Jutta Steiner, CEO of Parity, and Gavin Wood, who goes by the title “chief white space officer,” describe the network Parity plans to launch later this year, Polkadot, how it aims to solve scalability, interoperability and security and when a developer would choose to build a dapp on Ethereum vs. a parachain on Polkadot. We also discuss another one of their products, Substrate, which enables developers to easily customize blockchains, and perceived competition between Ethereum and Polkadot. Plus, we talk about the frozen funds of Parity and other crypto teams, and why Jutta and Gavin think the community should upgrade in a way that would enable the funds to be unlocked.
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Episode links:
Parity: https://www.parity.io
Jutta Steiner: https://twitter.com/
Gavin Wood: https://twitter.com/
Polkadot light paper: https://polkadot.network/
Polkadot Wiki: http://wiki.polkadot.network/
Gavin’s 2014 blog post on Web 3: https://gavwood.com/
Gav’s keynote on the journey to Web 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?Chain Fibers article in the Ethereum Wiki: https://github.com/ethereum/
Web 3.0 vision:
https://medium.com/@gavofyork/More explanation of Polkadot, Substrate, Consensus, Governance, etc.: http://wiki.polkadot.network/
Upgradeability without hard forks via Substrate
https://medium.com/polkadot-Controversy around Afri Schoedon’s tweet:
https://breakermag.com/Dothereum: https://twitter.
Gavin and Vitalik Buterin discussing competition between Ethereum and Polkadot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Why not to fork for the frozen funds:
https://medium.com/@avsa/Transcript:
Laura Shin:
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Laura Shin:
Live from the subzero conference in Berlin, my guests today are Jutta Steiner, co-founder and CEO of Parity, and Gavin Wood, co-founder and chief white space overlord of Parity. Welcome, Gavin and Jutta.
Jutta Steiner:
Thank you.
Gavin Wood:
Thanks.
Laura Shin:
How did you each get involved in crypto? And Gavin, why don’t you start, because I think your involvement pre-dated Jutta’s.
Gavin Wood:
Well, I guess it goes back to, I think it was early 2013, when I was sitting in bed reading a newspaper article on this crazy place in Berlin where there was this guy who had a bar on the street in Berlin, and he was talking about how it was kind of quite anti-establishment, there was a lot of kind of artists, sort of squatters, it was a very foreign scene from my point of view, I was sort of living in a suburb of Leeds at the time, and he was talking about how a lot of the businesses were switching to, or it was making it seem at least, how a lot of the businesses were switching to bitcoin for their means of payment between each other, and it really got me thinking, you know, is this legitimately a sort of, see change in how the world could work. Around the same time, Silk Road was also gathering some sort of infamous-ity, you know, but it was all again, linked, you know, there was tor, crypto, bitcoin, and together they sort of made me sort of think there might be some sort of underlying kind of social change happening here, so I sort of set about it to investigate it further and I met a guy also featured in the article called Amir Taaki.
I went out to London to see him, just to sort of have a chat and figure out what’s going on here, and one thing led to another. I sort of got to know a bunch of people in the space and eventually Vitalik, and I sort of set about working on Ethereum, which he very recently published a white paper on, sort of proposal for, if you like, a kind of re-think of blockchain or bitcoin, it was all bitcoin at the time, there wasn’t really blockchain back then, and I figured this would be a really interesting way of getting to learn about the technology and also, in some sense, understand a deeper level, what sort of implications it might have for society in general, so it was around December 2013 that I set about coding Ethereum, basically, and things progressed kind of quickly from there on for me, January going to Miami and sort of meeting all the other guys in the sort of space, and February we basically kind of launched the thing that I’ve been writing as the sort of initial proof of concept of Ethereum, and I mean, a lot of crazy antics followed and here we are now.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. Seriously, I mean, your story is obviously an important one in the Ethereum space. And Jutta, how about you?
Jutta Steiner:
I got involved a few months later, around May 2014, so almost five years ago now. Coming from a bit of a different angle, mainly driven through a personal lead, I guess, I was more concerned after the Snowden revelations, like, how our lives work online, privacy, what’s happening to my data, so I was researching, like, what’s the most up to date tool for sharing personal data encrypted into, and found discussions online where people were speculating how to use Ethereum in that context and that got me interested, I think I first came across Maidsafe and then some links later I found myself on Reddit, people talking about Ethereum, and then saw that Gav would be in Berlin speaking at the bitcoin meet-up back then about Ethereum, and so I went there and that’s how I got to know the people and got more interested.
Laura Shin:
And so, as we have mentioned, you know, before Ethereum it was really all about Bitcoin and so why did you guys become so captivated by Ethereum itself?
Jutta Steiner:
To me, it was really like, the idea how to rearchitect the web, and I think Gav crystalized it very recently in the post that he wrote about Web3 and the idea of how to build a complete peer to peer stack of the web to fix a lot of the issues that we see these days, so that was really what so much resonated with me, like, being fed up with the fact that I had to rely on all these defunct institutions online.
Gavin Wood:
Yeah. When I came to the space, I guess it was, you know, I saw bitcoin before 2013, but I kind of dismissed it as being a bit of a whacky idea, this sort of currency that didn’t really have any real sort of meaning, or grounding in the world, and it was only later when I figured that actually there might be some legitimate utility in the technology belying in a bitcoin. When Ethereum came along, I could see it was an improvement, but I couldn’t really understand what the real ramifications were, like, it was, if you go back to the initial proposal that Vitalik made in late 2013, it was really kind of more programmable version of bitcoin, but there wasn’t anything, you know, fundamentally different in how it was being pushed, it was still very much purely a blockchain solution. The idea was that you had money, the idea was that you could attach rules to the money, but the sort of the main distinction was that these rules could be Turing complete, and that was all of the real communications about why is Ethereum different to bitcoin back then, revolved around this Turing complete concept.
Laura Shin:
And just to explain, because I’m not a technical person, like, I have heard of Turing complete, but what is the significance of that?
Gavin Wood:
Essentially, it means that you can express any sort of set of rules or process of business logic that you want, so Turing completeness is merely a way of stating that a particular language can express basically any kind of concept that we can come up with.
Jutta Steiner:
So, it’s basically the difference between bitcoin being a calculator that can do some specific things, and then the computer which can do like, anything, basically.
Gavin Wood:
That’s right. So, when we got to actually writing Ethereum, I remember having a bit of a eureka moment in January 2014 where I sort of understood that the, whereas bitcoin was crypto currency, and whereas some other projects out there were really trying to become the crypto finance where, you know, introducing financial contracts and so on, I understood that the real sort of tangible utility of Ethereum was to become a sort of crypto legal system, and that would have that much more of a ramification for society in general, and as time went on, it became increasingly clear that for Ethereum to really have, you know, the utility it wanted to have, it really needed to pull together a number of other technologies, so it was only one piece of the wider puzzle, so the idea with bitcoin, the idea of blockchain in general, is to reduce trust between participants, right, so when we go and do a transaction in society, typically if we go down to the shop and we buy some bananas and we pay with our credit card, it involves trusting a number of people that we don’t really think about, we have to trust the credit card, we have to trust the guy who made the credit card machine, we have to trust the bank to process the transactions, we have to trust the receiving bank to process their end, we have to trust any, if there’s any label on the banana that says, hey, this banana came from Brazil, then we have to trust whoever put the label on, we have to trust the trademark of the label, we have to trust the shopkeeper that he’s selling his bananas from, that haven’t gone off, or they’re bad, you know, didn’t have bad pesticides used on them, and the list goes on and on, we trust an awful lot of people in our daily life, and the idea of blockchain in general, is to reduce this amount of trust that we have to put ourselves under, but it only works so far, blockchain is only part of the answer.
Another part of the answer is to ensure that there’s an effective communications mechanism behind the blockchain, or to the side of the blockchain that allows us to get information that perhaps the blockchain references, but that we can’t be sure is necessarily sort of true, so the blockchain isn’t very good at storing lots and lots of information, publishing information, or allowing people to communicate between each other, so there are additional technologies still in the cryptographic ecosystem, but they need to be created in order to allow blockchain to fulfill its sort of duty as the crypto decentralized trustless legal system by basically allowing people to communicate in a way that they don’t have to trust any additional sender, so if I want to talk to Jutta, for example, on email or Facebook, then I have to trust either Mark Zuckerberg or Sergey and Larry, to not look at what I’m talking to her about, or not change the messages, or ensure that they get delivered on time, all the rest of it, so it’s really about trying to build, blockchain in general for me, the space for me, is about trying to build a whole new set of technologies that can replace the way that we do things which allow trust.
Jutta Steiner:
I think I tend to think slightly differently about the trust aspect these days. To me it’s more about making trust a lot more granular, so when I think of, we’re on Facebook, like, I probably trust Google that they do have really good operation and can do calculations really fast, but I don’t trust them to actually care about my personal data and like being able to make all these different things that also these companies do in a way, like, far more transparent and granular and accessible and traceable for me, that’s what I hope we can deliver.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. And something I’ve been thinking about, I don’t know if it’s even, like, that then we don’t have to trust, it’s that, then instead we’re trusting technology, because we’re still trusting something, but in your case, where you know how the technology works, like, maybe trust isn’t the word that you would use, but in my case, where I don’t really know, you know, like, I can’t check the code.
Gavin Wood:
So, the main thing is that you can, even if you yourself can’t check the code, you can find somebody, you can go out, you can put an advert up, you can contact your brother-in-law’s mate, but you can find someone that you do trust to some degree, and have them check the code for you, like, someone who’s an expert, or you can pay multiple experts, none of whom have aligned interests, and get them all to check the code, in principle, that avenue is open to you, in a system that’s open and transparent. It’s never open to you in a system that’s closed and opaque, like, the traditional corporate silicon valley style start-up, where, you know, the operations and the internal workings of the systems are closely guarded.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. Or on the flip side, also that the Wall Street institutions, too. And actually, one other thing I wanted to ask, when you were describing that kind of vision that you had, and you were saying that there needed to be other entities in this decentralized legal system, like, what are some examples of other entities you were thinking of?
Gavin Wood:
So, the main aspect of this kind of decentralized economy that I put forward, aside from the sort of crypto legal system, were a means of publishing information in a cryptographically secure manner.
Laura Shin:
Would that be like an oracle?
Gavin Wood:
That would be basically a bit like BitTorrent, a means of like, just pushing information off to the cloud, to the centralized…
Laura Shin:
Okay. But not necessarily verifying it.
Gavin Wood:
But not necessarily verifying it, but certainly being able to be sure that if you download some information, that you believe that you have some digest of, so you’ve been given a sort of key for the information, being certain that the information that you’ve been given exactly corresponds to what it is that you asked for, and that’s not something that we have. At the moment, if I want some information from, I don’t know, a website or whatever, I can go to the website and I have a URL, so I have like, someone says, here’s a URL, go read this news article, then I can put the URL into Google Chrome and it will go and download the news article, but I can’t be sure that it’s the same news article the Jutta read. Now, most of the time it will be, but if I live in a more repressive state that has a greater control on the media, then I don’t get that guarantee quite so solidly, and what we have here is the ability to, if Jutta gives me a special key, what we call a hash or a digest, then any information that I get, I can actually check to make sure that this is, the digest of this information, the digest of the news article, exactly matches this shorter hash or digest that Jutta gave me, so I can be sure that I’m reading the same content.
Laura Shin:
Okay. So, it’s sort of like IPFS?
Gavin Wood:
Exactly. IPFS kind of came along after BitTorrent, but it kind of, at least part of IPFS solved a very similar problem, and then the other one is like, a means of communications between two or more parties. This could be seen as somewhere between a sort of instant messenger, so the ability to send a message and then have it arrive in a timely fashion on someone else’s computer, or it can be seen as sort of a bulletin board where you can post a message, and if people know the sort of topic that they’re looking out for, that your message sort of mentions, then they will get your message, that can be seen more like Twitter, right, so you use a hashtag and people who are following that hashtag can see your message, so something that sufficiently general to be able to be used for all of these different kind of communication use cases, but is also again cryptographically secure, so you get certain guarantees, you get guarantees that if they don’t know the topic, they won’t be able to read the message, if they don’t know its a message they won’t know it ever existed, if I send a message and I say it’s from me, then whoever reads it knows it was definitely me who wrote it, and again, you don’t get these on traditional platforms because if you post a message on Facebook, it’s Facebook that tell people it’s you who posted it, and if, you know, Mark Zuckerberg’s having a bad day, and he really doesn’t like you, and he wants to sort of make you post something that you didn’t actually post, then he’s perfectly able to go into his servers and insert a message that claims to be from you, but it actually isn’t, of course, he’s not going to do that, but hackers might do that, and they could make your life kind of annoying if they wanted to.
Laura Shin:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Which has happened a ton already both in the non-crypto space and the crypto space. So, you guys have these ideas which actually are similar, or at least converge, and you are both officially working with Ethereum and then you left to start Parity in late 2015. What was the motivation for that, and what does Parity do?
Gavin Wood:
So, there are a number of reasons why that sort of turn of events happened, but the sort of big underlying one was that Ethereum was a project, at the time it had been launched, it was in some sense, as far as version one went, reaching a degree of maturity, so it had been built, it was now sort of out in the open, there was no clear governance on how it should change and there was no sort of, unlike a normal start-up, it was sort of based around a foundation that didn’t, again, have a real clear roadmap or in terms of execution, on how to actually move the thing forward, because of course, Ethereum is a protocol, sort of existed, and the foundation didn’t have any direct control over that, so really, we wanted to, or at least for me, I wanted to sort of get out and build, sort of carry on building, build more stuff, and I felt in some sense that the foundation wasn’t the right place to be doing that, partly, you know, as a foundation, it was sort of constrained in what it’s able to do, both in terms of resources, and in terms of sort of missions and goals, and so it felt a perfectly reasonable thing to sort of stay on good terms, but nonetheless work from within a private entity in the same ecosystem, so I didn’t view it as leaving Ethereum, I view it as simply a sort of setting up an entity with which we could really deliver as much value as possible in the ecosystem.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. And you continued working on Ethereum because you guys have created, well, not just the Parity Ethereum client, but then also you’ve been working with other blockchains, you’re doing stuff for Zcash and you also have some consumer facing products…
Jutta Steiner:
I think for me it was really, I mean, I was working partially also on some applications really, like, that wanted to use Ethereum and supply chain on a project called Provenance, for me it was really also the realization that it wasn’t like, even though it was like the first version, it wasn’t there yet for, so you could actually use it, and I felt there’s a lot that needs doing sort of on the lower level again, and how to see the right way of doing that and that’s what we committed to, basically, building blockchain technology and making that accessible for people.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. Which is kind of the perfect segue to your next big things. You guys will be launching Polkadot, potentially later this year, which is a new protocol. How did you have the idea for Polkadot, and what problems are you attempting to solve with it?
Gavin Wood:
The idea of Polkadot sort of goes back to, I think it was late 2014, early 2015, I wrote a small article called Chain Fibers, I think it’s still on the Ethereum/wiki and the idea was to put forward a means of scaling Ethereum, so what’s now called sharding, and sort of an early version of what perhaps might be called Ethereum 2.0, and it was something that certainly for the first couple, I don’t know, year, year and a half of Parity’s existence, we wanted to stay very much in line with the direction of the Ethereum foundation and the technology, the specifications, and so on that they were putting out, but as time wore on, we kind of thought, well, you know, we’re kind of stuck here, not twiddling our thumbs, but you know, we really want to be developing cooler stuff, we don’t want to let the world move on too far without us, so let’s start thinking about how, what kind of cool stuff can we do, so I went back to Chain Fibers and I thought, well, a, this is a bit too similar to actual Ethereum 2.0, so I don’t want to do it itself, because you know, I much prefer to just sort of stay in line with the Ethereum protocol itself, but maybe we can create something from it that fulfills a sort of different task, a different sort of niche or use case, and that was when I sort of, I sat in a café, I think in San Francisco, with one of the sort of founding developers, Marick, and just sort of chatting about, well, you know, if we were to do something that was sharded or parallelizable, what would be the simplest possible way we could push this forward, how could we deliver something as soon as possible, because you know, we don’t want to take 3, 4, 5 years in order to get to this, so we took chain fibers, basically removed all of the stuff, we made the problem as simple as possible.
I’ll give you an example of how we made it simpler, in Ethereum as it stands, and in chain fibers, the idea is the individual smart contracts where they want to interact with another smart contract, so if they want to like, spend some tokens, for example, then that message would happen synchronically, which means it happens immediately, so they get sort of all figured out all at the same time, it’s not that it happens seconds or minutes later, it’s a lot harder to make things synchronous because if you have, the way that you make a system scalable, is you split it, you divide and conquer, so you split up the problem, the smart contracts, across lots and lots of different computers, and you have them all execute them at the same time, that allows you to execute that many more, it’s almost like splitting a workload up between lots and lots of managers, or whatever, factory floor workers, so they can each do the workload independently and come back and assemble the finished product, much faster than if one person were just sort of doing everything themselves, but the problem is, if the workload involves several of those people sort of communicating with each other, then it becomes harder because they’re busy working off in their own corner, right, they can’t talk to each other so easily, so what we did, we made it very simple, and we said, right, well actually, they can sort of talk to each other as they’re busy working off in their own corner, they can only talk to each other at the end of the day when all the messages sort of get rooted, so we’ve got a very simple memo system basically, and that simplifies things an awful lot, it made the protocol something that we believe we can develop, you know, in the next 18 to 24 months as was in the next 18 to 24 months.
Now, what we realized not long after that, was why are we bothering, all these workers, when they’re going off to their different corner and doing their jobs, why are we insisting that these workers have the same kind of job, why are we insisting that there’s only kind of one type of job, the job of executing Ethereum smart contracts, why don’t we make it so that these workers can execute any kind of a job, so we can make them each have their individual specialties the main that they can work in, so one could be a doctor and another could be a lawyer and another could be a postman and another could be a bank cashier, and then they could all come together and kind of chat to each other at the end of the day with the memo system, but most of the time they would be off doing their individual, domain specific activity workload, and that’s really where Polkadot came from. Polkadot was this idea of saying, right, well, when we scale, we don’t necessarily have to just scale a single protocol, a single kind of blockchain, we can actually scale, but also have lots of different kinds of blockchains all connected together, doing their individual domain specific specialty, but still able to sort of chat to each other, and critically share in the same security guarantees, now of course, you can have many different blockchains, each doing their own thing, we already have that, we have bitcoin doing currency, and we have Zcash doing sort of opaque crypto transaction currencies, we have Ethereum doing smart contracts, there are many different blockchains out there, each fulfilling their independent domain specific goals, but the problem is that they each need to be secured individually, and the security works by, basically, for proof of work, blockchain, like bitcoin and Ethereum, it works by having people spend money on wasting lots of compute power, right, so they spend money on basically keeping a small corner of China very warm, and that’s obviously not such a good idea, for a number of reasons, the main one being that different individual blockchains would each have to add to the heat as they want to make themselves more secure, because they can’t share in the other blockchain security.
If I launch a blockchain, I can’t share in bitcoin security unless I can persuade all of the bitcoin miners to also mine my chain, and with proof of stake, the problem is the same, so this is a new way of securing blockchains, but it still suffers from the same problem that you can’t easily share the security. If you want to add a new proof of stake blockchain, you also have to find lots and lots of capital, lots of money, that will sit behind your blockchain and sort of insist that it’s valid as they create new blocks and process more transactions, and really, what Polkadot, the sort of nice, really important new thing on Polkadot, is that it does allow these lots of different blockchains, but it allows them to share in the security so they can each, by creating more utility, drawing more capital to the system, they each gain additional security.
Laura Shin:
So, it sounds to me like there’s kind of three main things you’re trying to solve, scalability, inoperability, and then security, which is basically like reducing start-up costs, you know, the way that like DropBox can do that now whereas back in the day, start-ups would have to spin up their own servers and stuff like that, and just for listeners, kind of like, the technical ways this happens, and tell me if I get any of this wrong, but there’s the relay chain, where that’s like the communication at the end of the day happens, and then the parachains are like the doctor, or the lawyer, or the banker that you talked about, and then bridges are where you take the already existing blockchains that are out there, and like, make it so that they can interoperate in this system, is that correct?
Gavin Wood:
Yeah. That’s right.
Laura Shin:
Okay. So, something, when I was like thinking about this, I was a little bit like, okay, so how do the chains all talk to each other, because as far as I understand, I think like, you can be in an Ethereum smart contract and call a Tezos contract or you can be like, in Ethereum and then make a Zcash transaction happen, but does that mean you that you guys have to write instructions for every possible permutation across chain communication, or is there some way of doing it without like, literally, it just seems like that would be a lot of work for every time a new paradigm gets added, like, you’d have to write 50 different instructions for how to talk to all the other parachains.
Gavin Wood:
Yeah. I mean, much of the utility of Polkadot is really providing this housing for new blockchains. That said, Polkadot is, by facilitating what we might say is very sophisticated logic, much more so than a typical smart contract. We do allow bridges that essentially have to be light clients, right, so they have to be at least really quite complex pieces of logic than can synchronize to sort of external chains, be it Tezos, Ethereum, or Zcash, or whatever, we allow these light clients to sit actually inside our consensus protocols, inside Polkadot, inside as one of the parachains, but I don’t want to, the point of Polkadot isn’t really to be a lot of bridges, we sort of envision a few bridges, but we don’t envision like, you know, hundreds of bridges in order to connect all of the blockchains, Polkadot would be much more valuable as a sort of test bed, as a execution round for many individual sort of domain specific projects, to bring their own logic, and actually execute the logic within Polkadot rather than having separate blockchains and sort of having this bridge.
Now, if a bridge is for bridging sort of existing systems, the bridge component itself would be the go between, the sort of translator, if you like, between what will likely be standard messages within Polkadot, messages that say, hey, you know, I’ve burned five bitcoin tokens, you need to mint five bitcoin tokens on your side in order to ensure that all of the bitcoin tokens in the system stay, the total number stays the same. Those kinds of messages will be interpreted by the bridge, and the bridge would do things like unlocking bitcoin on the bitcoin chain, or transferring bitcoin that was previously sort of under the permission of the Polkadot validators to wherever it was that the parachain that sort of supposedly holds this bitcoin wanted it to go, so in essence, these messages are being translated by the bridge authority, so it’s not that bitcoin has to learn what these messages are, but it’s also not that the parachains have to sort of figure out first, hey, is it going to bitcoin, then we need to send this, or is it going to Ethereum, then we need to send that, the message is, realistically there will be probably just one or two relatively small, like, thin standards, for these kinds of messages.
They don’t need to be very complicated because Polkadot guarantees things like, that the message will be delivered, or be delivered once, and it will be delivered where it needs to go, so you get very, very strong economically strong guarantees on these messages, which means the messages just need to be kind of like, mint five bitcoins because I burned five bitcoins on my side. Beyond that, the bridges, new parachains will likely just build these standards into them, but bridges will have to translate between from the standards that Polkadot has, the sort of Polkadot native messaging, into some action that can be concretely taken on the sort of foreign blockchain like Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Laura Shin:
Okay. But the parachain, it sounds like, even just from building there will be like, some standard way that they’ll communicate.
Gavin Wood:
There’ll be one or two standardized messages, I’m sure, in the same way that Ethereum shortly after it launched, we standardized the ERC 20 format for token contracts, so they’ll be kind of similar efforts with the protocol.
Laura Shin:
And then also, if security is one of the features they’re offering, why is it only 50 to 100 validators, like, is that decentralized and secure enough?
Gavin Wood:
So, that won’t be, that’s more as a launch thing, the fact you know, there won’t be very many parachains at launch, it takes time for the system to build up, and therefore, there’s not really any great need to have 1,000 validators on day one, but certainly once the system is fully up to speed, we’re designing it to have off the order of 1,000 validators.
Laura Shin:
Will that slow down the block time or the communication or anything like that?
Gavin Wood:
No. The nice thing is, that we have, we built a special sort of new protocol hybrid, BABE and GRANDPA that means that it won’t slow down, it’s actually really clever in how it manages, it basically has adaptive finality, so you’ll hear some talk of probabilistic finality, and of instant finality, so probabilistic finality is basically non-finality, so bitcoin and Ethereum are examples of these. This is where, as new transactions are added, as new blocks are added to the chain, you can never be absolutely certain that those transactions will stay there indefinitely, there’s always a small chance that the chain will be reverted and that instead of those transactions, other mutually exclusive transactions will be processed, and this is what we call double spending. Now, the newer thing, the sort of thing that a lot of projects, that are basing their consensus on an old algorithm called PBFT, practical byzantine fault tolerance, these projects are claiming instant finality, and what they mean by that is that as soon as the block is produced, so as soon as the transactions are sort of laid out there and published, then there is an economic guarantee so you can be sure up to, that someone will have to lose a million dollars or something, that these transactions won’t be reverted, that the block will stay there forever, ad infinitum, that they will never be sort of moved back and then some other transaction’s in their place instead.
Now, the problem with instant finality is that you don’t get any, by linking block production, so the creation of this block, the transactions in it, and finalization, what you’re doing is you’re saying, all the parties that are needed for finalization, and it’s quite a complex algorithm, so you need, let’s suppose you have 1,000 validators, well you need two thirds of these validators, so about 680, or whatever, to come back and sort of communicate all with each other, so they have to send a message to each of the other 680 validators and get a response, right, and then send another message, this has to happen before the block can be even published, right, so rather than in typical systems, like bitcoin for example, where it’s a minor block, you really just solve a little numerical problem, rather difficult one as it happens, but still, a very small problem that can easily be recognized, and then you just publish it, that’s it, there’s nothing more than that. In these instant finality systems, it’s not actually very instant, right, it takes quite a long time for all of this protocol to sort of get its head together and actually make its mind up which block is going to be next, because you’re tying together finality, which is a much harder thing to do than production, which is very easy. So what we’ve done, with a hybrid algorithm, is split off these two things, so production is still as fast as it would be on Ethereum or bitcoin, it’s very easy, simple thing, you just recognize that someone was the right person to create the block at this time, and it’s done, and then finality follows it, and if network conditions are good, then it follows it really quickly, it follows it about as quickly as even instant finalization, instant finality, but if network conditions are not so good, where instant finality would actually just never, ever, produce anything, it will just sort of lag behind a bit more, right, so there will be an extra, let’s say, 10 or 50 blocks that are sort of almost certainly final, but not definitely, definitely final and if you’re using it for like, low amounts of transactions, like low value transactions, like you’re buying a cup of coffee, it really doesn’t matter, you just trust it, but if you’re using it to transfer, you know, a hundred million dollars and you want to make sure you got a hundred million dollars before you let go of the suitcase of cash and the guy goes off on his merry way, then you would wait for the 50 or whatever blocks before you get guaranteed finality, so what this allows us to do is to increase the number of validators, so we can decentralize further, and that’s very much opposed to the fast finality route of, so called instant finality route, where you have to keep the number of validators low because you can’t produce even blocks without having all of these guys, basically, talk to each other quite a bit, and that can be problematic in certain circumstances.
If you’re talking that there’s going to be thousands of validators, so Ethereum 2 for example, we’re targeting around, I mean, vaguely the same sort of numbers, 1 to 10,000 validators, so we decentralize further in Polkadot though by having a notion of nominators, and nominators allow us to decentralize, if not the chains underlying computational maintenance, those people who are in the service, at least the funding of the validators, so nominators can nominate a number of validators to sort of act on their behalf, right, so they have some funds, they have some capital behind them, the nominators, and they in some sense, kind of, lend it to the validators for the purposes of getting block rewards that the validators would take, and we’ve got all sorts of economic sort of incentivization to ensure that, you know, it becomes fair and there’s market mechanisms that overly popular validators don’t take overdue amounts of funds that certain other systems suffer from.
Laura Shin:
Yes. Which is super important for security. All right. So, we’re going to discuss governance and Substrate after the break, but first a quick word from our fabulous sponsors.
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Laura Shin:
Back to my conversation with Gavin Wood and Jutta Steiner of Parity. How does governance work on Polkadot?
Gavin Wood:
Well, we haven’t finalized the governance protocol for Polkadot yet, so everything I say here is, you know, subject to the usual, it needs to be audited, our research team needs to sort of say that they’re happy with it, but I can certainly talk about what we have so far. So, in Polkadot, and the current proof of concept, we have a, if you like, kind of, bicameral system in some sense. On the one hand we have the legislature, which is the group of people, or group of accounts, whatever, economic entities, that can sort of pass new laws, so to speak, which in the context of Polkadot means, having this kind of super user administrative privilege to alter the code of the chain, and potentially also alter storage aspects, alter the state of the chain. Now, altering the code of the chain might mean fixing books, it might mean rolling out upgrades, it might mean a correcting for previous, for the problematic actions of previous books. Now, I mentioned there were two houses, so the other one is kind of this notion of the council, so the council can be viewed upon as an executive body within Polkadot, and the council gets a few, sort of bonus actions that it can take, so the council can put forward proposals for the legislature to vote on, so in some sense, it’s a little bit like the UK’s government where the parliament has, which is a house of around 650, or house of commons at least, has about 650 people in it, and they can pass new laws through a majority vote and then the government, or the current sort of executive, which is around 100 to 150 of these people, are the ones that can sort of propose by and large they’re the ones who can control the timeline that the votes, particular proposals for votes, happen.
There’s a few interesting tweaks though that we’ve made, so while the legislature is, I mentioned that it was sort of a large body referendum, so it’s a referendum of token holders, so everyone who holds dot tokens in the Polkadot system, would in principle be able to vote on measures, and the votes are weighted according to the number of dot tokens that they hold, but they’re also weighted according to a second thing which is the period by which they are happy to hold their dot tokens, to HODL their dot tokens, right, to not sell, to not move them elsewhere, so as holders are more committed to the platform, so they give up the optionality of removing themselves from the platform, they get a greater amount of voting power. Furthermore, there’s another interesting sort of tweak made to the referendum system, which is that there’s a period between the end of the vote, and the enactment of that vote, assuming it passes of course, whatever the proposal was proposing, there is a period of deciding that it will be enacted and actually enacting it, it’s about two weeks, during this period, those who voted in approval of it are not allowed to move their tokens at all, right, so there’s a minimum kind of lock period of this two weeks before it’s enacted, and also during the two weeks, those who voted against it, and those who didn’t vote at all, are able to move their tokens, they’re able to sort of say, well, you know, we think this is a terrible, terrible decision for the system and we’re going to move everything that we have out of the system, we’re going to sell up, we’re going to go, potentially we’re going to hard fork, who knows, and this is meant as a means of mitigating things like vote buying, since we are coin holder oriented, everything in Polkadot is decided ultimately by the set of coin voters weighted according to their commitment to the platform, we want to ensure that those holders, that basically third parties can’t come in, buy a bunch of, loan out a bunch of tokens, throw a particular proposal and then exit without paying any costs, we want to ensure that no one is going to loan these guys any tokens for the purpose of sort of destroying the system through a bad proposal.
Laura Shin:
And also, why did you guys decide on this kind of more activist and basically, on chain governance, as we know, this was something where like I know the Ethereum system actually decided, okay, we’re going to do off chain, like why did you decide to go this direction?
Gavin Wood:
I view governance as a problem of trust, so in much the same way that bitcoin solved the trust of currency, of being able to send tokens without having to trust banks or a central coin issuer, in the same way, Ethereum is trying to solve the trust of law, right, of counterparty risk and so on. I view governance as another one of those issues, it’s a trust of a process, it’s the trust of whoever has the authority or whoever, whichever, assembled actors have the collective authority to alter a system to do things that the system wasn’t in some sense designed to do, it’s a problem of trusting that they won’t act in a way that is against your wishes without giving you a chance to kind of exit, or at least have some sort of say, proportional to what your expectations would be, so it’s about making open and transparent the process for how the system will change over time. Now off chain governance isn’t really a thing. Off chain governance is really just saying, well, we don’t want to have very transparent processes, we don’t want to have a means of ensuring that the rights and obligations of the various actors in the system are clear, what we want to do is kind of just have everything be quite vague, and then the current policy as it stands, the current people who are essentially in charge and hold the cards and have the power, will just sort of, we believe that that system should just keep going, so I view off chain governance really, as a, we don’t want to tackle the problem because we’re quite happy with the problem being there.
I see on chain governance as a means of solving the issue of transparency and openness in exactly the same way that smart contracts solve the transparency and openness of counter party risk and all the rest of it, and in exactly the same way that bitcoin solves the transparency and openness of currency and sending value across the internet. The only question in my mind is, are we clever enough in order to be able to design these rules, these hard rules, by which a system like Ethereum or Polkadot, or whatever else, should be governed on day one. I have no doubt that we will solve it over time, like if we experiment, we’ll find out what works, the question is whether we can sort of get something that more or less works or at least works as well on day one, and that’s really the challenge for us now.
Laura Shin:
So, one thing I was wondering was, like, if I’m a developer, when will it make more sense for me to build an idea as a dapp on Ethereum versus as a parachain on Polkadot?
Jutta Steiner:
One thing, that’s why we’re here today I guess, one thing we are putting out very soon is Substrate, that framework that we’ve been developing to make it easy to building blockchains, it’s used in Polkadot and which is, I think, the best way of getting into it and experimenting like, what you can do with it, you can also use it, like, without tying into the Polkadot framework and some people are doing that as well, but it’s really our learning from having built a bunch of blockchains and making it easy to come to your own ideas and use the networking stack and what not without having to build it yourself, so I think now is actually a pretty good moment of starting to experiment with it, even though it’s still a bit uncertain when exactly the launch is going to be.
Gavin Wood:
Yeah. So, the difference between smart contracts and building your own sort of dapp chain, so Polkadot parachains are really designed to be fully fledged blockchains, which means they do one very particular domain specific thing, and they do it well. They don’t suffer from a lot of the restrictions that you would have on a smart contract system, so there’s a notion, and we were, during my time at Ethereum, we were happy to sort of have this notion, sort of be trumpeted from the rooftops, that a smart contract system can do anything, you can do anything in smart contracts, it’s true and complete, you can do absolutely anything you want, it’s not true really. While it is true and complete, it has a very, very particular limitation, and you know, I did mention this at the time so I don’t consider myself one of the worst offenders, but the limitation is gas, right, there is this notion of computational resources that your smart contract can never not respect, right, if it runs out of gas then it stops and everything gets reverted, right, so when you write smart contracts you have to be very, very careful that they don’t use more gas than they’re allowed, and this is necessarily the case. Smart contract systems are a smart contract blockchain like Ethereum, it heavily constrains its users, heavily constrains the logic that can operate on it by having this notion of gas. The gas becomes an economy in and of itself, so users of smart contracts don’t pay the operators of smart contracts, so if I publish a smart contract, I don’t automatically get paid for when a user uses it, rather, users of smart contracts pay Ethereum miners, and Ethereum miners are the ones that take that profit.
What this means is that as a dapp, there are three people to the party when you would really prefer there just be two, right, you want yourself and your users, but Ethereum forces you to have the Ethereum miners to the party as well, right, and they get a cut of anything that you and your users are doing. We designed it in this way because you know, we wanted the Ethereum token to be valuable and this is one of the ways that you make it valuable, but the problem is, that for dapps, it often makes it just way too expensive to do anything because you’re forcing your users to pay for every single transaction they make with the smart contract, and most of the time, not only will they have to pay the Ethereum miners, but they’ll also have to pay you for whatever services that your smart contract offers as well, so everything just becomes way more expensive, partly because you have to pay the existing Ethereum infrastructure to keep doing its job. Now, if all you’re doing is transferring money, like on bitcoin, then you know, hey, whatever, it’s just a sort of small percentage, whatever they mined, cost compared to the existing use case, that essentially would be way higher so it looks good, but when in talking about smart contracts, and there isn’t, you’re not necessarily transferring money, you’re like, I don’t know, messing around with CryptoKitties or something, suddenly these transaction fees, they don’t look so nice, especially when you’re trying to get it into the hands of people that are used to having literally everything for free because they’re using Zuckerberg or Sergey Brin, Larry Page is sort of offering, so what we do in Polkadot, what Polkadot facilitates, very much unlike smart contracts is to return it back to a two actor economy again, you’ve got your users, and you’ve got yourself, right, so when you put forward a parachain, a dapp chain, whatever, then you don’t have to care about the Polkadot miners, they do their job but they don’t take any cut of your economy, your economy stays your economy, until you want to communicate with other parachains, and then we can talk about, you know, there might be fees associated because then the Pollkadot guys are actually doing some job for you, they’re relaying your messages, but as long as you sort of stay within yourself, then you don’t pay any extras, there’s no extra tax, so the main distinctions between smart contracts and parachains are really this notion that you can control your internal economy that much better, you don’t have to sort of leak funds out to the sort of system for the purpose of securing your logic, that happens anyway, so we get that for free.
Now the distinction of course is, the sort of flip side of the coin is, you have to pay for one of these parachain slots upfront, you pay for it through depositing dots, you get them back at the end of it, but in some sense opportunity costs, right, you can’t sell them and stick the money in a high interest account, you have to actually stick them in the system and lock them there until your parachain is done, so it’s really offering a very different economic proposal, and that means that some systems, some dapps will be more than happy to stick with the smart contract system, those dapps are the ones where, you know, it’s just a guy, they want to push out some interesting logic, and they want users to basically pay for themselves, they just want to fire off some logic, we’re done, we’re out of here, you use it as you want, whereas the dapps that really want to optimize everything, they want to build a real sort of solution, and they want to continue interacting with their users and generate a sort of internal economy, for them parachains are a more interesting proposal because they will be happy to put forward the initial capital on the basis that they will be able to have full control over the economics with their users.
Jutta Steiner:
I think the notion of the economy indicates, like, it’s not going to be just a simple that just does this, like, they just need some simple logic on chain, but rather like more like the domain specific, all the banker, or like, so it’s not adaptive won’t see at least until we have like hierarchical chains in Polkadot we won’t see, like, one app, one chain, one parachain, but rather, a protocol that develops, for example.
Laura Shin:
Oh, that’s interesting. So, there will be like parachains, then there’ll be smart contracts within each of those.
Gavin Wood:
Yeah. So, that’s right. There’ll be some parachains that will be domain specific, but the domain will be hosting smart contracts. There’ll be other parachains, perhaps ones that just host assets, so there’s just an assets parachain, and you can put any assets that you want on there and sort of shift them around and stuff, but they don’t deal with any additional logic, if you want additional logic, you move the asset somewhere else.
Jutta Steiner:
If you think of the current crypto economy I guess, like, there could be a Zcash like chain, a bitcoin like chain, a smart contract like chain, so that’s sort of what we’re going to see initially rather than an app specific chain until the apps become really big and then it would make sense for them to try to have their own parachain slot because then the overhead becomes too big.
Laura Shin:
Okay. Yeah. Well this was my next question, like, what the future vision of many parachains looks like. Is it just what you described, or is there anything else to it?
Jutta Steiner:
I mean, that’s the next couple years, until the system becomes more hierarchical, like, I mean, the idea is in the future there will be like, a relay chain of relay chains like scaling it out and then it becomes, I mean, also as more libraries develop, like as it becomes easier to also be a parachain, it’s probably going to look more granular, more sort of depth specific, but in the near term, it’s more domain specific, what we’re going to see.
Laura Shin:
All right. And you mentioned Substrate, which you guys have built, and it’s sort of like developer tools which make it easier for people to build things on Polkadot, as far as I understand, so what are some of the different customizable features that people can implement using Substrate?
Jutta Steiner:
So, you could use it just as a tool for building your own completely new blockchain, completely independent of Polkadot, your own consensus, whatever that might be, or…
Laura Shin:
Oh, I’m sorry. I thought it was just for Polkadot, but it’s for any blockchain?
Jutta Steiner:
No. It’s for anything, so that’s also why we’re doing this event, to make people more aware that this isn’t like, Substrate and Polkadot are two different things in that sense, I mean, most people who will develop a parachain will probably use Substrate, but they’re not obliged to do that, they could also become a parachain without using Substrate, but it is a helpful tool in both directions.
Gavin Wood:
So, we’re actually building Polkadot with Substrate, so not only will Substrate be used for creating parachains on Polkadot, but the relay chain itself is a Substrate chain, and so this allows us to kind of let the snake eat its tail and we circle back and make the relay chain be itself a parachain, and we can sort of make it all hierarchal and recursive.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. I heard you say, I don’t remember where this was, that it sort of like, you just like food waste and as you were building it you wanted to make sure the code, you know, that the work kind of like accomplished more, which I totally understand, that was like, I’m so with Gavin on this concept, so one other thing that’s really cool about it is that I guess it enables people to then upgrade their networks without hard forks, so what are some examples of things you can change using Substrate without a hard fork that like now you would need a hard fork to accomplish?
Gavin Wood:
Well, basically you can do anything. The only thing you can’t touch is the sort of core underlying consensus mechanisms, so most chains I expect will use this kind of hybrid BABE and GRANDPA that I mentioned earlier, but you can change things like the staking algorithm, so you can say, right, well, we want to change it from proof of authority to proof of stake, no problem. Suppose you want to, you initially have a bitcoin chain, so you have this what we call unspent transaction output, UTXO chain, this is a very basic kind of currency chain, the initial use case of blockchain, suppose you want to add smart contracts to it, sure, upgrade can do that. Suppose you want to add governance to it, sure, upgrade can do that. Suppose you want to take a smart contract chain and you want to add operations that allow you to do zero knowledge proofs on your smart contracts, sure, can do that. Suppose you want to take a Polkadot relay chain and suppose the zero knowledge guys, the STARKs or the SNARKs guys make it so that we can interpret, we can guarantee that parachains are being correctly operated, not through actually executing them, which is what we do now, so we have all the validators execute some of the parachains, but rather by providing a short proof that they were executed correctly, and this is what some of the latest research on the zk-STARKs stuff is looking sort of towards, and you know, what Ethereum, too, is also trying to research a bit, as well, so suppose you want to do that, sure, we can upgrade that, no hard fork required, so basically, we can do anything, we can change the entire nature of the blockchain and we can do so just with a single transaction.
Laura Shin:
So, something else that I want to bring out just because this is out there, is that the community seems to perceive that Polkadot and Ethereum 2.0 will be competitive, and even your employee, Afri, showed and did write a tweet that framed it in that way, that they are competitive, so do you agree with that?
Gavin Wood:
No. Afri’s an outspoken guy, he likes to, he says what’s on his mind.
Jutta Steiner:
He also likes to be competitive.
Gavin Wood:
And he does enjoy the occasional argument, that must be said. So, no, I mean, Afri speaks for himself, and we have a general sort of rule at Parity that, you know, don’t say anything stupid, but you know, we’re also not going to require that you tow the company line, your own people, you know, we trust you’re going to be sensible, but no, it’s not a sentiment we agree with at all, I mean, I was chatting to Vitalik last week in Singapore, and you know, it was pretty clear that we agree on most things regarding Polkadot and Ethereum 2, the different systems really designed and geared for different things with different development timelines, and different ways of solving a problem, so they are very much different. Now of course, there’s some, in some sense, every project that has a token in the space is competing, right, there’s a leader board of tokens, right. There’s a market cap, you know, you want yours to go near the top, so of course there is a very sort of base level amount of competition, but we see more as competition, at least with the projects that don’t try and keep everything to themselves, we see that competition as being healthy and as having only partly competition and partly cooperation, and as we sort of mentioned in the Singapore chat, we’re working on quite similar things, there are Z knowledge proofs being one of them, some of the crypto being another, and it’s, you know, because we both project the developing an entirely open fashion, it’s perfectly reasonable that as much as we’re in competition, we’re in cooperation because we’re going to use each other’s ideas and pushing forward the technology in general.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. I mean, looking at it just on a technical perspective, they don’t seem obviously competitive, however, it does look like, because Polkadot operates kind of like at a lower level, that it could make Ethereum sort of less important, which is maybe, you know, I think that’s where some of the fear comes from.
Jutta Steiner:
And I guess we’ve seen similar thinking going on when Ethereum came along and people were like, oh, this is more general, will this make bitcoin obsolete? …
Laura Shin:
But one other thing I wanted to ask about was, what is dothereum, and who’s behind it? Are you guys related to that?
Gavin Wood:
Don’t know.
Jutta Steiner:
We don’t know.
Laura Shin:
You don’t know?
Jutta Steiner:
No.
Gavin Wood:
No.
Laura Shin:
I saw a theory on Twitter that it was Afri, but you don’t know?
Jutta Steiner:
No.
Gavin Wood:
I’m not told of anything to tell you, you know, I’m kind of interested to see what it is myself, but yeah, if you find out, let me know please.
Laura Shin:
Okay. Yeah. Haven’t really looked into it, but I thought you guys would know because you know, dots, and whatever, anyway. Let’s talk about the frozen funds. There is potentially a way to access them in the future. What is your best argument for why that should happen?
Jutta Steiner:
I think the biggest contentment around this is to my mind, like around how mature do people actually perceive the technology is, and like some people think, like, oh we’ve come to a state where we shouldn’t change anything anymore because people are relying on, like, how it’s working, and all people on the other side saying, look, and I think we’re more on that side, like, look it’s still immature technology, like, they’re going to be bugs, we need methods and tools how to fix them and if we don’t, like, that’s not a good argument for people to come along and use the technology, so that’s why I’m still confident or like, hopeful, that we’ll find some way, especially like with the recent hard fork that included the CREATE2, so you could think of it as, if something like this had existed back then, then the likelihood of the bug slipping into the code would have been much lower, or like there would have been a way of recreating it and what not, so I think like, people are starting to appreciate that the way how the virtual machine works and the technology worked at the time, didn’t provide us with the tools for creating smart contracts in a safe way, and so as we develop these and include them, like, we should also fix the bugs that wouldn’t have existed if we had the tools at the time.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. I think one of the arguments that I saw against reinstating the funds is that that could lead to a chain split, which, you know, obviously that has happened before with Ethereum classic and Ethereum which, actually, didn’t have a huge effect on Ethereum, but they were saying that, well now, if that were to happen, then there would be doubles of all the ERC 20 tokens and the CryptoKitties and all the games and dapps would have like two worlds, and obviously, like, for something like Dai, where you know, that’s kind of now a big chunk of the Ethereum ecosystem, that that could be destabilizing there and that’s supposed to be pegged to the dollar and anyway, so, is there any way to recover the funds without putting all of that at risk?
Jutta Steiner:
I mean, I wouldn’t think of it as putting every, I mean, again, like, it’s about how much do you care about what’s going to be on the platform and like how people could use it in the future, like, we’re finding a solution that doesn’t, that’s sensible for people, so yeah, and I think, like, I mean, the discussions we’re seeing that there is consensus, like in principle, people feel like the ownership of tokens should be respected and that’s a principle that should be leading the rebuild.
Gavin Wood:
Yeah. I mean, as you mentioned, Ethereum classic sort of went its own way, and you know, it wasn’t that Ethereum was empty at the time, there were plenty of smart contracts, plenty of ongoing projects, yeah, it was fine, people chose one or the other and the projects that, you know, if they chose Ethereum then the project deployment on Ethereum classic just sort of decayed and crumbled and everyone forgot about them, so I don’t really see that as a particularly salient argument against doing anything. I think if there were, chain splits can happen for all sorts of reasons, and ultimately if the right decision is to propose, you know, some fork in one direction or another, that in and of itself wouldn’t stop, I don’t think it should stop anyone, but I think with, so this notion of chain immutability, right, I think it’s a bit of a fallacy. I think chain immutability more or less goes out the window as soon as you accept that the chain should be able to be upgraded, and in some sense, by placing this difficulty bomb, right, by basically saying that the chain needs to be upgraded or it will just stop, we’ve already acknowledged that the blockchain must be mutable, right, there must be hard forks because otherwise, it has a life expectancy of like, six months or a year or whatever it is now, so something has to change, we’ve already baked that into the protocol, the protocol must upgrade, the protocol must change, the protocol must be mutable, so the only real question is, well, does by mutating it, do we change people’s expectations more or less, so is the expectation that the chain, that these funds should be spendable, or they should not be spendable, who expected them to be spendable, and who expected them not to be spendable, what were those, when this contract went down, what were the expectations that Ethereum would do to them.
Now, you can argue this one of two ways, you can take the sort of absolutist thing, well, I expect Ethereum to exactly interpret the code and if the code has bugs, then it should interpret those bugs correctly, or you can take the, I think the much more pragmatist reasonable sort of point of view which is that, well, the contract was clearly meant to be a wallet, and it was clearly meant to have the funds in it be spendable by these set of people that are named in the wallet, therefore, the expectations that Ethereum should, in principle, an immutable Ethereum should uphold, are that the wallet should be spendable, the funds should be spendable in it, so I think you can’t really, I think an absolutist point of view falls flat as soon as you say, well, the chain must be upgraded and at that point, you just have to go to, what are the expectations, and I think reasonable people coming to the system would expect that in this wallet, the funds should be spendable.
Jutta Steiner:
And I mean, like, all the debates that came also afterwards, I mean, so yeah, what you’re saying is basically, one camp is, oh, you should only do technical upgrades, basically, but what’s a technical upgrade really, like, there are no, like, every upgrade or every change that you do has some aspect of, oh, you give preference to someone and maybe some preference to somebody else, and you need to always make, like, it’s never just a technical decision that you make and finding a way of integrating those decisions is, I think, key, otherwise everything will stall.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. It’s political in some sense. And actually to go back to Gavin’s point, this just reminds me, like, right after the DAO incident, nobody could figure out whether or not to actually call it a hack because the code allowed them, you know, it was just like this funny thing where people started to use that word, and then other people were like, well, technically, you know, because it wasn’t like they broke in anything, they just like did what the contract allowed them to do. All right. Well, we’ve gone way over time, but this has been a fabulous conversation. Where can people learn more about you, Parity, Polkadot, and Substrate?
Jutta Steiner:
Come to our website, follow the Twitter accounts.
Laura Shin:
And what’s the URL?
Jutta Steiner:
Parity.io.
Laura Shin:
And the Twitter is?
Jutta Steiner:
Paritytech.
Laura Shin:
Great. All right. Well, thanks so much for coming on Unchained.
Gavin Wood:
Thanks for having us, Laura.
Jutta Steiner:
Thank you.
Laura Shin:
Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Gavin and Jutta, and Parity and Polkadot and Substrate, check out the show notes inside your podcast player. If you’re not yet signed up for my email newsletter, go to unchainedpodcast.com right now to get my thoughts on the top crypto stories of the week. And be sure to check out our new channel on YouTube. Unchained is produced my me, Laura Shin, with help from Ralene Gallipoli, Fractal Recording, Jennie Josephson, Daniel Nuss, and Rich Stroffolino. Thanks for listening.
