Fully On-Chain: Internet Computer

Transcript

[Music] foreign [Music] hello everyone uh thanks for coming to listen to let's talk about the internet computer um I'm Dominic Williams founder and chief scientist of the daffinity foundation which is the primary developer of the internet computer and we're going to talk about internet computer today with a particular focus on how it can be used in the ethereum ecosystem so uh definitely the definitive project

actually came out of the early ethereum community in 2015 with a view to pursuing a vision a vision of a World's computer that ran at scale such that you could build absolutely anything on it and the project took a long time to get into production just because of the complexity um that was involved and you may have heard Divinity has a large team of cryptographers computer science researchers engineers and so on um and we got into this not just because of the world computer vision but because

of a sort of General appreciation of the way that Tech History arcs from private infrastructure towards open Networks and back in the 1990s we saw this the internet was emerging and people were proposing Alternatives Microsoft and Oracle began pushing this idea of the information superhighway which would be a kind of Walled Garden Network where the content would be created by these big corporations and in the end we got the internet which is formed by private privately owned and operated routing devices that

are combined by the tcpip protocols into one open Global Network and today we have traditional I.T um which is where most people build and that's cloud services databases web servers middleware City ends firewalls all of that stuff and we think eventually people are going to move on to the open network and the internet computers formed by privately operated and owned node machines that are connected by the ICP protocols to form a

serverless autonomous cloud and there are these these two things the internet computer network and something called internet identity and and they enable two other things that we're very interested in one is open internet services an open internet service is a service which is fully autonomous runs under the control of something called a service nervous system which is an evolution of Dao technology and the other is what we refer to as a sovereign Enterprise where the infrastructure is tamper-proof doesn't need to be protected by firewalls and doesn't have any hidden back doors or kill switches which of

course if you build with closed Source software and cloud services are present so how does this uh help the ethereum community and the ethereum ecosystem so the internet computer can help address the final frontier of ethereum decentralization so today when you have something like a metaverse in practice that that runs on centralized traditional I.T like all of the compute all of the data in vast majority is probably on Amazon web services and the services really running

on you know databases using a web server memcache to speed it up and that's where all the hackers had that's where the problems typically go obviously it's not censorship resistant you have to trust the developers those guys have a back door you know they can log in with their username and password and um arbitrarily modify code and data and things like that and we we want uh the ecosystem to progress in in this direction and replace traditional I.T with autonomous internet computer canister software and for that

canister software to be placed under the control of a service nervous system which is a kind of evolution of Dow technology so end to end the whole thing secure and decentralized and of course autonomous so just quickly how does the internet computer work I mentioned that you have these independently Opera owned and operated node machines and they're run by people we call node providers from data centers around the world so this thing isn't based on cloud instances it's based on physical Hardware a bit like Bitcoin uses um a bit like Bitcoin uses like A6 for hashing and and actually the moniker

applied to the network model is proof of use for work so the internet computer protocol ICP combines these nodes to form efficient subnet blockchains and each of these additional subnet blockchains adds more capacity for running canister smart contracts and we'll come back to those in a second and then these subnets are combined into one serverless cloud environment I mean more specifically serverless autonomous cloud in the environment and and that actually has unbounded capacity the network can't just increase

the capacity by adding new subnet blockchains and infant item and that's what the internet computer is so it's really a new form of blockchain uh you know 2009 we saw digital gold emerge Bitcoin and 2015 we've got some more contracts with ethereum and when the internet computer launched it provided something completely new autonomous cloud and the internet computer has some very interesting technical capabilities and um the one of these is is multi-chain native multi-chain capabilities and and this derives from something called chain key cryptography

and it allows uh the internet computer to interact with other chains without there being Bridges just using trustless cryptography and this is one of the key ways we think that the original ethereum well computer vision from 2014 uh can can be realized so what's cool is that canisters on the internet computer can sign transactions on other blockchains and of course canisters aren't doing any clever cryptography themselves they're just interacting um with with apis that the internet computer environment provides them with and they can create for example East DSA public keys and then sign messages

using the virtual private key but there isn't a private key the signings done by the internet computer itself using this thing called chain key cryptography and full Network level integration with ethereum's coming you can still sign ethereum transactions at the moment but you have to forward them by the user experience um One Network level integration is fully working today and it produces something called chain key Bitcoin as a kind of Bitcoin twin that can be processed by canisters and uh very very cheaply has a one the finality about one second enables you to use Bitcoin things like D5 social media and so on

um bidirectional ICP eth is coming soon it's quite challenging to to implement at the network level for a bunch of reasons related to gas and so on but it's coming and it's going to enable uh canister small contracts on the internet computer to directly call into ethereum smart contracts and vice versa it's obviously a very basic level um you could bring erc20 tokens onto the internet computer wait process them in an order Book Exchange um but you cannot to do too much more sophisticated things than that too so canister code what is it um

firstly we have a sort of General Vision again which is that just in the same way the software is eating the world like everything's going to run on software small contracts are going to eat software and that that means eventually there'll be a world computer and everything will be coded using smart contracts and of course when you code with small contracts you don't need a database right I mean the data is stored inside the smart contract that's one of the interesting properties of small contracts and the differences between small contracts and traditional software the data is actually stored inside the contract itself rather than in an external database and if you can scale that up you don't need databases anymore

don't need firewalls of course because they're tamper-proof so rewinding to 2015 what was introduced with small contract software well it's actually a new form of software and they have all of this um you know amazing small quadrants have all these amazing properties so they're tamper-proof you know systems running on ethereum on surrounded or protected by firewalls they don't need it they're Unstoppable of course they're autonomous which means you can create software that exists independently of a person or organization uh smart contracts can process tokens that can very easily composable um in ways that enable kind of dynamic collaboration between

independent parties and of course they're borderless no one even where does a small contract live exactly it doesn't live anywhere it just lives in in cyberspace or cyberspace depending on your definition um canister um canisters are a new form of smart contracts and they aim to sort of generalize what we had um back in 2015. so the fast uh they sort of run at web speed rather than blockchain speed they can scale we aim to make scaling on the internet computer easier than it is on traditional using you know traditional I.T it's multi-chain natively multi-chain it's highly efficient

um it's important for things like the carbon footprint but also cost compute costs on the internet computer are approaching traditional I.T and they can process HTTP and that's of course essential if you want to accredits a centralized user experience um and they enable a sort of pure form of web3 um here we have the internet computer um obviously a very big approximation with the screens showing something called open chats the service built on the internet computer actually open chat is composed of many thousands of canisters so there's something to bear in mind but the user is interacting by

the web browser with these Services over HTTP and there's no traditional it involved um internet identity which I mentioned earlier is creating uh RPC transaction sessions so there's no wallet involved you're not like signing every individual transaction and authorizing it with your Ledger wallet instead what's happening is that you log in if that's the right word you credit session using this thing called internet identity and you of course have a key that's used to create your session but the internet computer this is one of the really interesting aspects of it the internet computer itself has a single Master 48 byte chain key right so if you know this single 48 byte chain key you can

authentic you you can verify the correctness of every single one of your interactions with with the network no matter how big it gets and of course a chain key is is an assembly of a bunch of things like you know hash paths and and um threshold BLS signatures and so on but all you need to know is this 48 by Chain key and you can verify your interactions with the internet computer and if your interactions verify um you know the actual chains run it correctly too last thing I mentioned this thing uh the uh service nervous system the whole network the whole internet computer runs under the control of this thing called

the network nervous system same kind of evolution of Dow technology and it's a factory for service nervous systems and if you have canisters that need to be updated of course you can make canister code autonomous just by setting its controllers to null right then nobody can update it ever again but if if it's a complex system you're going to need to upgrade it so and fix things so if you want to make that autonomous you assign it to a service nervous system um internet identity um does a bunch of things it's actually created by uh a combination of these three Technologies TPMS uh trusted platform module it's a chip that's

inside modern devices like a phone and a laptop um and that that holds keys and it can sign um use those keys to sign messages inside the chip and you can't break the chip open to get the key out a protocol called Web or then which connects code inside the web browser to those TPM chips and of course a bunch of cryptography on the internet computer so this is what it looks like you know you open up open you go to the open chat URL for example oc.app click launch app choose your internet identity authorize it could be whatever you want right fingerprint sensor face ID that's activating the the TPMS so the sessions

being sent inside the TPM where your key is signing it you have multiple devices attached your internet identity and boom you're in so it's a different way of authenticating yourself to uh you know web3 service it's very easy it's secure your key card is stolen um you prevent there are various ways you can stop yourself losing the key but for example by adding multiple devices to your internet Identity or if you want adding a you know a recovery key with a seed phrase so um you know when you combine all of these different pieces um you can create these you know end-to-end um decentralized autonomous web3

services that are more powerful so open challenge I just mentioned um runs 100 on the network chat accounts also wallets so it's kind of full social fi you can send satoshi's with a message there's no wallet or anything involved every under the skin of course every message is a blockchain transaction and in you know the thing is stored as part of the blockchain State um and this was actually the first open internet service it kind of went live in April and it's fully controlled by a service nervous system down which means any updates to open chatter propose to this service nervous system down and that it applies them if they go through um

hot a lot is another one that recently transitioned to becoming an open internet service running under the control of a service nervous system um it's fully it's like a fully tokenized Tick Tock delivered into the browser and it's creating like a sort of ingenious decentralized economy so users bet it's not actually hot tokens but we'll go with that for the second for now um uses better hot tokens on whether videos will go viral users help with content moderation and then the creators of viral videos get rewarded by these tokens and eventually advertisers are going to have to pay with these tokens um in order to get their ads on onto the service and so you know that that's what drives the value of the tokens and

creates the economy um and it's designed to be a service that you know founderizes its users like makes its users part of the team and creates this sort of virtual industrious Workforce from the users and that's what we think um is the future of web3 again the whole thing's controlled by an SNS final example IC Dex this is an alpha it's not an open internet service yet um but it's it's runs entirely on the internet computer it's a full order Book Exchange created by a smart contract right and obviously it's hack proof and transparent soon it'll be autonomous and so you know it provides an alternative to

the centralized world where you have something like FTX and there can be a secret back door created by someone like Sam Banger freed which gives them a 63 billion dollar cheat code Etc and allows them to sort of suck all the money out um this we think is the future um continuous double auction exchanges order book exchanges created by small contracts where even the user experience is created by a small contract where there's absolutely no back door whatsoever and all of the updates to The Exchange pass through the service you know proposed to the service nervous system and and then applied so uh considering all of these uh

examples have just been through some things we should know they're very cool very sophisticated got complex functionality and yet they were built by tiny Tech teams the first two I think have core teams of three developers each The Exchange is a bit larger there's like 10 plus but nonetheless these teams are small um there's no Cloud no database servers they're running exclusively on the internet computer you can do video streaming for the internet in Productions I think Hot or Not may not be at the moment but it's it's coming and no files right I mean if you think about open chat is this very complicated

messaging service where chat accounts are actually crypto wallets and you can send crypto chat messages and yet you don't need firewalls and you don't need a security team so I think that just speaks to how revolutionary small contracts are as a new form of software um something that's coming on the internet computer is the localization of subnets currently subnets com uh you know combine node machines from all over the world so you know the rule is you know no machines from different node providers in different data centers in different geographers and different jurisdictions which is what we call the term deterministic decentralization which is used to minimize the the replication involved and to keep the

cost very low localized subnets um will will combine no machines that are in the same geographical locality and the question here is you know going forward and we're looking at things like you know fundamental compute infrastructure that runs the foundations of society and identity and things like that should we be depending on U.S corporations for example should um you know next Generation identity uh turn out to be something like Visa or Mastercard and we say no and and that that Sovereign societies cannot depend upon digital foundations in which other states might have kill switches and back

doors and that's what you get when you use Cloud Computing Services closed Source software single sign-ons Services even security Hardware so security Hardware is proven time and time again to actually come with um Trojans and back doors and things like that um so I mentioned how you know you're going to get bi-directional calling from canister smart contract code into ethereum smart contracts and vice versa that means that all of these capabilities can be leveraged or at least shortly or it'll be possible to leverage them very easily from ethereum so you could build a user experience on the internet computer and have D5 RLS on ethereum

in addition um one of the other cool features is a single https out course the internet internet computer canister small contracts can make our calls that go through consensus and the results are normalized so you can pull things like price feeds into a canister small contract from someone like coinbase or even from a variety of exchanges and that enables you to create web 2 Integrations and then Sovereign Oracle functionality without relying on a centralized Oracle company um lastly but not least internet computers are going to surely sort of add support for something called AI

compute units with a pathway to full AI smart contracts so um AI is going to be absolutely fundamental to to web3 and nobody should should underestimate how important it's going to be to the future of society and in the future you know AI is going to want to people are going to want to have ai analyzing all of their um data if you think about something like a metaverse very likely a lot of the environment will actually be generated by AI which will be fantastic and AI isn't just about you know stable diffusion and and large language models

you can even do things like compressed data and what's important is that all of this functionality is accessible from web3 so in the future it'll be possible from within an ethereum smart contract to make a call into an internet computer AI compute unit spin up and you know spin up a model um even direct it towards some training data give it a prompt get a response process it do it do whatever um full AI smart contracts um further off but um working with people who are doing something called integral neural networks and you can apply transforms to AI models to make them deterministic

that's how it's done if you're curious and they'll be very useful for things like um you know Medical large language models where you need to know with absolute certainty what the software is what the parameters are what the training data is and the users need to know if they Supply a particular prompt they need to know with absolute certainty that an inference was performed and produced a specific response so our mission is to essentially get as much of Humanities services and systems and services onto World computer you know the internet you don't hear

much about the internet computer within the industry but um it's it it's the compute on the network is growing so currently it's it's performing about 250 000 eth equivalent transactions a second when you actually look at the number of instructions that are being run so it it's growing it's doing well um and I hope you know anyone here is interested I'll be around um for a while um takes a look at the internet computer and sort of joins us in pushing um and then the next phase of decentralization yeah thank you [Applause] thanks

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