Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Greg Meredith: Synereo – Rebuilding the Attention Economy from the Ground Up

Episode Date: October 25, 2016

As content becomes more and more abundant and immediately available at our fingertips, our limited attention is a barrier for those whose business it is to attract and harness it. In this context, large (social) media companies understand that attention is a scarce commodity, and, as has been demonstrated, those who control attention wield enormous power over our society. We’re joined by Greg Meredith, CTO of Synereo, to talk about how this new Blockchain platform rebuild the attention economy. In a sense, Synereo is to attention, what Bitcoin is to money, in effect, removing intermediaries from the transaction between those who have attention, and those who wish to attract it. Greg, also gives his insights on how functional programming languages could allow for verifiable computational smart contracts. Topics covered in this episode: Greg’s background as a mathematician and his work on Microsoft’s BizTalk Process Orchestration How he transitioned into the crypto-currency space What is Synereo and what the project is trying to achieve Greg’s thoughts on the attention economy and how it is fundamentally broken Synereo’s technology stack How Vlad Zamfir’s Casper consensus algorithm influenced Synereo Rholang, Synereo’s functional smart-contracting language Synereo’s economic model and product roadmap Episode links: Synereo Synereo White Paper Logic as a distributive law Quit social media by Dr. Cal Newport Deep Work by Dr. Cal Newport This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/154

Hey everyone. We're looking to hire a part-time communications manager to join the Epicenter team. You can get more information about that position at epicenter.tv slash apply. So if you're interested in learning more about that, if you think you have what it takes, go to that website and you'll find the job description and the instructions on how to apply for our communications manager position. Thanks. This is Epicenter. Episode 154 with guest Greg Meredith. This episode of Epicenter is brought you by the Ledger NanoS, the hardware wallet which sets the new standard in security and usability. Get it today at ledgerwollet.com and use the offer code Epicenter to get 10% off your order. And by Jaxx.

Jacks is the user-friendly wallet that works across all your devices and handles both Bitcoin and Ether. Go to J-A-A-Wallet.io and embrace the future of cryptocurrency wallets. Hi, welcome to Epicenter. The show has talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization. and the global blockchain revolution. My name is Sebastian Kutu. And my name is Brian Fabian Crane. We're here today with Greg Meredith.

Greg Meredith is a researcher around a lot of interesting areas, such as concurrency theory, type theory, essentially parts of mathematics. He's also one of the co-founders of a project called Scenario, which I think probably a lot of you have at least heard about in some way. And he's been doing a lot of interesting work in his field, among other things, he's been working with Flat Samfair, who's been on this podcast before as well, on Casper. So, yeah, thanks so much for coming on, Greg.

Oh, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. Thank you. And thanks for your patience for finding time for us to get together. No, it's a pleasure. Well, can you give us a little bit of background? So one of the things we read about you was that you were involved in something like at Microsoft called Bistalk Prom.

process orchestration. So I was really curious, is this, what was this work? And did this in any way kind of flow into the work you do today related to a blockchain and decentralized systems? You know, it really is. Actually, you can think of the Bistock process orchestration as the first generation of Internet scale smart contracting. And just like the scenarios, Rowling is built upon a core mathematical foundation arising from concurrency, so was Bishtag process orchestration. So we had a little smart contracting language that was called X-Lang that was built around something called the asynchronous pie calculus. And we had a nice little environment where you could draw smart contracts in a graphical interface.

and then it would synthesize an execution that would run at enterprise scale. We had large kinds of clients like the UK tax return system amongst others that were built using BizTock. And it gave rise to a whole bunch of standards, so BEPL and BEPML, those all derived directly from, from X-Lang and from the work that we did at Microsoft. Likewise, WS choreography, that all derives directly from the work that we did on Bistock process registration. So first-generation smart contract is the way you think about it. And so can you give an example of what kind of process or functionality would be executed

or managed with these tools? Sure, of course. So one of the domains that we did was supply chain management. So you could imagine that Ford Motor Company wants to be able to manage relationships with vendors like Firestone, where they're able to get the right kind of supply of tires and other kinds of things for the vehicles that they're shipping. And so they want to be able to write down processes about when to issue orders and how those orders for those orders for companies. tires are related to shipping vehicles out to distributors. So you would describe a process for each of the different participants, and then you could glue the different processes together and also verify that the execution of these different

processes would be correct. One of the interesting things was that it was very difficult to get Microsoft to understand that this could be done in a decentralized way. So the best I could hope for in the Microsoft setting was a kind of hub-and-spoke enterprise-based execution model. That was what they could understand, and that's what they felt they could productize. But from the very beginning, I was explaining that this was, in fact, a decentralized kind of offering. And in fact, when I walked into Microsoft, it was just me. And at the time, this kind of notion was called Workflow.

And there were six other workflow projects inside Microsoft, Office, SQL, and many other large groups already had workflow engines under construction when I was making my proposals. And typically they built them around sort of state machine semantics. And I would say, well, that's really interesting. So let's take a look at that. in a workflow that involves both Microsoft and HP. Who owns the state machine? Where does that state machine run? Because if you're going to run it over in HP,

you've just given HP a critical part of your business. And if you run it over at Microsoft, you've just asked HP to give HP's critical business over to Microsoft. So that isn't going to fly. So how do you do that? How do you apportion that work? And it was the mathematical formalism that I had.

that enabled me to talk about how you apportion and delineate those communications and collaborations as smart contracts that enabled me as a single lone individual with a rag-tag team of rebels inside Microsoft to build BizTalk Process orchestration despite the fact that SQL and Office and a bunch of other large-scale groups were trying to do the same thing. They would have killed us, but we had And we had sort of secret special sauce that made it work. That's really fascinating. I didn't know about BizTalk process orchestration. And what's fascinating is that I'm co-founder of a company called Stratom,

and we're building something that is very similar to what you described, but that has that distributed component to it. So, yeah, I'll probably look into BizTalk Process orchestration after the show. Yeah. Also, check out this. standards, WS choreography and Beppel and all of those. There are lots and lots of these standards out there right now, and lots and lots of workflow engines.

So how did you transition from that into the cryptocurrency blockchain space? You know, it was a crazy ride. What I explained to Microsoft was, you have to understand that when I did this work, I did a very sort of, I guess in some sense, cynical analysis. Gardner, Forrester, and many of the other groups were estimating the market for this kind of workflow at trillions of dollars. And I figured the inefficiency inside Microsoft would be such that I would only get 1,000th of that.

I thought, well, okay, that's still a billion dollar market, it's still worth going after. So when we delivered kind of the hub-and-spoke solution, with which I was very very, dissatisfied. I said, look, you've left most of the money on the table. Let's go after this for real. Let's build a new operating system and a new programming language based around these tools and techniques. And they said, you're crazy, but you might be the right kind of crazy. So here's an office directly under the CTO, Craig Mundy. Have at it. So we built a programming language called Highwire, which is not too dissimilar from Rowling. And in 2003, I demonstrated to build some of the cool techniques that you could do with Highwire,

like we introduced on-purpose a deadlock inside some distributed processes, and the compiler caught the deadlock as a part of the demo. And if you look at how that relates to Rowling, it's closely related to how the Rowland type system would catch the Dow bug. In the case of the Dow bug, there's a race condition that the type system detects.

In this case, it was a deadlock that we were illustrating, but both are examples of liveness conditions. And so that's kind of some of the kinds of things that you can do with the maths. But when we were looking for a market, the market that I was looking at, and I was quite interested, it was biology. The reason I was interested in biology was because,

you know, well, for multiple reasons, one of which was that people were beginning to employ the mathematics, tools and techniques quite successfully to biology. And another was because that was an area where Microsoft was not. And so it seemed like a match made in heaven. And also it turns out if you look at this from, again, from a purely market perspective, in the U.S. alone,

health care is 17% of GDP. So if you have good, good sound solutions for reasoning about therapeutic like cell signaling chains and immunological phenomena and disease phenomena like multiple sclerosis then you essentially have a license to print money so I suggested hey let's go and do that Microsoft didn't want to do that but I had already developed relationships with Merck the Institute Persistence Biology the Trento Labs etc and I said hey I've got all the relationships I'm gonna go off and do this on my own

So I started a little biotech company and began sitting with the biologists. And one of the things I realized was they were swimming in data. They were drowning in data. And so what we needed was a content delivery network just for the data alone that fit with their market requirements. I'm about to bring this story home and I'll shut up. And open up space for the next question. So while I was doing that, I was approached by another online. entrepreneur who said, hey, you know what? I'm really, really worried about the privacy imbalance

that's being created by applications like Facebook and other social media. And I'm also worried about the economic imbalance. I think these two trends could be disastrous for democratic society. And so I listened carefully to this message and we began working together. And I realized I could pivot my content delivery network into a content delivery network, not for data in biology, but for social networks. And then I started looking at, hey, how do I monetize that? And that's when I looked at the blockchain. And that's how I met Doer, because we started, that's, you know,

Door and I kind of had the same intuitions about the need for an attention economy. Okay, great. That's actually one of these phrases I wanted to sort of hatch on and explore a little bit. what do you mean with attention economy? What is that? Yeah, so that's a really great question. I mean, if you think about it, your social feed is kind of like a little model of your present moment, right? It's what you can see of the world and what you can make of that little particular social world that is, you know, say Facebook or Twitter. and whoever controls what falls into your present moment, right, what's within the bounds of your attention,

they're essentially framing your worldview. And so if there are economic factors in play for how your worldview is framed, well, that becomes a kind of attention economy, right? What is available to your attention? If that's informed by economics, well, that's a kind of attention economy. But this is a really critical idea when we start to think about the sharing of social information. And I really want to set the stage here because I feel like the sharing of social information is becoming more and more important. The planet is melting.

If you are not alarmed by the climate data, let me repeat this, if you are. are not alarmed by the climate data, you are not paying attention. And so we need to be able to communicate with each other to solve the problems that are desperately facing the human race. And the current incumbents are not well suited for having those kinds of discussions where we can begin to organize ourselves. If you look at it, let's take a look at, I always on Facebook. Look, I have to say I love Facebook. A lot of my friends are on Facebook. I stay in touch touch with the Guitar Circle community, the Guitar Craft community started by Robert Fritt via Facebook. And so I don't mean to pick on Facebook, but it really is a part of an older

wave of technologies. So the way to think about this, like right now, if you're a centralized company like Facebook, at any point, the NSA can come knocking on your corporate doors. And they can say, here's a court order from a secret court, you know, give me all of Brian Crane's data. And if Facebook wants to keep doing business in the U.S., Facebook has to comply. And so, you know, maybe that's the cost of doing business. But the reality is that Facebook has also shown itself to be susceptible to manipulating people's feeds. So they've run psychology experiments on people. and published papers about the results of manipulating people's feeds.

So if you want to see the real impact of manipulating the information that people are associated with, go look at that. That's real. That's a thing. So just two more points and then I'll shut up. So if, you know, some people might say, hey, that's the, you know, I'm willing to make that trade off. because I don't want to deal with the headaches of running data centers and all the other stuff that's required to do social media at scale. Now, that might work, except that there's another gotcha that ties back into this whole idea of the economics that's associated with the manipulation and essentially hijacking of your attention. If you think about the analog of Facebook 50 years ago, what is that?

That's the New York Times. Right? But let's think about the New York Times. The New York Times writers and curators, they got paid. They got paid pretty well. Now, who's the analog of the New York Times writers and curators today? That's us. That's you and me.

We're the content providers. We write the articles for Facebook, and we curate the articles for Facebook. But are we participating in the economics of Facebook? So Facebook is making building. of dollars in profit per quarter, are we as a culture participating in that economic proposition? No, we're not. In fact, what's happening is quite the opposite. There's a growing divide between the haves and the hafnots, which makes it harder and harder

for the bulk of the people who are have-nots to organize their own attention to solve these literally burning issues. So that's kind of what we're talking about. Those are the stakes with respect to the attention economy. And the mechanism of the attention economy for us is simply to wed a cryptocurrency to the promotion of content. So that value follows valued content. right as when you know if abed makes a post and Troy wants to promote that because he thinks that that that post which may be about climate data for example is important right so he might put some scenario amps behind that post so that more people see it right and then if people then engage that post then amps will flow back towards Abed who is the originator of that post and maybe some of them

we'll go back to Troy, who was a curator of that post. So people begin to participate in the economic engine. They're part of the solution in that way. Does that make sense? Am I? Yeah. So I really enjoyed that whole discussion of how social networks work. And this is something I've been thinking about for quite a long time as well.

So I've been, for example, following the sky named Cal Newport for, I don't know, like five years or something, I've been reading his stuff. And he's a sort of computer scientist, and he's a big sort of enemy of social media. And he wrote a book called The Deep Work, which is essentially the argument just that this, you know, kind of destroys our focus. And I also deleted my Facebook account like three weeks ago or something. And it was interesting, too, because there was no others. So I joined Facebook when I was in college, in the U.S., when it launched, right?

So it was sort of, I guess, among the first to join it. So it was the longest service I've used of any application. It was like, you know, 12 years or something. Wow. So, yeah, and the main reason actually, when you think about it, it's exactly what you kind of described in your paper, right? It's what are they trying to do? They are trying to get you to spend as much time on Facebook as possible,

clicking on random stuff, me doing their ads, et cetera, which is obviously not in alignment with my objectives for my own life, right? So it's like you're fighting against that. And it's, I feel also where, so I think it's a very good point that this is going to be like one of the key, you know, one of the key skills in the future, you know, is to be able to manage your own attention because it's just going to, the tools to distract yourself, it's just going to get more. worse, better and better. And I think there's a big danger that a lot of people, if they're not able to do that, they'll just literally not be able to do anything of value. I would add something

to that, Brian. I would say that, that, because I watched that, that talk that you had mentioned by this guy Cal Newport, which I guess we'll link to in the show notes. And he says that, I think Greg, you may have mentioned this earlier, that these algorithms are made to for, or made to make you addicted to using Facebook. I got to say, like, in the last year, I've seen the quality of content in my feed reduced drastically. And I find myself looking at it, having no interest in any of it. So, I mean, I guess it would be valuable if I would be interested in the content.

But for some reason, my profile must be in some weird spot in the algorithm where, like, there's a mismatch between what I'm. I actually want to see and what I'm seeing, which is for some reason just Donald Trump videos. I don't even live in the U.S. I'm not an American citizen. I couldn't care less about Donald Trump. And that's all I see. So on your Q, Brian, I didn't delete my account, but I deleted the app from my phone. And it's been two days.

And I find myself going to my phone to look at it, but it's not there. So I'm like, okay, I'd do something else. But just to point out that not only is it sucking our attention, but it's, in my case, sucking my attention with something that is just not of any value to me. Let's take a break to talk about the Ledger NanoS, the new flagship hardware wallet by Ledger. I'll let Ledger's CEO, Eric L'Archeveque, tell you all about how simple the NanoS makes it to securely store all your private keys. The Ledger NanoS is our latest, generation hardware wallet. This is a multi-currency hardware wallet. It has a screen and buttons to manage everything on screen.

You can generate a new seed, restore a seed, or set up your pin on the device. Your seed will never be exposed to the host computer. On the nanoS, you have different apps. You have the Bitcoin app, you have the Ethereum app, and you have the Fido U2F app for strong authentication, for instance with Google, Dropbox, or a new app. Dropbox or GitHub. You can manage your cryptocurrencies with the ledger wallet Bitcoin Chrome app or the ledger wallet Ethereum Chrome app. With the nanoS, all your Bitcoin and ECUM addresses are derived from one unique seed. With one seed, you can have in the same time Bitcoin, Ethereum, ICERM classic balances. And also,

if you restore your seed, you will also recover all the keys associated to other apps such as Fido U2F, SSAH, GPG. So it's very simple, just one seed, and multiple applications. The NanoS sets the new standard in hardware wallet security and usability. You can get yours today at ledgerWallet.com. And when you do, be sure to use the offer code Epicenter to get 10% off your first order. We'd like to thank Ledger for their support of Epicenter. So let's then move on to, let's move to scenario, because this is why we're here.

Let's then describe scenario from a high level. What is scenario and what's trying to achieve? Yeah, so those are big questions, actually. So I think initially a scenario, we sort of presented this scenario, the scenario to the world as a decentralized social network. But there's a lot more to it. And this has to do with kind of peeling the onion, right? In order to build a decentralized social network, there end up being certain technical requirements.

So you have to be able to handle content at scale. And right now, the current blockchain doesn't handle content at scale. It doesn't even handle transactions at scale. So the kind of application that we're envisioning scenario grows up to be, and it's not there yet, but what we envision it growing up to be, is essentially handling, you know, visa level, transactions at scale and Facebook level content distribution at scale. So, you know, blockchain just doesn't do that. And our 1.0 architecture proposals, they essentially put the blockchain side by side with the content delivery network. And then the reason was because I built a content

delivery network that I am fairly confident can scale up to that. You know, I think there's a lot of work, but I know the engineering path to get there. Whereas with the blockchain, I didn't know the engineering path, and I was quite naive about, you know, a side-by-side architecture. Having worked in the blockchain space now for over two years and looking at proof of work and other kinds of consensus algorithms and what it would take to build a consensus algorithm that is scalable, I came to a conclusion rather late in the game. Like if you compare to Ethereum or even Steam, they made progress because they said,

we're going to own the chain itself. We're just going to take ownership of the chain and build our technology around, you know, a code base that is ours that we can muck with. Scenario tried to use blockchain technology via off-the-shelf technology, hoping against hope that we didn't have to take that on since building the content distribution network and productizing that is quite hard. Eventually we came to the conclusion that's not possible, and we have to own the chain itself in order to have a scalable chain and a scalable chain technology that would allow us not only to be in charge of how the transaction fees are related to the attention economy, but also to be able to eventually put content itself on the chain for a wide variety of reasons, like including making sure that storage,

as a part of the proposition, a part of the economic proposition of the decentralized network. So with that in mind, then scenario sort of ended up having to be a much more of a platform company than we had originally thought. So scenario is also, you know, below the social network, it's also a platform. It's a platform for a wide range of applications that include both content distribution. As an example, one of our key partners is lively gig. And they do essentially freelance networking for the decentralized space. And they've built their whole architecture around our content delivery mechanism and also and are taking a heavy bet on our chain, which is literally our chain, the scenario chain. So hopefully I,

gives you a little bit of a picture. If you look, if you explode the view of our chain a little bit, what you'll see is that there's a smart contracting language in addition to a scalable blockchain. And that smart contracting language is quite distinct from other contracting languages. It's not like solidity because it's built on a different model of computation. And that isn't, what's important there is that all of the scenario architecture is built on mathematical foundations that allow us to make everything in alignment with a correct by construction paradigm. Just one quick example and then I'll shut up. So if you look at the way the Ethereum Virtual Machine was developed and solidity was developed,

they were developed more or less independently. And so then there's a requirement when you build a compiler from solidity to, the Ethereum virtual machine, that that compiler does the right thing. Because if it doesn't, that's a vector of attack. Someone could come in and generate byte codes for a smart contract that you wrote that does other things, evil things. And so there's a requirement to prove that the compiler is correct. There's an alternative, which is that you derive,

shape of the language from the shape of the virtual machine. In which case, there's no correctness, there's no proof of correctness for the compiler. The compiler is correct by construction because the shape of the language conforms to the shape of the execution model of the virtual machine. So that's just one example of many where a scenario is using mathematics to shave its costs. I don't have to go and hire a team of formal verification experts to prove the correctness of my compiler because we get it for free. Okay. Perhaps we can come back to this topic of formal verification. You mentioned

Ethereum and the DAO, I believe, earlier. So maybe we can come back to this a bit later because I think it's an important topic. But staying on scenario, so if I understand correctly, then, scenario is is the the platform which allows for this social media platform to exist, but you just built the entire stack. So scenario, the social media app is one of those, one app that could live on the platform, which also includes a blockchain, smart content language and the storage system. And also, you know, tomorrow someone could. develop some other type of application on that?

For example. Yeah, that's exactly right. And we've, like even in 2010, we were looking at how we would segment the market. And the way we segment the market relative to the potential applications has to do with risk, personal risk of the users. So there's not a lot of risk in posting cat memes, right? It's not, you have nothing at stake when you post cat memes or any, any of a multitude of other kinds of things that are typically shared on social networks.

If you move just a little bit to the right of that, then a jobs network, like Lively gig, you do have a lot more risk. So it's a decentralized platform whereby people are trying to connect with each other to either do work or get work done. And there you have, you know, there's more at stake. Another example of something that's to the right of that is a dating site. So you could, like, you know, on this platform roadmap, we have a little spot which we call indecent, you know, to play on decentralization and dating, which would be another application that you could build on top of our content distribution network and economic engine that would be of great social value. So it's like decentralized OKCupid, if that makes sense.

So yes, lots and lots of applications can and should take advantage of this platform. And that's sort of our aim. And we think that if we get the platform right, then there's a rich ecosystem begins to emerge rather quickly. So how would those applications that you see people building on scenario, how do those compare with what people are building today on Ethereum? Do you think that will be a similar type of application in use case that people will address here, or will that be very different applications? And will those applications themselves look similar or will it be very different?

Well, currently, I don't know how you do content distribution with Ethereum. How do you do that? Where does the content live and how is it related to the transactions? I mean, I guess one of the things that people sometimes do sort of the IPFS, uh, EVM type thing. Exactly. Right. So essentially you have to do this side by side thing. And that's where we see a lot of, uh, a lot of issues, which is why we, we ended up having to do a sort of wedded, a wedded technology or a unified technology. Because we, we believe that there are significant security issues with that kind of approach.

And then the type of application that people will build on scenario would be especially specifically around content distribution. So video site, social media network, but for example, not something like what people are building today on Ethereum, like a prediction market or some sort of maybe organizational structure like DAO typing with voting and decision making. Yeah, yeah. No, actually it's quite interesting because I see that in today's world, all applications are inherently social. Let's look at a really good example, right? Who would have thought that code version history would be a social thing? Did the people who built subversion think about, you know, code revision management

and code source history as a social thing? Probably not, but GitHub is definitely social. and I would love to see a version control system built on top of the scenario platform. And there are lots of good reasons for that, right? That's one way that you could begin to also guarantee the security of the code that gets deployed in the decentralized setting, which is that you have both the security benefits of the platform, but you also have the security benefits of the community that's in the centralized setting, interested in that code, right?

And that also points back to the Dow, right, which has to do with the relationship of governance to code and governance to the behavior of these kinds of systems. Is that making sense? You see how I'm kind of trying to tie the loop there? Yeah, no, it does make sense. I think that having a wedded approach,

as you mentioned, does have some advantages. Now let's perhaps get into the architecture a bit more. So we mentioned that there's a blockchain layer. So that's sort of the ledger of transactions. There's a smart contracting layer, the storage layer. On top of that, you have the application layer. Let's get into perhaps the smart contracting layer and the storage layer, starting with the smart contracting layer.

So I guess if we were to use a frame of reference, Ethereum would be a frame of reference which people would already know, how is the smart contracting layer in a scenario different or similar from Ethereum? Yeah, so similar, what we store on the blockchain is not simply a ledger, right? In the same way that Ethereum stores the state of the virtual machine, the Ethereum virtual machine on the chain, right? We're storing the state of a particular virtual machine on the chain. and then ledger-like or financial-like applications are built above that virtual machine.

So that's where they're similar. The kind of virtual machine that's being stored is very different. So in particular, we allow fine-grained concurrency. So the Ethereum virtual machine is essentially sequential. And in fact, the sequential nature of the way transactions are processed is is one of the reasons why there are lots of interesting scaling questions about Ethereum. So just start to interrupt, but perhaps for those who are not familiar with currency, could you just briefly explain what that means in the context of smart contracts?

Yeah. So imagine that within a single smart contract, you have lots of threads of activity that are all going to happen at the same time. So, for example, in a loan approval application, typically what you want to do is you want to go and check the title of the, like I'm talking about a home loan approval. You want to go and check the title of the property that you're talking about. And at the same time you want to go and check the credit history of the applicant.

Now you don't have to sequentialize those, and it's a very bad idea to sequentialize those. What you'd like to do is to do a kind of fork join, where you force you this is not fork in the sense of forking the chain, but you fork off both activities and let them run simultaneously. And then when you have answers to both, then you can continue with the process. And this is just key to all kinds of human activities. The fork join pattern is just standard. Another example is, you know, when you submit a paper to a conference for review, as my co-author Mike Stey and I just did to Fossacks. What happens is a copy of the paper gets forked off to three or so reviewers.

And then each reviewer is simultaneously reviewing the paper, and then each reviewer will then supply their comments. And then from the collated comments, then a decision will be made about the paper. So the Ro-Lang smart contracting system and the RoVM allows for that kind of content, concurrency, that kind of simultaneous activity within a single smart contract. And we believe that this is the essence of scaling.

Now, there's a caveat, right, which is that it's really easy to screw up. And the Dow is an example where when you have activities that are unfairly treated, like you accept new client requests with more priority, or unfairly over updating the state of the chain, then you can have bugs. And that's why the other piece of the puzzle is that you have to have something that allows you to reason about the correctness

of these concurrent activities. And that's where Rowland's type system is so important, because it allows programmers, like most programmers, whether they're Haskell programmers or Java programmers or F sharp, programmers or O-CAML programmers, I mean, just like most programmers in the world who are building scalable, large-scale mission-critical systems are dealing with typed languages. Yeah, I mean, yes, there's this whole weird JavaScript community that is untiped.

But if you look at the big three, right, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, they have all put forward alternatives to JavaScript that are typed. So what is a typed language for those like me are not familiar with that? I'm glad you asked. In today's languages which are typed, essentially the types kind of make programs look like wires, and there are standards for the plugs on either end of the wire. So, you know, you don't try to plug, you know, a 10-based T connection into a USB port, right? That's what the types are doing.

But Brolang's types go quite a bit further. They don't just say how you can plug these together from the point of view of inputs and outputs. They say how you can plug them together more like plugging components onto a motherboard. So making sure that the components all play nicely together. So that's the rough idea. So I think an example, correct me if I get this wrong, right, of something like JavaScript, right? you could add the number three plus a string four, and then it would sort of automatically convert the string

into a number and it'd say seven. And then of course, those kind of things can lead to lots of mistakes if one isn't careful. And then in a type, a strong type language, we would just give an error. Yeah, that's correct. That's exactly right. And so what that means in terms of like production level code

is when you, when you do, have the when you do have type checking, then the compiler is doing a lot of work that in other languages like JavaScript you're having to write unit tests for. So in other words, you're not spending money on human labor to do things that could be done in an automated fashion. So code is produced more cheaply and more robustly. Today's magic word is concurrency. N-C-U-R-R-E-N-C-Y. Head over to let's-stock-Bitcoin.com to sign in, enter the magic word, and claim

you're part of a listener award. So, Greg, I'm curious about that because one of the big arguments that people have used for solidity, you know, is that because it's so similar to JavaScript, it's a lot of people know or can sort of easily get started and develop something, and the barrier to entry is quite low. Now with some of those, you know, row, lang, or pie calculus, et cetera, those are, I think, much more esoteric languages. So do you think that's going to be a big hurdle in terms of adoption that people have to learn these new languages, and especially languages that they're very different from the ones that they're used to? You know, I think that's a great question. And I do think

there is a little bit of a mind shift. But I think one of the interesting things about this space, and I'm always thinking about adoption, and I've thought about adoption since X-Lang in Microsoft. So the Rolang design is now benefiting from, let's see, we released Bistock in 2000, so maybe 18 years of design features. from working with developers. So, yeah, there will be some adoption issues, but interestingly about the blockchain is it's full of intrepid people.

It's full of people who are go-getters, who are not afraid because, you know, hey, this is all brand new stuff anyway. And it's very exciting. I mean, one of the things I say a lot in interviews like this, and I say it often because it's true, I am so inspired by the blockchain space because there are so many people who, instead of complaining that the world is broken, they are rolling up their sleeves and they're getting work done. And they're unafraid to go and try something new.

And that's what gives me hope with respect to the introduction of these new tools and techniques. The reality is that formal methods and formal verification are kind of coming up silently behind the sort of more traditional development methodologies, and they're making huge headway. And the reason that they are necessary in this space is because they're necessary in all mission-critical spaces. It's a great idea to go for adoption, but if what you're doing is getting a lot of people who have no real understanding of how to do mission critical financial applications, then you're going to have a lot more Dow bugs, a lot more. So either we begin to adopt tools and techniques that are going to help people, even people who don't have experience with them,

or we're going to be willing to take the pain. So then, and this is sort of an unrelated question, but I'm interested in knowing what you think about this. What are your thoughts on major banks and even, some central banks, at least one that I know, experimenting on Ethereum. You know, I think it's great. I think the more engagement and the more involvement with these technologies, the better. At the end of the day, I'm not, at a certain point, I got a little bit nervous about, you know, these deep-pocketed institutions getting involved with this tech.

And then I kind of relaxed because I realized that for the people who are paying attention, people who really understand what this technology is about, they're not going to just get back in bed with the banks. That's not what this is about. And so if we're able to Tom Sawyer, you know, the deep resources of these institutions to build better blockchains, yes. This is awesome. And if they don't do it open source, nobody's going to engage. So I just To me I just think there's this Tons and tons of positivity

About that and I'm very excited And at the end of the day We all are going to have to come to the table In this dialogue Right Whether you're whether you're an incumbent institution Or a crazy startup doing Doing things like a decentralized social network

Everybody's going to have to be involved in the conversation Let's take a short break to talk about Jax Jacks is a multi-coin wallet created by the people at the Central. Now, in the past, if he had a whole bunch of cryptocurrencies, it was a pain to handle them. You either had to leave them on an exchange, which was insecure, or you had to have all these different wallets, which was a hassle. Fortunately, now with Jacks, those medieval days of darkness, misery, and suffering are over. Jack supports multiple cryptocurrencies and new ones are being added.

But it's not just storing cryptocurrencies you can do with Jax, but you can also exchange them directly from within side the wallet thanks to their shape shift integration. And since there's only one seed, Jax makes it super easy to back up and sync to the other devices. Jax works with Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and has browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome. So go to Jax.io, that's J-A-W-X.I-I-O to download the wallet and get started today. We'd like to thank Jacks for the support of Epicenter.

Now, in scenario, is there like a consensus mechanism, something like proof of work or proof of stake? I mean, I know you worked with Vlad on Casper as well. Did that influence the design of scenario in any way? Oh, totally. Absolutely. I mean, you know, the art chain, the consensus algorithm underneath the art chain is a variant of Casper. you know in some sense we're heavily influenced by the work of Vitalik and of Vlad and we're very excited to be engaged and collaborating with Vitalik and Vlad on Casper again the point here is that these algorithms

they're new they're hard they require a lot of focus and a lot of attention and they require expertise from a lot of different fields like you know I'm amazed at the kinds of expertise that Vitalik and Vlad can bring to the picture. And it's largely around crypto and economics. It isn't really much around the sort of programming language semantics, formal methods, right? But we're going to need all of that talent and all of that skill and expertise to design something that's actually workable at scale for mission critical systems. So totally, yes, we are heavily influenced.

One of the places where we differ, for example, that I'm very excited about is, if you look at Vitalik's algorithm and Vlad's algorithm, the betting, I don't know if your audience is familiar with the way Casper works, but essentially there's a moment, there are moments in the consensus steps

where the validators, and these are the entities that replace minors in proof of work, the validators are effectively betting on which block is next. in the chain. So that's a simplification, but that's a way to get a foothold here. And what you want is to make sure that the bets converge as rapidly as possible towards, you know, a common outcome. So that everyone ultimately agrees.

And you can imagine that people could kind of game the system, right? right? So one of the ways that they might gain in the system is they could equivocate. They could bet on one side and then the other, but not in a way that's justified. They're doing this from some sort of nefarious economic motivations or other kinds of motivations. And the Casper algorithm, the punishments and rewards for betting behavior essentially may it so that those players who are well-behaved are left standing economically, whereas those who are betting in a sort of more in a various way, they end up draining their resources. So that part is somewhat independent from what they're betting on.

And if you bet on, if you bet on blocks, then you are effectively. rate limiting the algorithm. What the R-chain thing does, and actually, Vitalik makes use of that fact in reasoning about certain kinds of timing, the R-chain doesn't bet on blocks. The R-chain bets on propositions that describe the shape of the blockchain.

And there's a good reason for that. The reason for that, so that means that each validator is saying, you know, my requirements are that this transaction occurs and this transaction occurs and this one comes before either of those, right, and that sort of thing. So there are constraints on the shape of the blockchain. And the reason that's important is because if you think about it, when you go to buy a coffee in your local coffee shop, unless either of you happens to be living in Shanghai, I didn't check that. No? Okay, good. Right. So then the cost of me buying a stick of

of tofu from a street vendor, you know, that that transaction should be independent and have no conflict with your coffee purchase at a local coffee shop. And that's part of the reason that global financial network scale is because most of the transactions are isolated, right? And that's that that will be the same in the case of validators. Most of the transactions are going to be isolated. The only time you ever need to engage consensus is if they have constraints that are at odds with each other. Like I say, you know, transaction A has to come before transaction B. And you say, no, no, transaction B has to come before transaction A. And at that point, that's when you have to have some kind of betting structure or betting strategy, right? And so bet by proposition can potentially

allow for, well, I'll skip a bunch of technical details, but what it can allow for is to realize tens of thousands of blocks all at once because you're only betting on the shape of the chain, not specific blocks. And so at the moment, you read consensus, you're reaching consensus about a big giant chunk of the chain. So this gives you much, much better throughput rates. So does that, is that making sense? Do you answer your question? It did kind of make sense on a high level. I think the general idea, right, that you're going to have activity going on in different corners of the network and that can be unrelated and it this sort of idea that every single thing is validated together that that's maybe not the most

efficient idea i think a lot of people will can relate to that easily sweet sweet so so that's i mean it's certainly impressive just how innovative and how different and how like from the ground up a lot of this stuff is designed in a novel way So it really sounds completely, very much unlike any of the other blockchain projects out there. Yeah. So I confess, I often feel funny about it just because, I mean, certainly we've tried to build on others' work, but we've also tried to keep our eyes wide open about requirements. Right.

And every step of the way we've been driven by market requirements. We're not trying to innovate. We really, really, you know, it's like if I could just pull something off the shelf and have it do that thing, that'd be great because then I could get more sleep. Yeah. You mentioned before the currency, right? So we have this aspect that, you know, I post content on this scenario. I want it to be popular. So I like put some money behind that.

And so we have this kind of mechanisms. So I think this currently is called AMP. Can you talk a bit about this? So a few questions on this. How many are there? How are they created? Like, who owns them? How did they obtain them? And then what's their function in the network? Right. Okay. So, first of all, I want to make a quick distinction between amps versus Rio.

So amps are sort of the unit of the attention economy. They're the means by which people promote posts and, you know, essentially how value flows in this chain of value content. Initially, when we thought we were going to be able to utilize the Bitcoin blockchain, for our initial crowd sale, we minted the entire AMP supply all at once. And that was via the Omni layer on top of the Bitcoin Protocol. As we became more and more savvy about the actual market requirements and the technological basis for delivering the market requirements, we realized that that wasn't going to fly. And so essentially there will be a new AMP token issued on the R-chain,

and there will be a conversion from existing amps, which people hold and trade today, to this new AMP token. And, of course, it will be sort of linked to risk versus reward, in the sense that people who jump onto our chain sooner will be able to get a better rate for the conversion than people who wait until later. But essentially, that kind of makes sure that we're holding true to our promise to our investors. So the AMP is the crypto token that's associated with the attention economy, and ultimately amps will be convertible into the R chain equivalent of gas, right? And that's what allows you to essentially buy.

if every post ends up being its own smart contract and we believe that this is kind of the killer this is the killer app for Rowling is that the reality is that every post in the scenario network is its own little tiny smart contract so if that's the case then there's a reason to have the amp this nice connection or thread from amps

down to the rate limiting feature of the Rovium. So just to rephrase that, if I got this correctly. So there was a sort of an amp sale that was done with on the Omni layer, which Omni, some people may remember that as MasterCoin once upon a time. And now when scenario is kind of life, there will be a new currency equivalent to Ethereum's gas that's going to be created there. those amps are going to be essentially kind of moved over until you're going to have a new crowd sale

to sell additional of that gas-like currency or that's that's close let me let me make it slightly more accurate all right so so yes we have we've had not one but two crowd sales in which we sold the minted tokens to capitalize the project when we have our chain you'll be able to convert those tokens directly onto the tokens for the R chain. The, the, um, Ethereum's gas is not the same as ether, right? You convert, you can essentially purchase gas with ether. So the AMP token is like, is like ether more than gas. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. And, uh, and, you know, it's, it's not necessarily the case that the conversion event is a crowd sale. It's just that we want to make sure that people move over to arching, right? So people who are holding Amp, right? So people who are holding amps should be moving to our chain as soon as possible.

Now, that said, you can use the bits right now. You can go to Docker and get our Docker image and stand up a node right now. So you can play with it. You can have the user experience. We do not recommend this for any sort of mission critical amps. The only amps that should be flowing through those notes are test net amps. yeah so so you recently uh i believe ended the the crowd sale uh in crowd sale two in crowd in crowd set two in which you raised uh close to five million u s dollars uh 4.7 million i think

um so could you talk about well i guess there's a couple questions about this one is what is the structure of scenario is it a company is it a foundation um what will the government's model be around the allocation of those funds and what do you plan to use that money for? Yeah, so those are all fantastic questions. I mean, I should say that even before the crowd sale launched, we were holding us the first scenario governance conference. So we are fully, fully committed to this being a network owned by the people who use it.

And we are working as hard as we can to build a cookie crumb trail from the current situation where a scenario limited is the company that holds the ants to a place where, and holds the funding to a place where, you know, the funds are allocated according to the will of the community. right so that that that is our you know hard of we hold fast to that aim so scenario limited is an Israeli based company in order to do any sort of you know to pay for people doing work for scenario there has to be some kind of incorporation because there's always taxes involved right And so the choice at the time was to do an LTD. But now we're essentially moving in a step-by-step, reasoned fashion to a structure that is a better and better governance model. So one of the things that we are aiming to do is to move from a sort of standard corporate CEO,

CTO, C-STRO structure. and then reports like that is to have a partnership model, more like a law firm, where you have managing partners, partners, and associates. And then people can engage at whatever they, the level they feel is appropriate for themselves. So that's kind of step zero from where we are to get to something that's much more flat. And then one of the things that we hope to do

is for the R chain itself, we build a nonprofit organization, and I'm hoping that that is going to be a cooperative. So, again, we're learning as much as we can about that kind of governance model. I was in cooperatives when I was in college, so I went to Oberlin College in the U.S. And more than 25% of the student body

there lives and works in cooperatives. My own co-op, we made all our own tofu, did all our own yogurt, granola, baked, all our own bread, we ran the housing and everything, right? So I'm quite familiar with these kinds of governance models, and they make me very happy. And we're fully committed to this stance in which the scenario, the way the funds are allocated in scenario reflect the will of the community. But we have to operate within certain parameters in today's society until we can, you know,

sort of build a practical step-by-step mechanism to get to that place. And so then, I guess before we wrap up here, let's talk about the product a little bit. You mentioned that you can download a Docker container and start playing with TestNet amp coins. Where is the product at right now in the roadmap? And what does that roadmap look like over the next six to 12 months? Yeah, so essentially what we've got. is a rough sketch of the user experience and a very very rough sketch for the content distribution mechanism that's built around some abstractions called which

I've been developed called the reactive media so it's essentially taking the reactive programming paradigm and applying it to social media this is no big surprise Facebook is engaged in similar kinds of activities but there but the the programming paradigm is specific is especially well suited to this domain and a bunch of other domains as well. And so please take a look at what it looks and feels like to post and share with people in the content

part, the content distribution part of the user experience. The very, very nascent part of the attention economy is also available in one of the branches. This would be SOC 92 Omni. that will be moved into staging presently, in which case people will be able to play around with the test net amps. So the big picture is

we're going to be rewriting the backend so that we have one thing, which is the content distribution network on top of arching. And so that we don't block the development of the user experience. This is effectively the reason and we're releasing these bits.

We want people to play around with it, give us feedback, help us get it right, and that will inform iterations of the UI while we're rebuilding the backend. And so the aim and the hope is that we have the backend redone

and the UI in version 2 by Q4 of 2017. with lots of interesting drop points along the way. So we're hoping very much to have a drop point where people can be playing with arching kind of Q3 of 2017. So that's kind of a rough picture of things of the roadmap. So yeah, I mean, we've published the roadmap in various forms,

So please go check that out as well. And, you know, if anybody has any, if anyone in your audience, you know, has thoughts about the better ways to organize the roadmap or anything that I said, we really, really welcome comment and feedback. Yeah, we're certainly going to encourage that and we're going to have links to all of the resources. I mean, there's a very comprehensive white paper and website and links so people can also. So, I mean, you can download the software today, right? And play around with it. Yeah. Great.

So thanks so much for coming on, Greg. It's a fascinating project. And I certainly look forward to seeing how it evolves. I think it's super ambitious. And I think you're onto something. So let's hope it's going to have that impact that you're hoping for. Thank you so much. And I really, really appreciate the chance to chat with you guys.

It was very stimulating. and you guys ask really thoughtful questions. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks so much, Craig. And of course, thanks so much for a listener. So we are part of the Let's Talk Bitcoin Network. You can find this show and many other shows on let's talkbidcoin.com. And, well, of course, you can subscribe to the show

on any of the podcast players or watch the videos on YouTube.com slash Epicenter Bitcoin. So thanks so much, and we look forward to being back next week. You know, ... ...