Spacemesh Technical Workshop Lane Rettig

okay sweet um i'm lean i'm super thrilled to be here uh this is my fourth denver i think and for any how many first timers do we have anyone here first time to eat denver all right those of you who have been here before you know what you have in store for you for those of you for whom this is your first time get pumped because this is the best week of the year in the ethereum calendar so all right let's have fun um i know this is officially a workshop but given limited time and also as many of you have probably noticed less than amazing internet i'm just going to do a quick high level walkthrough of the space mesh team and project and protocol and i'll save some time for questions so what is space mesh we are building a novel layer 1 cryptocurrency blockchain platform um smart contract platform with some pretty cool differentiating features which i will walk you guys through we're a very value driven project which is why we talk about conviction a lot we are decentralization and permissionlessness maximalists um sorry let me just keep an eye on the time all right uh so we are targeting having a million nodes on the network i know that sounds like a very large number but i'm going to explain how we intend to do that and the protocol is custom built and custom designed we are not using proof of work we're not using proof of stake we're using something called proof of space time that allows us to do some really fun things with mining making mining from home easier and more cooperative so the things that we believe in are a low barrier to entry i will walk you guys through in a moment how we enable home mining and make it as as fast and easy as possible um unlike proof-of-work style protocols we have no um race in uh block production so we've removed kind of this leader election that happens actually in proof of work and proof of stake as well we are all about fair reward distribution for home miners we have a network topology so the the space in space mesh refers to hard drive space which i'll explain in a sec and the mesh part refers to the mesh topology so we have many blocks produced by many miners at each layer which gives us a natural high throughput which we're very excited about without without charting without layer two stuff of course that's all important as well and we'll have those also and the protocol is designed to be provably incentive compatible we have brilliant chief scientists and a 100 page technical white paper which i encourage you to read if these things are interesting to you so okay the first and most important differentiating factor is this proof of space time right so what is this and how does it work well um every layer one consensus mechanism requires that miners commit a scarce resource to the network to participate in the mining process and assert their eligibility so of course in the case of proof of work like bitcoin and the existing ethereum network that is cpu cycles or gpus or asics in proof of stake of course the scarce resource is the stake itself committed to the protocol our approach uses free disk space so the idea is any um any device you have with a little bit of hard drive space call it 100 gigabytes of free space and these laptops all have a terabyte or more these days will allow you to commit that space to the space mesh protocol and it's very easy on the cpu and the memory and stuff you just need to have that free hard drive space you could keep it running in the background and begin earning tokens um proof of space is inherently more environmentally friendly than proof of work in this respect it's like proof of stake right because you're not spinning the cpu and using a lot of electricity to mine however unlike proof of stake proof of space time like proof of work sorry i know this is confusing is permissionless right and the thing about a protocol like proof of stake is that you need to first acquire a stake in the network you need to find someone to sell it to you or buy it on an exchange or something in proof of work and in proof of space time you can just turn on a machine and just start mining you don't need any any credit card you don't need to buy any tokens or acquire them the the protocol's totally incredibly neutral right which means that for every unit of space you commit to the network you receive proportionately more reward in the network it doesn't matter who you are or where you are or how much um how to put it expertise you have um yeah so let's keep going so how do we make mining easier for home miners um so it's a very unique approach to mining which as i said is is cooperative so rather than having a so let's rewind a little bit in proof of work um you have of course many many miners around the world and many mining pools racing to produce the next block um so it's there's a race there and in proof of stake it changes it a little bit where you have a pool of eligible miners and you have a an algorithm part of the consensus mechanism that selects a single miner to produce the next block at each time slot so it's it's a so proof of space time is a very different approach where many many miners are eligible at every layer we call them layers because we have many blocks in each layer so you could think of this as being 50 miners or 100 miners are actually eligible to produce a block in each layer and then the protocol sort of takes these proposal blocks and combines them together into a single block and so what does this mean well it means that you don't as a home miner as a non-whale as a minnow miner i guess you don't need to join a mining pool if you try of course to mine bitcoin or ethereum today or chia which is a protocol some of you may be familiar with as a whole miner without joining a pool you're going to you know receive one reward every 10 years or something like that but with space mesh because of this this design you'll actually begin receiving rewards immediately in the first epoch an epoch is a you can think of it as about two weeks long so each minor because of the structure receives rewards without joining a pool and we think that's very important it's very fair to home miners and we get this inherent scalability i mentioned this before because we have many many blocks in each layer so rather than like if you think of bitcoin if you want to double the number of transactions you have to double the block size in space mesh you actually don't have to do that it grows logarithmically the in the the size of the throughput because you can just have a few more miners producing blocks and the reason we say it's zero cost for home miners is because again if you already have hardware if you have any kind of commodity grade laptop or desktop computer where we're working primarily with gamers right now because they have more than adequate hardware um it really is next to no cost uh you the bandwidth cost is very minimal the cpu cost is very minimal you just keep a background process running and just to show you how straightforward it is this is our space mesh application affectionately known as smap we have a lot of a lot of fun terminology in the space mesh world our miners are called smashers smashers are running smap and so this is literally it's as simple as it looks you download this application it's available for mac for windows for linux you double click it the setup process takes about 60 seconds you kind of there's a wizard you kind of click through two or three things you say which which hard drive you want to use and how much space you want to allocate and that's it you start mining it couldn't be easier you don't need to use the command line you don't need to worry about background processes or anything fancy um if you're familiar with a protocol like chia there's no complicated plotting process it all kind of happens very seamlessly inside this application and i'll give you a link at the end of the presentation where you can download the app and join the testnet this is a 200 chromebook this is my favorite slide in this presentation i have one of these at home maybe probably like 150 these days and uh i successfully got this device to download the app and run it and join the space mesh network and mine successfully i left it running for a month this thing has i think two gigabytes of memory um it's probably got 64 gigabytes of hard drive space uh it's got one crappy intel celeron cpu or something like that and i just i'm trying to re-emphasize the point that like really you can do this on any device it won't work yet on phones or raspberry pi's but it will in the near future so our vision is cheap devices commodity hardware whatever you've got plug it in and start mining and start earning rewards we also care a great deal about the economics of the protocol i'm really proud of this work it's been uh i'll show you a slide in a second to show you what the economics looks like and it may look simple but aligning interests here and working with investors and core team and community members to produce an economic plan that's sustainable over the long term is a big part of my motivation for this project it's something i'm very proud of and very excited about so um we have adopted an issuance uh function that looks a lot like bitcoin which is to say you have a smooth exponential decay but as i'm sure everyone here is aware you know bitcoin has this four-year half-life this four-year happening thing that happens and so we kind of took that curve we smoothed it out and we increased the length of the half-life a great deal it's i think 38 39 years almost 40 years something like that so we will continue to issue tokens for hundreds of years and this is a big deal right because with a lot of existing protocols you know if you don't get in the first year or two or three years the amount of rewards left on the table for folks who become aware of it later it's very limited um this is a really really key part of my motivation i think that this is um sebastians is here for the long term and we understand that people will be joining this project and creating value for the protocol for many many years to come so yeah this is what the issuance looks like uh the blue curve is bitcoin as you can see you know this this is over yeah 200 years so you know it's a bit compressed but bitcoin issuance happens relatively quickly um you know we're at something like 80 85 maybe 90 of the bitcoin that will ever be issued has already been issued um and in the case of space mesh the issuance goes on for hundreds of years uh so again i'm really excited about this and really proud of this so uh i'll talk briefly about the culture we are hiring for pretty much every role i'm sure many of the projects here are today and hopefully some of you guys out there are thinking about taking the plunge and joining the blockchain cryptocurrency web3 ecosystem full-time this is the best possible time to do it so i highly encourage you to do it and if you want to chat afterwards about space measure about any other kind of projects or ecosystems i'm always happy to chat my dms are also open on twitter um so yeah so we are first and foremost extraordinarily values driven you know they tend to be well how do i put this this was my motivation for uh switching gears from working on other projects i worked on and joining the space mesh team um you know we really believe in this this vision for for blockchain and cryptocurrency being a really transformative social technology which is why you know we emphasize the economics so much we're a very high trust team we're a small but focused team global i'm sure most teams are global at this point so we have folks across many many different time zones um i have to emphasize this flat and open i mean i i feel a little bit silly saying this in this audience because i i know that taos tend to be very open and most crypto projects relatively speaking are quite open and quite flat and not very hierarchical but i think even within the kind of web 3 ecosystem space mesh is extraordinarily flat and um everyone has equal say in the project and we really kind of don't do like titles and things like that so it's a really exciting collaborative kind of academic project to be a part of uh so yeah this is just a short list of some of the roles we're hiring for many technical roles um goaling developers russ developers devops type stuff um electron so the app i showed you a moment ago is a front-end javascript electron application yeah again if any of these are interesting to you please reach out we'd love to chat more if you know anyone send them our way so this is some urls you can you can go to to learn more so space spacemesh.io is our primary website if you go to chat.spacemesh.io that will take you to our discord we have a very active community on discord and testnet.spacemesh.

io will take us to we'll take you to download the the the app i showed you a moment to go and join the testnet and as i said you can do that on anytime any device just make sure you have a stable internet connection so maybe don't do it in this room um yeah that's all i've got again i'm lane i'm l rettig l-r-u-t-t-i-g on twitter and i think we may have a couple minutes left for questions so if you have any questions about space mesh feel free thank you [Applause]