#DappCon22: Day 3 - Orchestrating Universal Digital Infrastructure With Temporally Discounted Tokens

Transcript

um is this on yes uh hey everyone thanks for sticking around all the way till the very end um but let's make it fun um I'm very honored here to present some of the ideas uh that I've been working on over just shy a year like I took a sabbatical actually um and tried to think about some technical problems that and and try to build prototypes and this is the first talk I'm giving where I'm trying to put them together in somewhat of a coherent story hopefully and so this is much more a open invitation to a road map than it is a product you can deploy but before I go on I need to have a

clicker how do I click and then next right um so the concept that I will be talking about is called or has been called by smarter people than me delayed balanced reciprocity um it's a concept out of anthropology at least that's where I thought it was a very smart to name it such but in our context we will try to build an experiment um applied to these things that we'll call time tokens and it's in Social coordination uh rather than Market mechanisms that that will try to discuss how we can

potentially use them in a technical context and so to give a very simple definition to to frame the the ID for everyone and and to give you a bit of a red thread to hold on to time tokens get allocated to you continuously but they also disappear again and so they are not a store of value in this context instead they will try to help you coordinate value together or the generation of value together also another preface I'm very honored to be presenting this here on the Ubi track a lot of the original IDs are soft Fork as we were saying off of Ubi but they're also backwards compatible so

this is applied to a technical context of peer-to-peer networking for nodes um the same Machinery is still I think applicable in the human context as well but we can discuss this afterwards um however like we've been told that in order to organize Society at a larger scale we need to have money like Adam Smith writes in The Wealth of Nations before money there was only barter but we know now this isn't true like also not with the Advent of architect agriculture we see that for thousands of years networks of cities around arose they started to advance technology

themselves but there was no introduction of a ruling class until thousands of years later and we couldn't go even further back in history and the oldest evidence at least that I know of um I mean I'm not an expert on this uh but uh the oldest social invention that we can at least prove is 33 000 years old and it's the invention of gift giving and so tribes this is Southern Africa to the left is the Kalahari Desert but this happened all across the world um people would spend a lot of their time to create jewelry and they would travel hundreds of kilometers to go gift these

gifts to different tribes that were particularly also living in different environmental conditions and they did this to establish the social bonds over large distances so that when they would fish harsh conditions like a drought themselves they could disperse and they could go live with those stripes that they'd previously established relationships with um and so the this wasn't a market this wasn't an exchange of goods um this was to build and maintain those social relationships and then to rely on them if they needed as such right but as I said I'm not a historian so you should not believe what I say I can run commend you some books if you're

interested um I have however for the past like eight years I think now tinkered with uh consensus mechanisms and so the idea here is to try to take this idea of delayed balanced reciprocity reciprocity and apply it to peer-to-peer networking um Bobby before we go there let's come back to the topic of Ubi it's a very big topic Global poverty is uh an atrocity and it's why I'm also motivated to think seriously about this topic but let's try to see if we can reduce it to a smaller problem first and so the

question I want to ask here is can a person earn from their data if their presence has a value in a data economy um and then the first problem that we realize is markets as we know them and as we've been told to organize Society with their price finding mechanisms but your raw data by itself doesn't have a real price everyone has a digital Trace but by itself uh it only has a cost uh for collecting it and once it's collected it's basically it's a marginal zero cost to copy it so it doesn't have a price however through scientific research that

we did very intensely we argued that if you can find ways to combine people's data streams and find ways to produce actionable information over it that might actually have a value but then you reach a second problem namely what is valuable or what is valuable information it's not just that this is a question of multiple layers of refinement to get to something that is valuable over many people it is also a huge landscape and ultimately it's a subjective question what is valuable to me is not valuable to someone else traffic information about Boston right

now is not valuable to me whereas whether some restaurant in the area is valuable to you to me later tonight and so we have to also constrain that any type of operation any nodes have to be free to opt in and choose themselves which data streams they think might be valuable and which calculations to try to support um great let's assume that we can do this uh now we have another question we're trying to build a better world so why would we try to hyper financialize um knowledge of all people like uh information should be a public good then it should be open for people to to learn from

um and so the idea of a harbiter tax has been quite popular in the community already and it tries to balance the private ownership or the exclusivity of some good with the public interest of the community to that good and so our proposal would be that you can have a harbiter tax on the first access to updates of an information stream and so afterwards the information would be fully decrypted and public but the ones who own the data stream and pay the harbiter tax can have the first access if they can derive economic value from having this first access

we can organize these tax collections into a public fund and these funds can be redistributed to the people that contributed the data however there's no need so I drew this like little circle here information goes in information comes out money flows back down um there's no need to think that these data collectives need to be trivial inside these algorithms can be composed hierarchically they can also even be competing inside um and more than a data Collective I actually like the word a Bazaar where people would come together and under certain rules of social understanding so there could be rules for

who can contribute which data or what data can be contributed but also rules for algorithm designers what can be done with the data that is in this Bazaar or even rules to whom or for what purposes the data that comes out can be used and so this idea of a Bazaar like uh in a desert storm where where some wise lady guards the entrance I think it's helpful to to set um uh a first filtering on all possible data right but then we're not there like just as a very Bland statement no one has all the answers so I'm not proclaiming to know

how to build any of these architectures um and yet we want to have valuable information for Humanity why are we under producing Collective information streams that people can actually use to solve problems and I think here to me like we can call the Devil by his name money creates boundaries by construction and this is not a moral judgment um more of a logical one if you want to have markets then you need a region where there's money is enforced and by definition creates a region where this money isn't currently

accepted unless we would all accept some Global authoritarian currency that we will all have as a single currency but I think that's a less interesting option so it's not a moral judgment it's just an observation nation states have done this and we've repeated the same thing with networks like Bitcoin and ethereum and many more they build on a moneyless free open internet which has its own problems but now they form these islands and we need to try to bridge across these islands but we already can address this problem in uh we we know a very powerful solution namely very strict namespaces and typing allows you to read across

um boundaries we've built this this is called Web tree we know very precisely what Bitcoin data means we know very precisely what ethereum data means that doesn't mean that I can write to the other boundary but I can already read very unambiguously across boundaries and so we if we now want to compute something useful we still need to organize resources and so the question is what is something that everyone has but um is still scarce and we do have such a quantity it's called time so hence time tokens to try to organize uh resource usage across different

domains um what is very important to notice and I will explain this better in a few slides uh and many of you knowing circles will already know these time tokens themselves do not represent money they are not a store of value and explicitly the time tokens as I said in the beginning they will fade away out of your wallet so there's no point in trying to put them on an exchange it gets even more complicated than that there's no logical way that you can think of them as money so the harbiter tax that we talked about earlier would still be paid in Project

tokens that actually build out the data types the algorithms the interfaces that first try to solve people's problems and they would be the value that actually funnels through this system and again like the time tokens are just there to orchestrate resource usage in an equal way to be able to generate this more valuable product than just raw information so anyway very long um introduction to get to better definition of time tokens um or delayed balanced reciprocity this slide is thanks to circles Ubi they've been pushing this I would say a

genius idea for a very long time but I will try my best to like uh also briefly recap it graphic is also credited to one of their documentations um so everyone can generate a node on this graph without any constraints but it is just your unique labeled money and as any other random coin if I would create an erc20 contract it has no value no one's going to support liquidity for it however if I express the [Music] um that I trust any other entity to be honest and particularly non-civil

meaning they don't create multiple accounts what I also do on the contract is saying that my tokens are one for one changeable uh for the other tokens and so there's a long disconnection fungibility if we take this property over the whole graph then as long as there is a path between any of the two nodes and thanks to Chris's work I don't know if he's still here we can try to find a path and move tokens from one side of the graph to the other side of the graph through this transitive property over the path um a very interesting feature in the context of like peer-to-peer networking is that trust relations

form this small world graph which has the very attractive feature that any the average distance between any of the two points is logarithmic in the total size which is a property you tend to really want to have but because it's basically randomly generated this is quite robust property without any specific DHT structure or other properties that that you normally use in in Network Technologies um but everything I've said about the time tokens right now the graph properties isn't captured in the name itself

for which I'm sorry but like this sounded really well um so time tokens additionally Decay so they are continuously issued to you but they will also disappear back out of your wallet um like I said this is compatible with circles Ubi um uh I think the largest difference in this implementation is that the accuracy on the exponential decay is of higher resolution in these other contracts but on the interface they're fully backwards compatible the reason that I think it's interesting to emphasize and really use this property in the sense of

Network Technology is that we can now think of the connections along the graph as little Springs so if value would move from one side of the graph to the other side of the graph it will build up tension along these edges and if value moves in the opposite direction this rebalances the tension along these uh uh connections and as also previously explained these connections have a certain capacity they can dry out so you can even like stop like value will at some point not be able to flow if it's too unbalanced but by discounting them you have a natural cleanup mechanism so

if nothing else happens you will re-mint new tokens in the origin node and the nodes that got scattered they will exponentially Decay away and so you you have a natural property that history is kept along for the ride but not too long and if nothing particularly happens then it will just like little Springs come back to your rest state um thank you for bearing with me for so long this is the last slide but it's an important one so I hope to still have time I don't know if there's a timer so I've talked about also if you remember like at the beginning if we want to think about this huge landscape of

informational landscape of what to compute that's relevant for someone it's it's quite an ambitious goal right and in particular like you have to imagine now that nodes are talking about particular topics that almost no other notes will be talking about because we definitely cannot do the ethereum or Bitcoin in full replication model so you already have to start at the lowest level where you're reinforcing the peer-to-peer Network so that you can protect yourself against abuse of your resources and so here's where where I propose one first application of these time tokens namely

if you if you see this picture on your left side I made a little drawing of a of a social graph of the nodes and imagine that far away these blue nodes they try to request they send request messages over peer-to-peer network but they try to request this from the red node what we can now do is first of all at network speed they can just send these requests but instead they can ask that they attach a payment intent and so an intent here is understood in the sense of like how swap solvers or anoma intents that are executable cryptographic messages but that need to be combined by some

Computing algorithm to to actually execute them in a more efficient way and so we have these uh two behaviors happening at two time scales nodes can communicate at network speed to each other and request resources from somewhere else but they have to attach these these payments intents we can allocate these solvers can try to solve the aggregated paths and rebalance the actual time tokens that move across the network but if now some portion of the network tries to improportionately ask more resources from any other person region of the network

then it is your friends that actually will protect you because at some point their channels to you will get drained and the connection is is emptied out at least temporarily and it's and then their interest to make sure that they're not connecting to any in on in on in honest note and so the proposed Dynamic behavior that you would see is that there's this domain warm wall that forms like any Bad actors that try to act too much resources from the others and here this is relative to how much flows in the opposite direction this domain wall everyone has an interest to push it as close as possible

to the actual Bad actors and I think together so there's theoretical paper that's called the Brahms paper together with another piece of work I think this can give you a Byzantine fault tolerant peer-to-peer View um which is a necessary first step to even try to consider a network that is Computing various things where most nodes wouldn't know what the other nodes are actually talking about but still want to be able to assist this anyway sorry I'm a little bit out of bread so the idea was that we can make it very explicit that these tokens Decay call them time tokens and instead have them implement this

concept of delayed balanced reciprocity um we try to Showcase that this might be helpful in a peer-to-peer Network to orchestrate and balance uh resource usage such that you have a local measure of civil resistance which is very powerful to build on but by themselves they don't have any intrinsic value so the reason to use your time tokens well would be to get other people or other nodes in this case to actually collaborate with you on data that you might find interesting and interesting competitions over that data such that you are part of generating

valuable information that would have a market price and on that we could propose that a Harbinger tax funds access to the first updates of that stream and then pays back down to to the yeah the whole tree of contributions anyway I've skipped over like dozens of topics that um that you should ask me I'm very happy to to to chat offline uh or or in that time that remains um so I want to thank like Circle CBI also the conference organizers uh two friends in particular have been very helpful in figuring this out

um and then Stefan I don't know if he ever hears this for the desk in Lisbon and many for feedback thanks thank you so much so we're a bit over time but um since our next speaker is on his way uh we have time for questions if anyone has questions please what's yours I um do you have any of your own questions you want to answer you said you skipped so many tokens versus time-bound tokens maybe

you know since that's a hot topic of it um well Soul bound tokens and time tokens are probably at different layers of the stack here um but uh um there is something to be said that if you would have a way to organize your data um I've not talked about privacy by the way privacy is very important in all this architecture but of course Simplicity reasons um if you want to have interesting Soul bound tokens you'd probably want to generate zero knowledge proofs against some commitment and if you have an architecture that could hold your data

Trace throughout life privately but then you can make proofs against that trace or that those commits that I think can be much later work but quite quite interesting anything else anything on the screen Daniel has one so uh what makes your time token stick so what what kind of time reference do you use is it can I imagine it as real time or is it some time of a logical clock uh no this this is real time um I can go deeper into where relative time is important but maybe we should take this

off time off of offline so an important point to mention is this is not trying to compete with layer ones layer twos the observation writer is we have solved for double spend and the ability to do negative reputation so the idea is that a lot of this work is implemented as contracts on layer twos where uh we already know how to solve this problem at a reasonable scale and a lot of smart people are working to improve that um so there we have a measure of global time that you can refer to and as such it's also implemented okay thank you thank you thank you so much for your time Ben [Applause]