[Privacy&DID Speech] with #GavinWood at #koreablockchainweek2019

[Music] hello this is probably one of the least formatted presentations of this conference apologies if you like big picture e things upon the screen above me you're not going to get it here this is actually two little presentations so you get twice as much free money first one is about two words that I I think we see a lot in this ecosystem that I want to explore a little with you in the hope that in the future we'll see clearer usage of these terms I think they're very important I was reading a website yesterday and it's a website of a prominent project that launched recently it's called let's not name names anyway on the website it had a sentence bitcoin is the most secure and trusted blockchain in the world today it peaked my ears why because it used Bitcoin in the same so in the same sentence as trusted and I want to I want to I want to make sure that we understand the same thing with this term so what's trust and what's truth if you look at MIT in the dictionaries trust is really a way of describing a relationship between people or between people people organizations synonyms include faith and belief truth on the other hand is quite different truth is about something objective and universal something that if we explain to somebody somebody rational that they will accept you know you talk about things like scientific truths synonyms like facts so they're quite different things now I think they're actually comparable in many regards now you know Trust is sort of this belief that somebody else or some other set of people are basically going to act in a way that we expect generally benevolently generally the way that we expect them to when we trust them is is to act in our interests or at least not to not against our interests truth on the other hand is sort of taking matters into your own hands right with truth it's all about interacting with the world directly either by observing the world trying to gather evidence verification rationale you know use rationale rationality critical rationalism in order to work out what's really there in some sense you can like see both of these as ways of getting things done opposite ways of getting things done and crypto economics or economics in general really you're just trying to like get rid of trust trying to avoid having to trust that people will work in some particular stated way and rather generate principles models and axioms in order to work out on the wider scale how how people will sort of when clumped together what will be the emergent effect of though of whatever sort of system it is that they're brought together in in some sense it's trying to create systems created of sort of individuals that we don't really kind of know or understand particularly well on an individual level but create systems such that it doesn't matter that we don't actually need to trust them because we have a system that sort of guarantees certain outcomes so when we talk about trust minimization and trustless Ness or trust freedom it's what we're talking about systems that work correctly regardless of the need to trust regardless of whether this but any specific individual that's forming part of the system or generally up until some minority of individuals whether or not they act benevolently or indeed maliciously or Byzantine and the reason that we can be confident is because we draw upon you know these accepted principles and rules and on the other hand trust bound or trusted is the opposite its systems that don't work that don't that don't proceed correctly unless everyone roughly speaking everyone actually behaves as we expect in some benevolent manner often times and we talked about trusted systems we don't get much choice over which systems or which components of the system we are allowed to trust by and large we don't really want to trust things that we don't know a lot of times things are forced upon us governance governments for a start institutions large corporations Facebook and oftentimes there is no sort of direct point of contact with these things that we track with that we are being essentially forced or at least coerced to trust there's very little way of actually verifying that they're doing the job that they're stating that they are doing and if they do misbehave I don't know if anyone's ever sort of had an attempt to get paypal to do something to return money or generally fix it it but it's it's very difficult bordering on impossible because their misbehavior doesn't need to be addressed they don't feel the need to address it they're in such a position of control now what does trustworthy mean and this is the one that I've sort of I'm still grappling with I'm not quite sure why the trustworthy means well we have a really good rational reason to trust somebody and therefore it's not really trust because you know there is evidence there is something objective and universal it's more like truth or whether it's just something that we say to ourselves to make ourselves feel better about having to trust somebody I'm not sure which which it is I will say that no system is truly trust free yeah we can get close as we draw upon more evidence from rationality and etc etc we can get close to trust freedom you might argue that some of the most basic elements of mathematics are sort of trust free because you can prove them perhaps but by and large all systems require us to trust something or someone - some at least small degree Bitcoin for example unless you are willing to go through every line of code and I've not just Bitcoin but also all of the various compilers and peripheral bits unless you're willing to go through crypto read all the various papers on crypto and generally educate yourself to the point that would require probably I don't know there's probably only like a dozen people in the world that could possibly claim to have an end-to-end 100% truly trust to minimize the knowledge of Bitcoin unless you're willing to do that then you cannot claim Bitcoin is even approach interest free but similarly no system is like 100 percent respond either though I think religion comes pretty close to that religion sort of basing itself on faith basing itself on trust largely blind trust probably you know is pretty close you can draw a line between the two religion I think reasonably on one end math science on the other end crypto maybe spanning somewhere between the middle and towards the truth and depending precisely on its crypto economic foundations I think it's worth being aware of these two terms and worth really as practitioners in this space understanding whether a particular technology is trusted and should contain trust in its description or in fact truthful and inverted quotes in that it's based on all accepted principles and models that mean you don't have to trust very many people that make this particular system happen next little talk and it's going to be a quick one is on governance so governance is a is a bit of a sort of hot topic it's been something that's been developed been developing for the last year or two in Bop chain and it's one of the things that polkadot is really sort of trying to push forward that's the project I work on in case you don't know and I just want to talk about why I'm bothering to work on governance it's still like something that isn't what particularly heavily I don't know I don't see a hundred percent support for it so here's my pitch to you firstly evolvability of a platform platforms have to evolve products have to evolve if you look today if you buy I don't know a pair of headphones I bought a pair of headphones couple years ago I I very quickly installed the app the app tells me you've got to upgrade your headphones my headphones are just going to get a noise reduction like active noise cancellation they put a microphone in they didn't bother doing the software for it the software gets delivered a year later products these days upgrade software products obviously tend to upgrade right it's continuous like hey do you want to install this update well blockchain is a software product it really needs to look great the problem with blockchain is it's decentralized how do you decide what the upgrade is how to decide when the upgrade should happen it's all very well saying right well version one to version two let's do an upgrade but you actually have to work out what version two should be before you can actually make the upgrade some blockchain systems particularly the sort of very heavily widely adopted ones find it very difficult to decide on what that version two should be to the point that I actually have burst a part and split into several different versions of themselves as though you know some sort of crazy quantum experiment governance is a way of avoiding that sort of crazy quantum behavior actually keeping something in a single box avoiding that schism you can decide what version - really should be second point it is my view that decentralized economic crypto economic systems things that we call block chains and crypto currencies now that will evolve inevitably in the future will become things very much like nation-states in the future what do I mean by nation-states I mean they will have more than a currency if you think already crypto currencies don't just have a currency they have a defense program what do I mean by defense program I mean the miners the miners provide defense against attackers - that chain yeah they are build a sort of wall a wall of hash power perhaps a wall of steak perhaps but nonetheless a wall and they maintain that wall and they are paid in most block chains by inflation block chains are in some sense a true fiat currency in that their governance mechanism rather static as it is is minting currency to pay a deferred offense program in the future it will not be so static because governance will come along and work out maybe we want to mint for other things governance nonetheless in the terms of crypto economic systems becoming kind of like nation-states while they need to interact with other things outside of their little bubble they interact afterwards right with other nation-states for a start things that they might want to do in all sorts of trade agreements bridges perhaps even mergers and acquisitions there are all sorts of ways that we can sort of conceptualize this final point following on from the nation-states idea block chains these days tend to have tend to control at least crypto currency block chains tend to control a relatively large amount of value the big ones well the big one hundreds of billions the small ones tens of billions or billions by any stretch of the imagination this is a lot of spending power at the moment it's generally spent on defense defense alone yeah there are one or two exceptions - for example but prior by and large this this huge market cap this huge amount of value that is controlled by this logical system is mostly dipped into mostly inflated in order to pay for the defense of the system as a whole in the future it will be for more than defense there is no fundamental distinction between defending yourself and making yourself better both of them are mere examples of how to continue one's existence yeah we're used to the idea of biological entities fighting for existence existential threats defending themselves if an attacker comes but also feeding themselves also making themselves stronger and better having children I don't know whatever else it's all a struggle for existence and blockchains will already have that same struggle governance is a means of allowing them to continue the struggle in a more efficient and optimum framework than without governance in some sense blockchain sorry governance breathes this kind of life into a relatively static immovable object so when it does watch out for the big rock monster because it might come and get you Cheers [Applause]