This is epicenter episode 475, fifth guests, Gary Lieberman and Ted Blackman. Welcome to episode of the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization, and two blocks and Revolution. I'm Brian Crane. And today, I'm speaking with Ted Blackman, he's the CTO of the irbid foundation and also carry Lieberman. He works at correspondent Elites are a team. So, once again, we're going to speak about herb it and but just be real.
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They also running a layer to Adventure that rewards you For exploring the arbitrary ecosystem of Tallyho, you can get a space dog, and if T, and be entered giveaways for other entities. So head over to tally that cash to check it out. All right, so thanks so much guys for coming on. It's a, it's great to do this episode. Really looking forward to it. Thanks for having me. Yeah, let's start with you.
Ted, tell us a little bit about yourself and sort of, like, how you found your way to where you are at this point. Sure. Yeah. Well yes, as you mentioned I'm the CTO of the Urban Foundation. I took over in this role about two months ago and for the five years before that I was working at too long as a core Dev honor, 'but and so the first four years just writing code and then the last year year and a half or so is also a managing a number of
people working on the colonel. And yes, I started working on Urban full-time in 2017. I'd first heard of the project in 2014, but didn't understand it. And then in 2016, the docks were a lot better and I started
looking into them. And by that point I had had enough varied experience, writing code at a lot of different startups as a, as a founder and as a several and as An employee at many others and I've been doing that for 10 years starting in 2006, my first term in college and it's very sort of lucked out that I actually graduated considering that. But yeah, so I've been working stars for a long time. Seen a lot of different things robotics distributed systems, web programming.
And the. So I had enough breath of background to understand, why herb, it is interesting. Technically not very much depth of background in that and that much actually, it's a lot of learning about networking and operating systems programming languages. I've had to learn a lot of that, on the job working honor of it.
But but yeah, that was what interested me in the project primarily was just I encountered it I looked at and thought this gets a lot of stuff right that I've never seen gotten right before in program, in a way that just just the basic ideas of what it is, that you build a program out of how those programs are situated, how they communicate with each other, what they do, how the networking Works, how identity works are
the operating system works, all. This is so much cleaner than anything else that I've ever seen. And I still feel that way and it's why I'm still excited to work on her butt. So, yeah. So that's That's kind of my the recent part of my story and and the and now at every foundation. So we've just switched gears to doing a lot of core development in-house.
And so we're hiring a number of guys to we'd like we have hired a number of people and we will be hiring some more to work on to do more Court of. And so expanding the size of the core Dev team that's to work on the urban OS itself, how the different parts of it. And really to push it over the hump to become a bulletproof consumer product. Cool. Thanks so much for for that. I want to start. I want to also kind of get into
something else briefly. So, you know, most of the listeners of this podcast here in Champion talk about crypto. We have done some orbit podcast before we did one in 2017 with gaalan, which I listen to not long ago and it's still pretty current. So we'll link to that in the show. Show notes if people want to check it out and then I think we did another one this year with Josh Lehman of the orbit Foundation is executive
director, of third foundation. So there's like a little bit but I still, I think most people writer but it's not easy to wrap your head around and I think most people kind of still struggle with that. So it would be great if you could sort of describe for let's say for this kind of audience, you know that kind of gets crypto that gets things around that but maybe don't know about irbid. Like what is orbit? It sure.
Yeah. Well I think for a crypto audience, I would say, you know, the one of the foundational part of the foundational ethos of crypto in general is not your keys, not your coins, right? So you own your assets, fundamentally through control of the private key. and one way to think about herb, it is that we're extending that, not just to money, but to all of computing, So you own your computer with a private key, you own that computers identity on
the network with a private key. And and then you have full control over that computer. So what data is stores with programs, that runs how it communicates with whom it communicates and and then I'll and then all those apps that you install into it, the programs that you actually run on. There are designed to run in a decentralized manner so there's no Central server. No central point of failure. No Central choke point and That this is. So it's sort of one way to think about herb.
It is it's trying to build the same world that the rest of crypto is trying to build and it's building all the pieces of that world that aren't on chain because you don't actually want to stick everything. All logic and all data onto a bottom. It's not the right solution for everything. It's the resolution for anything where you need Byzantine fault tolerance. Right. So you need a global consensus on. Who owns what? Even Global consensus on which, which transactions have been
performed right? For, you know, if you're sharing, if you're all sharing the same computer like in etherium, right? You're all sharing the same computer. You just need a way to guarantee that we all share that same computer State even if even if it's adversarial. But that's only a subset of the world of computing. And for everything else where you don't want or need that kind of Byzantine fault tolerance. That's where it comes in. So that's really I want to store
personal data. I want to use chat. I want to do file sharing. I want to do video streaming for any of those things. Yeah, you want, you want the world that crypto is promising, but blockchains can't do it individual applications. Can't do it very well because the current stack wasn't designed for decentralized world, the modern internet Unix, all these things, they were not designed to be as or Multipolar decentralized system.
And so the, ER, B thesis the core of the urban thesis is that which is actually older than blockchains But that thesis is that fundamentally. Getting to a decentralized world that same world that crypto promises is a technical problem and it's a technical problem that needs to be solved by an operating system that is designed from the ground up to support peer-to-peer applications. Thanks, I really appreciate how you explain that.
I think that's a, that's a very nice way of phrasing it and I do think that hopefully works pretty well for, you know, people coming from from a crypto go. I hope. So, I've been trying for a while, you know, Gary actually has his own way of describing it that I don't mean to put you on the spot, but I've heard you describe it very well. I actually don't know if it I mean it could be explained better. Probably, I don't know if it really needs to be elaborated on
necessarily. I mean, I think irbid kind of, is designed as a unified system. So, in the context of, like, if you're trying to organize your Digital Life, a lot of people do this by, like only buying Apple products, for instance, or only using, you know, Google Apps suite for all of their productivity. And, you know, there's all these ways that you can try to unify the system that you use. So that everything you use kind of makes sense.
As with each other and I think part of the herb, it's tsys is that things actually make much more sense. If you have a system that works for everybody for all purposes, that is truly a universal language that people can come to consensus on without any compromises. Yeah, that's so that's kind of like the idea of taste, you know, Universal Computing, environment.
And I guess what ties in there is that whole bunch of stuff that today, I guess don't happen at the operating system level of do happen at the operating system level in orbit, right? So like let's say something like authentication where as you know today is okay, you want to sign into some application. Then you can use like Google sign-in with Google, or you can use signing of a poor and, but those are like separate separate kind of ecosystems and they're not kind, not quite compatible.
Whereas, in irbid you have like over the ID and then, that is a universal thing that anyone can access. Yeah, that's right. And I mean, I think it's actually fairly obvious in a case of like, it, hypothetical world where there was only Urban, and, you know, Irvin had no incumbant that it was trying to You against it would be kind of obvious. I think that identity is something that you only have one of, its kind of baked into the
word identity that you have one. And so a lot of things that don't work properly in like the web to ecosystem and even web 3 actually. The reason why they're not quite compatible is because the identities just aren't compatible with each other. And so if you have a unified identity system at a very early point in the stack, a lot of problems just go away. They kind of, it's not even that they're solving. Solved. It's that. The preconditions for the
problems never even come about. Yeah, that's right. Like most people don't know, for example, that IP and TCP, you know, the protocols that the internet uses don't have any concept of authentication or encryption. Those have to be bolted on higher layers and because of that, you get all kinds of issues. You get a whole field of Ip, security, ipsec, DNS, security, DNS SEC, right? Like these things basically shouldn't exist, they should be in the network protocols.
But these numbers Protocols are 50 years old before anybody even thought to use encryption. And before there were, when they were maybe 10 people on the internet instead of billions. So yeah. So whether it, those those things are built in at every package, Is authenticated and encrypted. One, one question, actually, when Gary, and I were talking a little bit about the outlines, and there's this question that I think is is good question to ask right here. So, you know, herb it describes
itself as this clean slate. And, you know, you talked about these, like, Global protocols like TCP and I IP, so can you talk a little bit about, you know, how much of kind of the existing internet? And Computing stack like, how much does irbid like throw? Away and to what extent our existing technology still being used in orbit. Well, at a basic level with throws them all away.
And but it's not the that's not the whole story because despite that, we know that orbit must exist in the present and be useful for people in the present. And so however it also has the capability of acting as a web server to the old web and making web requests HTTP requests. So this allows you to access it from your browser access it from your phone. You know, have a serve Serve a
vlog for you racing. The studio app from Tyrell, lets you post a blog post a blog using your Urban and even they're working on. Adding a pay wall to that too. So you can even take payments three orbit. So it herb. It is not basically Urban's Building A Whole New World unto itself, right?
So everything from machine code, programming language operating system, kernel set of applications Network, Tikal identity system all the but that new world can communicate to the old world because that's can because that's very important in practice. Cool, thanks for everything that. Well, maybe we can go to Gary Ossipee flea and maybe you can tell us a little bit about you. And how did you get into urban what was the thing that captured your attention when it came to irbid?
I don't think my background is particularly interesting, but I was before, I mean I knew about her bit for a couple of years before I got really into it and I underestimated it for a very
long time. I would say what got me really into it was struggling with two things that I didn't quite understand were related one was that I was trying to organize my digital life in a way that really made sense to me and optimize my workflows kind of just running on the Option that I realized I'm much happier and much more productive in my physical life when I'm well organized.
So, I should be able to apply that same logic digitally and just coming up against multiple blockers everywhere, where it's like, okay, to actually solve this problem. It's like a full-time job for 10 people creating and maintaining a system that actually does what I wanted to do. So that was one thing and also just noticing on the other hand, I mean, it was right after covid, just how dystopian web to was it wasn't surprising to me at all that.
We had like this huge increase in like political violence and transgression with the same time that everybody was stuck in their houses with nothing but web to entertain them. Like it seemed very clear that that was like an insanity inducing situation and urban I think successfully made the case that that was also a downstream from the same technological problems that led to my my own inability to organize my digital life in a way that was automated and made sense.
And so I gave her bit the benefit of the doubt enough that maybe if I learn something about it and I spent quite a lot of time learning it but I could kind of test the assumptions and at least make a case for why it was or was not a waste of time and by the time I was done and felt satisfied that I understood it, I was totally Able to recreate the conditions that I had before, where I was not complete orbit maximalist, I can't even remember what it's like to believe that there's any
other possibility for the future computer. Fairly common story actually. You know, there's this question. I kind of wanted to get to at the end, but I think we should get to it now. So, you know, we've talked about, you know, if you've touched on earlier the bit like what's different and, you know, you guys have both alluded a little bit as to why you're excited about it, but if he, if he now kind of think forward and imagine that irbid, you know,
really accomplishes. The things it's trying to accomplish right like so it really I get so it's you know fully realizes its ultimate potential. What does that look like? How long does it take and what does the world look like what's different for people in the way they use technology in the way? They live their lives in the way political systems work you know like what is what are the kind of visions and ideas that you guys have around this?
I can start with a few things. So one is that I think you'll end up with a lot more. Localism is one word and you end up with a lot more subcultures that are sort of each of the subcultures will be autonomous in a way that they aren't really digitally autonomous at the moment. If you're running a subreddit the subreddit might just get
shut down. All right, the mobs could have a bad day and you know, And then you're not there anything and that culture can be gone, you can have it to you know, via Twitter poster and then big following and then put your foot in your mouth one day and your account gets flagged by an AI.
And band and then years of work that you put into developing that audience and, you know, sort of building a whole network of personal connections based on that can just be blown away in an instant by essentially mistake. Alright. And so this is actually kind of puts a damper on the ability for through subcultures to form and so you end up with more of a monoculture, right? So I think Trent from oh, Liam said you Facebook is 3 billion users No culture and I really stuck with me.
So I think the, your son entirely sure there's some right, but I think it's what we'll see is a lot more of those a lot more subcultures that, that are able to flower more, right there able to develop their own art, their own ways of communicating. They may eventually physically co-locate, they may do a Balaji Style Network State. They may do something else, I think.
That's sort of digital, like the ability for people to coordinate, collaborate online has been hamstrung by a lack of ability to, for people to control their own software, right? So you know, you're probably in some signal group chats and not just signal scattered all over the place, really, right? But for any one of those you can't, you can't say, oh well let's let's Fork signal the signal client, right? Like let's let's have it,
integrated something. Integrate of the calendar even read something basic where there's just, no way to do that, because that's its own world, right? It's siloed, right? And so, basically, that's sort of limitation where you kind of can't just arbitrarily extend things. You can't arbitrarily get your programs to work with each other.
That's a big cause of what well, Gary was saying he ran into, but it also just prevents like, groups social groups and other kinds of organizations from From being able to really make the most out of network computers. So by so nervous for the flips, the whole situation on its head because right now, you have to, you have to go through some big Central server to do, almost
anything on the internet. And instead, this is no, you can download an app into your irbid run at yourself, and you have full control over that yourself. And then you and people, you want to collaborate with have control over that, that small Network. So it's much more bottom-up. And so I think like, we're really not used to seeing bottom-up organization digitally, but I think that what it's going to look like mostly is yeah, better art more art better. Like, I think more seamless
economic activity, right? Like people a lot more people, starting small companies starting small, little investment, coops starting local businesses, things like that. I think that and getting local investment, right? So, all sorts of things. Things that in all kinds of different modes of interactivity that are very difficult to build
right now, right? So, you know, if there's an interesting example of this which is an app called radio on herba that was built a couple months ago and it's sort of like a jukebox for video. So y'all get into this room. You can set which videos playing and then Q another video and then people can talk about it as it's going, right? And you know it's not a not an earth-shattering application but it's it's something new. That's something that you can't
build otherwise. And so it's just sort of one little hint as as to what sorts of you can just have this. Lots of different kinds of interactivity different. Kinds of bottom-up, social organization that are infeasible
in the modern Computing setup. Yeah, and just one thing to add to that, I think I've key importance is the idea that within a unified system, a small-time app developer can actually have a big impact because they are working within the same language as the rest of the world, meaning to things in terms of culture, there can be an application made between friends in a group and not have this. You know, this big hump to overcome to actually get it
usable between everybody. If I develop an app for just the people in my friend group, It would be very easy in irbid world to just have them download it and try it and use it and it wouldn't necessarily have compatibility issues with the rest of their Digital Life. And that also makes a lot of sense in a business context. So if you're running a business and you realize that you have a very lucrative small business model and you're asking the question of what would it take
to franchise this business? Probably the answer to your question, includes, you know, you need some kind of software. And that you know, that captures the entire business logic of your operation and this is in practice not possible for most small businesses you have to overcome a significant financial barrier to do that kind of thing. But on a unified you know software ecosystem.
It actually becomes quite quite a reasonable proposition, I wouldn't call it easy but it's much more accessible to Simply capture the logic of the business within one program and that I think would lead to exponential productivity gains in pretty much any industry. Yeah, just to elaborate on that
a little bit. So there's One of the big differences between writing code in turbot and writing code for the normal internet is the distance between writing a toy and writing a production application. So normally in the normal Internet and mobile Computing, a programmer can take a weekend and write a toy, right? And that toy would be usable. It has the business logic, right? This rib meat of the application is there? But it's nowhere near something
that people could use, right? So you can't just sort of have your friends use it. Have it work, have it be something that is actually part of your lives in order to get to that stage. You have to do a lot of devops. You have to do you have to have some sort of authentication system maybe a few with backups what happens if somebody forgets their email address or whatever, right? I mean you have to administer a bunch of servers.
So if the to have some sort of cloud infrastructure, you may find yourself researching kubernetes Docker, right? And there's this whole long list of tools that the modern programmer has to be familiar with in order to actually deploy an application to users, even if it's just a web page. And so it's that that difference between the the meat of the system and all the sort of rigmarole of a deployment that's what brings in a ton of extra costs.
That makes it prohibitive to just say hey and we've got a few friends here. Let's let's write a Slap that does this thing that we needed to do. And so this is this is true already, right? So a good example of this is Now, Justin Murphy commission somebody to write an app called page. And it lets you copy some HTML into your orbit and serve it as a web page because he just needed to serve some simple stuff. So, he asked somebody to build
this forum. I think you paid him five hundred dollars took a weekend and now that happens is I installed on my rib. It works fine. All right, so I was able to download this. Run it myself. On my own herb right from $500 worth of work and that's that's a fairly unusual setup and we're going to make that even better in the future. So it will reduce that cost even further and that difference will
continue to increase. So that's I think one of the one of the things that's most exciting from a developer standpoint, it's like a you can about her is that you can write something publish it literally in a weekend and it's real it's already real. Yeah, I mean this is one of the ways if I explain orbit that I also tend to emphasize is, you know, if you are developing a new web application or some kind of application is normal web that because you have these
additional things that, okay? Now I'm going to have to run some infrastructure for it and the cloud and well, what does it mean? I mean, I have to make like an AWS account and now I have to pee Every month, and if there's more users have to pay more. So now all of a sudden, I have to run a business, right? And I have to have revenues to do that, and maybe that means I have to run raise investment or I have to charge people. And maybe I didn't want to do
that. I just wanted to create something right that, like, people wanted to use and and in irbid, you can kind of do that, right? I could. Develop some simple application, maybe people love it and it million people are going to run it on there, you know, on their orbits. And I don't have to do anything right after charge, anything and the pay for any infrastructure. And I think that's just going to
be so attractive for developers. And it's going to like unleash such a new class of applications. People will build and people play around. Round with and so much creativity, that becomes possible when you not everything has to be connected. If some business that you have to build, Yeah, I would say generally there's a very large class of questions that begin with. Why can't I just that turbot allows you to adjust and, and shipping code to somebody's computer is definitely one of them.
Why can't I just build an application? You download it from me and run it. Another one is why can't I just send you a file? Why do I need Dropbox, right? These are these are just questions that you only have to ask. Because if the kind of insanity and Computing and Herby I think Is kind of fundamentally trying to provide that sanity. So let's talk a little bit about, you know, what is Arabic
today. You know what's the current state of technology and what are the limitations of the system? Sure, yeah, so today, first of all, orbit does wrong, sometimes we'd ask that still, but it's been running since 2013 and the so you can you can get an orbit, you can buy one off of theorem and so you can buy an orbit ID. Once you have that Urban ID, you can boot your ship which is a name for your node. So you can boot your orbit. You can run that yourself on
your laptop. or pay one of a few different hosting providers to run up for you or you can run it yourself in the cloud if you're willing to do a little bit of system administration You can also move it from any of those three places to any of the others and Gary actually been working on standardizing the protocols for how that can be moved from place to place.
But you can do it yourself already so Urban you can you can get one, you can run it and you can install apps into it and the bait, it comes with a suite of apps. The flagship apps are groups and chat so you can chat and groups it looks Looks like Discord, it's our, you know, our slack, something like that, right? It's chat app. It's sort of asymptotically approaching feature.
Parity with those, there was a recent update that made it a lot closer actually, nowadays, threaded conversations and Emoji reactions, and it's starting to feel very similar to any other chat app. So that's mostly what people use our bit for right now. But you can also install any number of other apps And they're about over 80 of them that have
been published publicly. It's hard to know how many of them exist total, but there, yeah, many dozens that you can try out and some of those are more important than others. I would say. So, for example, there's one called campfire that lets you do video chat, That gets that's over webrtc but it's negotiated by orbit, so it's fully decentralized. Peer-to-peer video call. I'm so And they're all kinds of other things that people are building. So that's where turbots Act and
the tricep works pretty well. There's some rough edges, I would say that the the big limitations have to do with scaling and hardening. And some with developer experience. So as a user basically you know if you join a group that has more than a few thousand members and there are few of these groups, then it might be kind of slow, right? It works but it's a bit slow.
And if you're publishing a group that has many thousands of members, then you generally have to do some maintenance work on your server, to make sure it doesn't run out of memory. So, herb, it is supposed to not require any maintenance from the user should maintain its Right? So it's not quite there yet and in particular with scale, right? So if you're supporting a lot of a lot of subscribers than the system doesn't scale as well as
it should. And so you have to do some maintenance work and things get slow. And so that has to do with the reasons for that are basically to fold both. Well, three, there are three reasons. Essentially one is that there's a limitation to how much data you can store in your orbit right now. There's also Old, it just doubled, but it's still. It's still limited. That's, there's a limit to that. There's a limit to the amount of network bandwidth that you're a bit, can take advantage of.
So we're working on that as well. And then finally herb is programming language. Knock machine code is, is slow. So the so the combination of those three things makes put some scaling limitations on the All three of those are under active development and I don't expect any of them to be showstoppers but but that's that's the status. So the other aspect is hardening. So basically there it's this refers mostly to security Sumter. Reliabilities, there's some reliability issues are still
some bugs. Sometimes, I think crashes. Much, much less frequent than it used to be, but it still happens. And so getting the system to be really Bulletproof. Reliable. That's one of the big things we've got to do and and a very closely related phenomenon, is making sure that it can't be hacked into. All right, so making sure that
it's secure. So that people can't get into your orbit and download all your chats and, you know, we want people to be able to store private key is for, you know, relatively small amounts of money. But but you should be able to store private keys in irbid and answer anything other than like, your life savings. It should be relatively safe. You should feel secure about it.
We're definitely not there yet. So as a caveat like if you go play with her but keep in mind it has not been audited for security. There's a good chance that there are vulnerabilities in there so treated accordingly but that's
also under active development. So there's a hardening process that we're taking the system through and the other piece of that I would say is protection against denial of service attacks which is I think going to be a sort of long tail of hardening to make it sort of able to resist. Larger and larger and more and more. Well, resource groups of people who are attempting to just shut down the network, or at least shut down your ship on the
network, your node. So there's a lot of work to be done on that front as well. Also not I'm not particularly, you know, worried about it but it's a fair amount of work in front of us to do that. The third remaining limitation. I would say is in developer experience. So basically there's when it's a pretty new world, right? You got a whole new holding machine code. Whole new language woman, operating system, old, sort of Paradigm, of programming, and all these things are 10 times
newer than existing world. And so there's a lot of tooling that herb. It doesn't have that other systems have. So a lot of the so that this developer experience is very good already in some ways, but Other ways that needs a lot of work.
And so, a lot of that has to do with building, tooling building debuggers and having a better, you know, printer pretty printer for data and a lot of other technical stuff, but basically making it just a lot, bring building a lot of tools for developers, and there's a deeper peace of that, which is making sure that the apis that are presented to a user space program or somebody writing an app to make sure that the way that you interface with the operating system is clean and
easy to use. Use and particular easy to it should make it easy to write a program. That's correct. And so there's a big problem with this right now without which has to do with subscriptions. And so there's a whole set of complex of projects that were working on over the next year or two called subscription reform to redo orbits subscription system. So how you synchronize data from Urban turbot actually get a lot simpler cleaner and and more scalable as well. So there's a roadmap, dr.
B dot org, has That's a pretty new thing where we, where we laid out the technical roadmap for urban. So if you're interested in going deeper on the technical details of exactly where the systems at and what needs to be done to improve it. That has some pretty detailed explanations and linked to ongoing work on, get up. Cool, thanks. Yeah, I mean I was with Gary were actually looking a little bit at the roadmap the other day and it has to say it's like very nicely presented and so will
also link to that. So if people want to go deep and check it out, what are the timelines in this? Like when Rainy's herb it. I don't know. Do you see? Do you see kind of different stages of Readiness of irbid coming up for different types of? I don't degrees of adoption. And what does that look like? And yeah, on what time frames?
I think this is a little bit of an aggressive timeframe, but I generally say around two years to get to having a To have it, be bulletproof and scalable enough and reliable enough basically. So there's the system will continue to improve basically forever. The kernel itself will actually stop improving at some point, the version numbers go down to zero. We call this K versioning and this is to standardize the
system. So so all the different parts of the kernel, each have a k version, those all go down to zero, knock the machine code is that k for and And I actually did a podcast, we talked about what might cause it to go to version 3. But at the moment we don't
actually see that happening. We think that's probably done but the colonel different parts of the kernel or versions, you know, 144 the language up to about 400 for the standard Library. So, there are a finite number of versions of we have to play with there, which will take somewhere between 20 and 200 years to really congeal all the way down.
But the, but that's the colonel. There's also the runtime, which is the program that runs your Urban and that is not K version it so that will continue to improve forever. But that's basically just making making it faster and faster over time. So there's no sort of fixed Point. There's no, like, one point rule, say Urban has done exactly.
But there's a point where we will be able to say this handles all the kinds of applications that we want to handle and I think we'll be able to handle most of those by two years from now. And so that includes having being able to confidently, say this thing is secure. Nobody's going to be able to steal your data out of an ex will treat your data. It'll scale. Well, so if you want to have a million people in a trap Channel 2 years from now, you should be able to have a million people in
chat. Jim So basically, it should it should approach the level of scaling of web to. And that's an interesting set of problems. Most people don't don't think of decentralized systems as being capable of scaling up to the size of web to where you need your many data centers. Run it herb. It actually is designed to do that. So there's a very interesting set of discussions to be had about how it plans with doing that, but I do think it's possible. We're on our way.
So, it'll scale some, it'll be quite right and it'll be quite secure. It should be quite reliable. Like the, the program should not crash and it should be relatively easy to write. It should at least be yet. It should at least be relatively straightforward to write an application that synchronizes data correctly, without having
to worry about correctness. So like where it gets where it's a correct application, without having to think too hard about it. Now, by two years from now, it may still have quite a bit of boilerplate. Play it, right? It might be kind of awkward clunky to write those programs, but when you write them, you should be able to very quickly read them and say, yeah, okay, that's definitely right. We're not there yet, and mostly
was missing. There is the interface to subscriptions the interface to synchronizing data. There are few other things that aren't great either. So I don't expect that that I think that that API, right?
Like what it takes to write an application will be really, you know, smooth and just, you know, really Polished by then I think that'll take another couple of years to really get to really get nice, but it should be possible to hook into scalable content distribution from an application so that you can support many people subscribing to you, like, in the millions and and to feel confident when you write it, that it's correct and that the colonel is handling.
All of the sort of hard synchronization problems and other correctness issues for you. I was kind of wondering if there are any applications that you would like to see honor bit that it's just not ready for it because of, you know, the maturity of core development. And you know, when do you think it'll be possible and what it will look like tons. Okay. I want to store all my files in there. I have hundreds of gigabytes of music recordings and photos.
All kind, you know, hundreds of papers that have collected over the years, the corner. It's pure science, papers, ebooks tons of stuff. And I actually I had them in Dropbox for a long time. Then I decide to stop paying for Dropbox. They pulled him onto my computer's and I have 300 gigabytes of just crap sitting there in my computer and we need to upload it somewhere else and I've gotten around to it, that should all be in my room.
And not only should it be in my herb but yeah, I should be able to share that with you very easily. Alright, so in order to share media with you, Through orbit, you much higher. So, first of all, you'll be able to store that data in orbit. It's too big right now. I need to be able to stream that to you, or you need to be able to download it quickly. So we have to be able to max out a network connection, right? For the for the bandwidth.
So we need a better Network protocol and I need to be able to publish that to a lot of people to meet scalability, the network protocol. So there's that right? Anything with file sharing podcasting, you know, live streaming. You should be able to do all that from your herb. Right. And like imagine doing a live stream from your urbis. It's fun to think of all the other stuff you could build in there. All different kinds of objectivity and Integrations with other other herb, adapts.
And then, the other thing is, I want to be able to store a lot of my private keys in orbit. So I think like, yeah, for for stuff that's like, where you really want to keep it cold, then okay. Yeah, keep it cold. Don't put in your orbit, but but I want to have sort of What we aware? I'm paying my bills from right and where I'm, you know, sharing expenses with friends, you want an urban version of what's the app called where you like y'all go to a restaurant and split wise, right?
My friends and I use split wiser for go to restroom. So let's you settle up later. I think there's another one too. So I think there's more that there is. Yeah yeah but anyway like that kind of a poor. It's like yeah here's how I handled my sort of day-to-day expenses. Has income Etc. Right? Like that. I should feel comfortable storing that my herb. Right? And then at not only that.
But then from there, I can do things like have Urban integrate with the lightning Network. Have it integrate with the Aztec protocol on ethereum? I would integrate with kenosis safe, safe. Now, I suppose, right? I have it integrate with all this different stuff, so but in order to do that, I have to be comfortable having some hot wallets inside my room. And so for that, it needs to be secured. Right.
So there's this whole sort of big playground of all these things that could be built, right? It's like they're, those will be toys until we make sure it's secure and then they can be done for real. And so, I'm very much looking forward to those classes of applications. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the podcasting thing because I think this is actually like a very
powerful example, right? So for those who like you don't know, basically if podcasts are podcasts are basically distributed via RSS feeds and says a podcaster. You know, you putting up this podcast recording and then people download it and you don't. And there's a bunch of limitations that come with. That one. Is that? You don't have any way of like messaging, those people.
Like, if you want to build like a community of your podcast listeners, then, you know, you'd have to make this comment something of like, oh, you listening to this audio now go and clicking the link in the notes to go somewhere else and then we do this community or as it's so. But most, you know, 98% of people, they're just like, listen to it. And, and because it's so complex and people don't even try. And of course, charging for podcast is also basically not. Civil or it's only possible
through these again. Very, very terrible hacks that people do. So I think this is something where, you know, if you can just distribute your content, message everyone who's listening to it, maybe have better data about it too, because I think this is another thing that Paul said podcasting is very limited. If although I guess in irbid maybe this is also something orbit will be limited with no since people. What do you mean more? Better data. Well, I mean in podcasts like
you don't know. For example, two people actually listen to it or not. You only need to download analytics tracking that kind of stuff. Yeah. Well I think people could hide the fact that they've listened to your podcast relatively easily but most of your listeners probably wouldn't. So if you kind of requested that information I think most of your listeners would give it to you and you'd have a reasonable idea of what your audience looks like.
You can also track the networking requests coming into your orbit, right? So you can track just how many requests came in or I should say you can build this sort of analytics to track that sort of thing on your irbid. There's a little bit of that in the runtime right now but it's not as granular as it could be. But yeah, you could, you could build a system like that. So that any time somebody tries to fetch this. We're fetching it for my herb, it, right? So I can tell you, may not know
that. Exactly, if we end up building a sort of distributed caching system, which is likely Yes. Um so yeah herb. It is re probably requires a little bit more work to get really good analytics which just has to do with sovereignty actually, right? Like there's act, there are some places where you have fundamental trade-offs between privacy and sovereignty and being able to track what people do which is the opposite of that. But but I think there's quite a
bit of middle ground in there. What about you? Gary, you mean, you mentioned the example that I really liked and I hadn't actually fall off In this way before. You know having this business that like is in a code and you can kind of franchise it easily. So I think that was a nice example but what else? What are some other use cases for her bit that you're most excited about?
Actually, I think what I would find most useful are things that are currently possible and just need a little more developer effort. So I'm very excited about anagram wholly-owned product which should work towards kind of Allocating the feature set of notion on orbit. I personally find that if I'm journaling, even if I pretty much trust that I'm not going to get snooped on by whatever third
party, owns my data. I'm just going to be a little more hesitant to really speak freely about what I'm thinking. If I know that it doesn't, it's not private. And so, and so, I would much rather have something like that on my herb. It and I personally prefer to journal on my local computer rather than a more powerful platform like notion for that. And I think for a big can do it. I think it's just a matter of developer effort and kind of getting the ux, right? And another thing is task
management. I use tasks Warrior which is a Linux program and it works really well, but I would probably prefer for that to be honored as well, because I would have better sharing functionality and I wouldn't have to work within two different systems you don't use the emacs know. I don't usually mix that task for you is good enough. I don't get exactly. but no, I mean These are kinds of ways. We're having a personal server, makes a lot of sense, because you have a variety of devices.
I'm not going to carry my laptop, necessarily do all the same places that I might carry a phone or a tablet. But I still want access to these basic things like my notes and the things that I want to do and these are low amounts of data, it's just important to me that I can access them from anywhere.
And the only way to do that in a sovereign way right now is to deal with honestly, just a very terrible ux and, you know, do probably Lee you know more more Linux work than most people want to do. And I think our bid is going to make that much more accessible and you no more free. Well let's talk a little bit about I mean we've touched on it in endpoints but about it the kind of crypto orbit Synergy.
So once orbit you know let's say two years from now we have addressed some of those issues around security scalability. You know you can keep your keys in irbid. It's pretty safe. What what does this convergence of crypto and Herb? It look like and you know, whether the most important implications of that, Yeah, I think they're this is there a lot of implications from it and the convergence happens in several different ways and so there's actually a lot to talk about here.
I think so one is that we'll start with some basic ones, right? So it's basically like anytime I that I as a user want to interact with the chain, I should use my Urban to do that. So even if that something simple like, I want to use unit swap, right? There's a there's an app I'm on. Irbid that serves Eunice op, you know, swap front end, right? But I should be serving that to myself and Herb, it has very good properties for code sign,
right? So, the software supply chain, can be sipped can be secured much more effectively honorable than through almost anything else because we have a real pki, very real public key infrastructure. Real identity system that actually lives on chain. Right, every herb, it ID is an FDA on a theorem and so what that implies is that if I, I can have a lot more protection, that the front end that's being served to me, is not spoofed. There's no DNS spoofing, there's no other stuff, right?
Like it's it's something where I can really get a lot of verification that I'm using the piece of software that I mean to use. They've been huge fax right. Where somebody's spoofed some front-end and there go hundreds of millions dollars so sir. But first of all you know, that should be the place that should be, what serves a client to you. Write some sort of any user interface you're using for interacting with change should be done through orbit.
This also lets you do multi-party computation, right? So if you want to do a multi sick, then that should be there should be an actor that this would be a nice out to, right? You could write it right now and and then that, you know, then, okay. We want to, you know, the three of us have a multisig. Let's say, and we want to, we want to move some funds. Okay, well we can use the herb adapt to do that. We don't have to copy and paste addresses. We don't have to worry about
backups for our keys. We're not to worry about backups for the state, right? Like if you're tracking, you know, the non something theorem account, you can use Herbal to store that and make sure that. And then, you know, that it's not going to get deleted. You're not going to forget it. You're not going to have nots reuse, errors, that could cause
security problems, right? This whole long tail like things that can go wrong with crypto or a lot of the stuff that people worry about with crypto, in practice, when using is like, well, what if I copy and paste the wrong address into the wrong thing? And there goes all my life savings. It Happens, right? So what you need is some abstraction layer there. So you look, I'm sending it to you.
It's just my computer. Sending it to your computer and yeah, I guess there are like public keys and address is involved, but I don't want to think about it. I don't see him. Right. Like I don't, I don't really think about that. Do you accept that? I have to think about that with normal banking. It's also a bit of a flaw, right? Like so, So there are those layers. All right, so you okay, I can do my own stuff. I can have my wallet in there. I can I can do. I can use it for multi-party
computation. And then yeah, I should also use it for storing all the client-side state. So all off chains, state that I need. So, if I'm using safe right to manage some assets, do other things like that, you my actual personal data has to be stored, somewhere special store that in my room. Another thing Yoruba can do for you is it can act as your Watchtower, right? So let's say you're doing
something with lightning, right? Or that's not the only thing that needs a Watchtower. But for some of these things where you have a like, a state Channel, You actually need some program running on your behalf. Monitoring the chain to see if something happens. So there's something happens that's against you. This thing can do an adversarial close of the channel and make sure that your funds don't get,
so, right. So you can rely on somebody else do that or you can use urban food, then there are deeper Integrations, right? So something we're basically You want to have an application, that's mostly off chain. But has a non chain component, right? So let's say you have a video game and their in-game assets that you actually want an economy for. All right, I need to double spin protection on those assets.
So, for that, there's, you can do that, just sort of normally right, where you can write it or B app, that's primarily, you know, in irbid out but also talks to a chain. You can do that by talking to existing chains and then there's also the Akbar project which is aiming to They're building a ZK, roll up as a layer to on a theorem that where you wear that uses knock orbits machine code as it's to write smart contracts. So they do ZK proofs of anak KO.
All right. So this allows you to write a your application in herb, its programming language. And you also write some little piece of it that stays on chain and those share the same data types, they share the same helper libraries They communicate very seamlessly with one another. So you, there's also a lot less code involved in deploying that application, right?
So, one of the big problems with deploying daps as they're currently conceived of is that you write a little bit of solidity, but most of what you write is Javascript because there's actually a lot more code that runs off chain. Then runs on Shane. And so you have to still deal with all this web to stuff all the difficulties of deploying web to application. Along with the difficulty to deploying web three applications. Can't Screw Up the solidity either, right?
So it's actually just a pretty scary thing to try to do so herb. It doesn't doesn't necessarily make the smart contract part of it that much easier but everything else around that. It's a lot easier to integrate that into an application and then there's an even deeper layer. I would say of integration between urban and blockchains and this is more speculative, more sort of philosophical, but basically Lee, I've been thinking about this lately that blockchains have Oracle problem.
Just in general, if any data is going to be put onto the chain as a transaction input, the data has to come from somewhere often. It can't be verified just by you, by being on Jane. The way that through derived data can be Right. So a general You know, so it's like a let's say you want to pay me for doing some work. Well how do you, how do you know that I actually did the work and so something, somebody has to put that data on chain, right?
And that's an oracle problem because when they put that data on chain, you have to try to figure out. Well, how does that? How does how do we know that that's true? That that's accurate information, right? So chain link is a whole system for those. Right. I think there are a bunch of others, their chains.
For Oracle for Price data. And so that has particular characteristics, where you can, you know, you can sort of average them out and throughout the outliers and have some economic incentives to get the good answer there, right? But that only applies for certain kinds of data. And for a lot of those sort of a lot of what people were
interested in blockchain solving back in 2017. 2018, that never are, that have not yet panned out, I should say, things like using it for, you know, the Love your house, right? Or like these sort of more real-world tokenizing physical assets. Some of that's probably just about idea generally but they're probably my guess is that there are several of those that actually are good ideas but
they're not feasible yet. And what's needed to make them feasible is includes a more generic and more like a more general purpose, Oracle system. And so irbid, I'll tie will actually get to the point here. The one of the ways I see her it is as a general-purpose Oracle system like a low. The lowest layer of an oracle system. Where basically, you want to put, you want to put some data
on chain. Okay. Well, it comes on chain signed by the ER but that produced it and located within turbots scry namespace. So this is very technical concept but basically herb, it has a way of assigning a permanent immutable name to a piece of data. And attesting to that by signing it with using the urban Public Service private Key verifiable by anybody. And so it's a way of laying out all the data that gets produced by any Urban on the network and having that herb attest to that date.
So at the moment, there's no double spend protection, or there's no, there's no Byzantine fall protection of the. So, there's nothing to say that I can't run a malicious, turbot kernel. That signs two different versions of the same data at the same path. But and most of it doesn't but most of the data that orbit deals with doesn't need that protection and so shouldn't have it because you actually again, you only want blockchains for certain things but You can take that data.
You could write a contract that that doesn't Force Byzantine fault Tolerance on those on those bindings. And then basically, you could use that as a way of just ingesting arbitrary data from anyone's personal computer and it comes a test of to buy them, you know who they are. Not even you don't other social security number. But but you can tie that identity to other other actions at that River has taken it. Does develop reputation.
And so, because it develops reputation that's where you can build systems of trust. You can build reputation systems on chain reputation systems that deal with this that you could use programmatically to filter all this data. So this is a whole line of thinking. None of this has been built yet, it's just sort of something that's been rolling around in my head, but I think there's something fundamental there, right? We're basically blockchains ordeal are specific specifically
for dealing with object of data. All right. Like, what is objectively? The sort of consensus truth about something herb has are designed for dealing with subjective data. What is my version of this is your version of this And so I think they use these two things complement each other very well. And you need both of them to really build a sort of cryptographically sound world.
But you need a world that has hardness as Josh Stark described in his essay of atoms institutions and blockchains right now block desert as as civilization progresses the hardness of our institutions increases. Bachchan's. Do a great job of hardening. Currency contracts potentially law but not anything subjective really. And so for so Urban is really where you harden the sort of subjective reality. I don't know what you think about that.
But yeah, I want to ask about one thing that I've been, you know, pondering a little bit and I'm kind of like Unsure how it's going to play out, right? So today, In Viv to obviously privacy is pretty bad at error. May be terrible, right? And Herb. It has this, you know, fundamentally different Paradigm that, you know. It gives you more privacy in some ways, right? Because like your program runs on your herb.
It and you data is there but at the same time because everything you do on the network is like associated with your planet ID. It all. They also seems to be the kind of this aspect where maybe there's less privacy to or like, you know, at least in the current system, you know, you can make like different usernames, use different emails, make different accounts. And so I'm curious like how you
think this is going to play out. I would say there's more accountability and that does cut both ways because yeah, if you get because so basically in urban you have this ID and it's typically a very permanent ID, like people get really attached to them, I'm very attached to Robin's brick for Gary. If somebody took teller told us away from you, I imagine he would not be very happy with this. You get attached to it. The way you get attached to your normal human name. It's a little odd.
Honestly, it's like it. That's part of the system works a lot better than I would expect it to but there's quite a bit of empirical evidence for this people getting very attached to their name so you can test your name because they were that's really who you are on the network. It's how people know you. And I think that will only increase as people start doing things like Financial transactions through or other sort of more serious, more
serious uses. And so yeah, there is a trade-off there somewhere, abstractly right between you know, can you Accountable for your actions. On the one hand, which also means you have a reputation. So developing the development of Social Capital requires attribute ability of actions, right? Like you have to know that it was me in order for developed in order to for me to develop that app, that reputation.
But then conversely you know, if I do something wrong then you know, my then everyone will spit and ever, they hear my name for generations to come the sins of the father shall be Revisited upon the child or whatever, right? Interestingly, I think blockchains have a Very similar problem, right? We're like the provenance of Turin, provenance of transactions, actually completely visible. I'm John a chain the way.
It's maybe not with in a more traditional banking system and so a nerve, it actually takes the same approach. The blockchain is do which is you have a layer of pseudonymity, right? So any particular Urban idea, yeah, that took that accrues reputation, but that idea is not tied back to your real world identity unless you want it to be. Yeah, I should mention that that
anonymity is possible. Honorable people will know you're anonymous and in most contexts you may want to be unaccountable and a given situation. But the other people in that situation probably what everybody else around them to be accountable and he would probably like everybody else to be accountable to. So while an annuity is possible, actually makes it more difficult
to socialize in many ways. So I think I think just like in web to honor between will see some anonymous Social happenings but the majority of interaction will be accountable with this kind of skin in the game based system. Yeah, so specifically, there's a type of urban idea that's called a comet. You don't have to buy it, you can create an infinite number of them effectively and yeah, you can throw them away their ephemeral and so, they're in
there Anonymous IDs. And interestingly, yeah, we find that most substantial groups ban them, because they tend to be Trolls but there are places where they're not banded because people really want to have Anonymous conversations. So it's different use case, different use cases, imply different things, and so you Can you can do both with her? So I guess there's there's herb it.org developers, dr. B dot org is the best place for engineers.
Who want to learn more. If you want to get started using orbit as a user, there's getting started Link at AB dot org as well. So that's all very polished and and user-friendly nowadays. Yeah, we're still working on it too. Is getting better. Yeah, I mean I'm just very excited mean today and also just for like you know, what is it look like today, right? I mean there are some of these applications but I think right now what really works is just this group's, right?
So you have some community and you can message each other in chat and it's like, it's pretty nice. And I think that's already something that, you know, at least for a lot of people it's enough to To kind of trigger a lot of thinking and a lot of seeing of possibilities. But I think what I'm super excited about is you know, the point where we really have compelling applications, you know they're like actually cool and I think we're pretty close. I don't think we're there yet, right?
I mean, at least personally, I haven't used anything where it's like, you know, this is really cool Beyond just illustrating some possibility of what could be in the future but I, you know, I would guess that this is Is something that will get to if in the next six to 12 months. And I think at that point, it's just going to be very exciting, right? Especially have people from crypto like come over and Explorer bit. And I think there's going to be an avalanche of innovation and adoption.
That's going to happen after that, I agree. Yeah, I would say if you're if you want to play with her but it's fun to play with and there's some interesting groups, you know. Through actually quite a few different social groups on our about that are very different from one another. So the the idea that we're going to Foster the development so subcultures has been empirically
true so far. And but then I think the thing that's really exciting about herb it right now is if you're a developer because this is a really good time to get involved and play with it, right? Build something, take a weekend, maybe it takes a week. If you got to learn the programming language first, maybe it takes a little longer.
But it's not that bad and then learn your way around the system, build an app and you can build and publish it and it's really easy and then and then talk to people about it and you might get some nice positive feedback and make it actually users very quickly. And there are all kinds of apps that should be written for a crypto integration.
So, if you're coming from crypto especially and that strategically, it strategically interesting for us, a tour of it and you may be able to To get a grant from The herbal Foundation to work on, something like that. We have a grant program you should check out bounties. So there are a lot of different ways of getting involved and also you can get on the network and talk to people about what they know, what they want to build work with some other people.
So, yeah, I think this is it's a really fun time to get involved with her bit because it's at the point where the app development and app distribution is somewhat mature, it's a mature enough that it's not a huge pain. And then also, but despite that it's still very young and so there's still a lot of low-hanging fruit that needs to be written. That's not too not too hard to do. Cool. Well thanks so much Ted and
thanks so much. Gary was really pleasure to have you guys on and there was a pleasure. I think this is a nice, a nice other introduction about her weight because I think often you need quite a few introductions of whether it's a completely, sure, people will enjoy this. And I'm also sure this is not going to be the last time we're going to talk about her weight, but there's going to be a lot
more to come. And I think the next year the next two years and what's ahead is going to be incredibly exciting. So I'm, you know, I can't wait to see. See how it all unfolds and yeah. Also so grateful for you, Ted like for doing all this work in trying to get this platform to maturity. Thank you. Really enjoyed this. All right, and thanks to our listeners for tuning in.
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