Swarm Alpha Online Event - A fireside chat with Viktor Tron

next up I have the absolute honor to again be talking to Victor Strom Victor just finished our is it ever finished but just wrote the book of swarm and released this a couple of months ago Victor can you join me if you fancy a chat how are you so Victor I'm gonna jump right in because we only have like 20 minutes I think and we try to keep a tight schedule here so it's like asking me to keep tight schedule so first of all let's dive right in people have been talking to me and everybody in this city reom and decentralized space about the Holy Trinity which is like terribly almost like a Catholic thing for me to hear and I always wonder what this has to do with computer science so could you could you elaborate and nothing could you explain what but people like if italic mean by that if they speak about it first of all it is is an interesting concept let's take two aspects of it like once the substantial was the kind of style style aspect more more important one is this abstraction respect the Holy Trinity stands for the three components that that make up a computer and taking that analogy and apply it to the word computer was in Stuarts computer when even Bitcoin came and first and sure that the decent rest consensus is possible to implement in with with blockchain then then Bitcoin does the first application which was able to do only only like financial transactions basically changing rules in an Excel spreadsheet if you like so the complexity of the operations were committed is that Kim's genius if metallic realized that that virtual machine can can equal even given this in this framework and there you can have distributed consensus over over global computation so it can be the basis of a math computer CPU can't eat and that's what makes what I realized but what do we want the computer for when we're computer should it should be the infrastructure for the advisor after so it's finally possible to create the dream vision really standardized back that's what is much better technology maybe one lap left 2.0 and so what what ingredients doing it for the better computer for to social function well you have the public watching which is the CP at the center processing check your computation and all you need is and and that is scalable data storage and retrieval mechanism which is which is supposed to is the original concept of school and messaging which is responsible we had time data transfer between neutral agents at nodes and the Swan I can do this to listen a mission and realization of this welcome to the very seriously and we have bitten a banner to provide the the the missing ingredients that they finally complete this mission and to life however mean I miss this these analogies in the holy things of course and the other side was school since I said time when when when when if he must read it strange letters index with first baseman Icelandic sounds and things like the special number two because of the using weekend and unexpected can offend on surrounding like very high tide need enthusiasm surrounding the blockchain and especially team controller chain makes possible people against you sort it to really just kind of balance is as a joke and it is mainly a gimmick made by by ethnic she's all part of it a lot of other things that Swan inherited wrong address that so do I hear correctly that or do I understand correctly that that there's like three parts of the world computer etherium is one it was supposed to be three and our swarm is taking over not only the second for storage but also the messaging part yes we can providing providing that the other layers complete that direct computer and the first first component that is there are discs of the word computer of course the saddest cases estimated this this kind of conversation with reducing the using the word disk which is an acronym for for decent distributed immutable storage of chunks the that guys will talk about this is important because this is the focus of this afternoon so the histogram the network that mobilizes a storage solution listen and packet and yes the the ambition is to provide a basic primitive state that you need metal pieces to be modular way more and more complex applications that fully the recent rest so since the instead of having the server client interest section deployment it hosted service the applications in decentralized but may be automatically scalable right right away after little sense we secured some so I remember from science fiction films in the 80s that the internet was kind of supposed to be like this giant organism that came to life and was like a world computer so as far as I always learned the Internet is decentralized so why are you guys let's say always talking about yeah we need more decentralization because it isn't the internet like inherently decentralized and this is a complex interaction of various go back to the times of red bond when when you easily you own the hosting service server and you going along happening what's happened if you're if you block suddenly came by maybe then then all the requests came and leader Stuart your own server because it was not meant to be serving such language and therefore as is that your more costs there skyrocketed were in worst case even even a sniper crashed and then basically never managed to self anyone to see tseebo consumer she was used but at least at the time in building data to a certain extent and now like imagine the web tool and what kinds of confidence came to the rescue to to serve this game need to provide infrastructure which is automatically scale Everest I can confidently hosting this publication needs these fabrications and unfortunately left platform is a shame and lots of fragmentation in the in the domain and and actually the the fact that these platforms providing the storage and and organization of your personal data they become they became can be disclosed with a little bit of a stone in the sense that switching cost from between these fitting within these platforms is his case so he between the high in the moment and let alone even for applications not have the network effect like obviously it's difficult to do so so difficult so the idea is to have a different paradigm in which huge data is stays in your hands basically you're suffering on instead applications you need to have permissions to access your data and organize it in a way to attract Twitter scheme to your to your own hundreds or less ready using for many many high-level lesson without the same infrastructure usually 14:6 yeah you know it's like like going on on the infrastructure because I really like the vision I think everybody can agree on that but like can you explain like in a sort of like real-world example like like I remember when I first had to explain email to my mom I used like the concept of you know like the real Postal Service and and how do we change electronically so how could you explain so armed with like real world metaphors I mean the core of swarm is really really it's a bit like like this infrastructure based on Association everything was compared to to me introducing running water pipelines for any more time the way you change it is similar in weight to what what the way we talked about the worksheet because it's very nature because it was providing this address consensus the core need for for a single source of truth which is needing a lot of fields surprised and effectively changing practices it has the promise of changing practices in all verticals and that's that's right on the one hand it's a dangerous proposition because it sounds like witch doctor who can who can cure your hand every DNS that you have but on the other hand it's it's also difficult to attach one particular killer to it and you see that it is and so so it's a good question to ask like what applications we expect to be to be merging in my face and that's we got this distance we can facilitate that it's done in the most efficient way so if if we were talking earlier about the Holy Trinity then I must say you probably wrote the Bible on this centralized storage with the book of swarm so but how do we go from this current vision I would I would advise everybody who has some free time to dive into the book of swarm by the way because it's a really interesting read but how how are we going from that grant vision to I guess a very concrete you know HAP I mean I should run something in my computer right so yeah so I consolidated the past four five years of the team's research with this sort of course please don't take it serious sometimes these references that indicate future if it's meant to be any in any sense the final word however it must be personal as well as a specific license as actually infinite in fetish aspects of specs for inflamed tensions across various clients so it's it nice to means to consolidate the important ingredients and component to the system in a very vigorous manner grouping the mother and the protocol state structures and algorithms strategies and api's of the market as yet the Lucas has basically the extended motivation that we've talked about including the data side wasn't it a captive of corporate Internet we live in at the moment as well as positive africana unfair its economy and house women senior sister city that and also how important is possibly coming new paradigm of Singhji this is software infrastructure services is all businesses it lowers the barrier of entry and an obvious need to put up front capital to invest in infrastructure and and the curve lattice is false proposition to basically a fruit most of the infrastructure and this technological cost the user base necessitates and this also means we down back to your question without howdy-ho system at range how we arrived at that an important takeaway from the four years of development of swamp was let me I finally understood what reading was not easy through the iterations not the further experiments as you can see the swamp currents one time to chestnut is next in the features client has a few an unknown bugs which exactly proves the point fire you need to we need to cut it together kind of in synchronicity with the book you kind of understood like what what will the basic ingredients are what are the primitives that in a way perfect that so you can't get rid of anything anything and these are the primitives of the shark storage and how you get from that so basically you can have various layers that which we are nice handleable functionality that's a an example with Charlie and can have chunks to reach committees and force and high level of functionalities for example after the directory represented in someone's work in a way that when you download you can reproduce the selector like such a simple see flashes so basically like that would be the basis of the Dropbox client and its biggest the last sources that I envision that most of the applications that directly use some of this squirrel core feature so easily file organizers publishing platforms do books like the already existing fare drops of the nebula see there is a kind of direct uses of the core protocol offerings and and on top of that I imagine that this will be a nickel system and can an ecosystem of various libraries and entombing initiatives which ultimately bring about as I said like already built up more complex library's Facebook is the library or for was in library and this is interact because of shared API in the Shelf incentive system very much my vision is that there are extremely easy to actually finally bring about good news which is that turnaround at the time they seemed launched but I have our finally I distance rise they're being decentralized in person Victor I'm afraid that we have to round it up because of both of the stage manager and the event manager are like in the backstage like doing this like you have to round it up now so I guess this is all we have time for but before you go I hate to put you here on the spots I know we're in a live stream but still I'm gonna do it but when do I have my alpha B or mice form in my computer because I've been dying to use it this discussion to me something this year something I mean that this year yes the papers can I start writing their headlines for tomorrow thank you so much Victor we will be hearing from you more in the AMA as always thank you so much for this conversation and I hope to see you soon and in real life and later in the AMA thank you so much thank you