ZK Paris: Lakshman Sankar - The Future of Naming Systems on the Internet

Transcript

okay so up next we have the future of naming systems on the Internet by lakshman Sankar from personae hello cool all right hi everyone I'm I'm lakshman um I'm with personi where we're sort of thinking about what happens when every Computing device can make zero knowledge device zero knowledge statements um so this this talk is I I guess for this audience I would interpret it as

sort of contextualizing the application class that's like most interesting to us and that we're spending all our time on so I'll start with a little bit of like a fluffy high-minded kind of like a little bit of history and story and Visionary stuff bear with me on that um and then I'll promise to get into sort of like the meat of like what we're doing right now and finally I talk a little bit about what we're thinking about next including kind of like a hint at some of our research mode math and things like this so uh just as a like a temperature check so I understand kind of like context in the room um who here has read this book uh true names by Werner vinge oh wow okay

oh wait who's that so someone oh all right of course um so I I would uh I think this is probably the one story that is sort of like most pushed my own thinking on on identity um I I'd pause it it's like one of those really prophetic uh sci-fi stories that like takes the real extreme of what what could be true if like the most extreme version of something happened it's almost like I think two identity kind of how I think about like the sovereign individual to bitcoin or something like that um but in this book I'm gonna need I think the 80s or 70s or something like that it's like one of the original like cyberpunk books um everyone in cyberspace uh has names that are entirely separated from their

true names and in fact they they make a lot of effort like they get get they gather in these things called covens which are like guilds I suppose and they they make a real point to not they form real relationships and do real things together but make a real Point not to connect to the true name so they can be safe from the great adversary which is sort of like I suppose the government or something like that um and one of the things that's really cool it's kind of a thought experiment you know what happens if true names are completely separated from like the pseudonyms we have like online um in in the story at least and I find this quite inspirational they do a lot of really cool exciting things together it feels like they have much more freedom to coordinate there's like less

worry about sort of connection to the physical world and stuff like that um and so yeah and as a slight tiny spoiler um I think uh forces want to think what's possible when humans and maybe even AIS can coordinate online without knowing anything about the the true true world all right so now I'm going to give a a tiny very opinionated history lesson um so about names on the internet so I think you know like the mythology of web one uh was this is not a web one Forum this is a modern form reconstructed to look like a web one Forum but uh was these sort of

geocities-esque forums with uh uh completely non-true names it's just like random random words people have put together to represent themselves to other people um and uh no no connection to True names most of the time um I think one of the reasons that this sort of died out was you know reputation was not really portable between these systems and there wasn't really enough going on at the internet at this time to sort of have meaningful reputation so names in stick and then of course the rise of web 2 was the rise I think of true names on the internet um I picked this post because it's uh it's a post where Zach said that he was going

to be completely open about all his content and you would be all true names z um I I posit that the reason that these names have stuck for as long as they have is because they allowed us to bootstrap internet identity with off internet reputation like initially like that you went to an Ivy League school or that like you know you went to the school or had this job or something like that or you are this person um and uh and it also became a way for people to do things off the internet with their internet identity and so that linkage was very very valuable um but I'd also posit that and this is like you know the classic I I don't I I feel like I'm a little cliche and and hating on a web 2 this way but it feels like this was sort of

this was a very convenient Tool uh like keeping things deodimized keeping things to people's true names was both like a growth mechanism because you know uh identity was bootstrap reputations bootstrap but also was like a power a great Vector for power accumulation um especially um as things like certain elections happened and stuff like that um and so finally uh names on the internet today um I think we're starting kind of like a new phase um it's it's it's mostly emergent it doesn't feel like the platforms are native yet um so we're seeing some of it kind of come out on Twitter but it's it you know Twitter wasn't built with this in mind um we're starting to see names or Nims

non-true names that have like real power you know like um and true names and this is a great you know like DJ Spartan interacting with suzu these are both like names that have power you know one one sure is bootstrapped to the real world but one is not um and and I think that it's partially because we we're reaching a point where there's like so much more going on the internet today there's efficient internet native reputation especially with the rise of things like ethereum and real sort of like observable value on the internet um that you can build the meaningful power and reputation um online purely online and so you know it's I I'm constantly trying to be critical

of my own thinking here because you know it's easy to pattern match but um I I posit that I think things are different now than they were in 2004. um like I said before we have meaningful inner native internet native truth around which people can build reputation that people spend a lot of time on well it's funny that these are all one I don't know why that happened um two uh you know asymmetric key cryptography is becoming very widely adopted especially with things like ethereum um and three and I think the thing that's kind of relevant to a lot of the conversations we'll have here later um cryptography statements about other cryptography statements IE zero knowledge and later other things you know homework encryption things like this um are becoming possible to do on

consumer devices um so I think that these three lead to kind of what we're thinking about now is trying to build a naming system for the modern internet with this with this new premise in mind all right so I'll get a little bit down from the clouds now uh talk a little bit about um some of the principles that sort of govern kind of like what we spend our time on and also talk about some of the things we've done in the process so first of all we are uh I think probably to an extremist level uncompromising with this notion of client-side ZK um it's uh it doesn't seem possible to create the new types of interactions

that we think are interesting unless the witness all right barring barring some cool NPC stuff which you know we're also trying to keep tabs on barring the witness staying on the device or at least like the private part of the witness thing on the device and also you know we think that resource constrained environments even though they're you know like um on sexy are super important web browsers mobile browsers things like this so we spend a lot of time on client-side ZK and we expect that in in that sort of like exploration I think we've realized that there's probably going to be likely a separation of proving systems here where

um client-side stuff will happen and then be recursed into something more like a snark that can be verified on chain and stuff like that but this is sort of this mental model has been very core to how we decided what to build uh secondly um and you know this is a little fluffy again but I we we live in this Loop um we you know I think we've observed a lot of teams that have like kind of failed by focusing too much on both and when the technology sort of landscape is moving as fast as sort of like the changes in like user Behavior one needs to be entrenched in both like if you were just focusing on apps and not paying attention to proving systems you would just be operating in operating in an old Paradigm and if you would just

just focus on proving systems and they'll look at what people are doing in like ethereum and other places you're probably not going to make things that are ergonomic and fit into reality um and then another one is uh which is why we sort of focused for those who sort of know we focused a lot specifically on each of the sa uh in in a zero knowledge proof is just like a very very specific problem but um we think that like the mo eventually things like ethereum uh if they are globally adopted you're going to have like million billion sized anonymity sets spawning up here and there and you want people to kind of like seamlessly be able to use some infrastructure corresponding to that and

so we don't see the uh we're a little worried about just like SSO like systems where you need to go into another identity system to make statements about the original identity system we want to make statements about the identity system where things are happening um another one that is uh I you know I think when I phrase it this way isn't controversial but I think in practice it's a little controversial as um uh and and by the way so this is from our our app uh nouns Nims I'm not doxing myself here this is the staging build so for those of you who use this like you don't you're not going to learn anything by looking at this um but uh it's super one of the things that I

think is really interesting about identity built on um asymmetric key cryptography is it's fundamental that you can create a new identity in a way that's not possible the social security number and I think this is also one of the things that allows for like real plurality on the internet um and so we really want to make it the choice between accruing reputation to an old reputation and making a new reputation very clear and sort of like the interfaces that we create um which is I I think I I you know like this is actually all constantly an internal discussion but um I I tend to think I tend to not be like that excited about proof of personhood as the way to think about civil resistance it's good for

other things but I think what whatever emerges as reputation in the long term is the Sybil thing um it's kind of self-reflexive definition but um all right now I'll talk a little bit about what's next um so yeah again this model of so this is probably the most interesting slide for a lot of the discussions we'll have here um is you know this this this model is sort of how we're sort of planning our proving architecture um we assume we need something that works really well for so the other thing is we we've gone down the route of like Spartan and breakdown where investing in Fry we were just chatting with about web GPU largely because these these systems are like base field agnostic which means that we can do right field arithmetic

and whatever crypto system but I I think we're also simultaneously paying attention to lookups I think uh that there probably will be a point at which lookups like kind of catch up for what we want to do here and so we're like you know kind of like trying to pay attention to that but like this this constraint made us really want to think hard about like real proof or optimization for the problem we're trying to solve um but yeah I mean constantly paying attention trying to figure out what the next step is and then you know like looking at trying to understand given this system what snark kind of like works really well here to get that information on chain so we're spending a lot of time actually right now sort of specking and planning this out um

kind of like more on the architecture I haven't said exactly what we're building because we're still sort of like figuring it out but we we sort of see like these symbol registration I.E like the reputation symbol registration needs to be something that is like modularly separated from a lot of other things um so this is not this this slide is by no means Canon but you know could see a world where there's like contracts for like posting content contracts for taking out loans contracts for voting that utilize sort of like a thin thin layer of abstraction with like the symbol registration so we're really thinking about designing this piece such that those other things can be built um and then finally it's kind of fun but

you know we started in these communities that um I think intentionally were very fun forward because um maybe maybe will would disagree if the stakes are higher now like it's a little a little less fun in nouns but um because we realize that the stakes of doing damage at least initially would be a little lower than if we jumped into sort of names for ethereum protocol governance or something like that but I think we've built a lot more confidence about sort of like what we know and what we don't know so we're also starting to kind of like dig into other places where people really care about their eth state and understand kind of like what kind of manifestations of a name uh can be useful there

um so some of the places we're looking at are like literal protocol governance Med searching defy governance and I won't mention the last one because it'll probably get me in trouble and oh okay yeah the new yeah I forgot to upload my latest live which had a QR code but um yeah we'd love to chat I think we're um we're exploring where we're building stuff and we want to build with more people we're looking for more collaborators uh and yeah we're just having a good time to come hang out foreign do we have any questions for lakshman hey nice presentation thanks a lot um

you mentioned the proof of personhood before uh what what do you understand with that um man I I shouldn't have because I I don't know if this is like the right venue for me to express these opinions I I think um one of the challenges with an idea so one one interpretation I have of and maybe you can correct me on the current sort of um modes of proof of personhood is that the identifier is extremely challenging to exit for

example it would require replacing one's retina or something like that um and so I I something about not being able to leave the identity system uh if while also feeling like it's like I think knowing persons online is important I think feels a little unsavory but I I we're still kind of like figuring out our way in the trade-off space but that that's the short answer yes but you have to wait for expiration then I mean yeah yeah I mean it's just like okay it's the difference between like having having and being able to create identities fluidly every day versus

having an identity for a window of time I suppose um I think there's certainly obviously trade-offs there I I don't know yeah yeah well thanks everyone or anyone else oh yep yep just a quick one um where do you see the kind of classic Anonymous credential systems like uh the PBS plus type stuff fitting into this ecosystem if at all um would like to adhere to common language and standards as much as possible I think one of the places that

I you know I'm representing you know our organization these are my these are my perspectives we try to hold all the all the perspectives you know in kind of like making decisions but one one way I feel like I've I've differed from a lot of the thinking in those ecosystems I feel like the most interesting reputation will be completely inside chains and so we don't really need to make statements about things outside that much um like very on-chain identity maximalist to a point that I think is a little irrational but um yeah I think that's one that's not that's not a fundamental standards or technology perspective but it's definitely different than kind of like deciding what to do but insofar as there's like common language I think we we should always speak in the same

language any other questions thanks from you [Applause]