Data Availability Summit 🗄 Verifiable by All

[Music] well hello everyone um the title of my talk today is verifiable by all and um what I'm going to talk about specifically is why verifiability is at the core of what makes blockchains decentralized and secure and specifically why a uh new node type called a light node that's enabled by modular blockchains um makes blockchains For the First Time verifiable by anyone um so it opens up accessibility and makes blockchains more decentralized and secure so uh you may have seen if you're on crypto Twitter in May a bunch of memes that were circulating of people running light nodes um you know on pieces of paper or in a club or on the co test um and and people were having a lot of fun uh you know meming the the celestial light node and and uh I was really glad to see that everyone was embracing this idea of running a Celestial light node but I wanted to make sure that the uh significance of light nodes was not lost amongst the the humor of these memes and um so to understand why light nodes are so important to blockchains and and I would even say to sort of the future of of humanity I uh we had to kind of zoom out a little bit and get high level and uh I want to start by uh sharing a quote from youve all know Harari which is that humans have the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers and this is probably something that you don't think about very often but one of the things that makes humans uh special among all the the different animals um is that we have the ability to work together in groups and by cooperating and working together we're able to do things that are much more powerful um and we're able to like create a better world for ourselves um and this is kind of a good way to understand this is by thinking about the difference between a single celled organism like a bacterium and a multicellular organism like like human beings themselves and and so like when in biology when cells cooperate and work together they're able to create organisms that are far more powerful and complex and there's a similar thing happening um you know at the at the human level when human beings get together and and cooperate we're able to do things that are more powerful and complex um now in nature or in the wild in our Natural State human beings are limited in the uh sort of the number of of humans that can successfully cooperate together um and this is the so-called dunar number and it's around 150 and U fortunately um we're we're we've been able to uh transcend this sort of like built-in constraint of of only being able to cooperate in a group SI 150 and this is one of the things that has actually led to um our our ability to uh sort of like expand and and grow as a species and create more prosperity and um well-being for everyone and so one of the arcs of of history is that and I'm going to introduce a really important concept here which is social scalability which is the number of humans that can successfully cooperate in a given system and um one of the arcs of History has been that over time human beings have been able to uh grow and increase uh social scalability by creating new technologies of cooperation so you know in the ancient times um we cooperated at the scale of of tribes so maybe you know on the scale of hundreds of people or so then as time progressed we started being able to cooperate at the scale of city states you know maybe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people and now in modern times we're able to cooperate at the scale of nation states or you know on the scales of millions tens of millions sometimes hundreds or even billions of people and um we've gotten this far and created this uh like a world where we have more prosperity and we're able to do more powerful things like you know launch rockets up into space um because we have Legacy sort of Technology of cooperation and the way that Legacy cooperation systems work is that you start with a set of rules that everyone in the system agrees to follow um and and you know unfortunately you can't stop there you can't just trust that everyone in the system is going to follow the rules so you have to empower another group of people the rulers who are meant to enforce those rules on on everyone else and this works pretty well I mean it's godten us to where we are today but unfortunately um it has a deep-seated problem within it and that is that as summed up in this question who watches the Watchmen so in other words you know who is enforcing the rules on the rulers there's no one there to watch over their shoulders and and make sure that they're actually you know following the rules themselves or that they're not arbitrarily enforcing the rules on on people that they favor for their own benefit and unfortunately um they have an incentive to cheat right in in a system of cooperation if you can cheat you can extract more value for yourself and this is what corruption is this is what fraud is it's people who are breaking the rules for their own benefit um and we got a very good uh you know unfortunately had a sort of a recent example of this and and what happened in FTX and a lot of people and you know took FTX and what happened as an example of what's wrong with crypto but in fact um It's actually an example of what's wrong with our Legacy systems of cooperation because FTX was is a legacy institution um and it's more an example of what why we need blockchains in the first place because we need to decentralize and and build something better than what we currently have where our trust can be exploited and so so this is this is a really important concept which is that trust in these in a system of cooperation trust doesn't scale um when you have to trust someone or a group of people um then that becomes a sort of a security hole in the system it it was a place that point of exploit where someone can capture that point then they can break the rules right um and then they can uh sort of abuse this the system of cooperation to their benefit and that's why in the blockchain space we're always using words like trustless or trust minimized it's because what we're trying to do is build systems that are more socially scalable by removing trust um and that brings us to how how blockchain cooperation systems work and the way that blockchains work is very different to our Legacy system in that um you have a set of rules again that everyone agrees to follow uh then rather than having a set of rulers that enforce the rules it's actually the people the users uh the participants in the system who enforce the rules on each other and this is really really a totally different Dynamic B because you no longer have this um Central party that is empowered and you have everyone is on the same footing everyone is uh equally empowered and Powerful uh in in the system so there isn't a central point that can abuse Lo um its power on the rest of the system so how does this work it almost it sounds kind of too good to be true well oh and I I should also mention um this is not uh it's really important that people realize that validators or miners in a blockchain system are not the ones enforcing the rules and this is a really common misconception um it's actually uh if it were the case then we would just be kind of repeating the same patterns of Legacy cooperation system the valid everyone would be trusting the validators to do the right thing uh but no one would be there to actually enforce the rules on the validators so that's not how blockchains work and uh to explain like how blockchains do work under the hood um the way that users are actually able to enforce the rules themselves is by running a node of the network so uh what this is what a note is it's just a computer program that has us that knows what the rules of the chain are and it constantly Audits and verifies everything happening on chain to make sure that things are are following the rules if anyone tries to break the rules then that block is ignored and the the the fraud or or whatever kind of malfeasance was trying to happen is stopped before it it can even take place so um this is what enables the core value proposition of blockchains which is they enable rules without rulers so you can have set of rules without having this privileged group to to enforce them on other people um and this enables us to uh scale cooperation to the Planet level scale because you're replacing the need to trust individuals or groups of people with the need to just trust in cryptography and um that way you can actually connect everyone in the planet through a uh sort of a shared network of cryptographic trust and this is the promise of blockchains of what they can achieve and do for the world um but unfortunately there there's a problem and that is that blockchains are not very technically scalable so what I mean by technical scalability is the number of transactions that a blockchain can process per unit time so blockchains uh inherently have a limit to the number of transactions that they can process and that's because um running a node is very inefficient um so if you're running a node in a in a monolithic system like all the blockchains that currently exist today you have to download all the data you have to download every single transaction and then you have to verify every single transaction that happens and unfortunately um you know if you're a user you may have uh you know a phone or a laptop or whatever like device you have has only a certain amount of bandwidth to download transactions and only has a certain amount of uh computer computing power to verify these transactions so at a certain point you can't download more transactions and you can't verify more transactions so this sets a a limit to the amount of transactions that the overall Network can process um and so that makes it so that you have this finite capacity of of throughput of of the system and so um this this kind of like in many blockchains basically make a tradeoff which is that um they say okay well you know if not everyone can run a full node on their their phone or their laptop that's fine they can run a like CLI and we can increase the number of transactions that we process um that socalled scaling but sacrifice actual social scalability um by forcing people to run a like client rather than a full node which is actually verifying the chain and the problem with a light client is that it actually reintroduces um trust in the system because people who run a light client rather than a full node actually make a trust assumption on the validator set um so it kind of breaks the value proposition of of blockchains in the first place so um you you you can see that there's kind of like this deep uh Paradox or uh sort of um dilemma I I would say between social scalability and Technical scalability so on one side you can have a blockchain that social socially scalable because um it limits the amount of throughput that it processes so that anyone can verify the chain um but then it's not very technically scalable because it can't process that many transactions or you can have a blockchain that's very technically scalable it processes a ton of transactions but it does that by increasing the uh cost for an end user to run a node and therefore it prices a lot of people out from verifying the network and becomes less socially scalable so this this is sort of the The Dilemma of I would say of of the modular sorry the monolithic blockchain era um and unfortunately this means that we can't actually achieve the the the full potential for blockchain technology and that um it won't neither of those systems actually scale to to the planet if you can only process you know 15 transactions per second or so then not everyone in the in the planet can actually use this system um or if you process a ton of transactions so that everyone can use it then no one can verify it so then you know you're not actually building this cryptographic network of trust that anyone can use um and so this is this is really like the core problem of blockchain scalability that is it was until this guy must of alam was just up here uh published uh two white papers and 2018 and 19 where he uh described a new way of building blockchains a new way of verifying blockchains U which which is modular and uses some new technology that makes it um significantly more technically and socially scalable um so the way that it works is that in a modular blockchain World rather than downloading every single transaction and verifying every single transaction one by one you simply download a tiny sample of the data and then you can verify a single proof that all those transactions were uh executed correctly and that valid and and and you can verify them so what this means is that um the as the number of transactions that the system needs to process increases the amount of work that you have to do to verify does not increase uh at the same rate so um this makes it so that we can actually have a system where the we can process more and more transactions without pricing people out of being able to verify the network and um this enables uh this new node type that I was talking about which is a light node and a light node has the uh achieves a similar level of social scalability of a full node with a similar level of technical sort of like scalability of of a like client so you don't have to um make this trade-off anymore you can actually have a system that achieves both of these properties of the same time and um you can see this uh represented in the node requirements uh of Celestia versus other uh blockchain nodes and see that in many cases the uh sort of the requirements are you know in order of magnitude or more um less than these other systems and um we believe and I think this is a core value not just of Celestia but of the entire modular blockchain movement that it's important that anyone anywhere should be able to run a node and verify the chain directly and that's why um we targeted the specs for running a light node to be compatible with running it on mobile devices because um mobile devices uh like smartphones are the most common and uest uh device in the world it's an estimated like five billion people uh have a mobile device worldwide and so if we can Empower anyone in the world to run a light node on a phone then all five billion people the onop phone could theoretically be connected in this cryptographic network of trust and then we can actually scale this system um this BL chain cooperation system to the planet and it can be a system that everyone can use because it's technically scalable and everyone can verify because it's socially scalable and so we can actually using modular blockchains achieve this this Grand Vision and state for what blockchains can enable um now this is really exciting and obviously I'm very passionate about it I think everyone and the Celestia team is very passionate about this Vision but um the truth is there's still a lot of work to be done so um I I made this slide as as sort of like a a depiction of all the different layers of the stack that need to come together and be built out in order to enable this this Vision to to work at scale um we know that it's technically possible and we have the first versions of lots of these things but there's still a lot of work to be done to build them out to a level where um it will actually uh work at that scale and so I'm this is sort of a message to all the protocol Builders out there if you're interested in this Vision there's there's tons of great work to be done and and you know this is a great time to get into the modular space uh while things are still so early and there there's so many uh great winds that we can have um a second part of this that needs to change in order to make this VIs of reality is that we need to reduce the friction for people to run light notes So currently the most common way to run a light note is using command line and um unfortunately that not that many people in the world actually know how to use command line and so we need to make it into userfriendly applications you can just download make a couple clicks and be running um be running a light node and T people like Josh on our team have built apps like quazar which I encourage everyone to check out which makes uh extremely simple to do and I think in the future um light nodes will be embedded in people's crypto wallets or and in the browser when they're using uh applications and in that way um we will actually have these systems be verifiable by default similar to how uh the Privacy movement has um private by default and last but not least actually we we going back to the beginning of the talk we need to make light nodes into a meme um we need to make them into a part of our culture that um everyone uh you know actually runs a light not and it's kind of like a write of Passage it's uh almost like you know if you want to join this movement the crypto movement you you have to run a light node and that's kind of how you get baptized into what uh crypto is all about and um fortunately the the the meme has been working and a lot of people have been running light nodes in in lots of different places in the world you know uh on airplane Wi-Fi uh the pyramids or you know in a remote place in in Vietnam people also been running light nodes on all different kinds of devices like Kindles or U you know Nintendo switches and even someone running one on their car and um so this is all great but you might be wondering you know why why should I care why should I go through the effort of of running a light node um you know I only have so much time on my day and this just sounds like a lot of work and like does it really matter right and the answer is that you should care because we're living in a world where um people in power are increasingly our rights are increasingly being infringed upon by people in power and um you know we've seen a lot of examples of this recently like in like recently in Canada there were like the Canadian government used the banking system as a way to suppress protests so they kind of weaponized the financial system um we've also seen leaks uh about how there's censorship on social media and there's widespread surveillance throughout the Internet by governance governments and I don't think it's a coincidence that trust in our institutions is at an all-time low because I think people are waking up to the re realization that um you know the people in power don't always have your best interests at heart and um you know this this may sound like a very uh s of negative message but the reality is um we're really lucky because in the past our ancestors when they had to you know stand up for their rights and what they believed in and what they deserved they had to go to war they had to fight they had to put their lives on the line and fight against you know their oppressors or uh whoever like fight against corruption and the beautiful thing about blockchains is that they give us a an alternative they give us a nonviolent path of as a way for us to actually enforce our rights and uh you know claim back our sovereignty and uh so rather than having to go to war all we have to do is is just run light noes um and and use blockchains as a way to uh enforce our rights uh in a non nonviolent way and I think that's really powerful but even beyond that light nodes are um not just about like you know fighting back but they're also about taking the next step forward in the evolution of of humanity and that we can you know using blockchains and light nodes create uh you know the next scale of of cooperation and the next sort of uh build a more prosperous um Democratic and peaceful Society going forward so um I want everyone to if you have a phone on you just pick it up and uh read realize that what you're holding in your hand is not you know a phone or a camera or a computer it's actually the key to your rights it's the key to digital freedom and it's also the key to a better future for Humanity so thank you very much hopefully um you're inspired to run a light node and inspired to be part of the modular blockchain movement thank you cartic yes we we have a big week coming up