Welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization. And the blockchain revolution, I'm free to recant and I'm coming to you from Bogota where def con is happening this week with a special bonus episode. I moderated a panel on credible neutrality and you will be listening to the audio track for that. We didn't plan on this, but the
discussion was so good. And in this case, that means so controversial that I decided to release this as a bonus episode to you. On the panel, we had the Bastion burger from Harper who was on a regular epicenter, episode two weeks ago, Phil Diane from fleshpots who has been on before as well, and Martin kupperman from noses who has been on before as well. Patrick McCarthy joined for in fury' and SRI Ram. Cannon, joined from I ganea, Martin had given a lightning talk previously.
So I skipped him in the intro round on the panel, but you will hear him in due time. I give you some background to the heart of the discussion. Even though a couple of weeks ago, a number of smart contracts related to the tornado cash. We're put on the sanctions list by ofac, we did an episode on that at the Time with Peter van valkenburg from coin Center. The move itself is debatable because in principle technology should not be able to be on a sanctions list.
But in response to this a large number of ecosystem players, stop to interact with any address that had tornado touch points in the past. You Nisswa poverty yd. It's balancer. The list goes on in fear of stopped serving requests for tornado. Addresses, flash pots, Mev boost that currently builds.
Half of all the theorem blocks. Stopped, including tornado touching transactions into any block that building, effectively censoring, tornado transactions, you know, from every other block and this numbers going up like crazy. So all of this is highly problematic and this is why we talked about Credible neutrality on this panel, please enjoy it. Thank you guys so much for joining us for this path.
It is a discussion on credibly neutral systems, and before we actually dive into it, let's get very brief, introductions, and I mean, like, like elevator brief, maybe, we can give Martin, but let's, let's let's start with sriram. Oh, hi everybody. I'm sure your am. I'm founder of this project I can layer which lets you Build new Innovations on top of the etherium, trust Network by using this mechanism called Reese taking. Yeah, my name is Pat McCrory. Historically speaking.
I'm a researcher but now I'm an intern at in fira. Hi. I'm Phil. I'm OCS. PhD student at Cornell and a steward of flash pots and I am addicted to Mev. Hi I'm Sebastian founder of Hopper incentivised mixed nets for private data transport and recently we're working towards private RPC providers called RPC over Harper. Fantastic. So before we dive in I expect there will be some contentious topics here today.
So if you feel you want to say something to some of these to someone of the other panelists, just jump in. Okay, don't let me you know, don't make me call your name. So fantastic. So, when we talk about credible neutrality in a nutshell, what would you say that means to you? So what's credible neutrality to you Sebastian? So credibly neutrality to me is the inability of third parties to influence the system in any way directly or indirectly.
And I think that's important. I actually don't know what it is, to be totally honest. I don't necessarily fully believe in them. Mean. So, maybe I'm going to add some spice to this panel, I think it's a nice idea and it like, implies a lot of nice things that people want and that I agree are like good. Like, you know, I think censorship resistance is great. By the way disclaimer, these are all my personal views, and not the views of Cornell or Flash pots.
But I think all this, all these, all these implications are great. But the devil here is in the details and like, can you really build a system or like, third parties can't, you know? Do things in kind of ways that they might undo even want to because, like, sometimes you want third parties to be able to make choices or Express preferences, those are open questions, I have. So I'll be I'll be pressing on those more soon.
I guess there are many words that to me means the same thing since the ship resistance permissionless, Innovation, credibly neutrality. But yeah, I think it all boils down to what you said that if You build an application on top of such a credible neutral system. You can be assured that. Yeah that that rules of that system don't suddenly change against you. Awesome. I'm just to clarify. My opinions are my own and that of yours as well.
Pull that out there. So in terms would be incredible new, credibly neutral, I mean, Google had this old slogan, you know, we won't be evil, you know, we will do our best to ensure that everyone has equal access to the system and we would abuse the data, but when the nation's didn't knock on your door and says are well know if you don't start saying who is entering this transaction, then we're going to do bad things to
you. And so to be credibly neutral you have to have this response to say that I Follow the instruction that I was given by this nation state or this all powerful adversary. So you won't be evil and you can't be evil. It is impossible to be evil because otherwise you'll get / you'll be removed from the system. So incredibly credible neutrality is really you just can't follow the instruction about self-harm and it becomes like a mad-10s express, my views
on censorship resistance. So if you look at our water blockchain is doing, it's actually freezing something temporal into something Eternal, right? You have transaction flow which is temporal and the core aspect of the blockchain is to harden this transaction flow into something that is frozen and Perpetual. So that a future can then come and see what happened at that time. So the way I look at a blockchain is essentially as bearing testimony as bearing
eyewitness to be happy. Earnings at that moment and censorship resistance is the ability to provide this service without discrimination to what was actually happening. You just stand there as a neutral Observer and see what happened there. And recorded that is censorship resistance and there are some very powerful properties Downstream of the censorship resistance, which is, for example, what I call, Matt, a censorship resistance. What is this matter censorship resistance?
We talked about sensor, For transactions. But there's also sends a ship resistance for the ability to deploy new functionality on top, which leads to permissionless composability. So if we build a system which has, which does not have the meta censorship Williston, which is the ability to deploy new features on top that is, again, a degradation of censorship resistance. Why do we want this in our view? Why you want? This is the entrance to parties in the system.
So we want to build a world where there is open, competition on almost everything, but the entrance to parties in the system, need to be credibly neutral in order to make sure that there is open competition on everything else. So, on a base layer of censorship resistance, you can build competitive systems on top, but if the entrenched layer itself is behaving in self-interest, they can rinse it. The heck out of the whole system, Everything we are building here, crumbles.
If you don't have such censorship lists, three of em. You've used censorship resistance as synonymous with credible neutrality. Would you guys agree? Or do you see a difference? I have a question, which is, how are the rest of the panel is defining censorship resistance?
Because when I think about this I think of like Old School academic definitions where it's like if a user has sufficient incentive to include transaction X in a blog, there's some censorship resistance parameter Delta where like within Delta Blocks the transaction will be included. Is this like our operating definition? Or are their disagreements that I can give like to like to breakdowns to it? I think there's two different forms of censorship. What is the clear kiss?
You know, the block proposer wants to stop the inclusion of this transaction at all cost. No, no matter. What if that transaction gets included, the block gets dropped and it will any of your super mean over. Majority-black proposals, are you can single-handedly do this? The other one is this delaying the inclusion of it. So maybe you don't have a majority of the harsh radar that
of the, steno the validators. You only have one third or less but you will do your best at the to delay is inclusion. I think even delaying it for ten blocks, 20 blocks, 30 blocks that is still a form of censorship, but it is not as harmful as full censorship. So, very similar guy, I would say that it is probably better to use the term incredible neutral or at least that's what what what is in my view
important. That is not just the censorship resistance but go to, but To go a step further and to say transactions are treated equally so it's not not enough to say, well if you are willing to pay sufficiently that then you will eventually get included. But I would say to be credible neutral and then it's maybe better to specifically use that term and not the terms intercept resistant, I would say to makes a claim system is credible neutral.
It would need to have the property that kind of, if there are two transactions and they fade pays the same fee, they To be treated equally and that's currently not the case on etherium. Unfortunately, we're not cool, but the frigid is that may be credible. Neutral is the goal that you want to achieve, but the do that, you need a censorship resist mechanism in order to allow it to be incredibly neutral or maybe to say, kind of censorship resistance is the may be credible, neutrality would
then be even a step. Above censorship resistance and you can kind of s. Say but are you certainly need to be? You certainly need to be censorship resistant to be credible neutral but yeah, kind of again, it's a step further, just to clarify. Why I use the word censorship resistance, I think there is many different layers in which you can be credibly neutral and we are talking specifically about transaction inclusion.
And I would agree that the standard that we really want is that irrespective of the content of the transaction. When I said that, your bearing testimony to What is actually happening in aspect of the content of the transaction, you are actually treating all transactions equally. So that would, I would agree with that as the definition, but I view credible, neutrality as a principle, which transcends
transaction inclusion. It is a more basic principle and as an example, we are talking about transaction inclusion, I would agree. And I also think that if you talk about credible neutrality, kind of reframes, the entire issue, right? So basically, if you talk about census, Censorship resistance. It's always kind of the, you know, you have this image of, you know, you know, like spies
or whatever. And, you know, people who do evil things, and basically credible neutrality is just creating a base layer that belongs to no one and hence belongs to everyone, right? So basically that's kind of as an opinion I did for me, it gives me like Switzerland during WWII Vives and like, I don't know if that's good, like, I don't know II just so I guess question like in y'all.
Use like when has he's been or not been credibly neutral and like, where has it been in the past on that spectrum? And where is it today? Basically would be curious. I would say you used to, I would say, probably two three years ago that statement that I made was true that that if your transaction, if they would be two transactions and they would pay the same fee, they would be treated equally with a doubt. Hacker agree. Yeah, I don't think that's true. I know. I mean, I mean.
No, of course, of course, it was the daily event and in, That case the theorem was clearly not credible neutral. I mean, there's there's no no no question about it, but, but since then, yeah, I mean, back then, I was certainly also in favor of doing what was done and probably yeah, if today there would be an issue, let's say was Something where 15% of all these are would be affected. Let's say, I don't know the refugees, a contract would be had a hidden issue.
I would probably also be in favor of kind of hard fucking or kind of hard fucking, if it would be possible in such a clean way as it was back in the day. But, but yeah, but but now, I think we, well, we lost that. And I, of course, they are reasons why that happened and Maybe I guess you would claim they are. It's inevitable, that that happened. I would say there could have been and maybe should have been several or there are in my view. Many, many options that are not
explored or not. Not done that could try to come closer to this goal of white least, maybe we should start to say kind of to eat in the round. Is it? Is it the worst vehicle to kind of has this credible neutrality and seems that you're saying? It's not. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the name is not clear to me and I think if you use it to make choices, it will lead
you to suboptimal outcomes. Because like there are clearly cases where like the community wants to make a choice, right? And like people also have the right to make choices. So to me, like there's also a subtlety here, maybe I want to get into with the panel, which is the definitions.
You all gave we're kind of technical like you have TX 1 TX 2. If they pay the same fee, their credibly neutral, what I was understanding from like You know what, Alex kind of writing on this in the general, like diaspora, is it means more that, like people believe that the system will like, treat them fairly, like, that's the credible part and that's not necessarily the same, as like these two transactions that have the same fee, get mine at the
same time. For example, the people who invested in the Dow may not think that that's the fair model. So I'm kind of trying to like challenge law. I'm not trying to troll you too hard. No I feel like I can just jump in quickly. There is like two aspects to this Source, the day-to-day operation of how the transaction system works. And there's the backstop in the social consensus, to socially recover about situations.
So that's a, there was a marsh Fashion Event because there's a zero-day exploit in a consensus client, will that be reverted or not? I believe it will be, but a lot of people say it won't be, you know, that's sort of the
backdrop of the neutrality. No, I just wanted to get back to what Martin, Martin said that a few years back, you know, maybe theorem was credibly neutral, I would say, I don't necessarily agree because, you know, the system, I'm was in some regards easier to capture than it is today. So, for me, censorship resistant is one necessity for getting to
some to credibly neutrality. And in order to get there, you know, we need decentralization and privacy actually, and, you know, both parts were actually less advanced than they are now. So, you know, I think since the launch of the beacon chain, you know, having more client, diversity is a great achievement. Of course, we're not fully there yet, but there are some points, which I wouldn't say it was necessarily better than maybe. Let's bring this into the very
concrete. So, recently we've seen instances where credible neutrality has clearly been breached. So I'm thinking for instance of that tornado, cash sanctions that kind of led to several key, five projects. No longer touching addresses that had previously interacted with tornado cash in. Fewer are no longer serves tornado. The elephants in the room here. Yeah, flash flash pots. Census for NATO cash transactions. So it's the community dealing with these issues in in the
correct way. What do you say? So maybe let me take this first in my view it's not that flash pots. The project like is intended or you know the goal of the project is to censor aetherium or anything like that. I think we look at the game theory of how can we most effectively achieve? Our strategic games which are basically ensuring any of the Dozen Central? Is Eve in like today's model. So from that perspective like yes, we do sensor certain
transactions. No, we do not want long-term to like, have the ability to impose censorship on eith. That's like a very hard line for us. Like, we won't step into that position. And again, it's arguable about whether it's already happening or not. My personal belief is it's not. The other thing is, like, you have to look at this game theory, right? Of like you have companies that are providing services and they also have like choices to make
and like certain rights. So like if you're a validator in The US. And the government comes knocking and says, like, look, you have to remove these transactions, or you have to shut down, or you have to go to jail, right? What ultimately ends up happening. If we like throw up the middle finger immediately, is that all of those validators will be shut down and it will move elsewhere. The same thing that happened in
China basically. And to me, this reduces the robustness of the etherium network. It reduces the censorship resistance, ultimately, what we need is geographic diversity, and ultimately, if everyone in this geographically diverse system, you know, agree. Is to like build blocks a certain way, like it's above my pay grade to try to stop them to an extent. So our philosophy is to provide paths, and try to decentralize and build as much competitive globally, competitive
infrastructure as we can. That's why we're open sourcing a lot of our stuff. That's why we kind of D vertically integrated, our client after the merge within that boost, and we're going to keep kind of aggressively pushing towards that direction, but at the end of the day, like, you have to be realistic. I'm just the, the win here for the Flash. Spine angle, offer the first Parts angle, you know, Sanders, Sanders up resistance, you need
to have like a good granular. Definition of it is filled with saying before, so if your blog proposer, there's two ways you could prevent the inclusion of a transaction either. I just don't include it in my block and that's what's happened in the flat spots today. You know, I propose a block, it's missing the transaction because the relay just didn't give it to me, but if there's another block, know what. So, if one, I don't include it in my block to, I have to pick a
block to extend. There has to be a parent block that I extend. That includes the center transaction but I extended. Anyway, then you're not Century in the network, you're just centering it from your own block. Sounds more like a delay. You're delaying its inclusion, but you're not censoring it because as long as there's one on as party, it will get included eventually, but where do you stop? So can you attest to block that that that has a tornado protector. Cash transaction in it.
Plus what happens, you know, with t webs that might have, you know, catastrophic failure modes if certain transactions Do not get included. So I think it is not fair to say that you know delaying things is just delaying things, it's not censorship, might have catastrophic failure modes in some, you know, apps actually disagree with that.
I think, if you're not building around like, short-term censorship, you're completely insecure even in like, completely honest Network. Because if someone a single Brock producer has a few blocks or like one person with substantial hatch power, decides to attack you like you need to build your parameters such that you're including enough, a set of miners that it gives you the guarantees you want. And like once you've Now, you won't have that.
So what is enough, what what is enough, what is enough? I mean that's like up to the privatization of Makoto auctions. A good example of that because they were timid at all consider blew up and now it's like six hours exact. But of course like what is
enough? Very much depends on the question of in. Well, kind of if you say previously, like let's say ten blocks were enough but then let's say you move to a situation where suddently 80% of the or let's say just 50 Scent of the validators, kind of don't don't include your transaction then suddenly, it means. Well, now 20 blocks are enough, but the issue is, you don't know, kind of whether it's 50%. Or, I mean, I feel like having that kind of having this additional uncertainty about,
yeah. Again, whether the, whether the network will, how do you treat your transaction will make it kind of impossible to determine this? What is enough? It's a hard problem and it's something you have to continuously, adjust, but that's the case. Anyway, even when we'd seen congestion fee markets, where your application might just be censured, by not being able to pay the fees for a woman like this, it's always something you need to kind of react.
We have like important Concepts like kind of the, the base fee and kind of what they did. What is important piece whites. Yeah, you can at least measure that so you can measure. Asians somewhat objectively. Those extra all those other forms of not including predictions that much harder to, to reasonable measure. I would say, I don't think so. I think it's very easy to reason about what percentage of blocks today. Don't have tornado Cash.
There's a dashboard on it online, but they, but I mean, also if you think about the Alternatives that security trusses sumption, if you're just delaying inclusion, you're relying on one on us, quality attorney lots of great trust, assumption. The how if there's a full outright And they're not extending blocks with Center transactions, then you ran on the honest majority. So, they're two different cases that should be considered
separately. I also think, an interesting point is, like, if you do have validators that are choosing because ultimately, this is a validator choice, how they build their blocks to not include certain transactions, that increases the revenue for anyone who's like, willing to adopt the
opposite policy. So, essentially, it's a subsidy for the network of self-healing subsidy away from censorship, especially if the systems are designed appropriately, I would say that the argument, like the example that we started with, You know, kind of doesn't support your point because like, tornado is an application that didn't have a shitload of transactions, right? So the subsidy that you get from it like the Mev potential and so on is minimal.
So you basically censoring like a large, you know, very interesting set of use cases and, you know, you do not actually provide significant upsides for anybody to take up these very few, very little value transactions. I feel like I'm falling everyone here, but this is a misconception, like Mev is not proportional to the number of
transactions. It's proportional to how much As people are willing to pay to not be censored and if there's like an act of censorship going on, that number will increase. So you have to so you think it's an okay idea that, you know, 90% of people and kind of sensor it and therefore like my costs of a tornado inclusion goes up by 10x, I think if that's the validator choice. It's like not unethical for them to do that. Personally and I think like, you know, there are their degrees, right?
Like it's a question of like, what is the x is like, a utilitarian calculation? To me, it's like a fallacy to think that like, every validator will. Really choose to include everything especially when today are one of our largest validation pools is a regulated u.s. exchange and I expect that will like continue in proof of stake. So I don't see an alternative really. Oh yeah, I mean they're plenty
of attentive. So I mean, just to mention one is, of course, is idea that you can have that you can commit to transaction inclusion. While transactions are are still encrypted. This is about you sure. Do know. I mean then you can just ask people to like kyc your endpoint and still sensor it right? There is no privacy doesn't solve this issue. Ultimately like the government's not going to say like oh this is private, we're not touching it. That's also a fantasy.
I feel like well I feel like we're far apart should have included was the see our list in their implementation. Yeah. So, you know, I can't, I again, these are all my personal views on this flat spots but we did, you know, we do like extensive work on this with key stakeholders in the Austrian like Again, like I think this will cook more will come out about this soon.
Basically, I would, I would definitely push back yourself because because in my understanding, it's absolutely not clear that that as well director, you even have that obligation to, to censor, those transactions. I mean in my understanding it is even allowed for us persons or clicking if there is is there's a way for you as person to to To get permission essentially to withdraw, from from from
tornado, in specific situations. So if that is even allowed, then then then it needs to be allowed also for for validators to include this transactions. I don't agree with your analysis and I think this is one of the things I like most, I mean, I don't agree that like, it's currently clear in like, the legal game theory, that validators have no obligation to sense. It survived the first part so you agree. It is or the law says you.
I don't want to get into legal analyses that's like not the direction I want to go in but like I want to make a meta point, which is like a lot of people here are looking at other people's actions and saying like here's my legal analysis of it and like you're not really in the position to like make that call like their lawyers are, right? So like it's easy to look at a coin base and say like wow you
don't have to be doing this. You're going overboard but they don't want to over comply right there talking to their lawyers and they're like, getting advice and like, you know, No, our legal understanding, as a community, doesn't supersede like their risk calculation against going to jail or like having their company liquidated. So like we do have to respect people's preferences as well. In that in that regard, I think. Do you think metadata's have a moral obligation to serve
everyone? I mean, obviously, you don't but I mean I mean I don't like what if you have a validator that says, this is a transaction that has Pike's, some really morally offensive content to me. And if I do - the community is going to slash Right? Leg. Is that a good position to be in? Is that what we want? For our validators know II II II
see your point. But say for instance what do you have said the same thing about kind of delivering mail or kind of connecting phone calls based on whether you like the person or not, delivering mail is not censorship resistant. Either our phone calls like new. You can't ship cracking the mail right. Look, I will generally deliver mail but not to African-Americans or not too.
When the no not in your, yeah, I think getting into the details of like, why things are not being delivered as a whole separate argument, but the nail is not censorship resistant and neither are phone calls. Like, you can be censored. I should they be? Can I jump high jump? And so this is the most famous. Connor isn't very fire pit. So I think like, theoretically speaking, it should be based on
the fee. But empirically speaking, they censorship has always been an issue in cryptocurrencies. So if you consider Bitcoin look jr. Tried the bonds Itachi dice because it was spamming the network back in 2013. Many miners were notorious for making deals with very large exchanges to make sure their withdrawal transactions would always get processed even if they can pay the fee at the time.
Now, the difference is that because mean one there's way more volunteers now, so it's very difficult to trust the five people who are basically ordering transactions and proof of work. And now this is why the flash boss issues come up because there's a it's a last trusted systems you have to have to build a real, you know, trust for your Mexican. Oh Max maximizing. The trustview protocol between the Relay on the Block Builder.
So it's a yeah, there's a basically empirically is always had this issue as much more evident now, I agree and there's like, many edge cases here, like he's selling blocked, space, Futures, and then mining something lower fee later because you've committed to it is that censorship or is it, is it not? Credibly neutral is, if you're a mining pool, putting your withdrawal transactions first and having zero fees on them because that's what they all do,
is that not? Is that not credibly neutral? I mean, it's not right. So, like ultimately to me, we need to realize that people have preferences and they need to be respected. So you would say, It's kind of expected that let's say you are large decks or there are two competing dex's and one will eventually say okay let's let's do a deal with validators. Say kind of, we get generally preferential treatment that's just how it is and that's yeah.
How many is even worse now because that's what these are. Yeah. Well the whole egg, the theoretical model around the transaction fee was that the minor we pick up all the fees and that was their main source of Revenue or actually in a theorem we burn all the These you get this constant issuance, you don't really care about the fee Market as much anymore, so as a less of an impact for deciding which transactions, I include some just getting tips.
It's been a major source of my Revenue anymore. I have a question for the people pushing credible neutrality name, these evasion Martinez sriram here. Do you guys think that credible neutrality needs to be enshrined in the technology itself or can it also be a societal consensus? That Behave in a certain way, all validators behave in a
certain way. But my view here is I think Patrick was unloading earlier to the idea of don't be evil to can't be evil and I think we need to make sure that technologically it is impossible or difficult to break credible neutrality. I think societal ways of enforcing it lead to only further conflict I It's not going to be easy to enforce censorship resistance in our
societal way ideas. Like, for example, you know, we I like the word the way that you are described credible neutrality, as a better way of phrasing. It just like net neutrality, right? Like you just want to send your a common carrier just sending packets through and we need to get to that model to actually make sure that the core function of validators. I think I don't I don't even like the word validator so I
think it's a very bad. Are you should call it consensus nodes because are even better witness nodes. There only bearing witness to a certain flow of information. This should be their official Duty. They're not validating any transaction, they're just sitting there and observing a certain transaction flow and recording it for perpetuating and their liability and duties and there, they are purely trading information. They are not trading in value the ACT.
Abusin of value to that information is X, is should be separated from the construction of an information flow, and the blockchain is purely. A construction of information flow that has been recorded for perpetuity, and and things like transaction. Encryption, actually make it technologically more feasible to actually get to a system like this. So I think credible neutrality should be more enshrined by technology.
And Core function of the blockchain should shift, or are the consensus notes should shift from validation or execution, or other things to just bearing testimony to information flow and in which case you're protected very strongly, it's just your trading and information. And that's really the main thing, which which cannot be objective. The only subjective aspect and the only reason we need a blockchain to begin with is to freeze this subjectivity If there is no subjectivity,
everything is just execution. I'll just do zero. Knowledge proof is on my server and then send you proofs. The only reason we need a blockchain is to resolve. This liquid temporal fluctuating thing into something solid for the future and we should build blockchains whose consensus nodes main feature is to Bear witness to this flow. Yeah, I was in, he say I'm not willing to give up on the idea
of having a cradle. For the platform, I think it can be done for etherium, but we will certainly try to push as hard as possible on another saying that direction. And I would say, the the list of potential ideas of how to do that is long. So, we are starting with from the very beginning of putting a lot of effort in making this diverse. Ali diverse validator said, was many kind of validate from home people.
There is this option of this shutter I speak in chain kind of the idea of yeah, privacy or yeah. Encrypted connections. There are ways to unchain objectively measure censorship and you could have rules too. Yeah, kind of to then do. Slashing based on that objective measurement and furthermore there are several potential ways to reduce the freedom of of well, data off of a builder to
build a block. I mean, super simple one would be would be to say you need to, you need to sort transactions by by feel but you There are also ways to kind of sort them pseudorandomly, but any any anything that reduces the anything that reduces the freedom of the Builder, or of the valid data to, to produce blocks will reduce Mev to some extent. And yeah, with those a bunch of different categories. We he will push as hard as possible to achieve Arctic Discuss the possibilities.
This incredible neutral base layer. I don't think it can be directly kind of enshrined in Technical Solutions this credible neutrality because to me, credible neutrality is a goal and this goal has some, you know, has some paths to get there and, you know, those are, some of them are technical, like, shutter. I speak in chain is one of them. But the other one to me, is kind of on the social side on the social side. Now, got Get to troll fill a bit back is like let's stop being
naive, right? It stopped like thinking our tiny little comfortable box or we get to think about you know, Game Theory and it's, you know, maybe not yet like YOLO incorporate a Delaware LLC just because the most convenient thing to do. It's not holes domains that end on something.com just because the most convenient thing to do and make ourselves capturable and making ourselves capturable is something that is just we see now, you know, while you
Yourself capturable Kelsey State me a little convenient box. And you know, now we you know find out right as people say. So I would say this is something we really have to tackle, we have to be serious about it. Maybe a positive shout out in the end is you know there's people are working on that and that is yeah, actually removing these single points of failure liquidy is in my eyes. One, great example to remove these Central choke points as for example.
Oil. The front end and decentralized properly. So if we take this seriously and if we actually strive for that, I think we will end up with systems that overall are much more credible neutral. And what we have today where there are some like violent regulator, which happens to be called Uncle Sam that, you know, comes after us and we say, oh we are very surprised about that. Do I get to respond or is it is censorship situation? I myself am not in the habit of changing people's.
Okay, great. So, sriram to things on your points. Number one, I disagree that we have net neutrality, especially when it comes to ofac. So I think that mean is great. And I love the comparison and I like totally agree with it. But Gmail sensors. Ofac, you know, Google sensors. Oh so do many, many any web to company is under this regulation, right? So like, we, as a society. Yes, we want this. But we've also accepted the trade-off.
So, like, let's be realistic about where we are and like that. This will be another instance of like the same pad. Blockchains because like we are not above the law, right? That would be Fantasy Land. The other thing I wanted to just roll you a little bit on and probably only you will get this is like I don't agree that you can separate the like information transfer from the value flow. I think, in these systems, the one in the same it's like relates to this crystallization
of like State process. We talked about, but we can go deeper on that later because I don't want to take up all the time. The other thing is like so I think making trade-offs for example, in gnosis chain that like increased credible neutrality that sounds great. And like I'm not opposed to any of Things.
I would love to experiment with all those things like amazing on the other hand, they imply trade-off preferences and this is why I was kind of drilling into this definition because it might be the case that like if you achieve this little definition of credible neutrality, so many other people that makes the mechanism, not credibly neutral, right?
Like it's not just because you have this technical notion that true transactions, pay the fee that get in that like some random person sample from the population will say, like yes this is credible to me that this is neutral. That's like a separate social property that we need. Need to be careful about conflating anyway, trying to rapid-fire and and yes, I agree with you completely in your trolling. I think flash pots is not trying long-term to build centralized infrastructure.
We are trying to build decentralized infrastructure. I want to be super clear about it. I think the criticism of the path, it's valid and like the success the path has had. I think the counter argument would be like, this is a rock and a hard place situation of like, there are doors to knock on. And is it going to be flash pots? Or is it going to be the validator? It's basically the choice. When we incorporated Delaware, LLC That we were facing and I do stand by the choice we've made.
I don't expect the community to love it. I expect that the community will keep trolling us and pushing back on our actions and like, our actions will need to like be above this kind of, you know, be kind of respond to this as well, and like, we are going to do that. So, no trolling. Love it, amazing. So fairly tell us about the roadmap for you know, mentoring towards no more credit, be neutral Place. Sure decentralization. Ation Global competition.
And by decentralization, I mean, of economic power in the market and of Technology as well, Global competition. And also, like engaging with everybody in the community, everyone in this room, everyone on this panel, yes. Also The Regulators. Yes, also the validation Community, everyone who is a stakeholder in this industry because I do believe like the pie is bigger when like people can cooperate. That's ultimately what we're trying to build here. That's what the internet is
trying to build as well. And I think like really the entire Community is Line behind. So that's the roadmap. If, you know, if you want more specific information, all I'm going to do now, is pop my talk on Friday. So we will drop some alfond you there. Yeah, we have come to your talk with more questions Sebastian. Tell us about Hopper and how you're trying to get to Credible neutrality. Yeah, so as I said to me censorship resistant is One requirement for neutrality and
censorship resistant needs. Ation which everybody talks about which we all love but you know, a decentralized world needs privacy much more than a centralized world. That's something that many people don't realize, you know? And we only start to realize that now. So you know the trust Assumption of the web to they are kind of okay, right. I like to bring this example of Facebook and US uploading random stuff to Facebook, it's okay.
Right. Like you don't find like really embarrassing pictures of yourself and the billboard cross from your home, right? But that trust is sumption. Doesn't Going to have three which is not protected by any laws and regulations. So the only thing that actually protects us in their web three world, that is fully decentralized is strong privacy Tech and that's what we built on Harper at Harbor and the most like fundamental layer. Not all these Fancy on change stuff.
That's all great. But even the most private chain does need transport privacy. And yeah that's what we build a Topper with this with this mixed net and you know, one point a tie Like to also point out because we talk a lot about validators. It's like, you know, if we don't have validator privacy, it's going to be a whole lot of weird
stuff that will happen. So even if we have a single secret leader election, you know, maybe I can, you know, knockout in a targeted fashion fails, validator, but in a targeted fashion that I can still just troll him, you know, because you know and Phil likes to get trolled and you know, I find it funny to just ddosed him all the time. So even with SLE we do need some Some fundamental error of privacy. It's a hard problem, especially when we talk about the trade-offs, for example, of
latency versus privacy. So lots of work ahead there but I think it's an absolute necessity to get us in a Direction Where We I think I'll want to go. Patrick, tell us about a new fewer and fewer. Oh, yes, I do. I heard you in training. There is no longer the master node. So I'll start with that, I'm not joking. So obviously, in fear is a web to company and it is following the ofac sanctions and obviously not allowing people to send
transactions to to tornado cash. So, inferior is working on a new goal for decentralized inferior, but the goal of that isn't necessary. The censorship resistance, but I think that was just be a side and a side, a side effect offered because you have any, no, a fatter in a network of, I don't know, 10 20, 30 different known providers.
They'll be reasonably digital reasonably geographically, be distributed, you'll hopefully get that for free but in fear is music, has run out and focusing on redundancy and reliability. You know, I'm sure you've all seen The Meta, Moscow, teach that we don't like to talk about. But that sort of inspired, decentralizing fury because we want to make sure. Even if we go down, man. Still works. So sort of a focusing on right now. Thank you, Shriram.
What about you? And I can layer, I can layer is an add-on layer to aetherium, so it does. It cannot increase etherium censorship resistance in a basic way, but we do think a lot about how we can contribute to potentially increasing the censorship resistance before it,
our War II later. I just want to address this point on Because I think at the end of the day, Gmail may have to censor but optic, fiber companies may not have to censor what is going through and this is the right layering that blockchains be treated like optic, fiber companies, especially if it is not even feasible for them to look into what is going on inside. And I'm not saying there for that, we will get value censorship resistance.
They'll be in Emission censorship resistance is different from values and social assistance because value needs. What we need to do is to push more agency to agents and the system should not have any agency and what is an agent in our company, which is trading on top of this Block Chain as an agent, the user who's receiving money from somebody else's an agent, they are counterparties to somebody else.
They should be able to express their Rich intersubjective preferences on who they to deal with and they will take the liability. So it's exactly like when it's a matter of layering and restricting, the scope of what is happening at different layers. Answering the question on what we can do to increase censorship censorship resistance. We had this proposal on how we can potentially let block proposes, subscribe to additional ordering constraints by Reese taking on I can layer.
So when this, when Now, proposes are restricting, I can layer. They could potentially participate in different kinds of markets, which potentially, for example, including things like distributed, relay is distributed building. There are different things you can build on top of that. I want to add one more point on a different way of achieving censorship resistance, which is to give more agency to light
nodes. We talk a lot about light clients in the theorem Community, but only in the context of validating safety, but I think the real Real real value of like clients is actually in their ability to add to censorship resistance because you know, they are the most B Li distributed and if your dad and every single phone and if they can contribute back to censorship resistance, in various ways, that would be something, which is quite preferable. How would they contribute to
censorship resistance? So these are schemes were working on internally but the core idea is something like, for example, everybody who's holding Eat in their wallet can be, you know, for example, their life node will be randomly salty shinned into and into an ability to contribute to the next block and this is transmitted widely through the network. So everybody knows that this is like a censorship. See our list initiated at light nodes by random sortation.
So you just running a very, very light thing in your wallet. And as long as you hold Keith, you're you're eligible to be randomly sorted in and you propose a transaction and Float, a mini block. Lock that that then goes around through the network. So there are many ideas for how one could do this with very light clients.
But the the matter idea here is that we should look deeply to how we can cap the very edges of the network to contribute to this sense of presence rather than only, you know, few valid and olds who are the sent Center, who I think the other thing that is measured in, all this discussion is, you know, we are in a Flash W things, a Board for example, how to not let the network centralized because there is no natural drift to decentralization. There's only a drift to
centralization. How, how can we enshrine the drift to decentralization is something, we should think about much more consciously rather than only making it at best neutral. You know. A central network is obviously as good as a decentralized network in every objective metric and is better in some ways. And this can't, By the way. So we can't keep touching more and more and more. So I think that's a bigger issue that we all have to deal with is how to enshrine decentralization.
If we think it's a valid principle, if we think that is sufficient for one or two run everything, we don't need to worry about it. So I actually agree with everything. He said, it wasn't very much trolling, maybe just not the legal analysis and again I'm not a lawyer. This is not big enough with the the film's position on the legal thing and in the fundamental way that we are all, you know, we are not living. No matter what, we are living in a physical Universe in physical
nation states. And we are dual citizens at best between this nation and some other like etherium matter of hours. So we have to comply to the loss of where we are living. And I think the the best way to counter all these things is to actually build systems which move more agency to the edges. Okay, here's an interesting interesting Troll. And again I'm not a lawyer. So please this is not legal advice for you all.
But like, this is when I actually agree with everything you said, and I think we're going to end up in the same place as the internet, right? Like, and ultimately, the way that nation-states look at this kind of stuff when it comes to government security, or like what are the choice? Okay points? What can we hit and what are the costs, right? And they want to get the benefit they need and like they won't compromise on that but also at
as little cost as possible. So if there was no ability to sense their Google, if that didn't work, yes, they would be knocking on the fiber providers door. There's no doubt, they're in my mind, but because that would be much more costly and detrimental to like, Raishin, they don't do that and I think that's exactly what we're going to see in
blockchains. Like they will, they will look at it and be sane about this kind of stuff and, and that's basically the outcome we're going to see again, not legal advice. Yeah, I suppose that's exactly my thesis that means that they will be able to censor the value flow and people who subject themselves to say that, hey, I'm not part of this country. I'm in some metaphors, they are free to do value exchange with whoever they want through this network. Whose information flow is
unrestricted. But value flow will have choke points and get restricted. That's so maybe we should have the validators all being run by bun, tag murky and you know, dig in Spartan more, and on validators would always be fun again, not the position of flash pots, but my own personal opinion, this is fantastic, closing statement. Thank you guys so much for participating in this family. It was super interesting and Illuminating and I wish you all
a really good evening. I hope none of you are super jet. Lagged still. So go home sleep and we'll see you tomorrow at Defcon 2.