Spacetime, Meshing, and Poets, Oh My!

Transcript

hey everybody good to be here um it looks like uh we're doing shorter talks i guess we're running behind uh okay so i will do my best to make best use of time um let's get started so i'm lane i am a core developer and i do r d for a project called space mesh um i'm going to share a little bit of my back story talk a little bit about what i worked on before and my motivation for working on space mesh and i'll share a little bit about the project as well space mesh is a very complicated project so with 13 minutes i won't be able to get into too much of the weeds but i'll give a high level overview of the problems it solves

so i started my career about 15 years ago working in quant finance for a large financial company on wall street in new york uh when you think of financial companies you probably think something like this i sat on a trading floor i was writing software uh the reality was not nearly this exciting it actually looked more like this i'm pretty embarrassed by this photo um a lot less glamorous than i thought but you know the point is big company finance this was 2006 2007 going into the global financial crisis i learned a lot i worked with very smart people um you know and then this happened the global financial crisis happened uh i kind of felt over time that i had like a

values misalignment with uh my role in in the company my role in society kind of the company's role in society i sort of didn't feel that um it was able to create a lot of value for everyday people that's always something that's like motivated me fast forwarding over a few years a bunch of things happened i kind of left finance i left my job i went back to school i dabbled in entrepreneurship in the interest of time well fast forward to 2017 when i arrived as a fresh-faced excited young person at ethereum devcon3 this was in mexico in 2017 i knew nothing about ethereum i knew almost nothing about blockchain maybe a little bit about bitcoin this is i guess my proof

of attendance before there was such a thing as a proof of attendance protocol [Music] and i think you know i had this vision that ethereum as a project as a technology would like make the world a much better place that you know ethereum is sort of like this operating system for building better human institutions and it would allow us to solve some of the coordination failures and problems you know defeat the moloch problems to borrow kevin owaki's terminology uh shout out to kevin and jay harrell and a few other people for turning me on to this um solar punk ethos it's kind of like the at the opposite of a steampunk if you're

familiar with that so kind of like aiming for this like more beautiful future and you know it's okay slides are not moving sorry there's a long delay here i don't know what's going on so you know there was a lot of this there was a lot of kind of building and hacking on things uh you know shout out to any ewasm team members former teammates who are in the room um but you know there was also the way that kind of decisions got made in in ethereum as a project it looked kind of like this it was kind of like a group of friends sitting around on the floor in circles um talking on the sidelines of conferences like this so this was devcon4 in prague i think we

were talking about solving some of the challenges that the ethereum network was facing at that time and it also involved a lot of meetings like this again with kind of like the people who were kind of in charge of these various projects you know companies things like that also kind of gathering in an ad hoc fashion around the table to make decisions that would impact millions of people using ethereum um you know none of us are elected uh we're kind of there by accident i guess you could say um by virtue of like the projects that we're affiliated with or like our background in the ecosystem um and you know like this is a hard problem i don't governance is a very hard problem i don't mean to suggest that

any of the folks involved in these decisions are not there for the right reasons or that there's like a much simpler way to make these decisions and kind of govern a complicated protocol like ethereum but the thing is when i kind of zoomed out and thought about it i asked myself like is this new right is this different and it kind of feels like this right if you think about it it kind of feels like a board meeting you know again it's like a bunch of unelected officials sitting around a table okay we're not wearing suits and there aren't always tables sometimes we're sitting on the floor but it kind of feels a lot like the way things work in the default world a bunch of men sitting around a table making decisions um and i wrote an article about this if

you're interested in ethereum governance this was back in late 2018 how open is too open talking about exactly this about the process of how some of these decisions get made and some ways we might do a better job of it and then there's mining right so we're all familiar with what proof-of-work mining looks like this is obviously a large mining farm this is probably in china this is probably um earlier this year or last year or something like before the chinese government began cracking down on on mining you know it's kind of interesting but it's also like very industrial um you need many thousands of dollars to buy and operate the equipment to participate in this mining uh it's you know not particularly environmentally

friendly and it kind of looks and feels like this to me you know it's it's like mining is mining right so this is also kind of like very industrial it's kind of run by big companies it's not super great for the environment and then i think the most interesting piece of ethereum is the application stack right so uh [Music] i don't have time to to even begin to do justice to all the interesting projects and pieces here but the point is you can you have this substrate you have this kind of base layer and you can build all these incredible composable applications on top of them right that's why we're all here we all love this about ethereum it's very unique you don't need permission you can plug into different code bases and smart contracts this is just one random example i pulled off ether scan of like a transaction

that as you can see goes deep down the stack and touches a bunch of different applications and just ties them all together so you have ave operating with maker you know built on top of uniswap et cetera et cetera the problem is as we you know as the chain has obviously become very full and very crowded and transactions have become very expensive we're moving towards a model of of like shards and when i say shards i don't strictly mean ethereum two shards i mean also different types of roll-ups and side chains and layer twos and things like that and uh that kind of like breaks composability right it becomes much more difficult to build applications that um communicate asynchronously with sorry synchronously with each other

and again i asked myself this question like is this new and the problem is that when you introduce these silos it begins to feel a lot like the way the web 2 world works and so in the case of web 2 you know we have silos that look something like this right and in the web 3 world those silos are different as i said they may be different blockchain ecosystems they may be side chains they may be rollups or layer twos but actually it's kind of very similar set of challenges you have to use very complicated bridging code and you have to make asynchronous calls across chains i'll go over this very very quickly for lack of time but you know this is a funny piece that appeared on hacker news a few days ago about building a modern

website in 2020 and it's it's really interesting so this guy who's pretty well known in the javascript community like it's a long article it's it's like 30 40 pages talking about all the different infrastructure he needed to build a website this wrapped this crazy complicated deployment pipeline uh this is how he did authentication this is all web 2 by the way right this is the list of technologies he needed to to make a website um that he considered modern uh it plugs into all these different services these are this is just his build pipeline on github the ci uh and there is come on

oh sorry this is all this is the list of different um resources he needed to call into from the website uh there's something called fly request replays i have no idea what that is i don't want to know what that is uh but he was trying to make this work um using cdns across many different geographies and this is basically my reaction to this like i honestly can't tell if this is satire but the reality is it's not right if you want to build a web 2 application today and you want to build a mature scalable global application like you really do need these many technologies and i think my fear is that in web 3 we're kind of going the same direction so again i'm just suggesting is this new i'm a little worried that we're going the same direction as web 2. um it feels

a bit like we have these clusters that are emerging right so again each of these different ecosystems whether they're roll-ups or shards or layer twos or whatever is kind of like the way that different cities cluster together and have sort of different industries or different verticals where they excel um and you know it the problem is you end up in a balkanized situation with effectively borders right you end up with sort of different regimes and different rules in different places and you have a lot of transaction costs you have to pay every time you want to like ship data or move capital or labor or whatever across these different borders and so i think we can do better than all of this and uh this is sort of um in the last few minutes i'll quickly share my

vision for for space mesh and how we're trying to solve some of these problems with the space mesh project so number one uh we'll talk quickly about the mesh topology rather than the chain how we make it possible to mine from home using whatever hardware you happen to already have and how the economics are much simpler and therefore the governance is much simpler so first of all rather than a chain topology like we have in in blockchains like bitcoin and ethereum we have a mesh topology in space mesh so what that means is that at every block height we call them layers you have many blocks produced by many different validators

this kind of solves the um the composability problem right because all these blocks are tied together into a single name space now of course there are fundamental limits right we there's a limit to how many transactions per second any individual node can process and so in the future probably we will have various types of layer two solutions on space mesh as well but we don't need them early on because we have several orders of magnitude greater scalability and this makes the protocol very very complicated but you get some very nice properties from it like again the fact that you can build and deploy applications that can communicate synchronously rather than asynchronously with other applications we maintain composability this is a chromebook this is a very very cheap laptop this costs about 200 250 us

dollars i bought one of these and i mined space mesh successfully for a few months from home using this a 200 piece of hardware really really cheap it was able to participate as a full complete um node a full peer in the space mesh network i think that's very unique and the direction we're going is being able to mine using micro servers things like raspberry pi's obviously i don't have time to get into the details of the protocol but the gist of it is that we have a novel consensus mechanism called proof of space time and so you don't need powerful cpus or gpus or asics to mine space mesh you use it with just you mine it with just hard drive space so if you have a few free gigabytes you can mine in the future you'll be

able to mine even on a phone which i think is very exciting we have a simple application that you can download and run you don't need any command line skills it's very very easy what happened okay and finally economics this is actually the first time we've spoken publicly about this so you heard it here first this is pretty exciting so this is what bitcoin issuance looks like i'm sure people are familiar with the happening cycles and the exponential decay function so this is space mesh issuance um it looks a lot like bitcoin the blue line at the bottom is a very small amount of issuance it amounts to about five percent of very long-term issuance which is reserved for

team and early investors as i said it's a very small number and the red is the vast majority of coins which are reserved for for smashers which is what we call miners in the ecosystem so over the long run 95 of the coins are going to go to miners i'm very proud of that this has been a battle internally to get this done uh but it's very very important that we have a fair and level playing field for all the participants in the protocol and this just shows bitcoin and space mesh side by side um we took the bitcoin curve we smoothed it out right so there's no hard happenings every few years um it's just smooth smooth curve smooth exponential decay so every layer produces slightly less than the one before it

we increase the half-life a lot so whereas bitcoin's half-life is four years our half-life is close to 40 years so we have about 10 times greater half-life than bitcoin so what that means is all the bitcoin will be issued these are months so after about 30-40 years the vast majority of bitcoin have been issued and they're gone in our case that'll take 300 or 400 years so again i want to emphasize like this is a piece of the project i'm very very proud of um [Music] yeah this is the space economic model so uh it's an important part it's it's it's our values right we want to reserve value for many people contributing to the project no matter when they join even if they join the project 10 20 30 50 years down the road uh and that makes the governance of the

project very simple because it doesn't need to change we're doing what bitcoin did we have a hard issuance cap i'm out of time so if you want to learn more about space mesh jump in our discord you can go to chat.spacebrush.io and you can join the testnet as i said it's it's running right now uh it's an application you download it's super easy it takes literally five minutes to onboard um that's basically it we will be launching our main net pretty soon in a few months so if you're interested now is a good time to get on to the test net uh and be ready to go when we go live thank you for listening [Applause] you