ZK Podcast: The road to Skynet & beyond with David Vorick

Transcript

[Music] welcome to xero 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] today guest host james prestwich and i will be talking with david vorik about skynet distributed storage a new content monetization solution and share some ideas on how to wrestle back control from the algorithms that are leading us astray

but before we start in i want to thank this week's sponsor ave ave is an open source and non-custodial protocol where users can earn interest on deposits and borrow assets ave also features access to innovative d5 building blocks like flash loans a topic we have covered a couple times on the show just as a reminder flashlights are a tool that lets developers borrow instantly without collateral as long as they return the liquidity to the protocol within one block transaction they are also introducing a new feature which is called credit delegation where users can delegate their credit to another person who can borrow against it if you're interested ave has a grants program for anyone building anything that contributes to the ecosystem check out the ave developer portal to learn more i've added the link in the

show notes you can also visit ave at aave.com or join their discord channel so thank you again ave now here is our interview with david [Music] vorik so today guest host james prestwich and i are catching up with david vorik who is the founder of skynet and the ceo of skynet labs welcome david hi esr great to be here thank you for having me and also hi james hi anna so today we're going to be talking about i mean i i actually just want to find out more about what this project is i know it's had a few kind of iterations and name changes

along the way to becoming skynet i also want to touch on the vision that's sort of presented through this project for the decentralized web which is a little bit different or i should say it seems very all-encompassing compared to some of the other projects that we've had on the show i also wanna at the end if we can talk a little bit about how privacy could potentially play a part i think as a starting point let's talk about the name skynet i mean is it is it a reference to a movie that i actually never saw but i hear involved robots yeah so um i i think that filecoin actually has a really good name and it was just my goal to come up with something better and all right i like skynet because it's aggressive it's this really big

force that like took over all of humanity and just caused a lot of it just it changed the world a lot um and so of course we aren't we aren't trying to like enslave humanity we're trying to set it free but um but i just like the i like the aura that skynet has and i felt like it's worth being aggressive uh the other thing is that it's also kind of a kind of a warning slash reminder because these decentralized technologies like they skynet in the in the lore found out that it had an off switch it got mad and it turned off its off switch and then humanity lost control of it and we're we're starting from a place where it doesn't have an off switch and so it's kind of kind of a reminder like

at least be a little bit careful because if it does if it does turn into something menacing we may not be able to get it under control and i think that's true not not just of skynet of course it's also true of bitcoin and a lot of these decentralized texts but yeah so i just i felt like there were a lot of uh a lot of nice points encapsulated by the name i mean i want to revisit this a little bit later in the conversation because i think that is a a topic that we should all be thinking about the this road to the decentralized web we should be thinking about like what that actually will mean yeah okay so the skynet team project company that's the the name that you that you have now for this project but it wasn't always called skynet

so can you tell me a little bit about like the road to skynet yeah so we started off as the saya team uh we made a decentralized cloud storage blockchain and saya had a big token focus to it and it also just had a lot of capabilities that over time people ingrained and so people kind of understand that saya doesn't do file sharing saya is for personal data if you lose your local machine it can be a challenge to get your files back so there are all these limitations associated with the side technology and just this focus on on personal stuff and not on web stuff or sharing stuff and so when we developed a new extension to the

protocol which we called initially download by root it was a really simple primitive just all that went out the window now suddenly the scia protocol with this one tiny edition is capable of doing web stuff it's capable of sharing files it's capable of an open data model and and so even though the technology is basically exactly the same as just a tiny little tweak you know it's a tiny little tweak that just like removes a dam from a river whoa you know every everything changes and we we felt that to kind of get out of the limitations associated with the saya brand uh uh rebranding was merited and and kind of along with this we're we're

moving pretty far away from the token model i don't i don't think we want to be focused on the cya coin anymore we want to be focused on the next generation of social media apps and have cya coin be this kind of background thing run by a separate entity so the the site ecosystem is actually splitting it's not that size becoming skynet it's that okay the parent company of saya is kind of spinning out assaya foundation and my co-founder is going to the saya foundation and the psy foundation is going to get a dev fee so so it's being left in very good hands right the the person at the top of the sci foundation has been with the saya project the whole time knows it very well

is very passionate about it and then myself and and most of the engineers are going to be focusing on on skynet and so uh this has caused a little bit of drama and tension within the community but i i can assure you that like at the top level between me and my co-founder the people joining messiah foundation the people staying at skynet labs everybody is very good friends everyone's aligned around a similar end goal and we think that overall this split is going to allow each party to focus on what's most important to them when did you add that feature that you just mentioned when you started to experiment with this new thing i'm just trying to figure out timeline wise yeah so that was in uh november 2019

okay um so i guess about 14 months ago now just just over a year ago and uh you know david you and i have known each other for a number of years now and uh have talked a lot about how you know amazing and open data model would be was there a technical reason that you didn't add that feature earlier yeah i just thought it was really difficult to do and honestly the download by root feature that ended up being pivotal that that's not even enough to do the open data model but i was i was in zurich struggling with a really bad bout of insomnia so i was awake in the middle of the night and i was just like wait if we did xyz we could have

very simple file sharing we could have a low complexity high reliability way to share files throughout the site ecosystem and as i kind of dug through it it almost felt kind of silly because we've had the primitives that we needed to do this for maybe three years now we if we had had the idea we probably could have implemented it in early 2017 but we didn't have the idea as often you know research goes until late 2019 and we had the proof of concept working pretty much by new year's day um so it was like 45 days between the idea and having the first example on the network so it's mostly uh lacking that flash of

insight yeah and then the real power uh of the open data model came when we had the idea of skydb and so we we had a way to achieve skydb by a really complicated l2 on top of handshake kind of an l2 that straddled handshake and saya and then again it was it was a similar sort of just i think around june of 2020 so barely six months ago there's just a flash of insight that's like wait a minute if we set up this this structure we can get everything that we you know we thought would take this this 18-month l2 project can now be done in three months

flat and again to the to the dismay of some of the people in the community we literally dropped everything we're like this is the most important thing we've ever come up with and the entire engineering team uh just went to zero on all other projects and we got skydb rolled out i think i think it was like 30 or 60 days it's one of the one of the fastest i think it was three weeks until we had a full prototype working so it's one of the fastest products we've ever launched and and from there yeah we've we've just been super excited about everything it can do i feel like this project has there's a lot in it and so i'm wondering if it would make sense to kind of start from what it was you say it wasn't decentralized storage of

files i always understood saya as living within the decentralized storage space i might have been wrong about it but yeah so scio was decentralized storage okay but it was not decentralized sharing so you could you know if you if you had like a personal backup you could put that on saya um and then save that but if if you wanted to say or create uh some music and then share it with friends saya up until skynet did not have any way for you to share files on scio with your friends okay but once you added that feature that you could share do you think the project in a way became a competitor of some of the other

storage solutions or do you still see it like i realize that because we're going to go through all of the pieces of it it gets a lot bigger but did you think of it like kind of bumping up against what they were doing yeah um when when we initially launched skynet uh which i think the full official launch was late february we saw skynet as pretty much a direct ipfs plus filecoin competitor so every everything that you thought that could happen on top of ipfs with persistence on filecoin skynet could do and then that's they were very comparable um and then when skydb came out skynet's capabilities significantly surpassed that stack does it have a like a very different

structure from ipfs and filecoin or is it like is it using any of the same techniques no i think we've made a ton of different design decisions from the ground up around building scia and that's what's enabled us to be so flexible in adding new features and launching faster we've we've been much more just in our design philosophy much more oriented around the storage layer first rather than the routing layer first and uh more oriented around performance making sure that the theoretical optimal performance was approaching that of centralized networks and then also just constantly looking for ways to make things

faster to implement and cheaper to implement which filecoin has such a large budget i don't think they feel the same pressure that we do where if we look at something we're like oh this would take six months to implement that's just not something that we ever have budget for and so we we just put it on the perma shelf until we come up with a you know smarter or more clever way to get the same thing done and i think that's given us a really significant edge actually cool so kind of like breaking down the tech stack a little bit we started off with saya which is distributed file storage we have skynet which allowed people to share those files uh what would you say skydb adds to that stack

that ipfs and filecoin don't have it allows you to share an identity with someone else where that identity resolves to a bunch of mutable files i guess that's not the cleanest way of putting it but but basically i can say hey james this is my twitter feed um and so you you receive a public key and you can use that key to look at everything i've posted on twitter and if you check it a day later you'll see all my new content and so that's something that ipfs can't do ipfs is all in hashes and it's something that skynet does uh at a high performance level and all all layer two there's no

there's no on-chain posting to make this work uh this would be uh like similar to the ipns system that never really caught on right yeah um and i can't claim to understand ipns super well but i think if it was if ipns was a lot more performant and a lot more efficient that it may be similar so you said uh mutable files so these uh unlike ipfs these can be updated over time right and you're delegating access to me you're sharing these to me with a public key can you also give me the ability to edit or update these files i could i think generally uh it's that's not

going to be a goal but for example we could do some sort of diffie-hellman or just any any out of band technique we could generate a shared key and we could have a shared space where either of us could update it but i think i think more interesting is rather than people updating each other's data is applications updating each other's data if that makes sense i you know i was one of the like 10 users of the key base file system and i really missed that short sort of uh shared folder that shared directory model of collaborating with friends got it yeah so that's something that's definitely possible to build um and i

think there is one project that's kind of looking in that direction called sky spaces and so maybe maybe you would find something similar there but also if you know if you're willing to uh pull out your javascript console um it could be an application that you build yourself what did i have time yeah you just mentioned this other project like is skynet db or skynet the entire project is that sort of a like is is the expectation that there will be projects building on top of this independently that are very much like are they building kind of the core parts of it are these more like dap for lack of a better word type things yeah i mean i i think you could compare it to the ethereum ecosystem where you

have um you kind of have the core team that works on the vm and adding instructions and and works on things like heath 2 and scalability and then you have all these ecosystem teams like compound or sushi or uniswap that are building what a lot of people would consider to be core infrastructure of the ethereum ecosystem right just because uniswap's not built by the core team directly uh doesn't mean that it's not super important to the space and so that's kind of what skynet is you have you know sky id which is this uh identity system on top of skynet that's completely third party and something that we've we've been involved in to the extent that sometimes we we help guide them make decisions but

you know someone else made made the implementation and someone else did most of the design work and then we have something else sky feed it's a decentralized twitter and same thing the the core team actually has been very little involved other than uh they're just constantly telling us ways that um ways that we can make it better ways that we can make it easier for them to build a really powerful skynet based twitter we have a we have you know alternatives to dropbox as well and and these um this ecosystem starting to get more and more collaborative and and more and more expressive so you mentioned this example of a sort of a new twitter built on top of the skynet system what can we go a little bit deeper into

what that is what would that even look like and what features of this skynet actually allows for such a thing to be built yeah so it's it's super interesting and honestly i thought that twitter would be one of the last things to get built because there's you you need to you need masterful use of many different pieces of skynet but this developer his name is red solver he has pulled it off and he's he's demonstrated that he's quite adept with all the skynet tooling and so basically what happens is that on on skynet each twitter account or on skyfeed each twitter account is a bucket of data owned by a single user and controlled by

a single user and so when that user makes a post they update their bucket of data to include the post when they follow someone they update that bucket of data to include who they follow and so when they log in they look at their own bucket of data and assemble their feed and if they follow a bunch of people when you follow someone you actually you know record where their bucket of data is and so you scan their bucket of data and see what what have they posted and if if you want to find more people to follow you can check out who they're following and so you get this like nice decentralized web almost like a meshnet um of content that is fully decentralized everyone's in control of their own data but everyone

can see everything else that everyone else is doing so uh what walk me through this a little bit uh when i use sky feed i'm going to connect to some server to load the ui right yep okay and the ui is going to check my skynet bucket and see all of my uh tweets and who i'm following right yep after you've logged in yeah yeah and uh you know from there it goes out to everyone i'm following and retrieves all of their tweets into their following right yep okay uh makes sense um so instead of querying twitter's server over and over to get all of these things and to get the

curated feed that twitter gives you you're going to get a raw view into what the other users have chosen to publish that's correct and then the front end is going to filter it or adjust it you know however however it deems to present a feed to you so the to the end user it looks like twitter but the truth is all of that code and curation is happening on the user's machine which means they have the freedom to to choose a different front end if they want does the user get to choose the depth at which they look into that network in a way like do you say like oh i'm going to look at three people's data and their followers and not further or does it kind of go

all the way through like i'm just trying to understand like at what at what point like is this just a setting that you can choose or so it's a setting that could be added i believe right now it just goes to a depth of one okay um but if someone felt that it would be a better experience to have a depth of two you could make an alternative uh presentation to sky feed that goes a little bit deeper and this i think is actually a super important point and one of the key things that makes skynet so much more competitive than the centralized web which is that if if you have an idea on how to make twitter better your only hope of trying that out in the real twitter environment is by convincing twitter to adopt your

idea um which is of course not it's it's not a practical thing unless you're high up in the twitter staff but on skynet if you have an idea like let's say what what if we follow to you know infinite depth and just see what happens that's something that you as a developer can just go ahead and implement and and because it's all open data and completely permissionless when you launch that you know alternative or that different twitter implementation right on day one you have all the users and all the followers and all the access you have a super rich environment and that's just not something you can do on the centralized web how does this compare though to like

projects that happened before like masted on do you remember this yeah um and mastodon is a project that i think has done a very incredible job of treading the line between federation and decentralization and also like a really clean ux i think that they tackled a very difficult problem and did a very incredible job of solving it well so the main difference between sky feed and mastodon is that mastodon is federated yeah and what that means is that as a user you sign up on someone else's server and that someone else has full control over what happens to your account and so mastodon it's it's called the fedoverse you know they're somewhere between dozens and hundreds of

servers that users use and any one of them could go offline and take a thousand users with it wow um but one of them can't go offline and take the whole thing down and so it's much better than twitter but it's still this situation where the average user on mastodon doesn't have control themselves they they delegate control to someone else whereas on skynet every single user has control themselves and also does not need to worry about running their own node at home so mastodon could be fully decentralized if every single user ran their own mastodon instance and on skynet you don't need to do that uh you know i ran a mastodon instance for a little while

um way back when it was much newer and you know what i figured out very quickly about myself is i was not willing to go through the maintenance effort to keep it up to date in order to participate in this relatively small social community so it sounds like the argument you're making is that hosting it on skynet kind of resolves that problem right is it's no longer up to the individuals to do the server maintenance it's handled by skynet yes um and so the the like really nice trick is that skynet portals can do all the maintenance and management on behalf of the user while still ensuring that the user has

full control at any time a user can switch to a different portal and the experience will be completely seamless all their data will be the same and and everything is still under their control and if a portal goes rogue and wants to do a lot of damage to the ecosystem it actually has no power to do so because everything is controlled by the users and i will say i'm cheating a little bit here because on the traditional web web browsers don't have the primitives necessary to you know double check that the portal is giving you the code it's supposed to be etc so we are we are assuming a little bit that the web browser gets upgraded to be able to do the cryptography with the portals that is

necessary um i might be completely off here but something about the setup that you described reminded me a little bit of like scuttlebutt is that totally wrong just the idea like the messaging and the way it sort of propagates is there any connection or am i completely in a different realm no i mean i think i think there are good parallels to scuttlebutt um and and that is another project that i have spent a lot of time looking at and and i would say it uh has done a very good job of achieving a nice trade-off between user experience decentralization and just technological complexity i think

scuttlebutt does a lot for how simple it is um and that's a remarkable feat but again scuttlebutt needs an instance each user kind of has to run a scuttlebutt instance and maintain that whereas on skynet we've managed to get away from the need for users to run instances i i also have run a you know scuttlebutt instance for a while i think that there are a lot of parallels between scuttlebutt and sky feed and that you kind of traverse a social graph so you connect to your friends and retrieve their uh feed but i i do think that the the fact that you don't have to run an instance is going to be huge for this people hate running code

i think that that's also one of the one of the big things we realized for our six years of maintaining saya we just kind of felt especially near the end of the six years that it was too much effort to get people to run aside demon and i think for for most of those six years we were very optimistic that we could get to a world where every every machine had a cya daemon on it but i think it's much better that we can get away from that and that no nobody needs to run anything you just use your normal web browser or or at least it all runs on someone else's computer yeah another project that came to mind when you were talking about id identity was and i this again might be a little bit off but it was

urban is there any connection like in the way that you're kind of designing this this very like multi-leveled ecosystem is it in any way similar to that i think we're probably less similar to urban uh my co-founder uh luke is a huge urbit fan he owns i wanna say an entire solar system okay um or maybe even one level up from that but he owns he owns a lot of urban real estate um and he's a big fan but i think uh from our end urbit is just a little bit too out there um and so we we ended up not pulling too many verbet's ideas uh just because we we felt that that something less less out there would be

more effective um one of the other topics that was like in the kind of announcement blog for skynet there's this mention of recursive content monetization and i think this is sort of separate from the twitter example can you tell me something about that yeah so this is uh the the final piece of skynet the big idea that we have not implemented yet we're actually waiting for some more traditional like tech stuff to be implemented but the fundamental idea of recursive on content monetization is that you can tag a monetary fee into any file which includes code any file or piece of code

running on skynet that people will pay every time they either load that file or use that code and the reason it's recursive is because let's say i upload a photograph of let's say just a beautiful picture of the boston skyline to skynet and i tag a little fee on it and then someone else uses that photograph in a video that they make so now that video is charging a feed but since it's using my photograph it's also charging a fee for that photograph and then if someone say embeds that video into a blog post when a user reads that blog post they are paying

for the blog post and also paying for the video and also paying for the photograph and so you get this long chain of monetization where content that that pulls from a lot of different creative energies uh also pays into all of those creative energies and so it's um it's an alternative way to monetize the internet is it is that using the cya coin then yeah so that would be using cya coin um and there's no reason it has to be cya coin it's just that uh saya already has an incredibly sophisticated payment network on top of it uh perhaps the most sophisticated l2 payment network in the world

and it's very easy and it's something we're super familiar with so it's just very easy for us to leverage that payment network to do the monetization the only kind of equivalent i can think of in that regard would be like something like brave but they do more ad feeds here it's really like payment for content but then is it is it sort of like a subscription like would you end up you'd have to hold this token because if you viewed a photo you'd have to then pay something or is it like odd is it sort of happening in the background yeah so to we want it to be frictionless for the user um so we don't want the user to be thinking about the photo they're paying for every time they

load a page uh thinking about paying people people hate paying people on the internet yeah so we've tried to we've tried to come up with a model um and again this you know this is subject to actual real world testing we haven't deployed it yet but the model we have right now is a freemium model where the portals do all the pays you go stuff and so the portal just like say an internet provider in isp is paying metered rates for everything that's happening but then to the user the portal is presenting just a flat rate and that flat rate doesn't have to be paid in a cryptocurrency it could be paid using a credit card

you know square or something or venmo and so a user signs up for a portal if they don't pay any money at all they're on the free account they get you know a moderate amount of bandwidth and let's say a photo cost 10 cents to load all that's going to happen is for that user that photo might take 20 or 30 seconds to load but if the user is paying five dollars a month now that photo is going to take half a second to load because the portal knows the user has uh has some money in the account and that the portal is kind of breaking even on that and so we encourage users to pay monthly to the portal and then the portal worries about the actual

per instance rates it's this it's the speed that's an interesting angle it's the load speed it's kind of like the way that you know isp there's there was talk a few years ago i think they actually did pass this law where the isps can now change the rate of download depending on the companies that did that passed that passed right uh i want to say it pass for mobile data maybe okay um i know the general topic is net neutrality and i know it's a big item of battle but in this case it is like on an individual level you can actually pay for faster access and even though i realize behind the scenes it's purposefully like slowed down it's not

because of a lack of bandwidth or something but it's interesting it's sort of just i wonder how the users would actually take that in because i do know like getting people to pay for content is hard getting people to either watch ads for money hasn't totally landed i feel like it it's been floated but it hasn't really worked but i haven't heard this example this idea that you would like slow down the absorption yeah so i mean i i think that it's actually a myth that getting people to pay for content is hard and i think this myth is refuted by services like netflix hbo disney plus and then even services like steam and spotify and youtube premium are all services that are that are very

successful and getting high amounts of user subscriptions and so i really think that it comes down to the experience of paying how often are you paying does it feel at the very moment that you pay for it does it feel like you're getting something valuable in return and then you know is the credit card most mostly out of the way once you know you pay one time and then you never think about it ever again um and you you just do what you want so i i really think that there's a way to get users to pay for things as as long as they feel like they're getting value and it's it's a very fluid smooth experience and i think there are plenty of examples of internet companies doing this well it's it's interesting that you bring up

all these traditional content services because they have all pretty much converged onto the monthly recurring payment model right yes which is also why we are uh targeting a monthly recurring payment model um so i i think like the difficulty isn't getting people to pay for content it's making it a per access payment adds an unnecessary amount of like management and emotional overhead to these payments right and we've aggregated onto this monthly model uh in in my opinion because it makes the uh like amount of thought the user puts into it

the minimal possible amount yes um and i and i think i would agree with that and it's it's very important and that's that's why we went with the speed because it's like somehow we have to discriminate at the service level between very expensive photographs and and very low cost photographs because we need you know we need users on different service levels to be able to access these differently but we also we didn't want an ecosystem where you know some content was only available to the highest paying users we kind of wanted everything to be available to everyone it's just a question of and similar similar to the ads if you're on the free service ads are really just a proxy for slower

access to the video and so just by giving you actual slower access in lieu of ads and and giving you the option to upgrade out of it i think we create something much healthier and of course ads aren't off the table we could we could inject ads to pages through the portals i'm really not a fan of that but um it's also it's it's something anyone could do the portals are open source wouldn't there be kind of a worry though if you had this lag that people would doubt the performance i mean if it wasn't clearly articulated to them beforehand if they sort of stumbled into this yeah um i think that is something we we're going to have to be wary of

and and kind of build a a common sense culture around what is a portal exactly like you sort of mentioned this recursive content monetization portal but what like would that be a netflix would that be a newspaper like i'm trying to picture what the thing that the person actually visits would even be yeah so i would i would think of it similar to like an isp um in the sense that it's not actually making any content itself all it's doing is it's giving you access and so there are a bunch of them you can pick whichever one makes the most sense for you they all have you know different pricing structures

and maybe even different data caps but you find one that makes sense for you you sign up with that that portal and then basically now you have access to skynet is it sort of whatever's published behind that portal or all of it it's just oh yeah okay it's just the portal into it i got the word now uh so so kind of where you know each mastodon server is providing a slightly different service right uh your account is home to on that server all of these portals should be providing the same service yes um with with the exception that like the speeds might be different but in terms of the data itself that's all going to be identical and

same thing if you switch from one portal to another all of your data automatically follows you you don't you don't have to do this transfer where one portal is you know shipping shipping your data over to the other it's just it's already all on skynet and so the portal can just log you in and and your stuff's already good to go i want to talk a little bit about um this idea of sort of skynet and privacy especially because you talked about this identity and i wondered like what is the approach to privacy we've talked a lot about distributed systems and decentralization but yeah i'm wondering if if that's also incorporated into this yeah so we have privacy on the roadmap and we we've actually had it on the

roadmap for a long time um but our opinion right now is that it adds a lot of engineering complexity and the situation is way better in in 2021 than it was in 2016. um so the number of hoops that we need to jump through as engineers to make skynet private is a lot less than it would have been five years ago and and so kind of our hope is that five years from now uh it's easy the hoops will be less again yeah and we keep we keep having these big breakthroughs even on the privacy front like we recently figured out how to do um fully private payment channels over skynet which is something that you could do with onion routing but like onion routing is a big mess now we now we can do it with what we're calling

a probabilistic charming bank that's more than i want to go into right now but the point is it's way way easier to make a probabilistic charming bank than it is to do onion routing um and so that gives us you know that's that's one piece of the privacy puzzle but of course the the challenge with privacy is that if you have you know nine out of ten pieces that are perfect and then the tenth piece is like just a little bit short you generally end up with zero privacy at all and so we we don't want to start you know putting the early pieces in place until we see the whole picture and we know that all of them uh can be you know the whole system can be made really airtight uh we're not we're not there yet we don't know how to do that

yet okay are you are you researching or looking into the latest in zero knowledge proof stuff or are you is that sort of off the table for now yeah so we um uh we attended a workshop with with starkware um and so starks are something we're we're keeping a close eye on the the two major things i really like about starks are one there's no trusted setup and then two um they're in a they're just in a really convenient trade-off space for us the proving time for complex uh and repetitive programs is really good and then the proof size is large but on a giant data network having a bit of data is not a problem and so i

i think for skynet starks are much further along in terms of meeting our needs than anyone else but in general we are we're keeping an eye on the space as a whole and i wouldn't i wouldn't really say we're doing a ton of work but we are we're we're watching where it's growing and and we're kind of updating our internal roadmap as as people keep coming up with with new things in the in the zero knowledge space cool that's actually david i think that's where you and i met in person for the first time uh it was at this in uh tel aviv at the starkware sessions and you were basically giving a talk on why trusted setups were the worst i think something along those lines

that's correct and now i actually maybe i understand a little bit more where you were coming from uh on that in that talk so david we we talked to earlier a bit about how sky feed can have multiple different uis with different behavior maybe some of them display only people you're following maybe they display two levels deep i think this abstraction of the view of data from the data itself is really important would you mind talking about it a little more with respect to like uh examples of photos or videos or other kinds of data not just tweets yeah so i i think a simple example would be if you had like a decentralized

instagram and you also had a camera that was connected to skynet you could set up your camera to automatically post things to instagram on your behalf but i think another really interesting place that this all converges is for example messaging right now we have this kind of giant mess on the internet where every every single app has its own messaging toolkit and none of the messages are consistent across applications whereas on skynet since you can write to other applications data you can actually you could just have a single inbox and twitter could write to your global inbox you know optionally if twitter wants its own messaging system

that's something it could pursue but if it wanted if it wanted to just let you from the app talk to everyone else in your normal inbox it could also do that and so i think that's an example of something where we have the same thing repeated over and over and over and just a bunch of messy silos where on the skynet model it could be a much more coherent picture when those web two projects were being built do they build themselves that way because they couldn't interconnect better part of it is that it's difficult um because everyone needs to get on a similar standard and and protocols become protocols are a much bigger deal in the centralized web than they are in

the decentralized web because if someone wants to talk their own language it's just they can make their language incompatible with with the languages that other people are talking but i think another issue is that like you get giants like facebook that want to capture the network effects facebook would consider it a very bad thing if you could talk to your facebook groups on twitter because that's one less reason to visit the facebook website and in the skynet world facebook doesn't have any control over that if twitter wants to have your facebook group inside the twitter app it can do that and facebook can't do anything about it and so i think a big part of the challenge with the centralized web is

that you get these giants who build a network effect and all they want is to maintain it in every way possible they don't like sharing and skynet just forces that sharing to happen when you start to think about what that decentralized world actually looks like it it's so wild to imagine businesses in the way that we know them existing in that space like they have to completely rethink you know walled gardens and the kind of competitive war-like mentality that they often have in their industries i get the sense or actually given the human spirit they'd probably find new ways to create wild gardens despite the decentralized nature but yeah it's it's a really like it's an

interesting uh space to think about what could be definitely yeah and i i think that's one of the reasons that skynet is set up to succeed and is set up to win is because in the centralized web businesses ability to create moats is very harmful to innovation it makes it a lot more difficult for aspiring entrepreneurs to enrich people's lives because they can't you know they can't access the facebook walled garden um except inside of the the facebook cradle and but on skynet um if you have an innovative idea you can push it out into the world in a matter of weeks and start enriching people's lives immediately and so this this innovation just has a much much lower barrier to

entry and i think the amount of interesting new stuff that's produced inside of the skynet world will be so fast um and and just be something that the centralized world cannot keep up with at all and and that's what's going to let skynet bulldoze everything else is that it it's not that users care anything about decentralization it's that the builders and the entrepreneurs realize that with the decentralization they can just make so much more powerful applications than they can in the centralized world that that's that's where all the smart people are gonna go and that's where all the attention is gonna be so you mentioned this earlier when we were talking about the name skynet and the idea that we should kind of be taking this seriously so you just gave

an example of like an amazing future amazing outcome where entrepreneurs are set set free but you did mention that there's this ominous nature associated with the name and potentially releasing unstoppable things let's talk a little bit about that so you did choose to name the project that is that something that you are are worried about is that something you can actually mitigate from where you are yeah so i think i think recent events um underscore that very well which is that you know it's it's early 2021 donald trump is about to be out of office joe biden's about to be sworn in and this platform called parlor is experiencing this major d platforming and in the skynet

world there would be no de-platforming of parlor it would be extremely difficult to take the infrastructure away from parlor and so if you have this uh area where incredible radicalization is happening and no tooling that allows you to get in there and interfere with it that's an example of somewhere where this might be able to spin out of control but i would say in general i i think that a lot of the radicalization we struggle with today comes from the nature of centralized feeds these these feeds are presented to you by twitter by facebook by tik tok and they are

on running on machine learning algorithms that are designed to increase engagement increase susceptibility to ads and and brand manipulation and it just so happens that humans get engaged a lot more when they're enraged and so even though you know twitter is not top down saying like let's make people really angry twitter is top down saying let's let's make people really active and the machines are finding out if we make them really angry at each other they're really active and by decentralizing and giving users the ability to pick their own feed right when on decentralized twitter i pick my feed algorithm not jack picks my feed algorithm

and that means that i can select feed algorithms that are healthier for my psyche um and so yeah i do think you know in a in the fully dystopian version you have things like parlor and skynet uh creates unstoppable extremism um and all these extremists have these just wonderful safe houses um that they can build ideas and plot and then and scheme and then cause chaos but i do think that what's actually going to happen is that we're going to jettison the model that's that's causing all this extremism in the first term it's crazy as you say that i just realized how much like the algorithms that like especially the ai

driven algorithms it's like they are sadly a like a very harsh mirror to the human spirit they're holding up the fact is you get more energized more excited you know more focused more active if you are angry i mean i think we all kind of knew that but now it's like on math scale shown demonstrated the thing is in that sort of decentralized model though wouldn't you still potentially have things like governance for those tools like does the fact that it's distributed mean there's actually no oversight yeah so the the key here is that the oversight happens at the discretion of the governed and i think i think this is a really important point that a lot

of people miss is decentralization does not mean a free-for-all where anyone can do anything they want to anyone else decentralization is about putting you the end user in control and so if if you're thinking to yourself hmm you know i just never want to see any nudity ever in a decentralized world you can set up moderation and you can subscribe to moderators and you can you can build a world where your world will never have any nudity in it ever and even though it's decentralized nobody nobody can get that in front of you and so same thing communities that don't want radicalization inside of them will have the power

to reject radicalization but the other side of that coin is that communities that do want radicalization will have the power to protect that rata radicalization so just just as i have the power to protect my uh immunity to nudity they have the power to protect their their ability to you know talk about radical things to each other yeah i think you just you just brought up a really great point though about how like the systems that exist now are more to blame than the existence of potentially like hard to find edges of the internet channels for people to connect like it's not their existence of those channels

is not the problem necessarily the problem is that these large entities have been pushing us to just consume more content we consume our content of things we are into and we want to see in a way even if it's sad or just disturbing or enraging or nudity yeah i mean we even have a term for it now right we call it doom scrolling yeah i was really really good over the last few months to not do that to just ignore the u.s where i'm not from because i have no control anyway but then in the last two weeks it's been very hard i fell off the wagon it's sad i'm annoyed yeah but it is an interesting behavior to observe when you do it because you're

like damn it what a waste of time and why am i so bored that i'm doing that like i must be bored or something yeah but i do wonder like that that idea of choice is it's very appealing but i wonder like if you can narrow down your world that much is that also good yeah that's a good question yeah like what i just described before like my boredom it's almost like because i did that because i just just wanted to see the stuff that i for some weird reason wanted to see like this kind of stuff that's going over going on in the u.s and i it didn't make me happier i wasn't like

i wasn't actually learning that much yeah i think that's a good question and um i think that's something that the creators on skype the people who are building the twitters and the and the youtubes of the future you know it's going to be up to them to figure out the optimal point between like stimulation and education and uh and and just how much of a filter bubble should we have because i i do think filter bubbles are probably a good thing in at least a little bit of moderation but now now we have control and if we want we can have a you know a completely impenetrable filter bubble and is that a good thing is that what users are going to choose i don't know and i i think that's an open question and something that i'm i'm excited because i'm optimistic that

we'll find the right answers but i i am also aware that there are lots of wrong answers that we could end up on cool well david thank you so much for coming on the show absolutely it was uh i had a blast and i i think we covered a lot of really interesting things totally and uh i'm very excited to see what comes next with skynet especially i i'm particularly curious to see how this content recursive content monetization plays out do you have any timeline on when that stuff would actually land yeah we're hoping to have it uh completely deployed in march where oh the the main struggle right now is actually just

accepting traditional payments um in the crypto world it's like really easy you just send an address you get money but in the traditional world it's like stripe is like no we don't do crypto and then square is like oh we only service japan in the u.s and all of our customers are in europe right and then you have like these accounts and you have to manage the payments so it's all this all this like stuff that plenty of companies have solved before that's actually proving to be more annoying um than the decentralized versions of them so that that's what's holding us back but as soon as that's done uh yeah i'm thinking march is a reasonable timeline for monetization to be ready to go cool i mean march sounds very close and not completely surprising that it's it's these traditional payment systems

that are the holdup but good luck with that david and uh hope to welcome you back sometime thank you uh it was a pleasure to be here and i i hope to be back soon cool and james thanks so much for co-hosting again or actually no this this is the first time you co-host thank you for co-hosting oh anytime cool and to our listeners thanks for listening you