bit about, you know, what is Arabic
today. You know what's the current
state of technology and what are the limitations of the system?
Sure, yeah, so today, first of all, orbit does wrong, sometimes
we'd ask that still, but it's been running since 2013 and the
so you can you can get an orbit, you can buy one off of theorem
and so you can buy an orbit ID. Once you have that Urban ID, you
can boot your ship which is a name for your node.
So you can boot your orbit. You can run that yourself on
your laptop. or pay one of a few different hosting providers to
run up for you or you can run it yourself in the cloud if you're
willing to do a little bit of system administration You can
also move it from any of those three places to any of the
others and Gary actually been working on standardizing the
protocols for how that can be moved from place to place.
But you can do it yourself already so Urban you can you can
get one, you can run it and you can install apps into it and the
bait, it comes with a suite of apps.
The flagship apps are groups and chat so you can chat and groups
it looks Looks like Discord, it's our, you know, our slack,
something like that, right? It's chat app.
It's sort of asymptotically approaching feature.
Parity with those, there was a recent update that made it a lot
closer actually, nowadays, threaded conversations and Emoji
reactions, and it's starting to feel very similar to any other
chat app. So that's mostly what people use
our bit for right now. But you can also install any
number of other apps And they're about over 80 of them that have
been published publicly. It's hard to know how many of
them exist total, but there, yeah, many dozens that you can
try out and some of those are more important than others.
I would say. So, for example, there's one
called campfire that lets you do video chat, That gets that's
over webrtc but it's negotiated by orbit, so it's fully
decentralized. Peer-to-peer video call.
I'm so And they're all kinds of other things that people are
building. So that's where turbots Act and
the tricep works pretty well. There's some rough edges, I
would say that the the big limitations have to do with
scaling and hardening. And some with developer
experience. So as a user basically you know
if you join a group that has more than a few thousand members
and there are few of these groups, then it might be kind of
slow, right? It works but it's a bit slow.
And if you're publishing a group that has many thousands of
members, then you generally have to do some maintenance work on
your server, to make sure it doesn't run out of memory.
So, herb, it is supposed to not require any maintenance from the
user should maintain its Right? So it's not quite there yet and
in particular with scale, right? So if you're supporting a lot of
a lot of subscribers than the system doesn't scale as well as
it should. And so you have to do some
maintenance work and things get slow.
And so that has to do with the reasons for that are basically
to fold both. Well, three, there are three
reasons. Essentially one is that there's
a limitation to how much data you can store in your orbit
right now. There's also Old, it just
doubled, but it's still. It's still limited.
That's, there's a limit to that. There's a limit to the amount of
network bandwidth that you're a bit, can take advantage of.
So we're working on that as well.
And then finally herb is programming language.
Knock machine code is, is slow. So the so the combination of
those three things makes put some scaling limitations on the
All three of those are under active development and I don't
expect any of them to be showstoppers but but that's
that's the status. So the other aspect is
hardening. So basically there it's this
refers mostly to security Sumter.
Reliabilities, there's some reliability issues are still
some bugs. Sometimes, I think crashes.
Much, much less frequent than it used to be, but it still
happens. And so getting the system to be
really Bulletproof. Reliable.
That's one of the big things we've got to do and and a very
closely related phenomenon, is making sure that it can't be
hacked into. All right, so making sure that
it's secure. So that people can't get into
your orbit and download all your chats and, you know, we want
people to be able to store private key is for, you know,
relatively small amounts of money.
But but you should be able to store private keys in irbid and
answer anything other than like, your life savings.
It should be relatively safe. You should feel secure about it.
We're definitely not there yet. So as a caveat like if you go
play with her but keep in mind it has not been audited for
security. There's a good chance that there
are vulnerabilities in there so treated accordingly but that's
also under active development. So there's a hardening process
that we're taking the system through and the other piece of
that I would say is protection against denial of service
attacks which is I think going to be a sort of long tail of
hardening to make it sort of able to resist.
Larger and larger and more and more.
Well, resource groups of people who are attempting to just shut
down the network, or at least shut down your ship on the
network, your node. So there's a lot of work to be
done on that front as well. Also not I'm not particularly,
you know, worried about it but it's a fair amount of work in
front of us to do that. The third remaining limitation.
I would say is in developer experience.
So basically there's when it's a pretty new world, right?
You got a whole new holding machine code.
Whole new language woman, operating system, old, sort of
Paradigm, of programming, and all these things are 10 times
newer than existing world. And so there's a lot of tooling
that herb. It doesn't have that other
systems have. So a lot of the so that this
developer experience is very good already in some ways, but
Other ways that needs a lot of work.
And so, a lot of that has to do with building, tooling building
debuggers and having a better, you know, printer pretty printer
for data and a lot of other technical stuff, but basically
making it just a lot, bring building a lot of tools for
developers, and there's a deeper peace of that, which is making
sure that the apis that are presented to a user space
program or somebody writing an app to make sure that the way
that you interface with the operating system is clean and
easy to use. Use and particular easy to it
should make it easy to write a program.
That's correct. And so there's a big problem
with this right now without which has to do with
subscriptions. And so there's a whole set of
complex of projects that were working on over the next year or
two called subscription reform to redo orbits subscription
system. So how you synchronize data from
Urban turbot actually get a lot simpler cleaner and and more
scalable as well. So there's a roadmap, dr.
B dot org, has That's a pretty new thing where we, where we
laid out the technical roadmap for urban.
So if you're interested in going deeper on the technical details
of exactly where the systems at and what needs to be done to
improve it. That has some pretty detailed
explanations and linked to ongoing work on, get up.
Cool, thanks. Yeah, I mean I was with Gary
were actually looking a little bit at the roadmap the other day
and it has to say it's like very nicely presented and so will
also link to that. So if people want to go deep and
check it out, what are the timelines in this?
Like when Rainy's herb it. I don't know.
Do you see? Do you see kind of different
stages of Readiness of irbid coming up for different types
of? I don't degrees of adoption.
And what does that look like? And yeah, on what time frames?
I think this is a little bit of an aggressive timeframe, but I
generally say around two years to get to having a To have it,
be bulletproof and scalable enough and reliable enough
basically. So there's the system will
continue to improve basically forever.
The kernel itself will actually stop improving at some point,
the version numbers go down to zero.
We call this K versioning and this is to standardize the
system. So so all the different parts of
the kernel, each have a k version, those all go down to
zero, knock the machine code is that k for and And I actually
did a podcast, we talked about what might cause it to go to
version 3. But at the moment we don't
actually see that happening. We think that's probably done
but the colonel different parts of the kernel or versions, you
know, 144 the language up to about 400 for the standard
Library. So, there are a finite number of
versions of we have to play with there, which will take somewhere
between 20 and 200 years to really congeal all the way down.
But the, but that's the colonel. There's also the runtime, which
is the program that runs your Urban and that is not K version
it so that will continue to improve forever.
But that's basically just making making it faster and faster over
time. So there's no sort of fixed
Point. There's no, like, one point
rule, say Urban has done exactly.
But there's a point where we will be able to say this handles
all the kinds of applications that we want to handle and I
think we'll be able to handle most of those by two years from
now. And so that includes having
being able to confidently, say this thing is secure.
Nobody's going to be able to steal your data out of an ex
will treat your data. It'll scale.
Well, so if you want to have a million people in a trap Channel
2 years from now, you should be able to have a million people in
chat. Jim So basically, it should it
should approach the level of scaling of web to.
And that's an interesting set of problems.
Most people don't don't think of decentralized systems as being
capable of scaling up to the size of web to where you need
your many data centers. Run it herb.
It actually is designed to do that.
So there's a very interesting set of discussions to be had
about how it plans with doing that, but I do think it's
possible. We're on our way.
So, it'll scale some, it'll be quite right and it'll be quite
secure. It should be quite reliable.
Like the, the program should not crash and it should be
relatively easy to write. It should at least be yet.
It should at least be relatively straightforward to write an
application that synchronizes data correctly, without having
to worry about correctness. So like where it gets where it's
a correct application, without having to think too hard about
it. Now, by two years from now, it
may still have quite a bit of boilerplate.
Play it, right? It might be kind of awkward
clunky to write those programs, but when you write them, you
should be able to very quickly read them and say, yeah, okay,
that's definitely right. We're not there yet, and mostly
was missing. There is the interface to
subscriptions the interface to synchronizing data.
There are few other things that aren't great either.
So I don't expect that that I think that that API, right?
Like what it takes to write an application will be really, you
know, smooth and just, you know, really Polished by then I think
that'll take another couple of years to really get to really
get nice, but it should be possible to hook into scalable
content distribution from an application so that you can
support many people subscribing to you, like, in the millions
and and to feel confident when you write it, that it's correct
and that the colonel is handling.
All of the sort of hard synchronization problems and
other correctness issues for you.
I was kind of wondering if there are any applications that you
would like to see honor bit that it's just not ready for it
because of, you know, the maturity of core development.
And you know, when do you think it'll be possible and what it
will look like tons. Okay.
I want to store all my files in there.
I have hundreds of gigabytes of music recordings and photos.
All kind, you know, hundreds of papers that have collected over
the years, the corner. It's pure science, papers,
ebooks tons of stuff. And I actually I had them in
Dropbox for a long time. Then I decide to stop paying for
Dropbox. They pulled him onto my
computer's and I have 300 gigabytes of just crap sitting
there in my computer and we need to upload it somewhere else and
I've gotten around to it, that should all be in my room.
And not only should it be in my herb but yeah, I should be able
to share that with you very easily.
Alright, so in order to share media with you, Through orbit,
you much higher. So, first of all, you'll be able
to store that data in orbit. It's too big right now.
I need to be able to stream that to you, or you need to be able
to download it quickly. So we have to be able to max out
a network connection, right? For the for the bandwidth.
So we need a better Network protocol and I need to be able
to publish that to a lot of people to meet scalability, the
network protocol. So there's that right?
Anything with file sharing podcasting, you know, live
streaming. You should be able to do all
that from your herb. Right.
And like imagine doing a live stream from your urbis.
It's fun to think of all the other stuff you could build in
there. All different kinds of
objectivity and Integrations with other other herb, adapts.
And then, the other thing is, I want to be able to store a lot
of my private keys in orbit. So I think like, yeah, for for
stuff that's like, where you really want to keep it cold,
then okay. Yeah, keep it cold.
Don't put in your orbit, but but I want to have sort of What we
aware? I'm paying my bills from right
and where I'm, you know, sharing expenses with friends, you want
an urban version of what's the app called where you like y'all
go to a restaurant and split wise, right?
My friends and I use split wiser for go to restroom.
So let's you settle up later. I think there's another one too.
So I think there's more that there is.
Yeah yeah but anyway like that kind of a poor.
It's like yeah here's how I handled my sort of day-to-day
expenses. Has income Etc.
Right? Like that.
I should feel comfortable storing that my herb.
Right? And then at not only that.
But then from there, I can do things like have Urban integrate
with the lightning Network. Have it integrate with the Aztec
protocol on ethereum? I would integrate with kenosis
safe, safe. Now, I suppose, right?
I have it integrate with all this different stuff, so but in
order to do that, I have to be comfortable having some hot
wallets inside my room. And so for that, it needs to be
secured. Right.
So there's this whole sort of big playground of all these
things that could be built, right?
It's like they're, those will be toys until we make sure it's
secure and then they can be done for real.
And so, I'm very much looking forward to those classes of
applications. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the
podcasting thing because I think this is actually like a very
powerful example, right? So for those who like you don't
know, basically if podcasts are podcasts are basically
distributed via RSS feeds and says a podcaster.
You know, you putting up this podcast recording and then
people download it and you don't.
And there's a bunch of limitations that come with.
That one. Is that?
You don't have any way of like messaging, those people.
Like, if you want to build like a community of your podcast
listeners, then, you know, you'd have to make this comment
something of like, oh, you listening to this audio now go
and clicking the link in the notes to go somewhere else and
then we do this community or as it's so.
But most, you know, 98% of people, they're just like,
listen to it. And, and because it's so complex
and people don't even try. And of course, charging for
podcast is also basically not. Civil or it's only possible
through these again. Very, very terrible hacks that
people do. So I think this is something
where, you know, if you can just distribute your content, message
everyone who's listening to it, maybe have better data about it
too, because I think this is another thing that Paul said
podcasting is very limited. If although I guess in irbid
maybe this is also something orbit will be limited with no
since people. What do you mean more?
Better data. Well, I mean in podcasts like
you don't know. For example, two people actually
listen to it or not. You only need to download
analytics tracking that kind of stuff.
Yeah. Well I think people could hide
the fact that they've listened to your podcast relatively
easily but most of your listeners probably wouldn't.
So if you kind of requested that information I think most of your
listeners would give it to you and you'd have a reasonable idea
of what your audience looks like.
You can also track the networking requests coming into
your orbit, right? So you can track just how many
requests came in or I should say you can build this sort of
analytics to track that sort of thing on your irbid.
There's a little bit of that in the runtime right now but it's
not as granular as it could be. But yeah, you could, you could
build a system like that. So that any time somebody tries
to fetch this. We're fetching it for my herb,
it, right? So I can tell you, may not know
that. Exactly, if we end up building a
sort of distributed caching system, which is likely Yes.
Um so yeah herb. It is re probably requires a
little bit more work to get really good analytics which just
has to do with sovereignty actually, right?
Like there's act, there are some places where you have
fundamental trade-offs between privacy and sovereignty and
being able to track what people do which is the opposite of
that. But but I think there's quite a
bit of middle ground in there. What about you?
Gary, you mean, you mentioned the example that I really liked
and I hadn't actually fall off In this way before.
You know having this business that like is in a code and you
can kind of franchise it easily. So I think that was a nice
example but what else? What are some other use cases
for her bit that you're most excited about?
Actually, I think what I would find most useful are things that
are currently possible and just need a little more developer
effort. So I'm very excited about
anagram wholly-owned product which should work towards kind
of Allocating the feature set of notion on orbit.
I personally find that if I'm journaling, even if I pretty
much trust that I'm not going to get snooped on by whatever third
party, owns my data. I'm just going to be a little
more hesitant to really speak freely about what I'm thinking.
If I know that it doesn't, it's not private.
And so, and so, I would much rather have something like that
on my herb. It and I personally prefer to
journal on my local computer rather than a more powerful
platform like notion for that. And I think for a big can do it.
I think it's just a matter of developer effort and kind of
getting the ux, right? And another thing is task
management. I use tasks Warrior which is a
Linux program and it works really well, but I would
probably prefer for that to be honored as well, because I would
have better sharing functionality and I wouldn't
have to work within two different systems you don't use
the emacs know. I don't usually mix that task
for you is good enough. I don't get exactly. but no, I
mean These are kinds of ways. We're having a personal server,
makes a lot of sense, because you have a variety of devices.
I'm not going to carry my laptop, necessarily do all the
same places that I might carry a phone or a tablet.
But I still want access to these basic things like my notes and
the things that I want to do and these are low amounts of data,
it's just important to me that I can access them from anywhere.
And the only way to do that in a sovereign way right now is to
deal with honestly, just a very terrible ux and, you know, do
probably Lee you know more more Linux work than most people want
to do. And I think our bid is going to
make that much more accessible and you no more free.
Well let's talk a little bit about I mean we've touched on it
in endpoints but about it the kind of crypto orbit Synergy.
So once orbit you know let's say two years from now we have
addressed some of those issues around security scalability.
You know you can keep your keys in irbid.
It's pretty safe. What what does this convergence
of crypto and Herb? It look like and you know,
whether the most important implications of that, Yeah, I
think they're this is there a lot of implications from it and
the convergence happens in several different ways and so
there's actually a lot to talk about here.
I think so one is that we'll start with some basic ones,
right? So it's basically like anytime I
that I as a user want to interact with the chain, I
should use my Urban to do that. So even if that something simple
like, I want to use unit swap, right?
There's a there's an app I'm on. Irbid that serves Eunice op, you
know, swap front end, right? But I should be serving that to
myself and Herb, it has very good properties for code sign,
right? So, the software supply chain,
can be sipped can be secured much more effectively honorable
than through almost anything else because we have a real pki,
very real public key infrastructure.
Real identity system that actually lives on chain.
Right, every herb, it ID is an FDA on a theorem and so what
that implies is that if I, I can have a lot more protection, that
the front end that's being served to me, is not spoofed.
There's no DNS spoofing, there's no other stuff, right?
Like it's it's something where I can really get a lot of
verification that I'm using the piece of software that I mean to
use. They've been huge fax right.
Where somebody's spoofed some front-end and there go hundreds
of millions dollars so sir. But first of all you know, that
should be the place that should be, what serves a client to you.
Write some sort of any user interface you're using for
interacting with change should be done through orbit.
This also lets you do multi-party computation, right?
So if you want to do a multi sick, then that should be there
should be an actor that this would be a nice out to, right?
You could write it right now and and then that, you know, then,
okay. We want to, you know, the three
of us have a multisig. Let's say, and we want to, we
want to move some funds. Okay, well we can use the herb
adapt to do that. We don't have to copy and paste
addresses. We don't have to worry about
backups for our keys. We're not to worry about backups
for the state, right? Like if you're tracking, you
know, the non something theorem account, you can use Herbal to
store that and make sure that. And then, you know, that it's
not going to get deleted. You're not going to forget it.
You're not going to have nots reuse, errors, that could cause
security problems, right? This whole long tail like things
that can go wrong with crypto or a lot of the stuff that people
worry about with crypto, in practice, when using is like,
well, what if I copy and paste the wrong address into the wrong
thing? And there goes all my life
savings. It Happens, right?
So what you need is some abstraction layer there.
So you look, I'm sending it to you.
It's just my computer. Sending it to your computer and
yeah, I guess there are like public keys and address is
involved, but I don't want to think about it.
I don't see him. Right.
Like I don't, I don't really think about that.
Do you accept that? I have to think about that with
normal banking. It's also a bit of a flaw,
right? Like so, So there are those
layers. All right, so you okay, I can do
my own stuff. I can have my wallet in there.
I can I can do. I can use it for multi-party
computation. And then yeah, I should also use
it for storing all the client-side state.
So all off chains, state that I need.
So, if I'm using safe right to manage some assets, do other
things like that, you my actual personal data has to be stored,
somewhere special store that in my room.
Another thing Yoruba can do for you is it can act as your
Watchtower, right? So let's say you're doing
something with lightning, right? Or that's not the only thing
that needs a Watchtower. But for some of these things
where you have a like, a state Channel, You actually need some
program running on your behalf. Monitoring the chain to see if
something happens. So there's something happens
that's against you. This thing can do an adversarial
close of the channel and make sure that your funds don't get,
so, right. So you can rely on somebody else
do that or you can use urban food, then there are deeper
Integrations, right? So something we're basically You
want to have an application, that's mostly off chain.
But has a non chain component, right?
So let's say you have a video game and their in-game assets
that you actually want an economy for.
All right, I need to double spin protection on those assets.
So, for that, there's, you can do that, just sort of normally
right, where you can write it or B app, that's primarily, you
know, in irbid out but also talks to a chain.
You can do that by talking to existing chains and then there's
also the Akbar project which is aiming to They're building a ZK,
roll up as a layer to on a theorem that where you wear that
uses knock orbits machine code as it's to write smart
contracts. So they do ZK proofs of anak KO.
All right. So this allows you to write a
your application in herb, its programming language.
And you also write some little piece of it that stays on chain
and those share the same data types, they share the same
helper libraries They communicate very seamlessly with
one another. So you, there's also a lot less
code involved in deploying that application, right?
So, one of the big problems with deploying daps as they're
currently conceived of is that you write a little bit of
solidity, but most of what you write is Javascript because
there's actually a lot more code that runs off chain.
Then runs on Shane. And so you have to still deal
with all this web to stuff all the difficulties of deploying
web to application. Along with the difficulty to
deploying web three applications.
Can't Screw Up the solidity either, right?
So it's actually just a pretty scary thing to try to do so
herb. It doesn't doesn't necessarily
make the smart contract part of it that much easier but
everything else around that. It's a lot easier to integrate
that into an application and then there's an even deeper
layer. I would say of integration
between urban and blockchains and this is more speculative,
more sort of philosophical, but basically Lee, I've been
thinking about this lately that blockchains have Oracle problem.
Just in general, if any data is going to be put onto the chain
as a transaction input, the data has to come from somewhere
often. It can't be verified just by
you, by being on Jane. The way that through derived
data can be Right. So a general You know, so it's
like a let's say you want to pay me for doing some work.
Well how do you, how do you know that I actually did the work and
so something, somebody has to put that data on chain, right?
And that's an oracle problem because when they put that data
on chain, you have to try to figure out.
Well, how does that? How does how do we know that
that's true? That that's accurate
information, right? So chain link is a whole system
for those. Right.
I think there are a bunch of others, their chains.
For Oracle for Price data. And so that has particular
characteristics, where you can, you know, you can sort of
average them out and throughout the outliers and have some
economic incentives to get the good answer there, right?
But that only applies for certain kinds of data.
And for a lot of those sort of a lot of what people were
interested in blockchain solving back in 2017. 2018, that never
are, that have not yet panned out, I should say, things like
using it for, you know, the Love your house, right?
Or like these sort of more real-world tokenizing physical
assets. Some of that's probably just
about idea generally but they're probably my guess is that there
are several of those that actually are good ideas but
they're not feasible yet. And what's needed to make them
feasible is includes a more generic and more like a more
general purpose, Oracle system. And so irbid, I'll tie will
actually get to the point here. The one of the ways I see her it
is as a general-purpose Oracle system like a low.
The lowest layer of an oracle system.
Where basically, you want to put, you want to put some data
on chain. Okay.
Well, it comes on chain signed by the ER but that produced it
and located within turbots scry namespace.
So this is very technical concept but basically herb, it
has a way of assigning a permanent immutable name to a
piece of data. And attesting to that by signing
it with using the urban Public Service private Key verifiable
by anybody. And so it's a way of laying out
all the data that gets produced by any Urban on the network and
having that herb attest to that date.
So at the moment, there's no double spend protection, or
there's no, there's no Byzantine fall protection of the.
So, there's nothing to say that I can't run a malicious, turbot
kernel. That signs two different
versions of the same data at the same path.
But and most of it doesn't but most of the data that orbit
deals with doesn't need that protection and so shouldn't have
it because you actually again, you only want blockchains for
certain things but You can take that data.
You could write a contract that that doesn't Force Byzantine
fault Tolerance on those on those bindings.
And then basically, you could use that as a way of just
ingesting arbitrary data from anyone's personal computer and
it comes a test of to buy them, you know who they are.
Not even you don't other social security number.
But but you can tie that identity to other other actions
at that River has taken it. Does develop reputation.
And so, because it develops reputation that's where you can
build systems of trust. You can build reputation systems
on chain reputation systems that deal with this that you could
use programmatically to filter all this data.
So this is a whole line of thinking.
None of this has been built yet, it's just sort of something
that's been rolling around in my head, but I think there's
something fundamental there, right?
We're basically blockchains ordeal are specific specifically
for dealing with object of data. All right.
Like, what is objectively? The sort of consensus truth
about something herb has are designed for dealing with
subjective data. What is my version of this is
your version of this And so I think they use these two things
complement each other very well. And you need both of them to
really build a sort of cryptographically sound world.
But you need a world that has hardness as Josh Stark described
in his essay of atoms institutions and blockchains
right now block desert as as civilization progresses the
hardness of our institutions increases.
Bachchan's. Do a great job of hardening.
Currency contracts potentially law but not anything subjective
really. And so for so Urban is really
where you harden the sort of subjective reality.
I don't know what you think about that.
But yeah, I want to ask about one thing that I've been, you
know, pondering a little bit and I'm kind of like Unsure how it's
going to play out, right? So today, In Viv to obviously
privacy is pretty bad at error. May be terrible, right?
And Herb. It has this, you know,
fundamentally different Paradigm that, you know.
It gives you more privacy in some ways, right?
Because like your program runs on your herb.
It and you data is there but at the same time because everything
you do on the network is like associated with your planet ID.
It all. They also seems to be the kind
of this aspect where maybe there's less privacy to or like,
you know, at least in the current system, you know, you
can make like different usernames, use different emails,
make different accounts. And so I'm curious like how you
think this is going to play out. I would say there's more
accountability and that does cut both ways because yeah, if you
get because so basically in urban you have this ID and it's
typically a very permanent ID, like people get really attached
to them, I'm very attached to Robin's brick for Gary.
If somebody took teller told us away from you, I imagine he
would not be very happy with this.
You get attached to it. The way you get attached to your
normal human name. It's a little odd.
Honestly, it's like it. That's part of the system works
a lot better than I would expect it to but there's quite a bit of
empirical evidence for this people getting very attached to
their name so you can test your name because they were that's
really who you are on the network.
It's how people know you. And I think that will only
increase as people start doing things like Financial
transactions through or other sort of more serious, more
serious uses. And so yeah, there is a
trade-off there somewhere, abstractly right between you
know, can you Accountable for your actions.
On the one hand, which also means you have a reputation.
So developing the development of Social Capital requires
attribute ability of actions, right?
Like you have to know that it was me in order for developed in
order to for me to develop that app, that reputation.
But then conversely you know, if I do something wrong then you
know, my then everyone will spit and ever, they hear my name for
generations to come the sins of the father shall be Revisited
upon the child or whatever, right?
Interestingly, I think blockchains have a Very similar
problem, right? We're like the provenance of
Turin, provenance of transactions, actually
completely visible. I'm John a chain the way.
It's maybe not with in a more traditional banking system and
so a nerve, it actually takes the same approach.
The blockchain is do which is you have a layer of
pseudonymity, right? So any particular Urban idea,
yeah, that took that accrues reputation, but that idea is not
tied back to your real world identity unless you want it to
be. Yeah, I should mention that that
anonymity is possible. Honorable people will know
you're anonymous and in most contexts you may want to be
unaccountable and a given situation.
But the other people in that situation probably what
everybody else around them to be accountable and he would
probably like everybody else to be accountable to.
So while an annuity is possible, actually makes it more difficult
to socialize in many ways. So I think I think just like in
web to honor between will see some anonymous Social happenings
but the majority of interaction will be accountable with this
kind of skin in the game based system.
Yeah, so specifically, there's a type of urban idea that's called
a comet. You don't have to buy it, you
can create an infinite number of them effectively and yeah, you
can throw them away their ephemeral and so, they're in
there Anonymous IDs. And interestingly, yeah, we find
that most substantial groups ban them, because they tend to be
Trolls but there are places where they're not banded because
people really want to have Anonymous conversations.
So it's different use case, different use cases, imply
different things, and so you Can you can do both with her?
So I guess there's there's herb it.org developers, dr.
B dot org is the best place for engineers.
Who want to learn more. If you want to get started using
orbit as a user, there's getting started Link at AB dot org as
well. So that's all very polished and
and user-friendly nowadays. Yeah, we're still working on it
too. Is getting better.
Yeah, I mean I'm just very excited mean today and also just
for like you know, what is it look like today, right?
I mean there are some of these applications but I think right
now what really works is just this group's, right?
So you have some community and you can message each other in
chat and it's like, it's pretty nice.
And I think that's already something that, you know, at
least for a lot of people it's enough to To kind of trigger a
lot of thinking and a lot of seeing of possibilities.
But I think what I'm super excited about is you know, the
point where we really have compelling applications, you
know they're like actually cool and I think we're pretty close.
I don't think we're there yet, right?
I mean, at least personally, I haven't used anything where it's
like, you know, this is really cool Beyond just illustrating
some possibility of what could be in the future but I, you
know, I would guess that this is Is something that will get to if
in the next six to 12 months. And I think at that point, it's
just going to be very exciting, right?
Especially have people from crypto like come over and
Explorer bit. And I think there's going to be
an avalanche of innovation and adoption.
That's going to happen after that, I agree.
Yeah, I would say if you're if you want to play with her but
it's fun to play with and there's some interesting groups,
you know. Through actually quite a few
different social groups on our about that are very different
from one another. So the the idea that we're going
to Foster the development so subcultures has been empirically
true so far. And but then I think the thing
that's really exciting about herb it right now is if you're a
developer because this is a really good time to get involved
and play with it, right? Build something, take a weekend,
maybe it takes a week. If you got to learn the
programming language first, maybe it takes a little longer.
But it's not that bad and then learn your way around the
system, build an app and you can build and publish it and it's
really easy and then and then talk to people about it and you
might get some nice positive feedback and make it actually
users very quickly. And there are all kinds of apps
that should be written for a crypto integration.
So, if you're coming from crypto especially and that
strategically, it strategically interesting for us, a tour of it
and you may be able to To get a grant from The herbal Foundation
to work on, something like that. We have a grant program you
should check out bounties. So there are a lot of different
ways of getting involved and also you can get on the network
and talk to people about what they know, what they want to
build work with some other people.
So, yeah, I think this is it's a really fun time to get involved
with her bit because it's at the point where the app development
and app distribution is somewhat mature, it's a mature enough
that it's not a huge pain. And then also, but despite that
it's still very young and so there's still a lot of
low-hanging fruit that needs to be written.
That's not too not too hard to do.
Cool. Well thanks so much Ted and
thanks so much. Gary was really pleasure to have
you guys on and there was a pleasure.
I think this is a nice, a nice other introduction about her
weight because I think often you need quite a few introductions
of whether it's a completely, sure, people will enjoy this.
And I'm also sure this is not going to be the last time we're
going to talk about her weight, but there's going to be a lot
more to come. And I think the next year the
next two years and what's ahead is going to be incredibly
exciting. So I'm, you know, I can't wait
to see. See how it all unfolds and yeah.
Also so grateful for you, Ted like for doing all this work in
trying to get this platform to maturity.
Thank you. Really enjoyed this.
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