Episode 252: From Wireless to Blockchains with Pramod Viswanath

Transcript

[Music] welcome to zero knowledge I'm your host Anna Rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online [Music] this week taruna and I chat with pramod vistanaut professor of engineering at Princeton and the co-founder of witness chain we talk about his early interests that led him to work on wireless the early Wireless industry and how research was brought to Market at that time we

then talk about the introduction of adversarial thinking in his research the move over to blockchain how the incentives of blockchain can be used within the wireless industry and his new project witness chain and how they aim to reshape Wireless now before we start in I want to show that one of our ZK Summit Partners Elio are currently in their third incentivized testnet phase Elio allows for programmable privacy and with their testnet developers can now build their own private and scalable applications if you want to try it out check out the repo at github.com aliohq I also want to let you know that there is a new ZK hack multi-week event coming up starting on November 22nd this is our third edition and again we'll be bringing you a ZK puzzle hacking competition as well as a

number of workshops with the best teams in the space be sure to sign up for a kickoff event I'll add the link to that in the show notes now Tanya will share a little bit about this week's sponsor today's episode is sponsored by polygon introducing polygon ZK evm we all know that ethereum needs to scale and polygon believes that zero knowledge Tech is the best way forward polygon's vision for zke evm is simple developers can seamlessly deploy any ethereum smart contract to a layer 2 and benefit from the scaling power of ZK proofs it's all also permissionless meaning anyone can use it and open source polygon ZK evm was built by polygon but it's for anyone and everyone who wants a cheaper and faster way to use ethereum without sacrificing security or decentralization public testnet is now available so you

now have an opportunity to test their work and make improvements join them for this journey if you'd like to learn more about polygon ZK evm and stay up to date on the latest go to bit.ly forward slash start on zkevm and check out the getting started guide again that's bit.ly forward slash start on ZK evm so thanks again polygon and now here's our episode foreign and I are here with pramod visvanat professor of engineering at Princeton and co-founder of witness chain welcome to the show thank you Anna happy to be here so we've had two of your kind of associate colleagues on the show already David Shea and sriram Kanan I'm going to

add links to these episodes in the show notes I think one question that starts here is like because each of you mentioned the other and I'm very curious like who nerd snipe too you know this blockchain is a chain of blocks and there's a chain here too um they I was David Chase very first PhD student he was my co-phd advisor and sriram kannan was my PhD at YZ nice and I'm sort of the missing link between the two and I also had some role in encouraging both of them to join this whole research Saga and Adventure on blockchains you did okay saw I mean a lot of the work we actually mentioned in those two episodes prism blockchain is a race and Nakamoto always

wins like these papers these Works you're also co-authors on a lot of these so is this like I I just called you colleagues or Associates but what are you actually because they're all at different universities too right like it's not always yes but we talked probably three times a day every day for the last many years um my daughter's very first English word was day for David because David dad was talking to David like every day nice that's cool would you say it's in those conversations that a lot of these ideas are being shared and sort of the origins for these works are happening indeed you know research we become even though we're professors and they're students it sounds like a hierarchy but uh at a PhD

and a graduate level we were really friends and we're very very close to each other uh and just sheer number of hours spent thousands of hours over a four five year period and you get to know each other at a very close level especially intellectually how you think and and that stays on uh over a lifetime and um it's really a privilege to be part of that cool um let's start kind of at the beginning of your research and I mean I know that wireless P2P networks this is what we're going to talk about for this first part of the interview the work that you were doing on that kind of in the lead up to this though like what were you interested in that led you to work on

that field in the first place what was it was it the math was it the engineering was it the challenge was it because it was like relevant at the time or is it something that you yeah we're very interested in from the start I mean as a kid as a typical uh sort of a student who's interested in math and science and engineering you're interested in what the things that Hollywood promotes you know AI Science Tech and I was interested I came to Berkeley in computer science as a graduate student uh to do Ai and machine learning it was a bit early for its time this is 1995. it was at the cusp just before the real AI boom took off in about maybe seven to eight years too

early but I've always been interested in trying to bring Tech to as many people and improve the human condition it was a bit early the AI sounded a bit too when I actually started reading and get to grad school I felt this was not right there whereas Wireless was just happening the internet was happening not so much Wireless the internet was happening and it was very clear the first search engine inktomi was my lab mate and I could see the internet just growing around me so I wanted to be part of this revolution and Berkeley allowed me to pick any advisor I like the first year is open and I took that opportunity to explore what I would like to do and I spent my PhD years just trying to

understand how to efficiently bring communication to the masses really wireless communication so is this idea of like trying to actually get it into the hands of many but at the time was there was it mobile or was it like what was Wireless Wireless was a old thing right hundred plus years and you know Marconi and the transatlantic wire from um from the from the US to the UK and some well over 100 years so it's a long thing where old history uh but uh 95 96 it was clear that there was a time where the technology was growing and phones were available it's just that they were very clunky and um not the greatest of all coverage

everywhere and definitely not man woman child but it was clear that this was as an important role in bringing people together did you think at the time like was it already clear that there's going to be like cell phones in every hand very soon or was it sort of still a question mark I was just a student I was a maybe you I should just say I was a nerd um and I didn't think of these broader questions but it was very clear even to my you know when I was explaining my research to my grandmother it was very clear what this would entail so it didn't need to convince many people what this would if phones got to everybody it would what it would be but the vision was there that we want to bring this to everyone

and there's one more Vision Anna which was that phones were just used to make phone calls like a telephone you know phone uh but we really wanted to merge the internet which is a network which was taking off around us with another Network which is the wireless network and these two networks were as disparate as can be they were disparate technologically they were disparate like literally separate sets of things and there was also the separate in terms of applications was it different companies running each of the yeah totally different the internet was sort of decentralized it was up and coming you know America AOL and the

company of Yahoo uh this was way before Google right so this is the early days of of the internet and basically.com and um well it had a lot more decentralized aspect a kind of a feel of what today we see in crypto and wireless was uh very old large companies I mean the the biggest gorilla of them all was a T and T it was so big that they got broken up into two parts a t and Lucent and they had these big operations where they would literally draw wires all over the country and um you know tell atnt telephone so it was um they were very centralized versus decentralized very hierarchical and

physical networks compared to packets and switching on the internet so they were very different so I think one thing that maybe the listeners of this podcast might not know a ton about is sort of the also the fight that sort of took place over buying Spectrum uh in that era and like sort of how the Commerce side of Wireless interacted with the technology technological side so I guess you know how would you kind of describe the kind of evolution of the wireless industry because you know it sort of started as car phones and very like low energy radio things to like hey now we have people competing in Spectrum

auctions and people buying other companies just for for their spectrum and how did that like impact that the kind of research like was there sort of a feedback loop between what research was done and sort of What new technologies were people were willing to kind of sponsor or how did that go about was it the research that caused certain Technologies to be sponsored or yeah thanks tarun I mean it's a complicated question and I was there at the time so the issue I would say the main way to characterize the State of Affairs at that time was that it's a very permissioned system you know to use a blockchain language very permission you have to be it's a country club there are only a few people and you have to be in the room literally uh to be part of any conversation whether that conversation

meant on the business side buying Spectrum all are on a technology side you know actually impacting what kind of protocols and what algorithms and what tech goes over um it was a very low risk appetite very permissioned Country Club I think a feeling to the whole industry to be fair it's a complicated industry it remains so because it's Capital intensive you want to cover the whole earth really like literally cover it right you have to be everywhere you have to put access points it has also got Hardware aspects to it it has antennas and you alluded to Spectrum which is regulated by you know governments so it had multiple aspects to it and um at the end it became very risk-covers and very permissioned and the internet

on the other hand was so open and the wires had been done for decades earlier right during the DARPA project and the setups were there and the intelligence had just come to the computers and the browser was just born at that time early to mid 90s and now that you have a browser you can build application locations on it and e-commerce was an obvious application when you were doing this like the the wireless research were you actually designing new forms that these networks could take but like probably wouldn't take at the time because of this incumbency because of the late like Capital intensive nature of the industry was it sort of like experiments that you were putting out there but not necessarily getting to see them happen in real life to see them

yeah become alive entirely true we wanted to make the protocol simpler make the hardware simpler just de-risk the business in a way from now that I look back I wasn't so much a business person but not have these vertically integrated stacks and and spread them apart and now in the hindsight I can look back that's because that was what the internet was yeah every individual person could take their own relatively low risk an easy way to get on to the wagon and experiment and explore and see where the market takes you um whereas Wireless was so discovered so research really was about how to build decentralized or peer-to-peer was also a

big thing BitTorrent had come around that time that's again on the wired side and we were trying to understand what the implications would be and how would you in any practical way bring such way of thinking I wouldn't say the same technology but a way of thinking to wireless which is so vertically integrated and you know everything is controlled together so in other words all the pieces work for example I'll give you an example Anna so and what I mean by they're all completely tightly centralized controlled right you have a phone you're moving around you go from one place to another and you will go from the view of one base station which is where you're talking to to another one simply because you moved and this could be let's say a couple of miles if those base stations had to be talking to each other in a closed way so you could

hand over the conversation from one end to the other end as you move and this was a basic requirement of phone Mobility mobile phones right that's what it means to be mobile I mean if you're static then you had a phone it was in the wall so the whole point was to allow mobility and if you make a very centralized decision where all the base stations are coupled together they are synchronized to milliseconds or even hundreds of microseconds the crystals are so clear they're all synced and then the signal can move from one to another without breaking your call and that was how the designs were and so they were very careful uh controlled um Electronics together with the protocols the internet was

completely opposite it was packets packets would get dropped they would be recent yeah yeah it was really a free-for-all wireless was the opposite side interesting do you feel though over time did Wireless move more towards the internet model or was it more that Tech got good enough that you could use that sort of perfect model better the market forces were clear that you should move towards decentralized okay and it happened in two different ways and it's a little bit subtle and I'll come back to this later in this uh in our discussions but the tech part was not there and that is something that we were working on and in 1999 I did an internship at um Lucent at the labs and

I met a great engineer scientist his name is Rajiv laroya we get along we got along spectacularly it was a moment where I had spent time thinking of how to build uh such decentralized wireless networks how to make them efficient and what would be ways in which people can join asynchronously and still be connected and not got dropped off together with Rajiv laroya's vision of how to build a whole system around it that can scale in a global way and connect to the internet efficiently and so that was a spectacular summer of 1999 it was also the peak of the.com and Rajiv was at the cusp of saying that we should take this technology out of bell

labs and commercialize it oh but did you do it yeah so Rajiv laraya started this in late 99 and I started off joined them in early 2000 just as I finished my PhD and this company was called well it was called radio router oh you know it's a radio but the router so really want to be both radio has a phone and router as a core component of the internet so and in fact our tagline was every bit Wireless yeah understand what what could you do at you at that time what was actually possible that phones were still clunky so there was just a few phone companies and the phones were very clunky this and in our just in our pitch slides where things

like imagine you can do email on your phone and so people had to imagine that but it was clear that email was there MapQuest I mean Google Maps were in there or Apple Maps but MapQuest was there so people would download maps from the online and you can print it so it was changing the changing many things that people were used to from a physical world to the cyber world so they could imagine it but the hardware was not there but we were doing the algorithms and the tech underlying it did you so this was your first foray outside of Academia I guess this is my first job right out of PhD okay sort of first 4A that's right but this wasn't your company this wasn't you weren't found co-founding this you were joining someone well maybe I was employed too or

okay okay uh very early I was also working with them beforehand yeah I learned a lot through this experience of being in the industry and being an entrepreneur and well sorry what year we're now just after the.com bubble right now yeah it was still uh when we raised the money and we still did it it was still the very Peak of.com March 2000 and then September came and the whole thing crashed and 2001 was really bad because there that's when the communication crash happened and people remember the.com crash of 2000 but 2001 to 2002 is where all the communication companies went belly up these are you know like the Titanics of the era Global Crossing had put fibers all over the

oceans and connected the continents really and um they went belly up I mean they had no business most of the there was no data flowing there's no YouTube yeah and all these fibers were dark and they went Belly Up and sold on Pennies from the dollar really fire sale at the time so it was a bad time to be in Communications and and networking those years that's interesting it was like the ray Trails they were setting the rails in place for something that didn't exist yet this sounds oddly familiar to our industry but anyway well I I think I think the funny thing is like didn't you write your your kind of Wireless Communications textbook around that time like it's funny if I look at the timing it's like right you

know like right at the the bottom of the market was a perfect time to write a textbook because that's when I felt I think we I we had done the research right during my PhD and David Chase research he had just gotten tenure and here I was I'd come from this startup experience being in the real world how to design protocols which algorithms which research makes practical sense which ones go together and also they have to be this is another thing that has a commonality to blockchain is that Wireless at the end has to be very robust and very simple in two ways first it has to scale globally like man woman child everybody will hold a phone and and you can't be worried about interference so you have to handle it at a core level in a robust level the

other thing about Wireless is that these are gigahertz radio signals so every leaf of every tree will bounce off the signals in different ways so if you are not designing for that in a robust way and upfront you'll never get there and I got you trained as an engineer as a system engineer to think about robustness and scalability these two points uh you know very very it got into the blood basically you think it becomes instinctive that any protocol any algorithm that you think about any Tech does it pass robustness and scalability and this came in handy when we did blockchains um before we go into that I actually that that book The fundamentals of wireless

communication I learned in the interview with David that this was like the book that described it at that moment in the best way it's sort of like the formalized version of all that research in a way that could be taught I actually wanted to ask you about like like in turn I sort of I think you sort of alluded to like you did this at the bottom of the like where the market had already crashed out in a way do you think that the reason you could do that textbook then was that there was enough research and maybe the research had crystallized how did you know it was ready to be kind of like fixed in in print I think it's partly both uh of the factors that you mentioned first is that we had done research for roughly I would say seven eight years by then okay seven

years through my PhD and uh and David's own personal research and uh at that time we had also built this as a practical system and uh on the field this was someone that radio router is not a good name so it was called Flareon Technologies and it sounds like toothpaste or something radio router also sounds a little like it's from the 60s or something so maybe it's better but yeah and I think one of the things we did in this book and something I clearly clearly remember is that at the end every few pages every at the end of every chapter for sure we had something called a system view which is to put together all the ideas and how they would all fit together through these two

lenses ruthless lenses of robustness and scalability what would it mean individually there could be an idea that's a breakthrough I mean this is truly deep Tech Wireless is you know rocket science like literally rocket science Rockets lie because we can communicate and do wireless yeah and so this is deep tag but at the same time one can get into a very narrow aspect and like do it exactly the right way like Optimal but it doesn't make sense if you put them as a whole system uh they don't fit together so every now and then in this box we had the system view aspects taking a whole stack view of how these protocols this deep Tech would fit in in the broader context yeah and we had these two ruthless lenses like I said

they're very sharp uh sharp instruments robustness and scalability are they like either or like do you get more robust for less scalability or more scalability and less robust or can you get like high on both yeah they're complementary okay so you can get efficiency and optimality at the risk of robustness okay and similarly you can get optimality and efficiency at the risk of not having scalability um so you can just have more performance but not be as robust or scalable so usually there's a third component which is performance you know you want to do one gigabits per second or high throughput that's a normal thing people think of but then you may not be you may not have coverage everywhere or it may

be less robust something happens and you suddenly you start getting into a phone car and start driving and your call drops so you want to be efficient and have high performance at the same time uh you want to be robust and scalable this is the central engineering challenge efficiency is kind of everybody wants high efficiency it's clear but but Wireless was especially solved because you are paying uh dollars for spectrum so it is roughly a few hundred dollars per Hertz of spectrum Nationwide license and you would need something like at that time 1.3 megahertz but today like five megahertz channels to transmit on the phone this is really bottom line then it's like you need to be able to

get as much into that to make it worthwhile to run these whole structures I guess can I can I ask maybe a stupid question which I actually have not never heard the story to when did governments realize that they could have a monopoly on spectrum because like you know think about this way like if you're if you're like you know Marconi coming up with the radio it's not like the Italian government was there like no no you have to pay us per Hertz right so like when did governments versus industry kind of realize like hey this is a sort of public good that we're gonna commandeer because blockchains have the same actual problems uh excellent I mean I I'm no expert on this history but World War II was a era of radar and wireless so it was clear

that Wars are won by having Wireless technology very very clear it would have made a pivotal difference and um and cracking the codes the Enigma chords and so there was a whole history of communication and Wireless in general having Central roles in how human civilizations it affected you know a lot of all of our civilization I I think that had some big role in government realizing gee I mean not so much making money as much as you know controlling our nationhood and statehood so even at the start of the wireless industry that like in in the way that we understand it in the time you were there like the government had already been keeping tabs on this for a long long time oh

definitely I mean I think it's only gotten deeper in measurement it's like Transportation networks like roads and it's just uh in the air yeah true that's where the information goes when did this book come out and actually who's it tailored for the book came out in 2004 so it's roughly I started thinking about this in 1996 about eight years of both research thought process and on the field experience uh in an entrepreneurial way and bringing this Tech in a scalable way so it's and the book indeed was a mix of both it had algorithms it had the title said it it was fundamentals but the same time had a very system view is what we called it so the audience was both universities we

taught it our own home universities it was taught in dozens of universities around the world uh including all the mainstream ones in the US and to the companies so we gave lectures we've given tutorials and it's used at most of the wireless companies um even today even yeah even today actually quick question how much of the book would you say just like ballpark guess was Theory known prior to 1999 and you working in industry and how much of the like exercises or problems in the book came from like hey I was working and I ran into this thing and it didn't work out of curiosity because like you wrote this book after having both like an academic experience as well as a

practical experience like how would you divide up the book in that way yeah it's uh the first few chapters I think were somewhat known uh but even there there were subtleties especially when you started looking at robustness when we were summarizing work all done in the in a short four five year window and some of the chapters and exercises were really brand new because they were done because we understood the landscape so when you want to of the engineering design space once you understand the design space it's somewhat High dimensional but you know the design space now you start saying oh there's a vacuum here you know with this Dimension with antennas and robustness there's no protocol and we don't know how it fits

in and how they sit together so that's the new uh component to study um so I enjoy this process of this pedagogical aspect is not just one way so that means all the things we did we can explain but really it has uh gone back the other direction several times where it gives me ideas of um new ideas to pursue point forward in your story did you did Jane industry I kind of know the answer to this or did you return to Academia yeah I returned back to Academia I I went I became a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and uh I've always been close to the industry so I've always had both hats at different time scales uh

over my career and rarely doing both at the same time but one or the other in an intense way but without ever taking my foot off of both and mostly because I find them very synergistic with each other when I'm teaching I get new ideas that have different time scales of being useful from a practical standpoint and when I'm uh in the in the Practical era I get a very visceral feel of exactly what the burning questions are yeah and some of these questions are business questions and some of them actually have deep Tech questions and you don't know these things unless you try both and I enjoy this aspect of being of being both when you went back though did you

continue to work on wireless or did you sort of switch directly yeah indeed one of my first students at the time after when I went back and early students was sriram kannan okay that was when he was like you met sriram and um and his PhD was on basically generalizing this idea of how to make Wireless as decentralized as possible instead of having these base stations so coupled with each other where their clocks are coupled to you know hunt tens to hundreds of microseconds can we have base stations that are separate they somehow find a way of synchronizing basically bringing BitTorrent like protocols on the internet to wireless and so that was sriram's PhD thesis and

I had several a few other students who did PhD thesis broadly on this topic which is how to do it efficiently how to route data how to manage interference because if everybody talks at the same time and they're not being synchronized that's no good so how do you handle interference these were things that we worked on with a series of research topics there was this period though where like P2P at least sort of had a drop off did you ever shift Focus did you ever look at other kind of angles in other words web 2 right the other angle at the time the industry moved decisively from decentralization the vision of web one the internet to closer and closer to web 2 so from 2006 2007 when sriram started his PhD with me all

the way to 2012 to 14 by the time the web 2 had been firmly entrenched which is just a few players control all aspects they control the source which is YouTube where you upload data they control the output where you interact with the data so both sides the major platforms of today they had strongly enmeshed themselves in the economy and I mean they were the economy you could say and apple of the big event that happened was that Apple came just before um Flareon was acquired by Qualcomm personal I should say that the technology we did that Flareon today finally came into fruition today it's called 4G LTE oh cool yeah but it took some time because technology takes time and wireless is slower to adapt partly

because uh it's just as Hardware aspects and we are at an era where Hardware has become commodity enough that it can be programmable but it's still still not there yet and that's something I'm working on very actively well well actually one question about that era was you know I remember in the 2000s there were all these projects by you know now the big Tech Giants but at that time I think they were maybe a little more in puberty about like they all tried to do their own Wireless projects and like none of them really survived do you remember that era right like Google bought Motorola and stuff like that what kind of lessons can we learn from the idea of like whatever new technology is trying to buy the old technology

because I I kind of feel like in some ways cryptos has had things like that where where people have tried to like buy old technology or buy sort of I hate the phrase web 2 or web3 but like web 2 and air quotes uh Technologies and try to bolt them on do you think there are any like lessons to draw from this idea of like hey like the innovators who tried to do the old thing usually fail somehow once they are big enough yeah I think it's the innovators dilemma I mean I think I mean I can't speak to exactly what the big tank company's interest in Wireless are but to the extent I interacted it was mostly about making sure Google product and Facebook could be on more people um and so it's just to get to the end

mile but Wireless was more than that it was about opening up platforms to others and um yeah so I think uh sit with the open aspect the composable the programmable aspect of wireless and the vision that you would get by having such open radios just having a link and doing what you can do over it it was not fully aligned with uh with the platform's sort of business core business goals at the same time I think Wireless became part of our society I have an anthropologist friend who talks about how humans started wearing clothes that's a major thing we carry on our body and the second most carried thing is some form of money which is some form of money okay it

could be a wallet but it could be some form of money and the third most carried thing on the human body has been a phone of all time and so it changed us as as an animal species and how we interact with each other uh through this device um and it became it was it was a force of nature in other words there is some biology that drove Wireless so much well let's bring it kind of up to president and the topic we tend to cover on this show so that's kind of going back to the second thing the form of currency that people hold on their person but at what point did your work start to intersect with the blockchain world and like yeah did you sort of ignore blockchain at the beginning or

Bitcoin at the beginning or do you feel like you you spotted it right off the bat oh I didn't spot it I mean I'd heard of Bitcoin and uh but you know just like anybody else probably uh read some articles about it and did it and I'm not I was not following it I was in Wireless which was kind of separate from that uh and I was not following it but sometime around 2015 and I was looking for what other things to work on I still was interested in Wireless I had a student who was very very passionate about rebuilding wireless networks that are robust but in a different way robust not just um like I said every leaf of every tree bouncing off signals but robust to adversaries and that was my first time I was used to

adversary but my adversary was usually nature when I was doing Wireless okay you could say it's not adversary adversarial oh I get it okay so you're the nine yeah it's relatively benign but uh but this student was very interested in uh people adversarially trying to do uh Wireless for uh you could say malicious purposes and the student's name was Julia fanti and she drove this research in a very strong way you know sometimes people have this view that maybe outside in the show right people think professors and students are like a hierarchy but and I think I alluded to the fact that it's more equal but sometimes it's the other way around too and in this case it was very much I was driven by her passion and focus on

trying to build wireless tech that was decentralized and we're trying to do decentralized in two ways first at that time this was the time of Hong Kong protests and Arab protests and Arab Spring so people were using phones to team up to beat in a certain place to protest and the authoritarian governments were using cell towers to triangulate who is using this particular app to coordinate and zero in yeah and like literally triangulate physically where you are and come and catch you while you're on the phone this kind of wow and the technology was because it was centralized you could do such a thing the second thing was when you send a message they would try to track down which IP address sent it and go back and

catch it through that and so we were interested and I think Julia was very interested in trying to avoid both types and basically provide anonymity layers on top of regular communication and in some sense this was my first project where I always thought about high performance as my main thing for wireless and decentralization but now we have a new angle which is a diversary resistance and that was the resistance for the network level and physical level resistance and this where we did two projects you can already see that there's some aspects of blockchains coming in definitely in fact that's exactly where we started uh how we started were you looking for adversarial testing for

decentralized models and that led you to learn more about this financial system that was sometimes getting attacked I mean we we've heard a lot about the adversarial nature of the blockchain space but yeah I'm curious how that linked up no I hadn't heard of the blockchain at all at the time when we were doing this it was purely Wireless and we were driven by very practical issues we wanted to get a technology and an app out for for individuals literally actually ship it to the protesters and to provide a resistance against tracking of the IP address B resistance against tracking or physical location so we did two projects we did the messaging protocol and this is also the time when lot of messaging apps were coming along and WhatsApp was a big thing at the time and so forth it had already become a

fairly big thing and right you still have signal and Telegram so these were all born at that era by the way so we had an app called Wildfire we put it on the Google Play Store but and the tech underlying it won some research Awards we called it spy versus spy and um and we had good fun from research and we were also very practical I had this practical bent of mind and and Julia fanti was also a very Hands-On student I mean like she built her own bike and stuff like that very Hands-On nice and so we built this app as an Android app and um we released it online so that didn't take off but nevertheless I think we got a feel for this adversarial resistance

and we built a separate project called LTE shark where you would put an antenna on top of your phone and with this extra Anton on your phone your phone could now they cannot triangulate you up to let's say 500 feet so they can say you're roughly in this area but previously they were the cellular towers can triangulate you up to a few uh few meters but a sub meter and so basically catch you but this time you could have up to 200 100 to 300 meters of obfuscation nice so this was a physical device like an antenna system that you could put connect on top of your regular phone so we did the research underlying it and the technology and we brought it to sort of practical products but there were products at a university level and so

they were proof of concept you could say they were funded by the National Science Foundation so and the National Security Agency so we're thankful they gave us a blank check to do this research done nothing at stake I think I'm still trying to find the link to blockchain stuff like so this is still within Wireless and this is almost like physical you're talking actually like techniques in the physical world but yeah where does it where does it lead to this sort of decentralized network blockchain land exactly so we were giving these talks around and we talked to variety of people in both Academia and in the market space around that time we met a colleague we had just hired him as an assistant professor at Illinois

his name is Andrew Miller and and Andrew Miller was being in blockchain since his high school from the days of Nakamoto and he was blocking he did and he said you know this is very related to a major issue in blockchains Bitcoin transactions uh Bitcoin has anonymity at the wallet level as an address but IP addresses can be tracked to wallets based on your transaction it's an issue and there were some heuristics and hearsay about you know on Reddit forums that people can do it and he he put this idea in our head I clearly remembered that sort of February cold afternoon in Illinois when he said that and we got into this we said okay we were trying to do de-anonymization

and Anonymous anonymity protection algorithms for wireless but at a conceptual level it's still a networking staff and we can bring it to bitcoin so we did our first project where we tried to de-anonymize basically when you transmit a transaction on chain on on the Bitcoin Network it goes through the IP network and if an adversary is looks is just listening to the timestamps of which transaction packets were received in which location where then they can go and triangulate as to who the source which IP address was probably likely the source of this transaction and we showed we built sort of machine learning protocols that can do it very very

cheaply that means just a few hundred dollars of botnets that you can build on the network and you de-anonymize really every transaction on bitcoin it's not de-anonymization to a physical person but it's de-anonymization to a IP address which is close I think I see your link here so it's kind of like you started from sort of the land of research dealing with these big companies you went into industry you kind of come back to Academia finding new problems and what you learn is like this adversarial mindset where you're like you have to like in your case you were trying to build to counter an adversary but the minute you introduce an adversary you're thinking like an adversary and then you were able to go into this new field and basically use

the adversarial perspective this is interesting yeah and it was very close we wanted to just prevent um IP addresses from being tied to bitcoin transactions you lose your entire anonymity on chain if your IP addresses are tied to every transaction totally and so that's how we got in and we the once we showed that the existing networking protocols uh they hadn't changed since the days of Nakamoto and so we designed the first sort of networking protocol with focus on how to bring anonymity in your IP address when you transmit uh in in terms of which transaction was sent and we had this protocol called dandelion it was a lightweight protocol cryptographically

very lightweight and it was also compatible with existing so not everybody needs to use it so you use dandelion on your networking stack it was a networking stack change nothing to change the L1 layer or consensus or anything it's just how you do the packets forwarding and the dandelion was a way of putting Randomness in where you send and whom to send and when to send that provided this anonymity layer dandelion what era are we talking now so this line was 2017 2016 through 17. we put that paper up on a public Research Forum called archive and in the morning we had dozens of messages from people and a community we had never heard of this was the Bitcoin community

they'd found your paper and they wanted to talk just overnight okay and I said oh wait a minute uh this is a very different pace of research and activity and engagement than I'm ever used to in the wireless world and it was really a extraordinarily exhilarating to meet an open society which is so interested in they want to try it like right now yeah did you leave Academia then at this point did you like actually go for a back out into industry yeah so we first tried to get dandelion into Bitcoin core so we spent a lot of time we met all their devs and it got into several cryptocurrencies you know Monero memorable several currencies used it was a networking stack so it doesn't change

their consensus so it's kind of harmless why not and we showed that it doesn't harm your performance anyway um so it's an extra level of anonymity that you have and sometime around late 2017 um Julia had just gotten a job at Carnegie Mellon as a professor but before joining and just at the time time of joining she took some leave and I took leave and we got into the crypto world so we that's our first crypto startup 2017. that's that's fine at the same time I started this show actually that's right so a lot of people jumped in then yeah yeah and I think we wanted to build a good scientific base what's the best way to do proof of work proof of stake was a thing at the time

finality Gadget sharding they were all topics that ethereum foundation and vitalik were just talking and we wanted to understand them they're all networking and communication aspects and I just gotten flavor for adversarial resistance and I'm always interested in robustness and scaling so all these put together I realized this is a thing for people like me and my collaborators in the wireless world so I went and talked to a bunch of my friends from the previous era including David Shea and sriram kannan they were doing computational biology and it wasn't a hard sell because it because yeah I think they can see that I'm fully in and I said the water is warm and it's very

easy to work in the area because we are communicating we're storing and it's still networking at its core decentralized networking 2017 that's not what you work on today what happened to it no so we uh 2018 crypto winter hit you know it was a rush like within 12 months everything started and closed that was a rapid winter and the same Rush with which people can come in I realize can also go here in Wireless somehow things are slow to come but they also are slow to leave I mean they're just like a physical aspect to it whereas here 2018 um I mean you were there Anna and I was

there and several of which was fast that was fast and a lot of people said it's actually over this was just a bubble for one time but I and and you know as you can see my collaborators that we worked together at the time we were in it for the long haul cool we had enjoyed working on this area and we sort of went back to academics I went back to Illinois and Julia went to Carnegie Mellon and we were working on variety of research topics we just wanted to understand the principles and the basic protocols what's the best proof of work protocol that was prison what's the best proof of stake protocol which has Dynamic availability and handle Dynamic stake capabilities what's the best way to mix proof of work and stake the fungibly you know like some parts work

some parts take this is the Minotaur protocol and what's the best way to do sharding so all the layer one methods and then we've spent time on what the best way to do data availability so you may want to do new cryptographic methods that bring hash accumulators Merkle trees together with information theoretic methods of coding and you put the two Fields together so we have this coded Merkel trees that are the sort of the right libraries to construct for data availability so I think we we developed what now I call the principles of blockchains that the layer one I'm wondering all of a sudden if there's a textbook in the works because that sounds like that era of like certain parts of it becoming formalized like when you when you say

you can like identify the best then it suggests that like enough research has happened that like you feel confident there's like a standard that could potentially be written down do you think we're there for some of those things I feel comfortable to say that we have the principles in fact I teach this class right now I'm teaching it at instant principles of blockchains and you know anyone who's interested it's web3.princeton.edu but it's a 2022 book you know when I wrote the book with David Shaco a third in 2004 it was a book like literally a book yeah I think five 500 500 to 600 pages and it's that style had it was published by Cambridge University press not changed since the days of Newton you know they also published Newton's principia Mathematica but this is a 2022 book and so which

means it has has about six seven pages of lecture notes there is a GitHub page and venue to program what the protocols are for every lecture there is a YouTube channel and in a nod to my very young Millennial or even sub-millennial student I don't know what the right gen Z movie students I don't know yeah what the students are we even have a three-minute summary a video for each lecture okay The Tick Tock crowd generation yeah so there's a three minute and some students are asking me to make a YouTube shot you know this one minute YouTube shot so it's a modern book with a Discord server uh some parts unavoidable latex and overleaf documents the disc GitHub and

YouTube videos so it's a modern book that I teach it's a large class by Princeton standards but it's open to everyone cool and enjoy just discussing the basic principles of blockchains um I think again this was done during the crypto winter from October to 2018 through 2020. cool reminds me a little bit of something that I'm doing over at the fck hack with the ZK I'm going to do a little shelf or something I'm doing too CK whiteboard sessions if people aren't aware we actually have like video series Discord server and we're also experimenting with shorts which is really funny when you're dealing with deep math I don't know if it works because it's like anyway but uh we're trying it out

we're gonna see if if yeah if people like it and I just want to say more power to you you know let the power of the universe come to such efforts it's all very good it's open permissionless it's the opposite of the and I'm early in that conversation I mentioned about a country club environment this is the opposite of that it's an extraordinary feeling to be part of the this Democratic movement where knowledge is democratized so besides the book and the creation of some of these standards to better formalize and understand why some things work and then communicate it what else are you working on because I know that you know we we know you come in and out of Academia so yeah what are you working on now yeah and the crypto industry also came back in late 2020 and early 2021 and but Wireless had never

come back it was still uh and in fact uh Anna and tarun the wireless industry had gone the other way so in 2000 when we were doing Flareon Technologies there were a dozen carriers and a dozen equipment makers and several handset makers but now the over the two decades since the industry had extraordinarily Consolidated there were just a few carriers there were four to begin with and by the time 2020 came it became three in the US there's a t there's Verizon and then there is T-Mobile which took over Sprint and so just three carriers and really just ATT and Verizon very highly Consolidated whereas the Tailwinds of the industry were blowing nicely which is that the hardware became

very inexpensive so base stations are like Wi-Fi plus plus you know Wi-Fi router you buy it it's just a couple of ten twenty dollars thirty dollars and these base stations that you can put together now 5G base stations are all not that cheap but not a whole lot more expensive couple hundred dollars and much of the networking stack went to Cloud so the other thing that happened with web 2 which is helping us here in the democratization is that compute became cheap and easily accessible you no longer need your normal longer need a super computer or a heavy equipment you could just get it on Amazon or Azure AWS or Azure very easily so the networking stack what used to be very vertically integrated got splintered and went to

the cloud and so the networking got controlled there so the industry Tailwinds have been blowing and I'm still interested in Wireless very much even though my blockchain interests had happened you know still part of the same the same person so in 2021 some late 2021 I started thinking about how we should bring crypto native protocols to wireless and that's it's like an old flame meets New Flame normally not a good thing actually but but in this case maybe they were meant to be very well and it's I'm the same person and um that's what I've been spending all my energy and intellectual energy and entrepreneurial energy on interesting

has anyone tried to tackle this like mixing Wireless and blockchain like and and how would you is it is it sort of is it in the incentivization of I don't know running infrastructure is it in something else that would like I don't know help to to grow some sort of network yeah so uh when Vice started at some point I think someone actually mentioned to me this project called helium which is a way to uh which was a which is a blockchain it's a way to incentivize people to buy Helium hotspots so they sell hot spots or at least they have vendors approved vendors selling hot spots and um you could buy them put it in your balcony put it in your house uh my

neighbor you know I had two one in the front one in the backyard and so I met mom and pop people who have these hot spots and they use this to earn helium tokens and by uh having uh saying that I put it up and the way the proof would work uh so what helium showed us the power of tokenized incentives the idea that you could cover a large Network and helium met at some point and maybe still now has a million hot spots so that's a large number people put in a few hundred to a thousand dollars so that's already a billion dollars to close to a billion dollars of Fiat coming in and using this and build the network organically and I think it showed the power of the

blockchain spirit which is incentives uh allowing individuals to participate together you know as a personal good incentivize for personal benefit but having a Global Effect and a Global Network effect but helium did this in a way that there's no the incentives are trust me incentives in the sense that their helium branded boxes they're closed shut they are not programmable um so the trust is basically with helium but incentives are open I see I do see a bit of the kind of mapping of like these hot spots that are incentivized to miners that are incentivized like miners all over the world are incentivized by the rewards that they could earn through running this stuff here you're trying to

use that model in the real world to run actual infrastructure but for something else but what you just said was like this particular project sounds like it's still pretty centralized it's not necessarily built in the spirit of like truly decentralizing Wireless or like actually creating this hot spot mesh that's truly decentralized is that true the technology definitely is centralized because the trust is in the hardware so you can you cannot participate in the helium network with our own equipment in the lab you have to buy it from Helium or approved vendors the trust is very much centralized but on the other hand the spirit perhaps was decentralized I mean I can't speak to that but I think the

tech was not in line yet and partly because or maybe mostly because the tech was not there so what is this Tech I'm alluding to right so you put up a base station or you put up a hotspot and you give it a fiber connection so that means you really switch it on yeah so it's now connected to the internet how does anyone verify you're connected to the internet and what speed do you have in today we have things called speedtest.com yeah yeah right you can do a ping test you can go to speedtest.com and it'll just check your Uplink down link but speedtest.com is a centralized trusted machine and you trust whatever numbers they give you yeah I mean if they say you have um 100 Mbps are playing then you accept it I mean what are you going to do you

have no way of checking yourself and internet this is the area of network what is called Telemetry so that means you measure networking performance like for example I say my phone I'm getting 10 Mbps connection on my to do while I'm downloading YouTube but who's to check that if Verizon says I got it then I I mean that's what I got I guess the Telemetry is always just given to you by the the host whoever's like providing you that's it you're doing great it's great that's down yeah the little bars on the phone it's not like that's some yeah yeah yeah yeah uh there's not even he said she said actually there's only uh you know they said and it's been that

way which is fine because Wireless and like I said communication was always centralized and top down and so in some sense the basic Tech was not there and even the underlying um inventions were not there and so this was an opportunity for me to think from first principles so we rebuilt classic very classic decade sold in internet measurement protocols ping hyper trace route which measure how much a certain link is carry capable of carrying in terms of throughput but this time with Byzantine resistance that is the other side people don't need to follow a protocol but you can do speed test without having a speedtest.com server so we call this proof of back calls we

basically did this series of inventions that we call proof of bandwidth I'm using bandwidth metaphorically by meaning you know I have bandwidth so that various Network elements and this could be back hall it could be service back all means I have a hotspot I'm connected with a 1gbps fiber like how do you prove to other people that you have a 1gbps connection and this should be trust free that means a third party should be able to check that this proof was legit in the true Spirit of proof of work in the true Spirit of proof of stake right the stake is on The Ledger I can check if your ha if your approval stake Lottery worked and I can check if the nons worked in proof of work how do you do in a similar

trust crypto native trust-free manner proof of bandwidth so this is networking protocols meets basic crypto Primitives interesting one question I have is building kind of these like basic networking Primitives in a Byzantine recent way makes a lot of sense but do you imagine that the adoption of this is from crypto networks first or do you imagine that the adoption comes from say you know someone who's a pirate cellular carrier and like you know they're they're kind of like hey like we're using Spectrum illegally and like this is like how we're gonna like Pirate Radio style I'm just kind of

curious like where you think this fits on the spectrum of like who's the initial sort of user consumer of this I'm looking at it on both sides I mean helium I'm sure that there is a demand for building ground up and right now helium boxes are closed but if you can have an SSH port or we're working to sort of open them up and the fitness chain is the is the company that commercializing these inventions um and witnesschain.com is where we are and these inventions they're lightweight stack that lives on top of these radios so it should be existing hot spots right should be be able to bootstrap and benefit from having trust free

incentives the other thing tarun is that once you have trust free measurements you don't have to use helium branded or any specific company branded equipment you can buy equipment off the shelf for for much less sick prices and this also drives the economics to make them because now there's a market for them and there are several other projects along with witness chain that are trying to bring relatively inexpensive Hardware base stations from a ground up perspective hmm but you also asked what happens to the other side you know like existing carriers what would Verizon and at T and we've been talking to carriers on three continents and the interest

there is not because they already have some base station they would like to grow organically but more like they would like to resell bandwidth so bandwidth is like Airline seats you know if you don't fill them they're gone the flight is gone the seat is not taken same here carriers are in the business of sending packets over the air if the packets don't contain any data they're gone and even a very good Network like Verizon or at T would only have about 35 percent occupancy it's kind of crazy most of the network is just going vacant because of the economics and it's again because of billing you know they I have a service from ATT it's 90 all you can eat service it's a buffet and there's no

incentive for the carrier or me to do anything better so you're saying we're getting obese off excess Spectrum well I mean but it's not it's best effort you know you get what you get but many companies would like a lot more they're more flexible but they would like a lot more service I'll give you an example here's a contract 500 000 devices all Bay area ZIP code between midnight and 4 a.m I want one GB of data Wireless all Bay area ZIP code this could be Tesla updating all their cars in the middle of the night between midnight and 4 AM every day but there's even for a for such a mighty sort of

even between them they've not had a contract like this and this I have from my own Decades of experience it's just a hard business because carriers have I mean they have lawyers and your lawyers have to sit down and do the contract in other words data and networking is a commodity but it acts anything like that hmm there is no smart secondary markets there are no Futures on data markets I mean there is it's not a flexible Marketplace and witnessing protocols by separating measurement and billing from service you can separate the historically they've been together basically and which is why lawyers are there and you need legal contracts to enforce it because they're

doing the same both the service and the billing so you need sort of legal contracts to enforce it but if you can separate them out and cryptography and crypto protocols provide Trust on the measurements and the service that you gave and tie them together then you have economic what shall I say lubricant to move the market to become more efficient so there are these economic forces they are slower than um to put it politely way slower than the blockchain side which is open and composable and permissionless uh because these are only a fewer entities but the market forces are in the favor of such technology being there I am bullish someone who's been around

for some two decades in this industry I have no doubt in my mind that you know what you said you sort of haired this branding of web3 right I think it's true but this would be one of the large large dinosaurs um because they haven't changed since web one did not really change web 2 didn't change them and this would be one of the industries that would become more Nimble more efficient and the forces are in favor of making this efficiency one one actual um I guess other point to this is you know in the same way that trying to be a new type of money fights the nation's day trying to unbundle Spectrum implicitly does sort of have the same subversive like

Cypher Punk thing because you're sort of you are the Pirate Radio except for many different Communications in some ways for communication do you imagine that that will be um a sort of fight like where like the big carriers are like look at the like like let's suppose this whole Space grows a lot and uh do you think the big carriers will try to go kind of Lobby governments to be like no no this is illegal governments like Monopoly over spectrum is being violated by this type of circuit because like it could actually have that kind of iconoclastic end State because it is challenging a state Monopoly in the same way they were challenging the same Monopoly on money which is actually kind of interesting in the sense that I don't think anyone's

framed it that way obviously I'm not trying to say that we should should try to make it as adversarial as that but it could be viewed that way very very easily it could be that would be I think we've already won at that stage when we get there and so I would be uh that would be a I think a good day already um because when you're having pushback at that level is a good thing that means you've well past the noise level but the third aspect which is sort of you said is the is the role of the government from a from a national security perspective um the national security agencies from the Army the military the Navy there have been always been bullish on decentralized networking partly because they work in hostile areas where there

is no way to enforce the rule of the law so in a way sort of government is that against crypto but in this case actually they could be in favor uh because of just making it more robust to operate in environments which are inherently hostile to operate interesting I I guess I just think about all of the kind of like the famous sort of like I mean depending on how you view history like the robber barons of spectrum right like the Ann Schultz of the world and stuff like that and so there's sort of this question of like they've sort of effectively enforced you know like dish and like a few people who've like won the Spectrum options by perhaps unscrupulous means they have a lot of incentive for this not to work

right in some ways I I could imagine that ends up being like I agree with you like if it even is a war it will have already been like you would already have been successful right but like if we just like play this out to like that piece of the world what what do you kind of imagine there are any like if the adversary could do in response like let's say this network grows and like let's say there's a million devices using it how do you think it could could get do you think there is some sort of like regulatory crutch or do you think it's like it really is like a layer one blockchain where it's like once the chain is around there's enough people and there's enough density that it's just very hard to censor at some scale and then Wireless is decentralized by

geography you know there's so many people in so many places and just literally distances so I would say that decentral is hard to crack down as you would crack down on the internet you know like the Great Wall of China so you can crack that down but here this is truly decentralized there's you have to go block by block every few every few hundred feet and sort of shut the things down it's uh there is something very innately decentralized and open about Wireless that is sensor resistant but the tech and the underlying networkings around it should be commensurate with it and I think for variety of reasons the tech had never sort of been invented to make adversary resistant measurements and

protocols and helium sees it actually right what kind of adversial action do you envision well helium you see it because it's helium branded Tech and they have people report I put it hotspot here and I have several of them well I mean you know you can see some things in the middle of the Pacific Ocean well how did I mean how did that happen yeah and somebody your argument is that there could be a supply chain attack against them that back door is like the actual device that's exactly what has happened yeah and the fact that you can't have yeah yeah okay and the protocols are trust me then you don't have the trust and it's vulnerable and you can see it actually already happening on that Network so what we are trying to just do is to First principles bring measurement techniques that are native crypto so you

can verify from far this is the most violent usage of metrics in some sense because if it succeeds it actually does like sort of break a state Monopoly which is very you know I think that that to me that's like the thing that's most interesting about it cool I want to ask you a little bit about the proof of bandwidth and the proof of backhaul I'm just curious like you sort of said it but that's not your consensus mechanism is it like what is where's the blockchain part is it sort of like there's an incentive to run these things yourself just by having a token or is there some crypto like cryptography blockchain part in the actual system so excellent question Anna so this is not a layer one by itself so what these are

these are crypto protocols just like your proof of work you have a nonce and you produce it nons to do some activity that activity in Bitcoin and proof of work is propose a block and go inside a chain and that's part of a consensus protocol here proof of backhaul is a crypto again just just like proof of work would be of showing a nonce here you have some other proof it's a cryptographic proof or a witness of the network that's why we call it witness because the network is literally witnessing who got what and so the witness proof are taken and these proofs can be put on chain as an OP code so I think of these proof of backhaul or witness proofs as op codes which are network level OP codes that can be used

to tie incentives on so there's not a layer one by itself there could be it could fit these all codes can sit on any other existing L1 or all of them in fact you can draw them as an oracle pull them in so they're naturally implemented as a proofs which are the state channel that can update and keep track of these proofs over time and from a blockchain perspective pull them in through an oracle would would somebody build a dab then I'm just trying to picture like even the incentivization token part like would it just be an erc20 that lives on another blockchain that has some connection or do you imagine there being like a depth that manages this somehow yeah so what

this allows is two things actually right so I think first is I think I already we talked about it which is that any device can come in you don't have to have branding by a company and trust it so that part is good so any device any Tech can come in you can have Wi-Fi 4G 5G and our demos are on all these Technologies the second part is the what you are alluding to which is the composability and programmability what do you do with these proofs who will use them which kind of adapt or which contract will use them couple of use cases first use case could be a carrier itself which is selling and reselling bandwidth this is the marketplace for data um and just like you have Futures and Marketplace for data you want a contract your business you're a dash cam company that wants

backhaul in certain zip codes for certain amounts of time you can buy them through contracts on chain this is the subversive part by the way this is the part that is is actually kind of anti the state's Monopoly on Spectrum I will just I just want to point out that is that is actually you know we've spent so much time in algorithmic Game Theory designing these auctions for a monopolistic State and like this is basically getting around that so like I think that's like kind of the most yeah Salient point about this because that such products don't exist because state has transfer restrictions on any transfer Spectrum right whereas like here you're arguing that hey I can just sell my own so I can resell my Spectrum whenever I want that's it we call it ecn

elastic Cloud networking as opposed to ec2 which is elastic cloud computing the equivalent of freeing up networking and having a Marketplace and compute was in one place like Amazon sells it AWS and Microsoft sells Azure but this is decentralized because networking is Mom and Pop putting it up that's one type of an app and we have an ecn demo living over the air and it's live in in South in South India Bangalore we have Spectrum experimental license to try this out so ecn is live over the air in in India another app could be and I'm imagining this this doesn't exist yet is a defy app that wants to have hard assets as collateral many D5 apps could be living on their own tokens and they

would like to collateralize it or bring hard assets well you can bring hard assets perhaps through a stable coin uh maybe right but you could also bring like literally hard assets by physical assets of networking if you actually have a hotspot that's serving so many people and getting such and such revenue and such and such backhaul chances are you want to exist exit overnight I mean you have physical devices and physical service so this could be hard collateral to put on chain and then offer us basically make the market flexible make it so there's no bring debt financing to the networks so this could be a way in which people could Finance hotspots and it's kind of because you have these proofs I guess it's digitally native

yeah the groups tie them together exactly the trust-free proofs and these are Hardware right how do you show and we didn't get into the deep Tech but I think this is the that's the fun part what I meant by Old Flame and New Flame do you want to actually be part of the hardware creation though or are you sort of like assuming these Hardware pieces already exist and you're just sort of the glue yeah exist already so in fact one of the so I talked about system view Anna which is to think how different parts of a system put together and the same system view comes in here so the hardware are very inexpensive ones the sits on the cloud witness chain is a very simple app through a standard interface grpc interfaces on the cloud and a very simple app on your device

side which is could be a phone it could be an app on the phone on a Wi-Fi router it could be a simple firmware upgrade they are simple lightweight software only stitching together so devices exist the pieces exist we just want to stitch them together in a trust-free manner cool that's what a carrier does a carrier today stitches together by bringing the trust so you trust Verizon you trust the ATT so there's a trusted entity stitching together everything and billing and metering everything and we are basically saying this crypto protocols should replace a carrier today if you you know let's say uh helium was the Bitcoin of sort of Wireless distribution

where do you view kind of witness chain you know what what sort of how would you compare it to some you know when someone's like hey I've heard of this I heard this helium thing I read some good press and I read some very bad press uh and then you know how would you convince them that there's like something kind of Greater here in the in the sense of uh you know avoiding some of the pitfalls that we've seen before I would appeal to the better uh you know the good side and the angel side I'm always on the on the Jedi side and I would say that you want these boxes are closed you can't do anything with them to open them up so we are starting this in witness chain we have a sister site or within within witness chain called helium mev.com

um so tarun they are doing mub but there's no Mev on wireless because it's a closed box with no way to ssh in no programmability it's a fixed box but for every fix box there is a way around it and we are bringing some basic Meb activity which is a force of good I think of innovation to this area so this is a more incremental witness chain is a more is the final stage uh but helium mev.com uh through witness chain is a starting point if you already have helium hotspots and we'll have more to come so help to put box in the middle and just to open up these boxes that one has already and we are hoping that they can be opened up and if not we'll try making them open ourselves okay you know

these are physical devices and we also have the tech to open them so they're never really foolproof and so that's our effort with helium Mev just to provide some programmability the boxes exist and just open them up you're basically saying like it's cool that they existed no matter what because the boxes got out into people's like hands and that's something you can use that's right and why would people throw them they're already paid really good money for that um and uh and I'm always a favor of using the emotion and the energy associated with the what you are alluding to into a positive force cool