Unchained - Parity's Jutta Steiner and Gavin Wood on Polkadot, Substrate and the Frozen Funds - Ep.119

Episode Date: May 14, 2019

Jutta Steiner, CEO of Parity, and Gavin Wood, who goes by the title "chief white space officer," describe the network Parity plans to launch later this year, Polkadot, how it aims to solve scalability, interoperability and security and when a developer would choose to build a dapp on Ethereum vs. a parachain on Polkadot. We also discuss another one of their products, Substrate, which enables developers to easily customize blockchains, and perceived competition between Ethereum and Polkadot. Plus, we talk about the frozen funds of Parity and other crypto teams, and why Jutta and Gavin think the community should upgrade in a way that would enable the funds to be unlocked. Be sure to check out the full show notes on Forbes! http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2019/05/12/how-polkadot-hopes-to-help-blockchains-scale/ Thank you to our sponsors! CoinDesk/Consensus: Since 2015, Consensus has been recognized as the most influential blockchain and digital assets event of the year. Hot-button topics such as adoption challenges, privacy,blockchain innovation, capital formation and more take centerstage as experts and pioneers give voice to the new developments and innovations occurring around the globe. Don’t miss this three-day experience! Register today: www.consensus2019.com. Use promo UNCHAINED300 to save $300 on your pass. CipherTrace: https://ciphertrace.com/unchained Episode links: Parity: https://www.parity.io Jutta Steiner: https://twitter.com/jutta_steiner Gavin Wood: https://twitter.com/gavofyork Polkadot light paper: https://polkadot.network/Polkadot-lightpaper.pdf Polkadot Wiki: http://wiki.polkadot.network/en/latest/ Gavin's 2014 blog post on Web 3: https://gavwood.com/dappsweb3.html Gav’s keynote on the journey to Web 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH1pEE0W3ug Chain Fibers article in the Ethereum Wiki: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Chain-Fibers-Redux Web 3.0 vision: https://medium.com/@gavofyork/why-we-need-web-3-0-5da4f2bf95ab More explanation of Polkadot, Substrate, Consensus, Governance, etc.: http://wiki.polkadot.network/en/latest/polkadot/learn/relevant-links/ Upgradeability without hard forks via Substrate https://medium.com/polkadot-network/never-fork-again-438c5e985cd8 Controversy around Afri Schoedon’s tweet: https://breakermag.com/exclusive-afri-schoedon-on-his-contentious-split-from-ethereum/ Dothereum: https://twitter.com/dothereum?lang=en https://www.reddit.com/r/dothereum/ Gavin and Vitalik Buterin discussing competition between Ethereum and Polkadot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=vRqJK16t4-I Why not to fork for the frozen funds: https://medium.com/@avsa/avoid-evil-twins-every-ethereum-app-pays-the-price-of-a-chain-split-e04c2a560ba8 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone, welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Be sure not to miss the crypto workshop I'm teaching with Meltem DeMiras of coin shares and Jala Jopatra of Future Perfect Ventures at Omega Institute in Rinebeck, New York, from September 20th to the 22nd. In addition to fascinating discussions, there will also be yoga, healthy food, and hiking, and other outdoors activities on Omega's beautiful 250-acre campus. Be sure to check out the show notes for the link to sign up.

Also, Unchained is now on YouTube. You can find the most recent episodes there every week on the Unchained podcast channel. And if you're not yet subscribed to my weekly newsletter, go now to Unchainedpodcast.com to sign up. CipherTrace makes it easy for exchanges and crypto businesses to comply with cryptocurrency anti-money laundering laws. Avoid illegal sources of funds and maintain healthy banking relationships. CipherTrace is helping you grow the crypto economy by keeping it. safe and secure. Coin desk, the number one media outlet for all things blockchain and crypto, is hosting ConsenSys, its annual event in New York City. Tickets are on sale now at www. www.com. That's consensus with a you, and you can save $300 if you use promo code on Chained 300. Live from the Sub-Zero Conference in Berlin. My guest today are Yoshe Steiner, co-founder and CEO of Parody, and Gavin Wood, co-founder and chief white space overlord of Parody. Welcome, Gavin and Yota. Thanks.

How did you each get involved in crypto? And Gavin, why don't you start? Because I think your involvement predated Yotas. Well, I guess it goes back to, I think it was early 2013 when I was sitting in bed reading a newspaper article on this crazy place in Berlin where, There was this guy, Yerg, who was, he had a bar on this street, Graefastrasse in Berlin. And he was talking about how it was kind of quite anti-establishment. There was a lot of kind of artists sort of squatters.

It was very kind of a very foreign scene from my point of view. I was sort of living in a suburb of Leeds at the time. And he was talking about how a lot of the businesses were switching to, or it was making it seem at least how a lot of the businesses were switching. to Bitcoin for their means of payment between each other. And it really got me thinking, you know, this is, you know, is this legitimately, you know, a sort of sea change in how the world could work. Around the same time, Silk Road was also gathering some sort of infamosity in, you know, but it was all again linked. There was, you know, Tor, crypto, Bitcoin. And together they sort of made me sort of think there was,

there might be some sort of underlying kind of social change happening here. So I sort of set about it to investigate a bit further, and I met a guy also featured in the article called Miataki. I went down to London to see him, just to sort of have a chat and figure out, you know, what's going on here. And one thing led to another. I sort of got to know a bunch of people in the space, and eventually Vitalik.

And I sort of set about working on Ethereum, which he'd very recently published a white paper on, sort of proposal for, if you like, a kind of a rethink of blockchain or Bitcoin. It was all Bitcoin at the time. There wasn't really blockchain back then. And I figured this would be a really interesting way of getting to learn about the technology.

And also in some sense understand at a deeper level, what sort of implications it might have for society in general. So it was around December 2013 that I, I said about coding Ethereum, basically. And things progressed kind of quickly from there on for me. January, going to Miami and sort of meeting all of the other guys in the sort of space. And February, we basically kind of launched the thing that I've been writing as the sort of initial proof of concept of Ethereum. And yeah, I mean, a lot of crazy antics followed.

here we are now. Yeah, seriously. I mean, your story is, yeah, obviously an important one in the Ethereum space. And Yota, how about you? I got involved a few months later around May 2014, so almost five years ago now, coming from a bit of a different angle, mainly driven through a personal leader, I guess. Like, I was, I got more and more concerned after the Snowden revelations, like how our lives work online, privacy, what's happening to my data. So I was recently, searching like what's the most up-to-date tool for sharing personal data encrypted end to end and found discussions online where people were speculating how to use Ethereum in that context and that got me interested. I think I first came across Matesave and then some links later

found myself on Reddit people talking about Ethereum and then saw that Gav would be in Berlin speaking at the Bitcoin meetup back then about Ethereum and so I went there and that's how I got to know the people and get more and more interested. So as we have mentioned before Ethereum, it really was all about Bitcoin. And so why did you guys become so captivated by Ethereum itself? To me, it was really that idea, like, how to re-architect the web. And I think Gav crystallized that very succinctly in the post that he wrote about Web3 and the idea of how to build a complete peer-to-peer stack of the web to fix a lot of the issues

that we see these days. So that was really what so much resonated with me, like being fed up with the fact that I had to rely on all these de facto institutions online. Yeah. Yeah, when I came to the space, I guess it was, you know, I saw Bitcoin before 2013, but I kind of dismissed it as being a bit of a wacky idea, this sort of currency that didn't really have any real sort of meaning or grounding in the world. and it was only later when I figured that actually there might be some legitimate utility in the technology and belying Bitcoin. When Ethereum came along, I could see it was an improvement, but I couldn't really understand what the real ramifications were.

Like, if you go back to the initial proposal that Battalic made in late 2013, it was really kind of a more programmable version of Bitcoin. But it wasn't, there wasn't anything, you know, fundamentally different in how it was, in how it was being pushed. It was still very much a purely a blockchain solution. The idea was that you had money. The idea was that you could attach rules to the money. But the sort of main distinction was that these rules could be true and complete. And that was all of the real communications about why is Bitcoin, why is Ethereum different to Bitcoin back then, revolved around this churing complete concept.

And just to explain, so because I'm not a technical person, like I have heard like a Turing Complete, but what is the significance of that? Essentially, it means that you can express any sort of set of rules or process or business logic that you want. So Turing completeness is merely a way of stating that a particular language can express basically any kind of. kind of concept that we can come up with. So it's basically the difference between Bitcoin being a calculator that can do some specific things and then a computer which can do like anything basically. That's right. So when we got to actually writing Ethereum, I remember having a bit of a eureka moment in January

2014 where I sort of understood that the, whereas Bitcoin was crypto currency and whereas some other projects out there were really trying to become. the crypto finance, you know, introducing financial contracts and so on, I understood that the real sort of tangible utility of Ethereum was to become a sort of crypto legal system, and that would have that much more of a ramification for society in general. And as time went on, it became increasingly clear that for Ethereum to really have, you know, utility or the utility it wanted to have, it really needed to pull together a number of other technologies. So it was only one piece of a wider puzzle. So the idea with Bitcoin, the idea of

blockchain in general is to reduce trust between participants, right? So when we go and do a transaction in society, typically, if we go down the shop and we buy some bananas and we pay with our credit card, it involves trusting a number of people that we don't really think about. We have to trust the credit card. We have to trust the guy who made the credit card machine. We have to trust the bank to process the transactions. We have to trust the receiving bank to process their end. We have to trust any, if there's any label on the banana that says, hey, this banana came from Brazil, then we have to trust whoever, you know, put the label on. We have to trust the trademark of the label. We have to trust the shopkeeper that is selling us bananas from, that

haven't gone off or they're unbad or that, you know, didn't have bad pesticides used of them. And the list goes on and on. We trust an awful lot of people in our daily life. And the idea of blockchain in general is to reduce this amount of trust that we have to, that we have to put ourselves under. But it only works so far. Blockchain is only part of the answer. Another part of the answer is to ensure that there's, you know, an effective communications mechanism behind the blockchain or to the side of the blockchain that allows us to get information that perhaps the blockchain references, but that we can't be sure is necessarily sort of true.

So the blockchain isn't very good at storing lots and lots of information, publishing information, or allowing people to communicate between each other. So there are additional technologies still in the cryptographic ecosystem, but that need to be created in order to allow blockchain to fulfill its sort of duty as the crypto-decentralized trustless legal system by basically allowing people to communicate in a way that they don't have to trust any additional sender. So if I want to talk to Yutter, for example, on email or on Facebook,

then I have to trust either Mark Zuckerberg or Sergey and Larry to not look at what I'm talking to her about or not change the messages or ensure that they get delivered on time or the rest of it. So it's really about trying to build blockchain in general for me, how this space for me is about trying to build a wholly new set of technologies that can replace the way that we do things, which rely on trust. I think I tend to think slightly differently about the trust aspect these days. It's to me more about making trust a lot more granular. So when I think of Google and Facebook, like I probably trust Google that they do have

really good operations and can do calculations really fast, but I don't trust them to actually care about my personal data and, like, being able to make. make like all these different things that also these companies do in a way like far more transparent and granular and accessible and traceable for me. That's what I hope we can deliver. Yeah. And something I've been thinking about is I don't know if it's even like that then we don't have to trust. It's that then instead we're trusting technology because we're still trusting something. But in your case where you know how the technology works, like maybe trust isn't the word that you would use. But in my case where I don't really know.

you know, like I can't check the code. So the main thing is that you can, even if you yourself can't check the code, you can find somebody, you can go out, you can put an advert up, you can contact your brother-in-law's mate, but you can find someone that you do trust to some degree and have them check the code for you, like someone who's an expert. Or you can pay multiple experts, none of whom have aligned interests and get them all to check the code in principle. That avenue is open to you in a system.

that's open and transparent. It's never open to you in a system that's closed and opaque, like the traditional corporate Silicon Valley style startup where, you know, these, the operations and the internal workings of the systems are closely guarded. Yeah, or on the flip side, also the big Wall Street institutions too. And actually, one other thing I wanted to ask, when you were describing that kind of vision that you had, and you were saying that there needed to be other entities in this decentralized legal system? What are some examples of other entities you're thinking of? So the main aspects of this kind of decentralized economy that I put forward, aside from the sort of crypto legal system were a means of publishing information in a

cryptographically secure manner. Would that be like an Oracle? That would be basically a bit like bit torrent, a bit like a means of like just pushing information off to the cloud, to the decentralized. But not necessarily verifying it. But not necessarily verifying it. But certainly being able to be sure that if you download some information that you believe that you have some digest of, so you've been given a sort of key for the information, being certain that the information that you've been given exactly corresponds to what it is that you asked for. And that's not something that we have. At the moment, if I want some information from, I don't know, a website or whatever, I can go to the website and I have a URL. So I have like someone who just says, here's a URL, go read this news article.

And I can put the URL into Google Chrome and it will go and download the news article. But I can't be sure that it's the same news article that you're read. Now, most of the time it will be. But if I live in a more repressive state that has a greater control on the media, then I don't get that guarantee quite so solidly. And what we have here is the ability to, if Yuta gives me a special key, what we call a hash or a digest, then any information that I get, I can actually check to make sure that this is, that the digest of this information, the digest of the news article exactly matches this much shorter hash or digest that Yuta gave me. So I can be sure that I'm reading the same content. Okay, so it's sort of like IPFS in a way. Exactly.

IPFS kind of came along and after BitToran but it kind of at least parts of IPS solve a very similar problem and then the other one is like a means of communication between two or more parties this could be seen as somewhere between

a sort of instant messenger so the ability to sort of just send a message and have it arrive in a timely fashion on someone else's computer or it can be seen as a sort of bulletin board where you can post a message and if people know the sort of topic that they're looking out that they want to look out for,

that your message sort of mentions, then they will get your message. That can be seen more like Twitter, right? So you use a hashtag and people who are following that hashtag can see your message. So something that's sufficiently general to be able to be used for all of these different kind of communication use cases, but is also, again, cryptographically secure. So you get certain guarantees. You get guarantees that if they don't know the topic, they won't be able to read message. I've got the message. They won't know it ever existed. If they, if I send a message and I say

it's from me, then whoever reads it knows that it's definitely me who wrote it. And again, you don't get these on traditional platforms because if you post a message on Facebook, it's Facebook that tell people it's you who posted it. And if, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's having a bad day and he really doesn't like you and he wants to make you, he wants to sort of make you post something that you didn't actually post, then he's perfectly able to go into his servers and insert a message that claims to be from you, but it actually isn't. Of course, he's not going to do that, but hackers might do that. And they could make your life kind of annoying if they wanted to.

Oh, yeah, yeah, which has happened a ton already, both in the non-cryptospase and the real, and the crypto space. So you guys had these ideas, which actually are similar, or at least converge. And you were both officially working with Ethereum, and then you left to start parody in late 2015. why, what was the motivation for that and what does parody do? So there were a number of reasons why, you know, why that sort of turn of events happen. But the sort of big underlying one was that Ethereum was a project that was at the time it had been launched. It was in some sense as far as version 1 went reaching a degree of maturity.

So it had been built. it was now sort of out in the open. There was no clear governance on how it should change. And there was no sort of unlike a normal startup, it was sort of based around a foundation that didn't again have a real, a clear roadmap or in terms of execution on how to actually move the thing forward. Because of course, Ethereum as a protocol sort of existed

and the foundation didn't have any direct control over that. So really we wanted to, or at least for me, I wanted to sort of get out and build, sort of carry on building, build more stuff. And I felt in some sense that the foundation wasn't the right place to be doing that. Partly, you know, as a foundation, it was sort of constrained under what it's able to do, both in terms of resources and in terms of, sort of missions and goals.

And so it felt a perfectly reasonable thing to sort of stay on good terms, but nonetheless work from within a private entity in the same ecosystem. So I didn't view it as leaving Ethereum. I viewed it as simply, you know, sort of setting up an entity with which we could really deliver as much value as possible in the ecosystem. Yeah, and you continued working on Ethereum. because you guys have created, well, not just the parity Ethereum client, but then also you've been working with other blockchains,

doing stuff for Zcash, and you also have some consumer-facing products. But now... Yeah, I think for me it was really... I mean, I was working partially also on some applications, really, like that wanted to use Ethereum in supply chain, a project called Providence. And for me, it was really also the realization that it wasn't, like, even though it was like the first version,

and it wasn't there yet for so you could actually use it. And I felt there's a lot that needs doing sort of on the lower level again. And how do you see the right way of doing that? And that's what we committed to basically building blockchain technology, making that accessible for people. Yeah, which is kind of the perfect segue to your next big things. You guys will be launching Pocod potentially later this year, which is a new protocol.

How did you have the idea? for Pocod and what problems are you attempting to solve with it? The idea of Pocod sort of goes back to, I think it was like 2014, early 2015. I wrote a small article called chain fibers. It's published, I think it's still on the Ethereum Wiki. And the idea was to put forward a means of scaling Ethereum. So what's now called sharding and sort of, an early version of what perhaps might be called Ethereum 2.0.

And it was something that certainly for the first couple, I don't know, year, year and a half of parity's existence, we wanted to stay very much in line with the direction of the Ethereum Foundation and the technology, the specifications and so on that they were putting out. But as time wore on, we kind of thought, well, you know, we're kind of sat here, not twiddling our thumbs, but, you know, We really want to be developing cooler stuff. We don't want to let the world move on too far without us. So let's start thinking about, you know, how, what kind of cool stuff can we do? So I went back to chain fibers and I thought, well, this is, A, this is a bit too similar to actually Ethereum 2.0. So I don't want to do it itself because, you know, I much prefer to just sort of stay in line with the Ethereum protocol itself. but maybe we can create something from it that fulfills a sort of different task, a different sort of niche or use case.

And that was when I sort of, I was like sat in a cafe, I think in San Francisco with one of our sort of founding developers, Marac. Just sort of chatting about, well, you know, if we were to do something that was, you know, sharded or parallelizable, what would be the simplest possible way we could push this forward? How could we deliver something as soon as possible? Because, you know, you don't want to take, you know, three, four, five years in order to get to this. So we took chain fibres, we basically removed all of the stuff. We made it as, the problem as simple as possible. I'll give you an example of how we made it simpler. In Ethereum, as it stands and in chain fibers, the idea is that individual smart contracts,

if they want to interact with another smart contract, so if they want to, like, spend some tokens, for example, then that message would happen synchronously, which means it happens immediately. So they get sort of all figured out at all at the same time. It's not that it happens seconds or minutes later. It's a lot harder to make things synchronous. Because if you have the way that you make a system scalable, is you split up, you divide and conquer. So you split up the problem, the smart contracts,

across lots and lots of different computers. and you have them all execute them at the same time. That allows you to execute that many more. It's almost like splitting a workload up between lots and lots of managers or whatever, factory floor workers. So they can each do the workload independently and come back and assemble the finished product much faster than if one person were just sort of doing everything themselves. But the problem is that if the workload involves several of these people sort of communicating with each other,

then it becomes harder because they're busy working off on their own corner, right? They can't talk to each other so easily. So what we did, we made it very simple and we said, right, well, actually they can't sort of talk to each other. As they're busy working off in their own corner, they can only talk to each other at the end of the day when all the messages sort of get rooted. So we got a very simple memo system, basically. And that simplifies things an awful lot. It made the protocol something that we believe we can develop, you know, in the next 18 to 24.

well, as was in the next 18 to 24 months. Now what we realized not long after that was, why are we bothering all these workers, when they're going off to their different corner and doing their jobs, why are we insisting that these workers have the same kind of job? Why are we insisting that there's only kind of one type of job, the job of executing Ethereum smart contracts? Why don't we make it so that these workers can execute any kind of a job?

So we can make them each have their individual specialities, a domain that they can work in. So one could be a doctor and another could be a lawyer and another could be a postman and another could be a bank, a cashier. And then they can all come together and kind of chat to each other at the end of the day with a memo system but most of the time they'd be off doing their

individual specific, domain specific activity workload. And that's really where Pocod came from. Pocod was this idea of saying, right, well, when we scale, we don't necessarily have to just scale a single protocol, a single kind of blockchain.

We can actually scale, but also have lots of different kinds of blockchains, all connected together, doing their each, doing their individual domain-specific speciality, but still able to sort of chat to each other and critically share in the same security guarantees. Now, of course, you can have many different blockchains, each doing their own thing. We already have that. We have Bitcoin doing currency, and we have Zcash doing sort of opaque crypto transaction. We have Ethereum doing smart contracts. There are many different blockchains out there, each fulfilling their independent domain-specific goals.

But the problem is that they each need to be secured individually. And their security works by basically for proof of work, blockchain like Bitcoin and Ethereum. It works by having people spend money on wasting lots of compute power, right? So they spend money on basically keeping a small corner of China very warm. And that's obviously not such a good idea for a number of reasons. The main one being that different individual blockchains would each have to add to the heat as they want to make themselves more secure because they can't share in the other blockchain security. If I launch a blockchain, I can't share in Bitcoin security unless I can persuade all of the Bitcoin miners to also mine my chain. And with proof of stake, the problem is the same.

So this is a new way of securing blockchains, but it still suffers from the same problem that you can't easily share the security. If you want to add a new proof-of-stake blockchain, you also have to find lots and lots of capital, lots of money, that will sit behind your blockchain and sort of insist that it's valid as they create new blocks and process more transactions.

And really what Pocodot, the sort of nice, really important new thing about Pocod is that it does allow these lots of different blockchain, but it allows them to share in the security. So they can each, by creating more utility, drawing more capital to the system, they each gain additional security. So it sounds to me like there's kind of three main things

you're trying to solve, scalability, interoperability, and then security, which is basically like reducing startup costs, you know, the way that like Dropbox can do that now, whereas like back in the day, startups would have to spend a third.

own servers and stuff like that. And just for listeners, kind of like the technical ways this happens and tell me if I get any of this wrong, but there's the relay chain where that's where like the communication at the end of the day happens. And then the parochains are like the doctor, the lawyer, the banker that you talked about. And then bridges are where you take the already existing blockchains that are out there and like make it so that they can interoperate in this system. Is that correct? Yeah, that's right. Okay. So something when I was like thinking about this, I was a little bit like, okay, so how do the chains all talk to each other? Because as far as I understand, I think like you can be in an Ethereum smart contract and call a Tazos contract or you can be like in

Ethereum and then make a Zcatch transaction happen. But it does, does that mean that you guys have to write instructions for every possible permutation of cross-chain communication? Or is there some way of doing it without like literally how you know because it just seems like that would be a lot of work for every time a new perching gets added like you'd have to write 50 you know different uh instructions for how to talk to all the other pair chains yeah i mean it's um much of the utility of polka dot is really providing um this housing for new blockchains that said polka dot is by facilitating what we might say is very sophisticated logic, much more so than a typical smart contract. We do allow bridges that essentially have to be light clients, right?

So they have to be these quite really quite complex pieces of logic that can synchronize to external chains, be it like Tesos or Ethereum or Zcash or whatever. We allow these light clients to sit actually inside our consensus protocols inside Pocodon, inside as one of the power chains. But I don't want to, the point of Pocod isn't really to have, be a lot of bridges. We sort of envision a few bridges,

but we don't envision like, you know, hundreds of bridges in order to connect all of the blockchains. That's, Pocod will be much more valuable as a, as a sort of test bed, as a, as an execution round

for many individual sort of domain-specific project to bring their own logic and actually execute the logic within Pocodot rather than having separate blockchains and sort of having this bridge. Now, for bridges, for bridging sort of existing systems, the bridge component itself would be the go between the sort of translator, if you like, between what will likely be standard messages within Pocod, messages that say, hey, you know, I've burned five Bitcoin tokens, you need to mint five Bitcoin tokens on. your side in order to ensure that all of the Bitcoin tokens in the system stay, the total number

stays the same. Those kinds of messages would be interpreted by the bridge and the bridge would do things like unlocking Bitcoin on the Bitcoin chain or transferring Bitcoin that was previously sort of under the permission of the Pocodot validators to wherever it was, that the para chain that sort of supposedly holds this Bitcoin wanted it to go. So in essence, these messages are being translated by the bridge authorities. So they're not being, it's not that Bitcoin has to learn what these messages are. But it's also not that the paratrochains have to sort of figure out first, hey, is it going to Bitcoin? Then we need to send this or is it going to Ethereum. Then we need to send that. The messages, realistically, there will be probably just one or two relatively

small, like thin standards for these kinds of messages. They don't need to be very complicated because Pocodot guarantees things like that the message will be delivered. It will be delivered once and it will be delivered where it needs to go. So you get very, very strong, economically strong guarantees on these messages, which means the messages just need to be kind of like mint five bitcoins, because I burnt five bitcoins on my side. Beyond that, the bridges, so new parochains will likely just build these standards into them, but bridges will have to translate between, from the standards that Pocod has,

sort of Pocodot native messaging into the, into some action that can be concretely taken on the, on the sort of foreign blockchain like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Okay. But the pair of chains, it sounds like, even just from building them, there will be some, like, standard way that they'll communicate. There'll be one or two standardized messages, I'm sure, in the same way that Ethereum, shortly after it launched, we standardized the EOC20 format for token contracts. Okay.

So they'll be kind of similar, similar efforts within Pocod. And then also, if security is one of the features they are offering, why is it only 50 to 100 validators? Like, is that decentralized and secure enough? So that won't be, that's more as a launch thing. The fact, there won't be very many parochains at launch. It takes time for the ecosystem to build up. And therefore, there's not really any great need to have a thousand validators on day one. But certainly once the system is fully up to speed,

were designing it to have off the order of a thousand validators. Will that slow down the block time or the communication or anything like that? No, the nice thing is that we have, we've built a special sort of new protocol hybrid, Babe and Grandpa, that means that it won't slow down. It's actually really clever in how it manages. It basically has adaptive finality. So you'll hear some talk of, probabilistic finality and of instant finality.

So probabilistic finality is basically non-finality. So Bitcoin and Ethereum and examples of these. This is where as new transactions are added, as new blocks are added to the chain, you can never be absolutely certain that those transactions will stay there indefinitely. There's always a small chance that the chain will be reverted, and that instead of those transactions, other mutually exclusive transactions will be, be processed. And this is what we call double spending. Now, the newer thing, the sort of thing that a lot of projects that are basing their consensus on an old algorithm called PBFT, practical

Byzantine fault tolerance, these projects are claiming instant finality. And what they mean by that is that as soon as the block is produced, so as soon as the transactions are sort of laid out there and published, then there is a guarantee, an economic guarantee, so you can be sure up to that someone will have to lose a million dollars or something, that these transactions won't be reverted, that the block will stay there forever, add infinitum, that they will never be sort of move back and then some other transactions placed in its stead. Now, the problem with instant finality is that you don't get any, by linking block production, so the creation of this block and the transactions in it, and finalization, what you're doing is you're saying, right, all of the

parties that are needed for finalization, and it's quite a complex algorithm. So you need, suppose you have a thousand validators, well, you need two thirds of these validators, so about 680 or whatever, to come back and sort of communicate all with each other, so they have to send a message to each of the other 680 validators and get a response, right, and then send another message again. This has to happen before the block can be even published, right? So rather than in typical systems like Bitcoin, for example, where to mine a block, you really just solve a little numerical problem, rather difficult one as it happens, but still a very small problem that can easily be recognized.

And then you just publish it, that's it, done. There's nothing more than that. in these instant finality systems, it's not actually very instant, right? It takes quite a long time for all of this protocol to sort of get itself, get its head together and actually make its mind up which block is going to be next. Because you're tying together finality, which is a much harder thing to do than production, which is very easy. So what we've done with our hybrid algorithm is split off these two things.

So production is still as fast as it would be on Ethereum or Bitcoin. And it's very easy, simple thing. You just recognize that someone was the right person to create the block at this time, and it's done. And then finality follows it. And if network conditions are good, then it follows it really quickly. It follows it about as quickly as even in instant finalization, instant finality. But if network conditions are not so good, where instant finality would actually just never, ever produce anything, it will just sort of lag behind a bit more, right?

So there will be an extra, let's say, 10 or 50 blocks that are sort of almost certainly final, but not definitely, definitely final. And that if you're using it for like low amounts of transactions, like, sorry, low value transactions, like you're buying a cup of coffee, it really doesn't matter and you just trust it. But if you're using it to transfer, you know, $100 million and you want to make sure you've got the hundred million dollars before you let go of the brief, the suitcase of cash. the guy goes off on his merry way, then you would wait for the 50 or whatever blocks before you get guaranteed finality. So what this allows us to do is to increase the number of validators so we can decentralise further. And that's very much opposed to the fast finality route or so-called instant finality route, where you have to keep the number of validators low because you can't produce even blocks without having all of these guys, basically talk to each other quite a bit.

and that can be problematic under certain circumstances if you're talking that there's going to be thousands of validators. So Ethereum 2, for example, are targeting around, I mean, vaguely the same sort of numbers, 1 to 10,000 validators.

So we decentralize further in Pocod, though, by having a notion of nominators. And nominators allow us to decentralize if not the block, if not the chain's underlying computational maintenance, most people who are in the servers, at least the funding of the validators.

So nominators can nominate a number of validators to sort of act on their behalf, right? So they have some funds, they have some capital behind them, the nominators, and they, in some sense, kind of lend it to the validators for the purposes of getting block rewards that the validators would take. And we've got all sorts of economic sort of incentivizations to ensure that, you know, it becomes fair and there's market mechanisms, so that overly, overly, Popular validators don't take, you know, over-do amounts of funds that certain other systems suffer from. Yes, which is super important for security. All right. So we're going to discuss governance and substrate after the break, but first a quick word from our fabulous sponsors. Betmoot activated.

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Back to my conversation with Gavin Wood and Yota Steiner of Parody. How does governance work on Pocod? Well, we haven't finalized the governance protocol for Pocod yet. So everything that I say here is subject to the usual. It needs to be audited. Our research team needs to sort of say that they're happy with it. But I can certainly talk about what we have so far. So in Pocodot, in the current proof of concept, we have a, if you like, kind of bicameral system in some sense.

On the one hand, we have the legislature, which is the group of people or group of accounts, whatever, economic entities, that can sort of pass new laws, so to speak, which in the context of Pocodot means having this kind of super user administrative privilege. to alter the code of the chain and potentially also alter storage aspects of the state of the chain. Now, altering the code of the chain might mean fixing bugs. It might mean rolling out upgrades. It might mean correcting

for previous, for the problematic actions of previous bugs. Now, I mentioned there were two houses. So the other one is kind of this notion of the council. So the council can be viewed upon as an executive body within Pocod.

and what the council, the council gets a few sort of bonus actions that it can take. So the council can put forward proposals for the legislature to vote on. So in some sense, it's a little bit like the UK's government where the parliament has the, which is a house of around 650, or the House of Commons at least, has about 650 people in it. and they can pass new laws through a majority vote. And then the government or the current sort of executive, which is around 100 to 150 of these people, are the ones that can sort of propose by and large.

They're the ones who can control the timeline that particular proposals for votes happen. There's a few interesting tweaks, though, that we've made. So while the legislature is, I mentioned that it was sort of, a large body, referendum. So it's a referendum of token holders. So everyone who holds dot tokens on the Pocodot system would in principle be able to vote on measures. And their votes are weighted according to the number of dot tokens that they hold. But they are also weighted according to a second thing, which is the period by which they are happy to hold their dot tokens, to hoddle their dot tokens, right, to not sell, to not move them elsewhere. So as,

holders are more committed to the platform, so they give up the optionality of removing themselves from the platform, they become, they get a greater amount of voting power. Furthermore, there's another interesting sort of tweak that we've made to the referendum system, which is that there's a period between the end of the vote and the enactment of that vote. So that whatever the proposal, assuming it passes, of course, whatever the proposal was was proposing, there is a period between deciding that it will be put, that it will be enacted and actually enacting it. It's about two weeks. During this period, those who voted in approval of it are not allowed to move their tokens at all, right? So there's a minimum kind of lock period of

this two weeks before it's enacted. And also during the two weeks, those who voted against it and those who didn't vote at all are able to move their tokens. They're able to sort of say, well, you know, we think this is a terrible, terrible decision for the system, and we're going to move everything that we have out of the system. We're going to sell up. We're going to go potentially. We're going to hard fork.

Who knows? And this is meant as a means of mitigating things like vote buying. Since we are coin holder oriented, everything in Pocod is decided ultimately by the set of coin vote. voters weighted according to their commitment to the platform, we want to ensure that those holders, that basically third parties can't come in, buy a bunch of, loan out a bunch of tokens, throw a particular proposal and then exit without paying any costs. We want to ensure that no one is going to want to loan these guys any tokens for the purpose of sort of destroying the system

through a bad proposal. And also, why did you guys decide on like this kind of, you know, more activist and basically on-chain governance, as we know this was something where, like, I know the Ethereum system actually decided, okay, we're going to do off-chain. Like, why did you decide to go to this direction? So I view governance as a, I view governance as a problem of trust. So in much the same way that Bitcoin solved the trust of currency, of being able to send tokens without having to trust banks or a central coin issuer. In the same way, Ethereum is trying to solve the trust of law, right, of counterparty risk and so on. I view governance as another one of those issues.

It's a trust of a process, right? It's the trust of that whoever is, has the authority or whoever, whichever assembled actors have the collective authority to alter a system. to do things that the system, you know, wasn't in some sense designed to do. It's a problem of trusting that they won't act in a way that is against your wishes without giving you a chance to kind of exit or at least have some sort of say proportional to what your expectations would be. So it's about making open and transparent the process for how the system will change over time.

Now off-chain governance isn't really a thing. Off-chain governance is really just saying, well, we don't want to have very transparent processes. We don't want to have a means of ensuring that the rights and obligations of the various actors in the system are clear. What we want to do is kind of just have everything be quite vague. And then the current polity as it stands, the current people who are essentially in charge and hold the cards and have the power, we believe that that system should just keep going. So I view off-chain governance really as a we don't want to tackle the problem because we're quite happy with the problem being there.

I see on-chain governance as a means of solving the issue of transparency and openness in exactly the same way that smart contracts solve the transparency and openness of counterparty risk and all the rest of it, and in the exact same way that Bitcoin solves the transparency and openness of currency. and how sending value across the internet. The only question in my mind is, are we clever enough in order to be able to design these rules, these hard rules by which a system like Ethereum or Pocod or whatever else

should be governed on day one? I have no doubt that we will solve it over time. We experiment, we find out what works. But the question is whether we can sort of get something that more or less works, or at least works as well on day one. And that's really the challenge for us now. So one thing I was wondering was, like, if I'm a developer, when will it make more sense for me to build an idea as a DAP on Ethereum versus as a parochain on Pocod?

So, I mean, one thing, that's why we hear today, I guess, one thing we're putting out very soon as substrate, that framework that we've been developing to make it easy to building blockchains. It's used in Pocod. Which is, I think, the best way of getting into it and experimenting what you can do with it. You can also use it without tying into the Pocodot framework, and some people are doing that as well. But it's really like our learning from having built a bunch of blockchains and making that easy to come up with your own ideas and use the networking stack and whatnot without having to build it yourself. So I think now is actually a pretty good moment of starting to experiment with it,

even though it's still a bit uncertain when exactly the launch is going to be. Yeah, so the difference between smart contracts and building your own sort of DAP chain, so Pocodop para chains are really designed to be fully fledged blockchains, which means they do one very particular domain-specific thing, and they do it well. They don't suffer from a lot of the, restrictions that you would have on a smart contract system. So there's a notion and we were, you know, during my time at Ethereum, we were happy to sort of have this notion sort of be, be trumpeted from the rooftops, that a smart contract system

can do anything. You can do anything in smart contracts. It's true and complete. You can do absolutely anything you want. It's not true, really. While it is churring complete, it has a very, very particular limitation. and, you know, I was, I did mention this at the time, so I don't, I don't consider myself one of the worst offenders. But the limitation is gas, right?

There is this notion of computational resources that your smart contract can never not respect, right? If it runs out of gas, then it stops and everything gets reverted, right? So when you write smart contracts, you have to be very, very careful that they don't use more gas than they're allowed. And this is necessarily the case. smart contract systems are a smart contract blockchain like Ethereum is heavily, heavily constrains its users, heavily constrains the logic that can operate on it by having this notion of gas. The gas becomes an economy in and of itself. So users of smart contracts don't pay the operators of smart contracts. So if I publish a smart contract, I don't get, well, I don't automatically get paid for when a user uses it.

Rather, users of smart contracts pay Ethereum miners, and the Ethereum miners are the ones that take that profit. What this means is that as a DAP, there are three people to the party when you would really prefer there just be two, right? You want yourself and your users. But Ethereum forces you to have the Ethereum miners to the party as well, right? And they get a cut of anything that you and your users are doing. We designed it in this way because we wanted the Ethereum token to be valuable, and this is one of the ways that you make it valuable. But the problem is that for DAPs, it often makes it just way too expensive to do anything because you're forcing your users to pay for every single transaction they make with the smart contract. And most of the time, not only will they have to pay the Ethereum miners, but they'll also have to pay you for whatever services that your smart contract offers as well.

So everything just becomes way more expensive, partly because you have to pay the existing Ethereum. infrastructure to keep doing its job. Now, if all you're doing is transferring money, like on Bitcoin, then, you know, hey, whatever, it's just a sort of small percentage. We don't really mind because compared to the existing use case, that percentage would be way higher, so it looks good. But when you're talking about smart contracts and there isn't, you're not necessarily transferring money.

You're like, I don't know, messing around with crypto kitties or something. Suddenly these transaction fees, they don't look so, so nice, especially when you're trying to get it into the hands of people that are used to having living. literally everything for free because they're using Zuckerberg or Sir Gay-Brin, Larry Page's sort of offerings. So what we do in Pocodot, what Pocodot facilitates, very much unlike smart contracts, is to return it back to a two-actor economy again. You've got your users and you've got yourself, right? So when you put forward a para-chain, a DAP chain or whatever, then you don't have to care about the Pocodot miners.

They do their job, but they don't take any cut of your economy. Your economy stays your economy. until you want to communicate with other parochains. And then we can talk about, you know, what there might be fees associated. Because then the Pocodot guys are actually doing some job for you. They're relaying your messages. But as long as you sort of stay within yourself, then you don't pay any extra. There's no extra tax.

So the main distinctions between smart contracts and parochains are really this notion that you can control your internal economy that much better. You don't have to sort of leak funds. out to the sort of system for the purpose of securing your logic. That happens anyway that you get that for free. Now, the distinction, of course, is the sort of flip side of the coin is you have to pay for one of these parochains slots up front. You pay through depositing dots. You get them back at the end of it, but in some sense there's opportunity costs, right? You can't sell them and stick the money in a high interest account. You have to actually stick them in the system and lock them there

until your para chain's done. So it's really offering a very different economic proposal. And that means that some systems, some daps will be more than happy to stick with the smart contract system. Those daps are the ones where, you know, it's just a guy, they want to push out some interesting logic, and they want users to basically pay for themselves. They just want to fire and forget, there's some logic, we're done.

We're out of here. You use it as you want. Whereas the daps that really, want to optimize everything, they want to build a real sort of solution, and they want to continue interacting with their users and generate a sort of internal economy. For them, para chains are a more interesting proposal because they will be happy to put forward the initial capital on the basis that they will be able to have full control over the economics with their users. I think that notion of economy also indicates like it's not going to be just as simple

that does this, like that just needs some simple logic on Jane, but rather, like more like the domain specific or the bankers or like so it's not as adapt chain like we won't see at least until we have like hierarchical chains in and pocketout we won't see like one app one chain one parachain but rather a protocol that develops for example oh that's interesting so there will be like parachines and then there will be smart contracts within each of those yeah so that's right there'll be some parochains that that you know will be domain specific but the domain will be hosting smart contracts there'll be other paratians chains perhaps ones that just host assets. So there's just an assets paratrochain. And you can put any

assets that you want on there and sort of shift them around and stuff. But they don't deal with any additional logic. If you want additional logic, you move the assets somewhere else. If you think of the current crypto economy, I guess, like there could be a Zcash like chain, a Bitcoin like chain, a smart contract like chain. So that's sort of what we're going to see initially rather than an app specific chain until the apps become really big and it then makes sense for them to like try to have their own parochane slot because then the overhead becomes too big. Okay. Yeah. Well, this was my next question. Like what the vision of many, or future vision of many parochains looks like. Is it just what you described or is there

anything else to it? I mean, that's the next couple years until the system becomes more hierarchical. Like, I mean, the idea is in the future there will be like a relay chain of relay chains, like scaling it out. And then it becomes much, I mean, also as more libraries develop, like, as it becomes easier to also be a parrot chain, it's probably going to look more granular, more sort of depth-specific, but in the near term, it's more domain-specific,

what we're going to see. All right. And you mentioned substrate, which you guys have built, and it's sort of like developer tools, which make it easier for people to build things on Pocod, as far as I understand. So what are some of the different customizable features

that people can implement using substrate? So you could use it just as a tool for building your own completely new blockchain, completely independent of Pocod, your own consensus, whatever that might be, or you use a bit more. Oh, okay. So I thought it was just for Pocod, but it's for any. No, it's for anything. So that's also why we're doing this event now, like to make people more aware that this is like substrate and Pocodot are two different things in that sense.

I mean, most people who will develop a parochain would probably use substrate, but even that, are not obliged to do that. They could also become a parochain without using substrate. But it is a helpful tool in both directions. So we're actually building Pocodot with substrate. So not only will substrate be used for creating parochains on Pocod, but the relay chain itself is a substrate chain. And so this allows us to kind of let the snake eat its tail and we circle back

and make the relay chain be itself a parochain. and we could sort of make it all hierarchical and recursive. Yeah, I heard you say, I don't remember where this was that it's sort of like you just like food waste. And as you were building it, you wanted to like make sure, you know, the code, you know, that the work kind of like accomplish more, which I totally understand. That was like, I'm so with get on this concept. So one other thing that's really cool about it is that I guess it enables people to then

upgrade their networks without hard forks. So what are some examples of things you can change using substrate? without a hard fork that, like now you would need a hard fork to accomplish? Well, so there's an interesting, basically you can do anything. The only thing that you can't touch is the sort of core underlying consensus mechanism. So if we, most of the most chains I expect will use this kind of hybrid babe and grandpa that I mentioned earlier. But you can change things like the staking algorithm. So you can say, right, well, we want to change it from proof of authority to proof of stake.

no problem. Suppose you you initially have a Bitcoin chain so you have like this what we call unspent transaction output UTXO chain. This is a very basic kind of currency chain, the initial use case of blockchain. Suppose you want to add smart contracts to it. Sure. Upgrade can do that.

Suppose you want to add governance to it. Sure. Upgrade can do that. Suppose you want to suppose you want to take a smart contract chain and you want to add operations that allow you to do zero knowledge proofs on your smart contracts, sure, can do that.

Suppose you want to take a polka dot relay chain and suppose we the zero knowledge guys, the Starks or the Snarks guys make it so that we can interpret parrata, we can guarantee that parachains are being correctly operated

not through actually executing them, which is what we do now. So we have all the validators execute some of the parachines. but rather by providing a short proof that they were executed correctly. And this is what some of the latest research on the ZK Stark stuff is looking sort of towards. And what Ethereum 2 is also trying to sort of research a bit as well. So suppose we can do that.

Sure, we can upgrade that. No hard for it required. So basically we can do anything. We can change the entire nature of a blockchain. And we can do so just with a single transaction. So something else that I want to bring up just because this is out there is that the community seems to perceive that PogaDot and Ethereum 2.0 will be competitive. And even your employee, Afri Shodun, did write a tweet that framed it in that way, that they are competitive. So do you agree with that?

No. Afri is an outspoken guy. He likes to, he says what's on his mind. He also likes to be content. And he does enjoy the occasional argument. It must be said. So, no, I mean, Afri speaks for himself, and we have a general sort of rule at parity that, you know, don't say anything stupid, but, you know, we're also not going to require that you tow the company line, Euro and people, you know, we trust you're going to be sensible. But no, it's not a, it's not a sentiment we agree with at all. I mean, I was chatting to Vitalik last week in Singapore. And it, you know, it was pretty clear that we agree on most things regarding Pokemon Ethereum 2. they're different systems really designed and geared for different things with different development timelines and different ways of solving a problem.

So they are very much different things. Now, of course, there's some, in some sense, every project that has a token in the space is competing with these, right? There's a leaderboard of tokens, right? There's market caps and you know, you want yours to go near the top. So of course there is a very sort of base level amount of competition. We see more as competition, at least with the projects that don't try and keep everything to themselves. We see that competition as being healthy and as having only partly competition and partly cooperation. And as we sort of mentioned in the Singapore chat, we're working on quite similar things, zero knowledge proofs being one of them, some of the crypto being another.

And it's, you know, because we're both projects that develop in an entirely open fashion, it's perfectly reasonable that as much as we're in competition, we're in cooperation, because we're going to, you know, use each other's ideas in pushing forward the technology in general. Yeah. I mean, looking at it, just on a technical perspective, they don't seem obviously competitive. However, it does look like because Pocod operates kind of at a lower level that it could make Ethereum. sort of less important, which is maybe, you know, I think that's where some of the fear comes from. But I guess we've seen like similar thinking going on when you see him came along and people were like, oh, this is more general.

Like, will this make Bitcoin obsolete? But I feel like, yeah, no, Bitcoin is still. Yeah. More or less three and a lot is actually Bitcoin's position. Yeah, but one other thing that I want to ask about was, what is Dot Therium and who's behind it? Are you guys really like that? We don't know.

You don't know? No. I saw a theory on Twitter that it was offering. But you don't, you don't know? I'm not told of anything to do with it. It's, I'm kind of interested to see what it is myself. All right.

But yeah, if you find out, let me know, please. Okay. Yeah, I haven't really looked into it, but I thought you guys would know because, you know, dots and whatever. Anyway, let's talk about the frozen funds. There is potentially a way to access them in the future. What is your best argument for why that should have happened? I think the biggest context.

intention and general around this is to my mind, like around how mature do people actually perceive the technology is? And like some people think, like, oh, we've come to a state where we shouldn't change anything anymore because people are relying on like how it's working and and or people on the other side saying, look, and I think we're more on that side. Like, look, it's still immature technology. Like they're going to be bugs. We need, we need methods and tools how to fix them. And if we don't, like, that's not a good argument for people to come along and use the technology. So that's why I'm still confident or, like, hopeful that we will find some way, especially, like, with the recent hard fork that included the create tools, or you could think of it

as if something like this had existed back then, then the likelihood of the bug slipping into the code would have been much lower or, like, there would have been a way of re-creation. it and whatnot. So I think people are starting to appreciate that the way how the virtual machine works and the technology worked at the time didn't provide us with the tools for creating smart contracts in a safe way. And so as we develop these and include them, like, we should also fix the bugs that wouldn't have existed if we had had the tools at the time. Yeah, I think one of the arguments that I saw against reinstating the funds is that that could lead to a chain split, which, you know, obviously that has happened for, Theorem Classic and

Ethereum, which actually didn't have a huge effect on Ethereum. But they were saying that, well, now, if that were to happen, then there would be doubles of all the ERC20 tokens and the CryptoKitties and all the games and DAPs would have like two worlds. And obviously, like for something like Die, where, you know, that's kind of a now a big chunk of the Ethereum ecosystem, that that could be destabilizing there. And, you know, that's supposed to be pegged to the dollar and anyway. So is there any way to recover the funds without putting all that at risk? I mean, I wouldn't think of it as putting every, I mean, again, like, it's about like, how much do you care about like what's going to be on the platform and like how people could use

it in the future, like with finding a solution that doesn't, that sounds sensible for people. So, yeah. And I think like, I mean, the discussions we're seeing that there is, there is consensus that in, like, in principle, people. feel like the ownership of tokens should be respected, and that's a principle that should be leading the debate. Yeah, I mean, as you mentioned, Ethereum Classic sort of went its own way. And, you know, it wasn't that Ethereum was empty at the time. There were plenty of smart contracts, plenty of ongoing projects. Yeah, it was fine. People chose one or the other, and the projects that, you know, if they chose Ethereum, then the project's deployments on Ethereum Classic just sort of decayed and crumbled

and everyone forgot about them. So I don't really see that as a particularly salient argument against doing anything. I think if there were chain splits can happen for all sorts of reasons. And ultimately if the right decision is to propose, you know, some fork in one direction or another, that wouldn't, that in and of itself wouldn't stop. I don't think it should stop anyone. But I think with, so this notion of chain immutability, right, is a bit of a, I think it's a bit of a fallacy. I think chain immutability more or less goes out of the window as soon as you accept that chains can upgrade them, that chains should be able to be upgraded.

and in some sense by placing this difficulty bomb, by basically saying that the chain needs to be upgraded, or it will just stop, we've already acknowledged that the blockchain must be mutable, right? There must be hard forks because otherwise it has a life expectancy of like six months or a year, whatever it is now. So something has to change. We've already baked that into the protocol.

The protocol must upgrade. The protocol must change. The protocol must be mutable. So the only real question is, well, does, by mutating it, do we change people's expectations more or less? So is the expectation that the chain, that these funds should be spendable or they should not be spendable? Who expected them to be spendable and who expected them not to be spendable? What were those, you know, when this contract went down, what were the, expectations that Ethereum would do to it. Now, you can argue this one of two ways. You can take

the to the sort of absolutist thing. Well, I expect Ethereum to exactly interpret the code. And if the code has bugs, then it should interpret those bugs correctly. Or you can take the, I think, the much more pragmatist, reasonable sort of point of view, which is that, well, the contract was clearly meant to be a wallet, and it was clearly meant to have the funds in it be spendable by these set of people that are named in the wallet. Therefore, the expectations that Ethereum should, in principle, an immutable Ethereum should uphold, are that the wallet should be spentable, the funds should be spendable in it. So I think you can't really, I think an absolutist point of view falls flat as soon as you say,

well, the chain must be upgraded. And at that point, you just have to go to what are the expectations? and I think reasonable people coming to the system would expect that in this wallet the fun should be spendable. And I mean, it's like all the debates that came also afterwards. I mean, so yeah, what you're saying is basically one camp is, oh, you should only do technical upgrades, basically. But what's a technical upgrade really? Like no, there are no, like every upgrade or every change that you do has like some aspect of, oh, there's, you give some preference to someone and maybe some preference to somebody else.

And you need to always make, like, it's never just a technical, technical decision that you make. And finding a way of integrating those decisions is, I think, key. Otherwise, everything will stall. Yeah, it's political in some sense. Yeah. And actually, to go back to Gav's point, this just reminds me, like, right after the Dow, nobody could, well, or the Dow incident, I'll just call it, nobody could figure out whether or not to actually call it a hack. Because the code allowed them to do, you know, it was just like.

this funny thing where people started to use that word and that other people were like, well, technically, you know, because it wasn't like they broke in anything and they just like did what the concert allowed them to do. All right. Well, we've gone way over time, but this has been a fabulous conversation. Where can people learn more about you, parody, poca dot, and substrate? Come to our website, follow the Twitter accounts. And what's the URL? Parity.com. And the Twitter is Parity Tech. Okay. Great.

All right. Well, thanks so much for coming on Unchained. Thanks, I'm used, Laura. Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Gavin and Yota and Parity and Pogodot and Substrate, check out the show notes inside your podcast player. If you are not yet signed up for my email newsletter, go to Unchainedpodcast.com right now to get my thoughts on the top crypto stories of the week.

Be sure to check out our new channel on YouTube. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Rayling Gallupali for actual recording Jenny Josephson, Daniel Ness, and Rich Struffolino. Thanks for listening.