Welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the
Technologies projects and people driving decentralization.
And the blockchain revolution, I'm free to recant and I'm
coming to you from Bogota where def con is happening this week
with a special bonus episode. I moderated a panel on credible
neutrality and you will be listening to the audio track for
that. We didn't plan on this, but the
discussion was so good. And in this case, that means so
controversial that I decided to release this as a bonus episode
to you. On the panel, we had the Bastion
burger from Harper who was on a regular epicenter, episode two
weeks ago, Phil Diane from fleshpots who has been on before
as well, and Martin kupperman from noses who has been on
before as well. Patrick McCarthy joined for in
fury' and SRI Ram. Cannon, joined from I ganea,
Martin had given a lightning talk previously.
So I skipped him in the intro round on the panel, but you will
hear him in due time. I give you some background to
the heart of the discussion. Even though a couple of weeks
ago, a number of smart contracts related to the tornado cash.
We're put on the sanctions list by ofac, we did an episode on
that at the Time with Peter van valkenburg from coin Center.
The move itself is debatable because in principle technology
should not be able to be on a sanctions list.
But in response to this a large number of ecosystem players,
stop to interact with any address that had tornado touch
points in the past. You Nisswa poverty yd.
It's balancer. The list goes on in fear of
stopped serving requests for tornado.
Addresses, flash pots, Mev boost that currently builds.
Half of all the theorem blocks. Stopped, including tornado
touching transactions into any block that building, effectively
censoring, tornado transactions, you know, from every other block
and this numbers going up like crazy.
So all of this is highly problematic and this is why we
talked about Credible neutrality on this panel, please enjoy it.
Thank you guys so much for joining us for this path.
It is a discussion on credibly neutral systems, and before we
actually dive into it, let's get very brief, introductions, and I
mean, like, like elevator brief, maybe, we can give Martin, but
let's, let's let's start with sriram.
Oh, hi everybody. I'm sure your am.
I'm founder of this project I can layer which lets you Build
new Innovations on top of the etherium, trust Network by using
this mechanism called Reese taking.
Yeah, my name is Pat McCrory. Historically speaking.
I'm a researcher but now I'm an intern at in fira.
Hi. I'm Phil.
I'm OCS. PhD student at Cornell and a
steward of flash pots and I am addicted to Mev.
Hi I'm Sebastian founder of Hopper incentivised mixed nets
for private data transport and recently we're working towards
private RPC providers called RPC over Harper.
Fantastic. So before we dive in I expect
there will be some contentious topics here today.
So if you feel you want to say something to some of these to
someone of the other panelists, just jump in.
Okay, don't let me you know, don't make me call your name.
So fantastic. So, when we talk about credible
neutrality in a nutshell, what would you say that means to you?
So what's credible neutrality to you Sebastian?
So credibly neutrality to me is the inability of third parties
to influence the system in any way directly or indirectly.
And I think that's important. I actually don't know what it
is, to be totally honest. I don't necessarily fully
believe in them. Mean.
So, maybe I'm going to add some spice to this panel, I think
it's a nice idea and it like, implies a lot of nice things
that people want and that I agree are like good.
Like, you know, I think censorship resistance is great.
By the way disclaimer, these are all my personal views, and not
the views of Cornell or Flash pots.
But I think all this, all these, all these implications are
great. But the devil here is in the
details and like, can you really build a system or like, third
parties can't, you know? Do things in kind of ways that
they might undo even want to because, like, sometimes you
want third parties to be able to make choices or Express
preferences, those are open questions, I have.
So I'll be I'll be pressing on those more soon.
I guess there are many words that to me means the same thing
since the ship resistance permissionless, Innovation,
credibly neutrality. But yeah, I think it all boils
down to what you said that if You build an application on top
of such a credible neutral system.
You can be assured that. Yeah that that rules of that
system don't suddenly change against you.
Awesome. I'm just to clarify.
My opinions are my own and that of yours as well.
Pull that out there. So in terms would be incredible
new, credibly neutral, I mean, Google had this old slogan, you
know, we won't be evil, you know, we will do our best to
ensure that everyone has equal access to the system and we
would abuse the data, but when the nation's didn't knock on
your door and says are well know if you don't start saying who is
entering this transaction, then we're going to do bad things to
you. And so to be credibly neutral
you have to have this response to say that I Follow the
instruction that I was given by this nation state or this all
powerful adversary. So you won't be evil and you
can't be evil. It is impossible to be evil
because otherwise you'll get / you'll be removed from the
system. So incredibly credible
neutrality is really you just can't follow the instruction
about self-harm and it becomes like a mad-10s express, my views
on censorship resistance. So if you look at our water
blockchain is doing, it's actually freezing something
temporal into something Eternal, right?
You have transaction flow which is temporal and the core aspect
of the blockchain is to harden this transaction flow into
something that is frozen and Perpetual.
So that a future can then come and see what happened at that
time. So the way I look at a
blockchain is essentially as bearing testimony as bearing
eyewitness to be happy. Earnings at that moment and
censorship resistance is the ability to provide this service
without discrimination to what was actually happening.
You just stand there as a neutral Observer and see what
happened there. And recorded that is censorship
resistance and there are some very powerful properties
Downstream of the censorship resistance, which is, for
example, what I call, Matt, a censorship resistance.
What is this matter censorship resistance?
We talked about sensor, For transactions.
But there's also sends a ship resistance for the ability to
deploy new functionality on top, which leads to permissionless
composability. So if we build a system which
has, which does not have the meta censorship Williston, which
is the ability to deploy new features on top that is, again,
a degradation of censorship resistance.
Why do we want this in our view? Why you want?
This is the entrance to parties in the system.
So we want to build a world where there is open, competition
on almost everything, but the entrance to parties in the
system, need to be credibly neutral in order to make sure
that there is open competition on everything else.
So, on a base layer of censorship resistance, you can
build competitive systems on top, but if the entrenched layer
itself is behaving in self-interest, they can rinse
it. The heck out of the whole
system, Everything we are building here, crumbles.
If you don't have such censorship lists, three of em.
You've used censorship resistance as synonymous with
credible neutrality. Would you guys agree?
Or do you see a difference? I have a question, which is, how
are the rest of the panel is defining censorship resistance?
Because when I think about this I think of like Old School
academic definitions where it's like if a user has sufficient
incentive to include transaction X in a blog, there's some
censorship resistance parameter Delta where like within Delta
Blocks the transaction will be included.
Is this like our operating definition?
Or are their disagreements that I can give like to like to
breakdowns to it? I think there's two different
forms of censorship. What is the clear kiss?
You know, the block proposer wants to stop the inclusion of
this transaction at all cost. No, no matter.
What if that transaction gets included, the block gets dropped
and it will any of your super mean over.
Majority-black proposals, are you can single-handedly do this?
The other one is this delaying the inclusion of it.
So maybe you don't have a majority of the harsh radar that
of the, steno the validators. You only have one third or less
but you will do your best at the to delay is inclusion.
I think even delaying it for ten blocks, 20 blocks, 30 blocks
that is still a form of censorship, but it is not as
harmful as full censorship. So, very similar guy, I would
say that it is probably better to use the term incredible
neutral or at least that's what what what is in my view
important. That is not just the censorship
resistance but go to, but To go a step further and to say
transactions are treated equally so it's not not enough to say,
well if you are willing to pay sufficiently that then you will
eventually get included. But I would say to be credible
neutral and then it's maybe better to specifically use that
term and not the terms intercept resistant, I would say to makes
a claim system is credible neutral.
It would need to have the property that kind of, if there
are two transactions and they fade pays the same fee, they To
be treated equally and that's currently not the case on
etherium. Unfortunately, we're not cool,
but the frigid is that may be credible.
Neutral is the goal that you want to achieve, but the do
that, you need a censorship resist mechanism in order to
allow it to be incredibly neutral or maybe to say, kind of
censorship resistance is the may be credible, neutrality would
then be even a step. Above censorship resistance and
you can kind of s. Say but are you certainly need
to be? You certainly need to be
censorship resistant to be credible neutral but yeah, kind
of again, it's a step further, just to clarify.
Why I use the word censorship resistance, I think there is
many different layers in which you can be credibly neutral and
we are talking specifically about transaction inclusion.
And I would agree that the standard that we really want is
that irrespective of the content of the transaction.
When I said that, your bearing testimony to What is actually
happening in aspect of the content of the transaction, you
are actually treating all transactions equally.
So that would, I would agree with that as the definition, but
I view credible, neutrality as a principle, which transcends
transaction inclusion. It is a more basic principle and
as an example, we are talking about transaction inclusion, I
would agree. And I also think that if you
talk about credible neutrality, kind of reframes, the entire
issue, right? So basically, if you talk about
census, Censorship resistance. It's always kind of the, you
know, you have this image of, you know, you know, like spies
or whatever. And, you know, people who do
evil things, and basically credible neutrality is just
creating a base layer that belongs to no one and hence
belongs to everyone, right? So basically that's kind of as
an opinion I did for me, it gives me like Switzerland during
WWII Vives and like, I don't know if that's good, like, I
don't know II just so I guess question like in y'all.
Use like when has he's been or not been credibly neutral and
like, where has it been in the past on that spectrum?
And where is it today? Basically would be curious.
I would say you used to, I would say, probably two three years
ago that statement that I made was true that that if your
transaction, if they would be two transactions and they would
pay the same fee, they would be treated equally with a doubt.
Hacker agree. Yeah, I don't think that's true.
I know. I mean, I mean.
No, of course, of course, it was the daily event and in, That
case the theorem was clearly not credible neutral.
I mean, there's there's no no no question about it, but, but
since then, yeah, I mean, back then, I was certainly also in
favor of doing what was done and probably yeah, if today there
would be an issue, let's say was Something where 15% of all these
are would be affected. Let's say, I don't know the
refugees, a contract would be had a hidden issue.
I would probably also be in favor of kind of hard fucking or
kind of hard fucking, if it would be possible in such a
clean way as it was back in the day.
But, but yeah, but but now, I think we, well, we lost that.
And I, of course, they are reasons why that happened and
Maybe I guess you would claim they are.
It's inevitable, that that happened.
I would say there could have been and maybe should have been
several or there are in my view. Many, many options that are not
explored or not. Not done that could try to come
closer to this goal of white least, maybe we should start to
say kind of to eat in the round. Is it?
Is it the worst vehicle to kind of has this credible neutrality
and seems that you're saying? It's not.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the name is not clear
to me and I think if you use it to make choices, it will lead
you to suboptimal outcomes. Because like there are clearly
cases where like the community wants to make a choice, right?
And like people also have the right to make choices.
So to me, like there's also a subtlety here, maybe I want to
get into with the panel, which is the definitions.
You all gave we're kind of technical like you have TX 1 TX
2. If they pay the same fee, their
credibly neutral, what I was understanding from like You know
what, Alex kind of writing on this in the general, like
diaspora, is it means more that, like people believe that the
system will like, treat them fairly, like, that's the
credible part and that's not necessarily the same, as like
these two transactions that have the same fee, get mine at the
same time. For example, the people who
invested in the Dow may not think that that's the fair
model. So I'm kind of trying to like
challenge law. I'm not trying to troll you too
hard. No I feel like I can just jump
in quickly. There is like two aspects to
this Source, the day-to-day operation of how the transaction
system works. And there's the backstop in the
social consensus, to socially recover about situations.
So that's a, there was a marsh Fashion Event because there's a
zero-day exploit in a consensus client, will that be reverted or
not? I believe it will be, but a lot
of people say it won't be, you know, that's sort of the
backdrop of the neutrality. No, I just wanted to get back to
what Martin, Martin said that a few years back, you know, maybe
theorem was credibly neutral, I would say, I don't necessarily
agree because, you know, the system, I'm was in some regards
easier to capture than it is today.
So, for me, censorship resistant is one necessity for getting to
some to credibly neutrality. And in order to get there, you
know, we need decentralization and privacy actually, and, you
know, both parts were actually less advanced than they are now.
So, you know, I think since the launch of the beacon chain, you
know, having more client, diversity is a great
achievement. Of course, we're not fully there
yet, but there are some points, which I wouldn't say it was
necessarily better than maybe. Let's bring this into the very
concrete. So, recently we've seen
instances where credible neutrality has clearly been
breached. So I'm thinking for instance of
that tornado, cash sanctions that kind of led to several key,
five projects. No longer touching addresses
that had previously interacted with tornado cash in.
Fewer are no longer serves tornado.
The elephants in the room here. Yeah, flash flash pots.
Census for NATO cash transactions.
So it's the community dealing with these issues in in the
correct way. What do you say?
So maybe let me take this first in my view it's not that flash
pots. The project like is intended or
you know the goal of the project is to censor aetherium or
anything like that. I think we look at the game
theory of how can we most effectively achieve?
Our strategic games which are basically ensuring any of the
Dozen Central? Is Eve in like today's model.
So from that perspective like yes, we do sensor certain
transactions. No, we do not want long-term to
like, have the ability to impose censorship on eith.
That's like a very hard line for us.
Like, we won't step into that position.
And again, it's arguable about whether it's already happening
or not. My personal belief is it's not.
The other thing is, like, you have to look at this game
theory, right? Of like you have companies that
are providing services and they also have like choices to make
and like certain rights. So like if you're a validator in
The US. And the government comes
knocking and says, like, look, you have to remove these
transactions, or you have to shut down, or you have to go to
jail, right? What ultimately ends up
happening. If we like throw up the middle
finger immediately, is that all of those validators will be shut
down and it will move elsewhere. The same thing that happened in
China basically. And to me, this reduces the
robustness of the etherium network.
It reduces the censorship resistance, ultimately, what we
need is geographic diversity, and ultimately, if everyone in
this geographically diverse system, you know, agree.
Is to like build blocks a certain way, like it's above my
pay grade to try to stop them to an extent.
So our philosophy is to provide paths, and try to decentralize
and build as much competitive globally, competitive
infrastructure as we can. That's why we're open sourcing a
lot of our stuff. That's why we kind of D
vertically integrated, our client after the merge within
that boost, and we're going to keep kind of aggressively
pushing towards that direction, but at the end of the day, like,
you have to be realistic. I'm just the, the win here for
the Flash. Spine angle, offer the first
Parts angle, you know, Sanders, Sanders up resistance, you need
to have like a good granular. Definition of it is filled with
saying before, so if your blog proposer, there's two ways you
could prevent the inclusion of a transaction either.
I just don't include it in my block and that's what's happened
in the flat spots today. You know, I propose a block,
it's missing the transaction because the relay just didn't
give it to me, but if there's another block, know what.
So, if one, I don't include it in my block to, I have to pick a
block to extend. There has to be a parent block
that I extend. That includes the center
transaction but I extended. Anyway, then you're not Century
in the network, you're just centering it from your own
block. Sounds more like a delay.
You're delaying its inclusion, but you're not censoring it
because as long as there's one on as party, it will get
included eventually, but where do you stop?
So can you attest to block that that that has a tornado
protector. Cash transaction in it.
Plus what happens, you know, with t webs that might have, you
know, catastrophic failure modes if certain transactions Do not
get included. So I think it is not fair to say
that you know delaying things is just delaying things, it's not
censorship, might have catastrophic failure modes in
some, you know, apps actually disagree with that.
I think, if you're not building around like, short-term
censorship, you're completely insecure even in like,
completely honest Network. Because if someone a single
Brock producer has a few blocks or like one person with
substantial hatch power, decides to attack you like you need to
build your parameters such that you're including enough, a set
of miners that it gives you the guarantees you want.
And like once you've Now, you won't have that.
So what is enough, what what is enough, what is enough?
I mean that's like up to the privatization of Makoto
auctions. A good example of that because
they were timid at all consider blew up and now it's like six
hours exact. But of course like what is
enough? Very much depends on the
question of in. Well, kind of if you say
previously, like let's say ten blocks were enough but then
let's say you move to a situation where suddently 80% of
the or let's say just 50 Scent of the validators, kind of don't
don't include your transaction then suddenly, it means.
Well, now 20 blocks are enough, but the issue is, you don't
know, kind of whether it's 50%. Or, I mean, I feel like having
that kind of having this additional uncertainty about,
yeah. Again, whether the, whether the
network will, how do you treat your transaction will make it
kind of impossible to determine this?
What is enough? It's a hard problem and it's
something you have to continuously, adjust, but that's
the case. Anyway, even when we'd seen
congestion fee markets, where your application might just be
censured, by not being able to pay the fees for a woman like
this, it's always something you need to kind of react.
We have like important Concepts like kind of the, the base fee
and kind of what they did. What is important piece whites.
Yeah, you can at least measure that so you can measure.
Asians somewhat objectively. Those extra all those other
forms of not including predictions that much harder to,
to reasonable measure. I would say, I don't think so.
I think it's very easy to reason about what percentage of blocks
today. Don't have tornado Cash.
There's a dashboard on it online, but they, but I mean,
also if you think about the Alternatives that security
trusses sumption, if you're just delaying inclusion, you're
relying on one on us, quality attorney lots of great trust,
assumption. The how if there's a full
outright And they're not extending blocks with Center
transactions, then you ran on the honest majority.
So, they're two different cases that should be considered
separately. I also think, an interesting
point is, like, if you do have validators that are choosing
because ultimately, this is a validator choice, how they build
their blocks to not include certain transactions, that
increases the revenue for anyone who's like, willing to adopt the
opposite policy. So, essentially, it's a subsidy
for the network of self-healing subsidy away from censorship,
especially if the systems are designed appropriately, I would
say that the argument, like the example that we started with,
You know, kind of doesn't support your point because like,
tornado is an application that didn't have a shitload of
transactions, right? So the subsidy that you get from
it like the Mev potential and so on is minimal.
So you basically censoring like a large, you know, very
interesting set of use cases and, you know, you do not
actually provide significant upsides for anybody to take up
these very few, very little value transactions.
I feel like I'm falling everyone here, but this is a
misconception, like Mev is not proportional to the number of
transactions. It's proportional to how much As
people are willing to pay to not be censored and if there's like
an act of censorship going on, that number will increase.
So you have to so you think it's an okay idea that, you know, 90%
of people and kind of sensor it and therefore like my costs of a
tornado inclusion goes up by 10x, I think if that's the
validator choice. It's like not unethical for them
to do that. Personally and I think like, you
know, there are their degrees, right?
Like it's a question of like, what is the x is like, a
utilitarian calculation? To me, it's like a fallacy to
think that like, every validator will.
Really choose to include everything especially when today
are one of our largest validation pools is a regulated
u.s. exchange and I expect that will like continue in proof of
stake. So I don't see an alternative
really. Oh yeah, I mean they're plenty
of attentive. So I mean, just to mention one
is, of course, is idea that you can have that you can commit to
transaction inclusion. While transactions are are still
encrypted. This is about you sure.
Do know. I mean then you can just ask
people to like kyc your endpoint and still sensor it right?
There is no privacy doesn't solve this issue.
Ultimately like the government's not going to say like oh this is
private, we're not touching it. That's also a fantasy.
I feel like well I feel like we're far apart should have
included was the see our list in their implementation.
Yeah. So, you know, I can't, I again,
these are all my personal views on this flat spots but we did,
you know, we do like extensive work on this with key
stakeholders in the Austrian like Again, like I think this
will cook more will come out about this soon.
Basically, I would, I would definitely push back yourself
because because in my understanding, it's absolutely
not clear that that as well director, you even have that
obligation to, to censor, those transactions.
I mean in my understanding it is even allowed for us persons or
clicking if there is is there's a way for you as person to to To
get permission essentially to withdraw, from from from
tornado, in specific situations. So if that is even allowed, then
then then it needs to be allowed also for for validators to
include this transactions. I don't agree with your analysis
and I think this is one of the things I like most, I mean, I
don't agree that like, it's currently clear in like, the
legal game theory, that validators have no obligation to
sense. It survived the first part so
you agree. It is or the law says you.
I don't want to get into legal analyses that's like not the
direction I want to go in but like I want to make a meta
point, which is like a lot of people here are looking at other
people's actions and saying like here's my legal analysis of it
and like you're not really in the position to like make that
call like their lawyers are, right?
So like it's easy to look at a coin base and say like wow you
don't have to be doing this. You're going overboard but they
don't want to over comply right there talking to their lawyers
and they're like, getting advice and like, you know, No, our
legal understanding, as a community, doesn't supersede
like their risk calculation against going to jail or like
having their company liquidated. So like we do have to respect
people's preferences as well. In that in that regard, I think.
Do you think metadata's have a moral obligation to serve
everyone? I mean, obviously, you don't but
I mean I mean I don't like what if you have a validator that
says, this is a transaction that has Pike's, some really morally
offensive content to me. And if I do - the community is
going to slash Right? Leg.
Is that a good position to be in?
Is that what we want? For our validators know II II II
see your point. But say for instance what do you
have said the same thing about kind of delivering mail or kind
of connecting phone calls based on whether you like the person
or not, delivering mail is not censorship resistant.
Either our phone calls like new. You can't ship cracking the mail
right. Look, I will generally deliver
mail but not to African-Americans or not too.
When the no not in your, yeah, I think getting into the details
of like, why things are not being delivered as a whole
separate argument, but the nail is not censorship resistant and
neither are phone calls. Like, you can be censored.
I should they be? Can I jump high jump?
And so this is the most famous. Connor isn't very fire pit.
So I think like, theoretically speaking, it should be based on
the fee. But empirically speaking, they
censorship has always been an issue in cryptocurrencies.
So if you consider Bitcoin look jr.
Tried the bonds Itachi dice because it was spamming the
network back in 2013. Many miners were notorious for
making deals with very large exchanges to make sure their
withdrawal transactions would always get processed even if
they can pay the fee at the time.
Now, the difference is that because mean one there's way
more volunteers now, so it's very difficult to trust the five
people who are basically ordering transactions and proof
of work. And now this is why the flash
boss issues come up because there's a it's a last trusted
systems you have to have to build a real, you know, trust
for your Mexican. Oh Max maximizing.
The trustview protocol between the Relay on the Block Builder.
So it's a yeah, there's a basically empirically is always
had this issue as much more evident now, I agree and there's
like, many edge cases here, like he's selling blocked, space,
Futures, and then mining something lower fee later
because you've committed to it is that censorship or is it, is
it not? Credibly neutral is, if you're a
mining pool, putting your withdrawal transactions first
and having zero fees on them because that's what they all do,
is that not? Is that not credibly neutral?
I mean, it's not right. So, like ultimately to me, we
need to realize that people have preferences and they need to be
respected. So you would say, It's kind of
expected that let's say you are large decks or there are two
competing dex's and one will eventually say okay let's let's
do a deal with validators. Say kind of, we get generally
preferential treatment that's just how it is and that's yeah.
How many is even worse now because that's what these are.
Yeah. Well the whole egg, the
theoretical model around the transaction fee was that the
minor we pick up all the fees and that was their main source
of Revenue or actually in a theorem we burn all the These
you get this constant issuance, you don't really care about the
fee Market as much anymore, so as a less of an impact for
deciding which transactions, I include some just getting tips.
It's been a major source of my Revenue anymore.
I have a question for the people pushing credible neutrality
name, these evasion Martinez sriram here.
Do you guys think that credible neutrality needs to be enshrined
in the technology itself or can it also be a societal consensus?
That Behave in a certain way, all validators behave in a
certain way. But my view here is I think
Patrick was unloading earlier to the idea of don't be evil to
can't be evil and I think we need to make sure that
technologically it is impossible or difficult to break credible
neutrality. I think societal ways of
enforcing it lead to only further conflict I It's not
going to be easy to enforce censorship resistance in our
societal way ideas. Like, for example, you know, we
I like the word the way that you are described credible
neutrality, as a better way of phrasing.
It just like net neutrality, right?
Like you just want to send your a common carrier just sending
packets through and we need to get to that model to actually
make sure that the core function of validators.
I think I don't I don't even like the word validator so I
think it's a very bad. Are you should call it consensus
nodes because are even better witness nodes.
There only bearing witness to a certain flow of information.
This should be their official Duty.
They're not validating any transaction, they're just
sitting there and observing a certain transaction flow and
recording it for perpetuating and their liability and duties
and there, they are purely trading information.
They are not trading in value the ACT.
Abusin of value to that information is X, is should be
separated from the construction of an information flow, and the
blockchain is purely. A construction of information
flow that has been recorded for perpetuity, and and things like
transaction. Encryption, actually make it
technologically more feasible to actually get to a system like
this. So I think credible neutrality
should be more enshrined by technology.
And Core function of the blockchain should shift, or are
the consensus notes should shift from validation or execution, or
other things to just bearing testimony to information flow
and in which case you're protected very strongly, it's
just your trading and information.
And that's really the main thing, which which cannot be
objective. The only subjective aspect and
the only reason we need a blockchain to begin with is to
freeze this subjectivity If there is no subjectivity,
everything is just execution. I'll just do zero.
Knowledge proof is on my server and then send you proofs.
The only reason we need a blockchain is to resolve.
This liquid temporal fluctuating thing into something solid for
the future and we should build blockchains whose consensus
nodes main feature is to Bear witness to this flow.
Yeah, I was in, he say I'm not willing to give up on the idea
of having a cradle. For the platform, I think it can
be done for etherium, but we will certainly try to push as
hard as possible on another saying that direction.
And I would say, the the list of potential ideas of how to do
that is long. So, we are starting with from
the very beginning of putting a lot of effort in making this
diverse. Ali diverse validator said, was
many kind of validate from home people.
There is this option of this shutter I speak in chain kind of
the idea of yeah, privacy or yeah.
Encrypted connections. There are ways to unchain
objectively measure censorship and you could have rules too.
Yeah, kind of to then do. Slashing based on that objective
measurement and furthermore there are several potential ways
to reduce the freedom of of well, data off of a builder to
build a block. I mean, super simple one would
be would be to say you need to, you need to sort transactions by
by feel but you There are also ways to kind of sort them
pseudorandomly, but any any anything that reduces the
freedom of the Builder, or of
the valid data to, to produce blocks will reduce Mev to some
extent. And yeah, with those a bunch of
different categories. We he will push as hard as
possible to achieve Arctic Discuss the possibilities.
This incredible neutral base layer.
I don't think it can be directly kind of enshrined in Technical
Solutions this credible neutrality because to me,
credible neutrality is a goal and this goal has some, you
know, has some paths to get there and, you know, those are,
some of them are technical, like, shutter.
I speak in chain is one of them. But the other one to me, is kind
of on the social side on the social side.
Now, got Get to troll fill a bit back is like let's stop being
naive, right? It stopped like thinking our
tiny little comfortable box or we get to think about you know,
Game Theory and it's, you know, maybe not yet like YOLO
incorporate a Delaware LLC just because the most convenient
thing to do. It's not holes domains that end
on something.com just because the most convenient thing to do
and make ourselves capturable and making ourselves capturable
is something that is just we see now, you know, while you
Yourself capturable Kelsey State me a little convenient box.
And you know, now we you know find out right as people say.
So I would say this is something we really have to tackle, we
have to be serious about it. Maybe a positive shout out in
the end is you know there's people are working on that and
that is yeah, actually removing these single points of failure
liquidy is in my eyes. One, great example to remove
these Central choke points as for example.
Oil. The front end and decentralized
properly. So if we take this seriously and
if we actually strive for that, I think we will end up with
systems that overall are much more credible neutral.
And what we have today where there are some like violent
regulator, which happens to be called Uncle Sam that, you know,
comes after us and we say, oh we are very surprised about that.
Do I get to respond or is it is censorship situation?
I myself am not in the habit of changing people's.
Okay, great. So, sriram to things on your
points. Number one, I disagree that we
have net neutrality, especially when it comes to ofac.
So I think that mean is great. And I love the comparison and I
like totally agree with it. But Gmail sensors.
Ofac, you know, Google sensors. Oh so do many, many any web to
company is under this regulation, right?
So like, we, as a society. Yes, we want this.
But we've also accepted the trade-off.
So, like, let's be realistic about where we are and like
that. This will be another instance of
like the same pad. Blockchains because like we are
not above the law, right? That would be Fantasy Land.
The other thing I wanted to just roll you a little bit on and
probably only you will get this is like I don't agree that you
can separate the like information transfer from the
value flow. I think, in these systems, the
one in the same it's like relates to this crystallization
of like State process. We talked about, but we can go
deeper on that later because I don't want to take up all the
time. The other thing is like so I
think making trade-offs for example, in gnosis chain that
like increased credible neutrality that sounds great.
And like I'm not opposed to any of Things.
I would love to experiment with all those things like amazing on
the other hand, they imply trade-off preferences and this
is why I was kind of drilling into this definition because it
might be the case that like if you achieve this little
definition of credible neutrality, so many other people
that makes the mechanism, not credibly neutral, right?
Like it's not just because you have this technical notion that
true transactions, pay the fee that get in that like some
random person sample from the population will say, like yes
this is credible to me that this is neutral.
That's like a separate social property that we need.
Need to be careful about conflating anyway, trying to
rapid-fire and and yes, I agree with you completely in your
trolling. I think flash pots is not trying
long-term to build centralized infrastructure.
We are trying to build decentralized infrastructure.
I want to be super clear about it.
I think the criticism of the path, it's valid and like the
success the path has had. I think the counter argument
would be like, this is a rock and a hard place situation of
like, there are doors to knock on.
And is it going to be flash pots?
Or is it going to be the validator?
It's basically the choice. When we incorporated Delaware,
LLC That we were facing and I do stand by the choice we've made.
I don't expect the community to love it.
I expect that the community will keep trolling us and pushing
back on our actions and like, our actions will need to like be
above this kind of, you know, be kind of respond to this as well,
and like, we are going to do that.
So, no trolling. Love it, amazing.
So fairly tell us about the roadmap for you know, mentoring
towards no more credit, be neutral Place.
Sure decentralization. Ation Global competition.
And by decentralization, I mean, of economic power in the market
and of Technology as well, Global competition.
And also, like engaging with everybody in the community,
everyone in this room, everyone on this panel, yes.
Also The Regulators. Yes, also the validation
Community, everyone who is a stakeholder in this industry
because I do believe like the pie is bigger when like people
can cooperate. That's ultimately what we're
trying to build here. That's what the internet is
trying to build as well. And I think like really the
entire Community is Line behind. So that's the roadmap.
If, you know, if you want more specific information, all I'm
going to do now, is pop my talk on Friday.
So we will drop some alfond you there.
Yeah, we have come to your talk with more questions Sebastian.
Tell us about Hopper and how you're trying to get to Credible
neutrality. Yeah, so as I said to me
censorship resistant is One requirement for neutrality and
censorship resistant needs. Ation which everybody talks
about which we all love but you know, a decentralized world
needs privacy much more than a centralized world.
That's something that many people don't realize, you know?
And we only start to realize that now.
So you know the trust Assumption of the web to they are kind of
okay, right. I like to bring this example of
Facebook and US uploading random stuff to Facebook, it's okay.
Right. Like you don't find like really
embarrassing pictures of yourself and the billboard cross
from your home, right? But that trust is sumption.
Doesn't Going to have three which is not protected by any
laws and regulations. So the only thing that actually
protects us in their web three world, that is fully
decentralized is strong privacy Tech and that's what we built on
Harper at Harbor and the most like fundamental layer.
Not all these Fancy on change stuff.
That's all great. But even the most private chain
does need transport privacy. And yeah that's what we build a
Topper with this with this mixed net and you know, one point a
tie Like to also point out because we talk a lot about
validators. It's like, you know, if we don't
have validator privacy, it's going to be a whole lot of weird
stuff that will happen. So even if we have a single
secret leader election, you know, maybe I can, you know,
knockout in a targeted fashion fails, validator, but in a
targeted fashion that I can still just troll him, you know,
because you know and Phil likes to get trolled and you know, I
find it funny to just ddosed him all the time.
So even with SLE we do need some Some fundamental error of
privacy. It's a hard problem, especially
when we talk about the trade-offs, for example, of
latency versus privacy. So lots of work ahead there but
I think it's an absolute necessity to get us in a
Direction Where We I think I'll want to go.
Patrick, tell us about a new fewer and fewer.
Oh, yes, I do. I heard you in training.
There is no longer the master node.
So I'll start with that, I'm not joking.
So obviously, in fear is a web to company and it is following
the ofac sanctions and obviously not allowing people to send
transactions to to tornado cash. So, inferior is working on a new
goal for decentralized inferior, but the goal of that isn't
necessary. The censorship resistance, but I
think that was just be a side and a side, a side effect
offered because you have any, no, a fatter in a network of, I
don't know, 10 20, 30 different known providers.
They'll be reasonably digital reasonably geographically, be
distributed, you'll hopefully get that for free but in fear is
music, has run out and focusing on redundancy and reliability.
You know, I'm sure you've all seen The Meta, Moscow, teach
that we don't like to talk about.
But that sort of inspired, decentralizing fury because we
want to make sure. Even if we go down, man.
Still works. So sort of a focusing on right
now. Thank you, Shriram.
What about you? And I can layer, I can layer is
an add-on layer to aetherium, so it does.
It cannot increase etherium censorship resistance in a basic
way, but we do think a lot about how we can contribute to
potentially increasing the censorship resistance before it,
our War II later. I just want to address this
point on Because I think at the end of the day, Gmail may have
to censor but optic, fiber companies may not have to censor
what is going through and this is the right layering that
blockchains be treated like optic, fiber companies,
especially if it is not even feasible for them to look into
what is going on inside. And I'm not saying there for
that, we will get value censorship resistance.
They'll be in Emission censorship resistance is
different from values and social assistance because value needs.
What we need to do is to push more agency to agents and the
system should not have any agency and what is an agent in
our company, which is trading on top of this Block Chain as an
agent, the user who's receiving money from somebody else's an
agent, they are counterparties to somebody else.
They should be able to express their Rich intersubjective
preferences on who they to deal with and they will take the
liability. So it's exactly like when it's a
matter of layering and restricting, the scope of what
is happening at different layers.
Answering the question on what we can do to increase censorship
censorship resistance. We had this proposal on how we
can potentially let block proposes, subscribe to
additional ordering constraints by Reese taking on I can layer.
So when this, when Now, proposes are restricting, I can layer.
They could potentially participate in different kinds
of markets, which potentially, for example, including things
like distributed, relay is distributed building.
There are different things you can build on top of that.
I want to add one more point on a different way of achieving
censorship resistance, which is to give more agency to light
nodes. We talk a lot about light
clients in the theorem Community, but only in the
context of validating safety, but I think the real Real real
value of like clients is actually in their ability to add
to censorship resistance because you know, they are the most B Li
distributed and if your dad and every single phone and if they
can contribute back to censorship resistance, in
various ways, that would be something, which is quite
preferable. How would they contribute to
censorship resistance? So these are schemes were
working on internally but the core idea is something like, for
example, everybody who's holding Eat in their wallet can be, you
know, for example, their life node will be randomly salty
shinned into and into an ability to contribute to the next block
and this is transmitted widely through the network.
So everybody knows that this is like a censorship.
See our list initiated at light nodes by random sortation.
So you just running a very, very light thing in your wallet.
And as long as you hold Keith, you're you're eligible to be
randomly sorted in and you propose a transaction and Float,
a mini block. Lock that that then goes around
through the network. So there are many ideas for how
one could do this with very light clients.
But the the matter idea here is that we should look deeply to
how we can cap the very edges of the network to contribute to
this sense of presence rather than only, you know, few valid
and olds who are the sent Center, who I think the other
thing that is measured in, all this discussion is, you know, we
are in a Flash W things, a Board for example, how to not let the
network centralized because there is no natural drift to
decentralization. There's only a drift to
centralization. How, how can we enshrine the
drift to decentralization is something, we should think about
much more consciously rather than only making it at best
neutral. You know.
A central network is obviously as good as a decentralized
network in every objective metric and is better in some
ways. And this can't, By the way.
So we can't keep touching more and more and more.
So I think that's a bigger issue that we all have to deal with is
how to enshrine decentralization.
If we think it's a valid principle, if we think that is
sufficient for one or two run everything, we don't need to
worry about it. So I actually agree with
everything. He said, it wasn't very much
trolling, maybe just not the legal analysis and again I'm not
a lawyer. This is not big enough with the
the film's position on the legal thing and in the fundamental way
that we are all, you know, we are not living.
No matter what, we are living in a physical Universe in physical
nation states. And we are dual citizens at best
between this nation and some other like etherium matter of
hours. So we have to comply to the loss
of where we are living. And I think the the best way to
counter all these things is to actually build systems which
move more agency to the edges. Okay, here's an interesting
interesting Troll. And again I'm not a lawyer.
So please this is not legal advice for you all.
But like, this is when I actually agree with everything
you said, and I think we're going to end up in the same
place as the internet, right? Like, and ultimately, the way
that nation-states look at this kind of stuff when it comes to
government security, or like what are the choice?
Okay points? What can we hit and what are the
costs, right? And they want to get the benefit
they need and like they won't compromise on that but also at
as little cost as possible. So if there was no ability to
sense their Google, if that didn't work, yes, they would be
knocking on the fiber providers door.
There's no doubt, they're in my mind, but because that would be
much more costly and detrimental to like, Raishin, they don't do
that and I think that's exactly what we're going to see in
blockchains. Like they will, they will look
at it and be sane about this kind of stuff and, and that's
basically the outcome we're going to see again, not legal
advice. Yeah, I suppose that's exactly
my thesis that means that they will be able to censor the value
flow and people who subject themselves to say that, hey, I'm
not part of this country. I'm in some metaphors, they are
free to do value exchange with whoever they want through this
network. Whose information flow is
unrestricted. But value flow will have choke
points and get restricted. That's so maybe we should have
the validators all being run by bun, tag murky and you know, dig
in Spartan more, and on validators would always be fun
again, not the position of flash pots, but my own personal
opinion, this is fantastic, closing statement.
Thank you guys so much for participating in this family.
It was super interesting and Illuminating and I wish you all
a really good evening. I hope none of you are super
jet. Lagged still.
So go home sleep and we'll see you tomorrow at Defcon 2.