Dominic Tarr: Secure Scuttlebutt – The “Localized” but Distributed Social Network (#290)

Transcript

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running in less than 30 minutes learn more at aka OMS slash epicenter hi welcome to epicenter my name is Sebastian Cujo and my name is FINA Deakins so today we have on the show Dominic Tarr Dominick is the one of the creators of a protocol called secure scuttlebutt and secure scuttlebutt is a new type of social network and it's it's kind of different from from anything that you know what most people are used to especially in the way that information propagates and what's interesting about it is it looks a lot more like real

human conversations and the way information propagates between you know humans in the form of gossip then I sort of centralized social network where you post something and then it automatically gets distributed to everybody in your network so it's it's really interesting in that sense and a lot of ways we when you're on on secure scale but it kind of resembles you know the early days of the internet it's it's kind of like early day internet culture and you know very cool and cordial conversations but with a bit of modern technology yeah so it's an open source project so there's there's no money at stake no business interests which is why I think

it's it's flown a little bit under the radar but it's super interesting so this man right so we have another announcement we mentioned last week that we would be in Berlin for the interchain conversations event and the hack Adams hackathon so once again want to mention that and give you links to register if you're interested so for the interchange conversations event you'll be happening on at full node in Berlin on Thursday June 13th and 14th and we actually have a discount code if you want to register tickets are 165 dollars and with the code epicenter you can get those tickets

for $100 and that's available for the first 10 people who register first 10 epicenter listeners who register so to register I've got a short link for you it's an event bright page so it's a bit of a long URL but if you go to epicenter rocks slash interchain Berlin that's epicenter doc rocks slash interchain Berlin and use the code epicenter you'll get a discount on registration and again that's on June 13th and 14th link will be in the show notes and then right after that event there's a hackathon that is also taking place at full mode and you can register for the hackathon again the short link for that is epicenter rocks slash cosmos hackathon Berlin epicenter dot rock slash cosmos hackathon Berlin you can register for

the hackathon that's happening on the weekend on June 15th and 16th so if you're in the area or if you're in Europe and just a short flight away do come to full note and see us most of us will be there I think maybe even if we're lucky you might even get all epicenter listen all I percent our hosts in one place for the first time ever so that would be really interesting very very exciting if that happens so yeah looking forward to see you there so without further delay here is our interview with Dominic Tarr hi so we're here with Dominic Tarr Dominic started secure scuttlebutt which is a very unique type of social network I don't

know if we even want to call it a social network but it's a way to to talk to people who matter to you and and others and Dominic is usually based in New Zealand or at least on the coast of New Zealand as he lives on a sailboat we'll get a bit into that in the episode but for the moment he's in Berlin hi Dominic hey thanks for joining us so why don't you tell us a bit about your background and how you got to live on a sailboat actually just for context you were introduced to us by another New Zealand er in front of the podcast and lover of boats and things that floats earth to Falls and and so yeah tell us a bit about your background and how you

how you got this far right well I ended up in on a on a bar because I just decided didn't once have pay rent just started to say like penguin was like a massive scam and I realized one day I could live in a bar and instead of penguin I could by boat and then after a few years I've paid for the boat and then turns out I like sailing as well when I first decided to look like a pirate I didn't I hadn't even seen a sailboat I closed so I kind of got lucky did I think I'm sure that this sort of was essential in in like leading me down the path where I created scuttlebutt

because um so things like living on a sailboat you have a lot of autonomy and you also find yourself in a lot of like near-death experiences so um you get you have to be like you know you have to understand how else it's very much like a hacker mindset you have to understand how everything works what the risks are and take actions and decisions and stuff and be confident about what and decisions you make so are you look are you sort of in New Zealand territory or New Zealand waters are you out International yeah I'm not even I mean I'm not even really sailing out there

okay just just like a coastal a around New Zealand but in the sort of boat I could sort of boat I could afford when I was 21 it was like even a small distance was a a big adventure and the the weather in New Zealand has been described as quite Moody so you can have you can still have terrifying beaches you know it's sort of relative to like that the scale of the bottom cybersyn that the new boat is much more as but there's a bit better and I'm in a much a part of the country that has much milder weather um better and it's like all the

other things have changed since then so now I have like now this like pretty widespread 3G it's a mint so and solar panels are much cheaper so have a solar panel like one solar panel that's enough to run the web token isn't it but most of the time and and I'm like doing remote work so it's it's quite a excellent environment it's quite literally remote work so how long you been doing this and what did you do before you were living on a sailboat I believe you were working regular job oh I haven't worked a regular job for a long time so the current part I had I've had like four years now

um previous to that I spent a couple years just traveling constantly and my head and to and no jeaious very early on and then I managed to get invited to speak at a conference and then I gave this talk wearing a was it a hit it was made from a Doritos bag and after that I just became like quite famous as a distributed systems expert although I really just all I had really done is read the Amazon dynamo paper and but I knew just enough more than everyone else that I could like pass off as an expert

and this was like at this point I didn't realize it yet but I was well on the way to scuttlebutt so in this process I learned basically everything I needed to know to think of secure scuttlebutt and yet so then it was just like kind of exhort so that at that period I was like travelling like at least nine months of the year I think one year I didn't spend longer than six weeks in any one country um this was like but that's got to be quite exhausting and ice I need to be sealed down and so I bought a boat and now I only travel like three months a year which and is still a lot about ordinary people standards about is like quite

quite sidled in civilized compared to what i was doing previously cool that that had story is hilarious so can you describe it a bit your path towards building secure scuttlebutt and basically what motivated you to build the the protocol is is yes so the fort there was a period where I like I knew I wanted to build a some kind of decentralized application platform and and I didn't really know but I didn't really know how it was going to work um and my motivation was actually more about so I started exploring this before like and before it would Snowden and

things like that like it was like privacy wasn't actually my main item it was more about with more about autonomy and the sense that like you know you look here so I remember being like frustrated and that Facebook would just change other interface works from an interface I was used to turn an interface that like I hated and I just had no recourse at all like it was really frustrating and there's like nothing and there's no kind of there's no like way to like feel that frustration like you there's no way to like fix the problem or even like express that there is a problem where's

like you know if you live in a democratic country the at least you can vote for the other party every couple of years or something like that so you can write a little as feared as her and my threatened that you're going to vote for the other guy and with software it's just like there's nothing there was nothing like this in like my preview so before the bad stuff I had what I call my first and last professional grown-up job we're so before that there was another boat rope and I ended up at this like hippie commune and I stayed there for a few month or so and I said this is great but just becoming hippie would be too easy you know I need to go to the city and get a job and give polite society a fair chance and so I did that and after 18

months I decided that polite society had failed me it didn't like so basically I had this job we're over it I realized that so the software we were providing customers was really crab but it wasn't the technical problems weren't really that hard the hard part was the social structures around surrounding us so that basically my boss would go talk to their boss of a golf game or something like this he could be like our yoga garlotte we use a software software and then the people who actually had to use the software and which were generally the like the accounting department they had

no they didn't actually have any say in the software and they find when they found it frustrating they talked to me but I wasn't allowed to fix their problems because we had to generate billable hours and I would have loved to have fix their problems but um you know there I was only able to really do things like that when my boss was on holiday because otherwise I had to like just you know fight the buyers and stuff like this so that got me like that sort of made me real that sort of got me thinking that you know the person who is like you know on the front lines has a very good perception of what the problem is actually are but there's often not in a situation where they can

actually do anything to keep those problem aside there's so much software that's like really frustrating but unless you're inside the organization that they created that software it's unlikely you can do anything about it and even complain about it and in a satisfying way except for open source open source has a lot more you know the you can actually attain a feeling of agency or you can sometimes you know point out a problem and it gets light sometimes where I pointed out a problem it's been fixed immediately and or if even if I don't make the public restore something like this often you can talk to talk to developers and like persuade them or negotiate some kind of solution

so I US and I find that that is like hugely satisfying you generally need to be a developer to be able to have access to that kind of thing but I was sort of thinking I was sort of interested in how you would make more egalitarian software basically and this sort of led me towards decentralization because then additions realized software so it's got about this this protocol and then application and pro so and just because I designed the protocol doesn't mean I can control what application you use to access it so even if you build like a commercial application for using

settle but you can't really stop other people from using different software and I don't have the solution to like how do you create truly egalitarian software and but was there decentralization capable protocol would be a big pop a big potential part of it let's talk about security you know gaps are pretty unique because unlike other types of software they can hold astronomical amounts of value that's why getting systems audited creating robust security processes and fostering a culture of security in your organization is so important and to do this you should only trust experts with real

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github to read their papers presentations and security reviews it's no wonder teams like parody status new cipher and organizations like Facebook and DARPA trust Trello bits for those security audits to learn more go to trail space comm and if you decide to reach out make sure you let them know you heard about them on epicenter we'd like to thank chillip it's for their support so MC skat robot is an open source and decentralized in in a form that way not that used and we'll go into in a little bit so but maybe let's talk about what it is first so basically I think I think earlier we refer to it both as a social network and the

messaging protocol so what what in your eyes is the function of of secure scuttlebutt well generally I start by explaining the name so scuttlebutt it's like an open nautical term for gossip so scuttle means open or opened and but as a barrel so it's the opened barrel of it's like the it's the drinking water on an old sailing ship yeah like the water cooler and that has a that becomes synonym for gossip and inevitably and then the thing with human gossip gossip doesn't consider very reliable because I can say something to

you and then you can say something different to someone else but say that that's what I see it so um or you just misheard it you know it could be malicious or it could be Minnesota and or something like that but interestingly gossip is actually a type of computer protocol and some computer systems one computer talks to another computer directly and that's the only way that those two computers communicate but you can also have someone a gossip protocol and message you can get from one computer to another computer by jumping around other computers first so in a gossip protocol you've seen them when you send a message you don't really even say oh it's going to this protocol you just like

broadcaster and it drifts out to like all of the computers and eventually gets the one that you need and these kind of protocols are extremely resilient because if some computers are missing it doesn't matter it just goes to other computers and said basically I read about this subsystem all dynamodb so dynamodb is part of Amazon so they used that to implement you were shopping carts and stuff like that and and it had a part they had a gossip protocol inside of it they just kept track of the computers that were like in the hosta so they had a peer-to-peer system it was inside of the data center and some of yeah I sort of took that basic

idea and then added and off security so that you didn't think the dad Caesar anymore so it makes a secure gossip protocol so in a secure gossip protocol it doesn't have the unreliable problem so you can pass on the message as I say that you can't change them so um my friend can verify that that's what I said yes sir I'd a bunch of other things so I was originally thinking of the design it was a bit more like um a little bit more like IBS than scuttlebutt originally but eventually I realized that by building a social network you sort of solve a lot

of the security problems but by basically passing them on to the humans so for example how do you deal with spam computers aren't very good at filtering out what is spam and what isn't spam but humans are really good at that humans have you know been prey you know they spent all their time basically deciding who they can trust and who they can trust so instead of making the computer decide they're just put a button that says with the human can say this is my friend and this isn't my friend and then so the that sort of stuff that the trust decisions you just push up the human layer and then the computers just sort of replicate in the messages perfectly which is what computers are really good at so could you walk us through this is

a typical experience for someone who's joining Sakura skele but so if I've just heard of Sakura scuttlebutt and I know that I have some friends on it how does that work and and maybe also it's it would be interesting to describe the the way that messages actually get transmitted and how one and so how they function more like actual human conversations and human gossip than the social network structures that were used to yeah so the you to join the scuttlebutt Network you basically someone else is ready and the network has to follow you so it has to start requesting your messages and then

survey so there's a couple ways of doing that best way is if they are in the same room as you're on the same Wi-Fi then they install so you and sauce gobo and then there's like a local broadcast so you can see each other over the local network and then they then they click follow and so follow make makes their computer start replicating your messages and it also post a message to their feed saying that they followed you and that means that their friends now know about you and they can start replicating your messages as well and in the same time you followed her them and then you start replicating their messages and then you're basically and then it work so every time that these two people meet on

on on a local area network on the same Wi-Fi or even I guess also exchanging sort of USB keys if they want like it can dig your date that it can decorate down to that level then they will replicate each other's messages so basically replicating the data on each other's system so this kind of works like the the friend request here kind of works like a real-life relationship I meet someone and all of a sudden I want to know about what's going on in life you know like I become friends with them and then I engage in conversation with them and so we sort of replicate experiences stories you know things that we tell each other yeah but it happens in a physical location yes yes

that works really well of course sometimes people like to use their computers to talk to each other over the internet when they're not and face to face and but that has this problem that was meant to be solved by ipv6 but hasn't yet been rolled out it's only been 20 years [Music] and you know now we have this problem we're basically imagines the Internet is like imagine we ran out of telephone numbers and now there are two types or two phones there's one they're only businesses can afford which can answer messages and then once the ordinary people have which can only dial numbers but can't receive calls and this makes

it very difficult to work but this is but its IP addresses so it means that you can call someone who has a website but you can't just call your friend so making a full peer-to-peer application work properly is kind of just quite tricky and this sort of hacks to get around it but but what we've found is good enough for secure scuttlebutt is just some people run servers on a with an IP address with a static IP address we call this a pub server and the same pub because both sounds like public and like a table essence like an English pub as in like a bar public house or just like a place you can make your friends

to exchange gossip and these pubs are like quite different to like you know master zone or email servers because the pub isn't so in email you have server email servers that the server actually owns your identity so your identity is named at silver and and scuttlebutt the pub is at best just like a robot that happens to be your Frick that happens to act like your friend so you're not your duty isn't actually tied to any one pub it's just a place it's just a entity that probably has your messages that you can reliably connect to

and if I understand correctly there two types of messages so their messages that you just broadcast through the word that readable to anyone and their but I could also send you a private message correct yes so a private message is just a public message that the body is encrypted so basically it's a broadcast model so everyone receives all of your messages but they can't but if it's encrypted they can't read that message and so I encrypted music so that only like you and that only you and Bob can and decrypt it and everyone else gets it and passes it on but they can't decrypt it and they say so this actually has very good privacy properties because so

it doesn't hide that I've seen to me search everyone knows I sent a message um but nobody actually not everyone tries to decrypt it and therefore no one except the people that it's 4x4 know who works for because anyone they could have potentially benefit anyone that follows me I see this makes perfect sense and so basically seeing that you don't have people like servers or you know like people who actually own your who actually are your point of access it's it's asynchronous by design right so basically if I send you data or some kind of message you don't if you're not online you're not getting it at that

moment and so so can you describe the process by which this message kind of permeates the network and arrives um arrives at your device yeah so basically when any two peers connect to each other they start by doing a handshake whether basically like so they start by just sending a list of who they have talked to since the last time they talk to you and they check if you have the same news so it's like I see you bumped you on the street and I'm like oh hey have you heard for have you heard from Bob recently and you're like oh no I haven't and then I tell you the news about Bob and then if sometimes you have you were really had heard the gossip about Bob from a different channel on

which case we see that and don't send anything so let's maybe you just use so your example or it's like your life as an example like you live on a book right and let's say that I live in New Zealand and you know Frederica lives in Germany so you're on your boat and you write public posts and oh by the way we're all friends so you you you write public posts like today I cut this huge fish and like today there was like a big gust of wind and I would be far ok like happens like the two things that happen in the book right then I you know you come short I meet you we sit in a

cat in a cafe and then we I I get all those updates so you know like maybe I like a month of updates basically just you life blogging kind of your diary of what's happening in your boat I get all that stuff and I'm like great and then maybe also you sent a private message to FeliCa and then at some point now felt like it comes to to New Zealand for like some conference and you're still on your boat and we meet up she'll she'll presumably get all of those public updates because I'm friends with her and then she'll also get the private messages you sent her because I'm gossiping those to her so the messages are all just in one log so it'll be like up on public private public whatever so

they just all sort of come and they just all get copied cross and they always get covered costs from oldest to newest and that means that if it breaks partway through and next time it just can replicates from there so it was I'm only receiving I'm only receiving that private message to FeliCa because the client knows that we're both friends nor you the Mesa the you don't know that it's full I'm free great guy I mean you just you just take all of my messages in order I'm some of the messages regardless of whether or not I know those people whether or not they're

front we're friends or whatever I just duplicate everything I replicate everything that you've posted yes okay so there might be some garbage in there like for people that I'll never encounter and for whom those messages will never get sent from me yeah but but replicating these extra messages isn't a huge burden basically it's designed so that it all fits within the realm of just like the small favor that you wouldn't really think about doing for a friend like it's not really a problem even if like even after like several years of using scuttle back a lot because you know talking about it's good but talking else got about every day um my entire list of messages is only like ten megabytes or something

like that okay so it's quite efficient yeah so it's not it's not really um and it could be more efficient as well but it's just not it's not really a big deal to have a huge extra messages the the thing that is a bigger deal is like attachments about images and files and that sort of stuff but that is sort of handled separately so you won't take those unless and you want to like view them so that's left but it's sort of handled very different protocol so if I took a picture of that Bush if you didn't look at the picture of the fish you might not see it you might not have it to pass on to a prig Rico okay I see so basically it's a lot like

having your own personal blockchain that you share with people and where you basically cryptographically encode parts of the of your updates so they're only readable for some people so can you talk a little bit about the role that that public service plays play so basically the pub service that that when you log into the network and you connect to it and you kind of you can you can get an invite from a pop server so can you talk a little bit about that Pub servers only really exists to create to make it possible to connect to the network um it's kind of wrong to say log

n because when you say so there's some terms we have left over from you know that we're used to using content like account and login and like logging in is like you know you go into it your chicken to a hotel and they write your name of the book and um account is like you join a club and they write your name down and in a book and that kind of concept really isn't doesn't really apply in the scuttlebutt world that's more like you just create an identity and once you've created identity and you are other people can have relationships with you so that the role of the pub is really an ideal world we wouldn't even

need pugs it's just because of this shortage of IP addresses and because your computer you know like I friends here I'm in Europe right now my friends are in New Zealand tend to be asleep now and while I'm awake and then awake when I'm asleep so there's only a small gap when we might both be online and but if there's a server that follows b-but it would get my messages and then give it give them to my friends wait if the network we're dense enough you wouldn't need those servers right crew yep yep and service went away if you know like some

kind of like you know zombie apocalypse took out all the data centers and all the national level infrastructure and scuttlebutt would still work as long as we had like solar panels and like local to run our laptop some local Wi-Fi and we just like you know we could like put SD cards on so migrating birds or something like that and that would actually work but we couldn't scuttlebutt utilize sort of similar architecture to BitTorrent to reduces dependency on these servers with yes sir but torrent has this DHT thing you could do that and but the problem with a DHT

is you still need to have to make a proper peer-to-peer connection you basically need to do this trick where it's called hole punching without getting stuck in the weeds it's more like being set up on a date than by just like than just making a phone call so you need to have an introducer there is a third a third party that you can eat that connects you and then that once you've connected then you then you can talk to requite right so this is what the torrent trackers fulfill as a role I suppose do you still need to have some sort of a yeah a central point of trust which introduces the at least the first

initial peers for discovery and then okay yeah so you'd still need to have something like pub servers for that anyway and you're like I think so basically I use a pub server design so that there would be because it's like this just enough reason for people to who are like you know good at computers to be able to run a pub server it's not really that much effort um you know lots of people have like your developers and computer people and stuff like those really really have a server and that they pay for and they run a website off it or something like this and you can put the pub sticker on that and that's enough to like act doesn't introduce it to your

for instance this is the paper we haven't actually got around to implement things I slept fully peer-to-peer thing but the idea was that it's enough and that people will want to run that the pub and then they can actors introducers and then you've got a full peer-to-peer I think and as long as one of your friends has a server then it shouldn't you'll be one that doesn't go matter if more than one or you know if not more than more than one Joe great but it doesn't really matter and this means that the requirement of of like passivity up all the time is actually very low so contrast that with like email like if your email server goes down and someone

tries to send you an email then they'll just get him a message back saying it doesn't work in scuttlebutt if the pub that we were going to communicate through is down at the time it just it's still you just place a message on your log it will get when the server comes back out but we received message the end so it's just like you don't need to worry about but just everything works smoothly even if there's applied so yeah what one one fun anecdote was one time I figurin was on an airplane and he was browsing scuttlebutt and um completely offline it was just like his local database and the person sitting next to him is like how come you have the internet when like no one else has and he's like oh well I'm

actually not on the internet let me explain so it explains federal school but it turns out this guy was some electrical engineer from the South African in tactic base so they had like yo I not very much feel very they probably have some kind of satellite thing but basically they had a lot of dough and snip in the tactic app and yeah okay let's go work great so how many users are there how many connections do they have on average and have you done any any population theory on the on the graph to see how long messages would actually take to percolate than the network to outliers say they say the South South African and

Arctic base or did is is have you done any data science on this at all not really I mean there's so much things to do just fly using the thing usually late assuming limb in cases we having conversation with someone and mr. just gets very pretty quick like fast enough sometimes you know some what ifs you're offline I mean the missus could if you writing them offline message could be delayed for an arbitrary amount of time and you know how long it takes to get online once you're sort of Kingston that the community group and it's pretty fast so the part the protocol is kind of

designed so I can't know too much um like about like who's using it we do know there's we can see like ten thousand ish I haven't really looked but Andre looked recently he's building the Android app like ten thousand bish identities on the in the network they could be more people who have installed it but haven't connected to the network and then there's you know like a small but very vibrant community of people that's like maybe few hundred that are like and still regularly using it so we didn't we didn't put any kind of like notification or something to put pull

people back so people that are still in the you know community of ear because that made friends and the coming back actively to check and participate in discussions so yeah I looked into this a little bit yesterday when I did my research for this episode it seems to be super friendly community very unexpected when you are when you're usually on Twitter and so I have I have one question one last question for the protocol so in there's no cost to broadcasting right so basically I can give you as my friend I can give you an arbitrarily long list of messages that I would like to see passed out into the world do you see any kind of attack that would use this property that basically

as my friend you kind of obliged to take on my gossip no matter whether it's relevant or whether it's woodline abuse or whether it's abuse you're not really obliged because you're free to change your mind and that's one of the philosophical design ideas behind scuttlebutt is everything is voluntary so if you don't want to do something if you don't want to connect to a particular peer or real a particular peers messages you can always and get out of that it doesn't like other things like a DHT only only really work if you sort of interact within everyone uniformly there's no way to choose which peers you want to you know interact with

honor you can't make any value judgments and and in a book in a blockchain um and scuttlebutt you could always make though your judgments so if you did make a mess like an unreasonably long log and I could just um I would just block you okay so if I were to dodge the network I'd just be blocked by all my friends and I'd have no friends left okay quit that makes sense good with regards to interests and topics and sort of things that people are using the scuttlebutt for so when you when you download pass work and you saw it and you get to a pub server there's all these topics sort of like hashtags which are quite diverse and there's like all kinds of different topics so could you talk about how those work and you know

this community of people that are there what are some of the dominant communities and themes that are being discussed on scuttlebutt Enzo the open forums is sort of a kind of variety of things differently people that have like how privacy and decentralization interests but there's also like I think there's an unreasonable amount of people that are living in cabins in the wood or in boats or something like that um there's a lot of people talking about stuff like that there's this whole um Solar Punk idea um are you familiar with this - a little bit yeah I think I think someone

mentioned it on the podcast before can you give a can you give a brief explanation from you though yes sir Solar Punk is the hopeful genre of scientific that we have science fiction that we have been waiting for so basically it's like so we have cyberpunk which is like dystopian with computers in VR and steampunk which is like this historical fantasy where like Victorian stuff just continued that Solar Punk is like it's a it's a optimistic future maybe in 100 years or something like this where humans now live and that still high-tech but now they live in harmony with nature we someone Zack came on schedule bad news like I seen anyone

heard of this this genre of science fiction I really liked it and we suddenly all got really excited and we're just like we are solar Punk's like this is what we're trying to do and interestingly it can be sort of it can be traced back to a particular time below the post where someone just sort of describes an aesthetic so there's lots of ways of you know there's lots of people who are concerned about climate change and at the environments and things like that but solo Punk is like this vision of like what the world would be like if we sort if we solve all these problems and I think that's really important because just thinking about the problem of you

know the impending climate collapse that we causing is like way too depressing yeah I would invite our listeners to Google Solar Punk it never rains in solar punk land well III think differently rhymes but there's a lot of rainbows yes this episode of epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft and the Azure blockchain workbench getting your block ting from the white board to production can be a big undertaking and something as simple as connecting your blockchain to IOT devices or existing ERP systems is a project in itself well the folks at Microsoft have you covered you already know about the Azure blockchain workbench and how easy it makes bootstrapping your blockchain

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than 30 minutes visit akms slash epicenter and be sure to follow them on twitter at MSFT blockchain we'd like to thank Microsoft and Azure for their support of epicenter moving on to another topic that I really wanted to talk to you about is is this idea of centralization versus decentralization you gave a talk I think it was earlier this year or maybe last year yeah last year at the decentralized web summit where you sort of redefine the idea of decentralization I thought it was interesting from the point of view that it was decentralization is sort of the opposite of centralization and everybody

in the blockchain space I think is like striving or trying to reach the goal of like building more decentralized systems when it's just sort of the opposite of something else and you made the argument that it would be much better for the for the communities working on this stuff to try to actually define sort of in a positive way what they're trying to achieve or like rather than like the opposite of decentralization like what's the positive version of that yeah so describe in your in your words what it is that projects like secure scale but and maybe some other sort of blockchain projects with similar goals or trying to achieve and how we should maybe use that

and when educating people about like the benefits of this yeah well I think the thing would seem about centralization is it's the centralization describes a structure like a like a pyramid or a star with this like one thing in the center that's in control and a bunch of things outside of that and decentralisation presumably is anything but there and that includes a lot of different things so you could have a you know all the nodes and circle and then everyone is connected to everyone that's kind of like how a DHT you works and that has us of a uniform structure where all the nodes are strictly equal and then you could have like a grid or like

a lattice structure so there's actually networks that do have that shape so cell phone towers are actually arranged in a hexagonal lattice and you can mention missionary works stuff like this laid out and yeah and some kind of more hair as a version of that kind of structure um scuttlebutt because it is based on the idea of a social network it's actually not quite a uniform mesh because some people have a lot of friends and other people have fewer friends and there's like a range of things so this is called a small world or a scale-free network and the system interesting properties

and yeah there's actually a lot of things that behave like this so but particular particular interest is and human relationships so you probably heard this six degrees of Kevin Bacon so the idea is that every Kevin Bacon's been in so many movies that you have been in film with someone who has been you've his belt been in a film with with Kevin Bacon or you've been in a film with someone who's been in a film with Kevin Bacon or someone who was being on film or so on who's been in film with Kevin Bacon and so on and it's Esley like quite um surprisingly short path from any particular person to Kevin Bacon there's nothing really special about Kevin Bacon just that he is being

a lot of movies and there's a part from anyone to everyone quite often through Kevin Bacon because of all the movies he's been in and this is kind of like you get this kind of thing through [Music] celebrity celebrities basically so celebrities have a lot Nowell of people and no one by a lot of people and this makes celebrities like a little bit centralized but I think it's okay because this will they don't completely control her like they can't force anyone to like them they have to they don't know people don't like them because they do good stuff like that funny or and you know they make great

music or something or make music that people enjoy etc and FST really starts doing stuff that you don't like then you can stop liking them and then they live such lose the power so it's kind of a bottom up and then we are you know there are some points that have more power but they're not they don't have absolute power maybe Kevin Bacon should have skill about observer yeah sure yeah so what are the in your view like the problems with centralized systems so I think maybe to preface this you we could talk about it in the context of this trilemma between scalability security and user experience and you know where do the

where do the problems start to emerge when all of those properties kind of erode and where does scuttlebutt sit on that triangle well [Music] Kjetil but is hot it's like highly but scalable and secure and as good as good a user experience as it can handle I think these kinds of [Music] tremors are late not necessarily like there are some designs that are just

better than other designs so you can have if you have a really good design you can have more than your share of all three the really bad design will be stuck out in one corner and so it was sort of somewhere in the middle you know some things that would make it perhaps a better user experience is if it like did all those things but didn't use any data on your phone at all and or didn't use any storage of course that's not realistic for me I think the most important thing is her Islam control of the system like are you able we if you have a problem that you were able to make some deliberate choice yes

there's something to improve your situation so like if you if there's something that you don't like can you make a decision about it so for example with my G the email app on my phone and from Google has these suggestions of like someone sends a message and be like you can say one of these canned things and I really wish this would go away because like it I feel I feel that it would be like the height of insincerity to just push a button and seeing someone I can message rather than type out what I actually think really it's like it's convenient but I don't really want convenience like

a once right hey Jim what when I write a message to my friend I actually want to write it but often often the messages that that Google kind of gives you they are they are sound bites of of things you regularly write so things like sure let's do that so you know like that works for me you know something that that is you know like that is a proving in some way I I don't ever get ones way for that that say this doesn't work for me or let's let's do it another way because presumably because I don't write that as often and why why would you see it as insincere to to press autocomplete and just send it off like that because I

mean it just it in a way you could also just do a thumbs up right yeah sorry if but if someone actually typed a thumbs up if I'd known how much if it they put up they push the button it looks like they put in more effort then they really do so effort said if they push the button in its head order complete message from Google then I would know that they just pushed one button so there's in this case where you know it used to say like seen from my iPhone that actually helps because if someone puts like a really short awkward message that's like badly typed it's like okay they sends it on a phone so that's accessible and if they push a thing that just says like that's the canned message it's like oh you

didn't really you know it's about estimating how much effort someone put in and I feel that is like the the essence of you know to show someone respect when you're talking to them over you know if I text it's like you need to tell how much how much effort they've put in to writing that message to you and just pushing a button very little very little with it and so I'm kind of terrified every time I see that there I used one inappropriately especially if it's something like this totally ministers from where it's like the the experi things are like the opposite of what I actually want to say and like today I'm terrified of like hitting one

by accident but the the pipes where this is relevant scuttlebutt is like this is like these things are like like Google has spent all of these all of this if that like analyzing what people they're probably doing things like testing if people push the buttons and keeping track of that and stuff like that but they didn't actually ask me what I wanted they are just studying me and so I don't really feel like if they actually asked me and respond to that and I would feel like I had some influence okay so you just you don't just want to be a be tested yeah I don't know a be tested I want to go to choose I'll be okay it would feel like that would I think that would be a better user experience that

would give me a feeling of autonomy um instead I have eyes I feel like an animal that's being like herded they could do an a/b test where you know some of a group of the people they're just asked instead of you know being randomly assigned and see so basically a meta AP test whether people actually like a be testing let's go back to the to the topic of centralization versus decentralization I think it's it's a hallmark of human nature that you think the time that you live in is special in some way right it feels like over the past say 50 years or maybe thirty years and things have been have become

enormously centralized so if you look at the amount of data that for instance at Google or Facebook or Twitter actually a mess it's it's enormous right so do you actually think that this is some sort of a special point in history where we have to choose the right path or do you think that you know this just seems like it right now but as well maybe it doesn't seem like that to you at all but yes well I think um yeah I think a dirt um in particular so there's some things is like so like geography is actually very like modern

cryptography it's very new by computer science has existed since the ok computers have only existed since the 50s but Computer Sciences exists a little bit longer than that they'd say the 30s or something like those but um cryptography modern cryptography and so both hashes and signatures have only existed since the seventies and we're only just beginning to figure out how you can build things using cryptography without cryptography without like so prolong the first like massively deployed photography was TLS so this lets you connect to a server and then to a secure connection so that this

means that no one else can see your credit card number and that you can log into two websites with a password without anyone seeing there without this it would be basically impossible to do copy us over the Internet it would just be too insecure to really [Music] - to buy or sell things or like you know our own interaction control things and and that's really just getting sad that's just like the simplest possible thing they're basically taking like an insecure Network and securing it and there's so many more things that you can build using by so basically secure see all the other all the recent things I call it um safer space so safest base so cyberspace is the space created by

signals so that's like cool that wouldn't your internet safer space is the space created by algorithms a cipher means like algorithm or code and in cyberspace the security isn't in the network the security is in the data so the database is secured in the information inside it is secure and we're just totally beginning to experiment with how you can build things like this there's a few example like all this I'm so get and blockchain and it's just be IP fierce debt and I like you know it's just basically we're just experimenting it's a totally different approach with lots of different approach

with different approaches but I think the thing is as well as I think potentially like there's all of these you know this this like cyber war thing and like computers as they are are so terribly insecure that we need we should need something there's so many problems to face so currently you have all these you know like states of governments having hackers like hack each other and collect all these vulnerabilities and they're just sort of hoarding them and the funny thing is that they don't really use them very often because if you use them so zero day is only useful if no one knows about it no one else knows about it so if you you if

you have a bacchanal vulnerability and you use it you'll reveal that you know there and then the end of someone else doesn't they vulnerability now they'll know that you knew it and so they will better estimate how many other things you must know about if you would women willing to burn that one so they're just like hoarding these vulnerabilities but it's like so it's kind of like an arms race but you could have a defensive arms race where the stressful goes away if you actually had a secret have you actually had a secure system so you know the fairy tale of the three little pigs so there's three pigs and one builds a straw house one builds a stick house on towards a brick house and the wolf just

comes along and he just blows the straw house over and blows the stick house over and that's kind of like how most computer systems we have today I like all operating systems and stuff like this like you just have to when you attack it and taking your sounds actually misleadingly violent because you don't actually attack it like you're an attack it like you might have take a person with us with like a a blunt object you protect computer by just asking it to attack itself and you just have to find exactly the right way to treat to like to trick it to like um falling apart and the third little Peck has a brick house and this is like a sturdy house that can't be blown over we could build

this brick house if we had using like cryptography and antenna Krypton and secure sandboxing and stuff like I definitely think this the brick house software is possible it's just means more people working on it we just need to rewrite everything we're doing and start again from scratch basically but I think it can probably be I think it can be done and I think it would be better that we do there then be hoarding these you know they had continued to have it in secure computer systems we just need to sort of approach this in a way we're just that you have to have just find a nation that really needs this and then get it working well

enough didn't expand out to other things so to follow up on that question you know revolutions have been around since the dawn of time and people have been fighting against a concentration of power and central centralization of power since forever and there are so these waves right so you know the French Revolution was one I wonder if at our particular point in existence and at the dawn of what might some people might call the technological singularity if we as a society might cross a point where it is no longer possible to revolt against centralized systems because once

state powers or concentrate enough power and a lot enough technology for mass surveillance you just look at China for example like it's very hard for people there to revolt we kind of see it there a little bit it's very hard for people there to revolt because of the fact that these technologies exist and they're that are so powerful in serving the interests of the state itself so I wonder if you think that if this is if this is true that at some point we arrive as a society as at a point where going back is no longer an option like we get to a point of no return with regards to our personal sovereignty and sort of like protection of our privacy

in data etc well I think the thing that's the force that's on the side of decentralization is that innovation is always Antikythera terian like its need to to have good ideas and like try different things you need like people people don't like that if you're trying to do a few fight because you find a different bitter way of doing something so if you want to be more innovative um you have to be you have to allow people freedom so like the thing it's no mistake that the you know Silicon Valley grew out of San Francisco

which was also the like center of the lytic like hippie movement and that you can read a book about like the sort of 70s and 80s even like like government-funded research from Stanford as AI laboratory and the in Elias online but did I get in Gruber part and stuff like this well those people were all totally take the metallicity with the hippies and that was like we're a lot of their stuff came from and I think you know we talk about like China being authoritarian but I think that if China is going to grow grow in power and if

people if China is going to start designing new stuff rather than just foot in today and having that like designer California building China China is actually going to have to become it will become more relaxed and they have already they've got like like Hong Kong which is like a special area which has different roles and we had to like finance happens and you know there isn't the same sort of stuff so I think basically that freedom is essential to innovation but you need to live this way you know you get your best work done when the boss is on holiday and to build things you know like the skunk works like that spy plane right it's a bit of what they you know Batman it's like like

anything but that was built to build that they had to get all the engineers and put them in the skunk works which is like a secret unit that is free from managerial interference so working on new ideas and secret where people can't interfere can actually be like essential to like having good ideas I see so freedom is essential for innovation that kind of leads me to my almost last question um how are you guys funded because basically you need you you need to have some sort of funding in order to have the freedom to to to innovate right yeah so this like a bunch of things so the the it started out was

just I was just like working on it in my own time and I had by living on a borrowed I mean I didn't have to pay rent so my living costs were greatly reduced and right now I have a side job where I do security audits through police authority and this is like a really good and this is like the perfect side job because I also keep current and how everything else works sort of all the things lots of blockchain things and stuff like that so I get two significant else doing and these companies they're emerging and building things on scuttlebutt is this and think they actually um raise venture capital and a

building and I over set they are funding some developers and we had we received a grant from [Music] and from Definity who another interesting blockchain thing that I'll show you've done a podcast about um they just gave us eternal grant for Noah for no reason basically uh because they wanted to support us but they didn't ask for anything and we just you know we just broke this up into little grants and shared it with the community I trust generally try to encourage anyone who wants to build something on scuttlebutt and you know this is sort of sort of more of an ecosystem approach I

think it's more interesting because I don't want there to be like a single company that owns Scott Oberg I would much rather a network company is there because I don't really trust any one company um even if they say they have good intentions then you know people change especially when money's involved and then um but if there's a whole bunch of companies that keep each other honest like for example the web itself like The Weavers protocol and web browsers if you want to change web browser you have to give Microsoft Google via file Mozilla and Apple onboard and because they are mutually suspicious of each other I'm

happy competing and competing agendas then one of them doesn't have the power to mess with mess it up and take over the whole thing and even if they have a larger a significant share like Google or something like this they can't really control what happens and the wheel doesn't mean that the web is the safe here I hope everything but I think that's basically it gives us a model the hell and things can work so um I think a couple more so at the moment it's kind of a problem that we dis just one company with a lot of money but I think there's is but they haven't really missed you they have in reverse still just getting started so this totally

ruined for like more things like that to appear and I think the most interesting thing we're doing though is you know open source doesn't really doesn't really work that well with bunny like it's just it's also such a different thing like money doesn't really for example we've received like some money from just like small like regular people's donations and quite a quite a lot compared to you know we've raised like a few thousand dollars from just people donating like five dollars a month and that's actually pretty it's actually pretty good as things go but those same people who are donating a small amount of money you're actually didn't donating multiple hours at a time to lay on turn people's questions and

things like that and their time and their time is worth way more I think that and the money that I've been donating so I'm interested in the thing we are we basically have some kind of system like a little bit of a system to coordinate and just people's volunteer labor so I mentioned something like like Kickstarter or or conflictive which does recurring donations but instead of donating money you're donating time the thing that I really like about the Internet is how everything's free and so much sort of like say Wikipedia was all entirely created by just like volunteers and if we can build a thing where you

don't even need the infrastructure in I think you could build a thing even big impressive things without actually using money at all so you know to write software all I need I really have a laptop can only cost a few hundred dollars then I just need coffee and somewhere to sleep like the edge wall like you know the means of production I really control it so it's just about organizing [Music] just about organizing the labor so where can people learn more about secure scuttlebutt and start using it and where would you recommend people go to the best place to learn about scuttlebutt is the is on scuttlebutt P we also have a website which might be a good play a

more accessible place of scuttlebutt dot in Zin and there's also a bunch of the all the Reapers on github under the this is B see if it sends for secure scuttlebutt consortium and the consortium part is a joke and and so from there then they can download patch work or this this android client that we mentioned a bit earlier all right that android client you can install from the App Store I don't actually personally meant any zeros like these so there's also another client worth checking out called hedge Bay and that's currently the most actively maintained and as interesting features such as back as

chess you can play decentralized chess it's actually suppress them very popular quit that's sounds wonderful Dominic thank you for coming on the show today as fast things learn about scuttlebutt and I'll definitely keep using in fact there's one friend of mine who refuses to use any social media or even you know secure messaging and I think the only way to reach him is probably through scuttlebutt so that's great all right thanks again for coming on and have a good time in Berlin so thanks for much we release new episodes of epicenter every week click here to subscribe for hundreds of insightful interviews with some of the leading minds in blockchain and crypto you can

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