The Third Web

The effect technology has on individual freedom is a recurring theme in lunchtime discussions in the Tlon office. Chief Product Officer, Anthony Arroyo has a background in linguistics and the philosophy of technology. This positions him well to explain the nature of this relationship and how Urbit positions itself between the two.

Anthony offered the key insight that today computers have evolved from their nature as tools into mechanical colonizers of our lives. More than just absorbing our attention, the online services advertising greater human connection are in reality limiting the way we relate to one another to a centrally defined mode of interaction. This extends to the way we consume news, poisoning the well of information and leading to a toxic mass social environment.

He offers Urbit as a solution that allows the user to determine their mode of interaction, and the scale of their social graph, rather than a graph that is global by default.

Anthony also introduces three characteristics of a virtual tool that are needed for it to conform to our expectations of physical tools. He describes those characteristics as simple, durable, and yours.

Finally, we learn about Urbit’s decrementing versioning system and the benefit of software that evolves toward stability.

urbit.org/install/

Urbit.live

Engineer Ted Blackman works on the Urbit OS kernel. Like many Tlon employees, Ted initially came to the project as an open source contributor. In this discussion Ted breaks the operating system down into its components and explains its relationship to Urbit ID which we will cover in-depth in episode 4.

Ted begins by helping us establish a foundational understanding of what an operating system is and what roles traditional OSs excel in. Then he explores how Urbit functions as a layer above, creating a unique environment for applications to run within.

A major question raised by the first half of this discussion, and which many Urbit enthusiasts will already have in the back of their minds is how can such a minimalist, universal operating system take advantage of the task specific performance benefits some CPUs offer? The answer lies in a unique Urbit innovation called Jets. In understanding Jets we can grasp the inherent performance limitations of an operating system like Urbit, and understand how those limitations can be overcome.

Ted has a talent for making the complex understandable, so while this is a very advanced episode, even a non-technical person will find this discussion educational and entertaining.

urbit.org/install/

urbit.live

Few software projects today share either the contemporary relevance or fringe mystique of the Urbit Operating and Identity System. As a highly secure personal server, Urbit aims to deliver on many of the ideas pioneered by the Cypherpunks, and, after nearly 20 years in development the platform has begun a phased launch. Urbit gives us persistent digital identity, a new benchmark for secure computing, and maybe even an open source response to more modern social computing platforms like WeChat and Kakaotalk.

In February of this year, Tlon, the main company developing Urbit, invited me to their San Francisco office to interview the team for a podcast series. During the three weeks I was there we recorded many hours of discussion.

This series is a collage of excerpts from those discussions. The episodes aim to introduce the philosophy of Urbit, establish the problems it is designed to address, explain the way the platform works, and relate it to the world through the lens of Bitcoin, Software as a Service, and the growth model of Silicon Valley startups.

We begin our journey with Urbit veteran Galen Wolfe-Pauley who introduces the project and its design principles while reflecting on the collective Stockholm syndrome we suffer in the grasp of existing computing models.

Urbit.org/install

Urbit.live

Holochain has been a project simminging in the background of the blockchain space for several years now. The promise has been a panaceaic solution to the performance and scalability issues facing decentralised hosting platforms. It’s an oft heard claim, but, as founder Arthur Brock expounds in this interview, by giving up our insistence on global consensus in favor of discoverable and verifiable local state, a world of options is opened to us.

This kind of discussion follows from the Secure Scuttlebutt and Urbit episodes. It raises, and offers answers, to questions of data vs agent based ontologies. But most interesting of all, it forces us to reconsider why we wanted to use a blockchain in the first place.

Arthur Brock from Denver Colorado

Interested in alternative currencies in 2001

Self organising companies are just a form of currency hacking

Discovered what a huge leverage point for change currency is

Change the business incentives and all business will reshape towards those incentives

The Future of Money, Bernard Leotard

2003 alternative currency became main gig

Metacurrency project 2004

Met Harris Brown

Currencies as more than money - symbol systems that we use to coordinate at scale

Out of metacurrency project came Ceptr 2006

Interact/transact with anyone else without intermediary

Required a reinvention of most of the communications stack. Modeling on nature - biomimicry

Prototyped for rewrite of computation, communication, commerce

Took piece of Ceptr and built Holochain, completed in Go in 2017

Bitcoin neither blindsided nor felt like a culmination of work

Seemed like a ham handed design

Questionably successful

Has captured a large following

Has not achieved what Arthur Brock wants to achieve

Not to dismiss blockchain - if nothing else it has prepared public consciousness and awareness for dealing with these problems.

Blockchain has altered the discourse

Pulled discourse in a crazy direction

Recreates unhealthy patterns turbocharged

Definitely need new money but need to do it in a manor that does not amplify volatility and wealth concentration

Recreating old problems won't get us somewhere new

Core issue is validation, not consensus

Everyone must use the same validation scheme to participate in consensus [validation is more fundamental than consensus]

Push for global state is a lazy way of modeling problems

In reality there is no global state or time. Only relative state and time.

Holochain uses an Agent Centric approach rather than a Data Centric approach.

Each agent has their own chain for an application, only tracking the agents activity.

Genesis block of each chain includes a hash of the source code of the application.

Holochain.org

Holo.host

Artbrock.com

Ceptr.org

Metacurrency.org

#webscale

#patriciatree

The range of third-web platforms in development today is greater than ever. From data-centric blockchain based approaches to agent-centric designs like Secure Scuttlebut, the potential futures of the third web are rapidly expanding.

Today we look at another approach with the Urbit platform. Like Secure Scuttlebutt, Urbit is agent centric. It is a deterministic operating system designed to be the filter between a user and the online services they use.

I last covered Urbit in 2016 and the project is now nearing public launch. Galen Wolf-Pauly explains.

What is Urbit?

A personal Server

A secure computer that

you actually own

Stores an event log of everything that has ever happened to it

That’s designed to live on any cloud server

But be controlled by a private key that you actually own

Your Urbit is meant to replace all of the consumer cloud software that you already use

How can it possibly be better than all of the expensive software that has already been created?

The basic thesis is that everything we use today runs on top of a unix of some kind.

The reason we wound up in this centralised world of cloud-based software is that Unix is too complicated.

Because the Unix is complicated, complicated layers between Unix and the application are needed.

The Urbit solution is to rip all of that out and create a single, extremely simple, complex system.

Urbit is a virtual machine, programming language, and operating system in 30,000 lines of code.

For comparison, Wordpress, an application that runs on Unix is 500,000 lines of code

Technical simplicity should turn into user interface simplicity.

Additionally, by hosting your Urbit in the cloud you no longer have a middleman serving you applications, Instead you only need them to host your virtual computer.

What does an Urbit future look like?

A single platform allows tighter integration of, for example, productivity software like Git & Asana.

As a designer, Galen looks forward to interface standardisation, -having messaging, documenting, code collaboration, task management and other consumer software working seamlessly as one system.

Rather than interfaces built for many people.

Do we need a new back end for a new front end? Hasn’t Wechat done this?

Today we use many services that have unified UIs

Google has both email and documents but do you really trust Google to have total control and visibility into your use of those services?

What if Google goes away?

Being able to run a server myself that I trust will be around a long time and is secure to me makes me feel alot better. [Platform Risk]

Wechat is a really great achievement

Apps are more like modules

But you have given total power to a single company

The decentralised Wechat pitch has gotten tired but Urbit is very much targeting that problem.

The future of cloud computing does look like that but makes no compromises in privacy or durability.

What is Edgeware

Edgeware being developed by an entity called Commonwealth Labs

Built on Parity’s Substrate

Grandpa finality tool

On-chain governance

Scripting built in.

Using Web Assembly (Wasm)

Building on Substrate

People used to build their own web servers, now they use the cloud.

People used to build new chains, now they can use Substrate.

This enables builders to focus on the area of their expertise.

One month after development began a test net was operational

Three months the project was live.

EOS was too centralised

Ethereum was not flexible enough

WebAssembly

Being able to use Rust or C++ is great

Still being experimented with

The Polkadot and Substrate ecosystem

Friendly and helpful community

20 projects underway

100 planned for the end of the year

Platform still stabilizing

People are building now planning to switch to the security of the Polkadot chain.

Securing the edgeware chain

Delegated PoS aiming to move to Nominated PoS as Sybil resistance mechanism

Grandpa for finality

Round Robin leader selection

The ultimate goal is to rely on the security of Polkadot

The problem of governance

It’s a problem that has been pursued by humanity for all time

Blockchains increase social scalability

Improves legibility

Enables new organisations

These new organisations need new governance systems

Blockchains are new so there is naturally experimentation and opportunity.

Want to further this human endeavour in the blockchain world

How does edgeware actually do governance?

Allocate tokens using a “Lock Drop” of ether.

One token one vote.

Vote can be allocated

Focusing on core changes to the network/protocol, allocation of on-chain treasury that is bootstrapped by the block reward.

The Lock Drop

Initial token distribution is the linchpin of effective network governance

Require the belief in the economic value of the token

Previous ways of doing this were an ICO or airdropping a token

The Livepeer Merkle Mine was an interesting experiment

Edgeware hopes to get the same effect of distributing tokens to people who want to actively participate without the bloat of a Merkle Mine.

Ether tokens are locked in a contract that prevents the tokens from moving for a period of 3, 6, or 12 months. The registry of locked tokens is used to initiate the Edgeware chain with additional tokens allocated to individuals who locked their tokens up for longer periods.

Infrastructure on top of infrastructure

Are we locked in an infrastructure phase?

Care of DFINITY I was privileged to attend the Web 3 Summit in Berlin last year. While there I interviewed Aeron Buchanan, the Executive Vice President of the Web 3 Foundation and Gavin Wood, Founder of Ethereum, Parity, and the Web 3 Foundation. These guys are two of the individuals that launched the programmable blockchain revolution and these interviews plot a course from the founding of Ethereum to their vision of the decentralized web and give us a trajectory beyond.

A quick production note. These interviews were filmed in the style of the other filmed interviews on The Third Web, unfortunately the footage was lost to a dead macbook leaving only the audio. As I usually cut myself out of the filmed interviews my contribution is less geared for production.

Visit https://web3.foundation/ , https://www.parity.io/ for more information

Aeron Buchanan

Executive vice president of Web 3 Foundation

Masters in Computer science with a focus on engineering at Oxford

Worked in film

Then completed a PHD in computer vision

Became algorytm designer

Tell us about your time at Ethereum

Ethereum was initial exciting

Went from raising interest to actually delivering and things changed a lot

Aareon ran most of Eth Dev

Very stressful

Was Ming Chan hard to work with?

Came later

Eventually delivery of Ethereum was on course.

A CEO or COO type role was needed.

Eth foundation was not doing much at the time.

The plan was to transition EthDev responsibilities to foundation

After a worldwide search Vitalik chose Ming Chan

Aeron transitioned out shortly thereafter

Web 3 Foundation

Drives the development and deployment of polkadot.

Parity is building the rust implementation

The runtime of polkadot is Parity’s Substrate.

What is Web 3?

Web 3 is different things to different people.

To The Web 3 foundation Web 3 is the deentralized web.

The Web 3 foundation aims to map out and build the technologies needed.

This seems very blockchain focussed

Yes, and polkadot is blockchain platform

The blockchain platform part is only part.

There needs to be a large number of other components to build the decentralized web

How do you build decentralised messaging and storage?

We are leaving that to others like IPFS.

Proof of replication is something that people who looked at proof of storafge instead of proof of work overlooked.

Whisper and Secure scuttlebutt are interesting options

Coordination can happen on the blockchain but messaging on the blockchain is a non-starter.

When will all this stuff come together to make ausable platform?

We are not yet at a stage of maturity.

The technologists building all of this know we are not at the end yet.

We started with scripting

Moved to scalability, reputation, messaging & everything else. We are not yet through the checklist.

Polkadot takes us 95% of the way to scalability

The next one is reputation. No clear solution yet.

Whats the challenge with reputation?

Proposals look at the result rather than the approach.

Reputation is different in different contexts.

There must not be an originator. Reputation must be decentralized.

Gavin Wood

Founded Ethereum

Founded Parity

Founded Web 3 Foundation

Lead of Polkadot.

Aparna Krishnan is head of education at Blockchain at Berkeley and co-founder of Mechanism Labs, an open source blockchain research lab. Earlier this year, Aparna was awarded a scholarship by the DFINITY Foundation for Mechanism Labs’ research into consensus mechanisms. This episode is essentially a primer for advanced discussion of consensus in decentralized networks.

https://mechanismlabs.io/

https://github.com/aparnakr

https://twitter.com/aparnalocked

https://medium.com/@aparnalocked

Aparna Krishnan

Co-founder mechanism labs open source research lab

All work and research is on Github

Telegram: @mechanism_labs

Co-founder of the education team at Blockchain Berkeley

Consensus researcher

Teaches executive education courses

Consensus

Proof of Work

Proof of Stake

Old Field

History

Cynthia Dwork developed stronger adversarial models

Did not have many applications

Blockchain has brought cryptography and consensus into the mainstream eye

Protocols

DFINITY

Tendermint

Bitcoin

Focus has been on proof of stake protocols

Mining may not be sustainable

Long term sustainabilities and lack of externalities is important

Proof of stake offers efficiently

As does proof of elapsed time and proof of space and time

Consensus

Sybil control

Coming to agreement relies on traditional consensus

PoS, PoW refer to the sybil control mechanism

PoS - Putting down capital

Financial penalty for misbehavior

Token holders are participants

PoW - burning energy

One cpu, one vote

No connection between token custody and rewards

P o Elapsed Time

Proof of Authority placing reputation

A cost of playing ball

Traditional Consensus (PBFT)

No concept of probabilistic finality

All honest nodes come to final agreement

Closed, permissioned

Blockchain

All nodes may with a high degree of probability agree

A probabilistic guarantee

Longest Chain Rule

Longest sequence of blocks is the

Ethereum

Ghost

Can be attacked by a stealthy entity

Open, permissionless, decentralized

Inefficient

Node churn

Better liveness properties

Early PoS 2013

PeerCoin

NXT

Bitshares

Primitive

State grinding attack vulnerable

Randomness derived from blockhashes

New Generation

DFINITY

Uses threshold relay decentralized randomness

Tendermint

Round robin

Has social layer fallback

Ethereum Casper

Thunderella

Algorand

Hides the block creator until the block has been created

In Tendermint a minority below the assumption cannot break finality

In Bitcoin >10% can change the finality through threatening to censor

Hard to get both economic and cryptographic security. Not clear that bribing and collusion attacks have been solved. No protocols have shown sophisticated economic models.

Mechanism Labs

Focussing on incentive schemes

What does it mean to have a stable, scalable protocol

Scalability

Proof of Replication

Recent work with Verifiable delay functions

In commit/reveal schemes there is an opportunity to manipulate by giving only one person the ability to reveal the randomness

Verifiable delay functions allow anyone to reveal the randomness

ASIC resistance because not parallelizable

Subodh Sharma is a professor of computer science at IIT Delhi, one of the most prestigious universities in India. While he’s not teaching, Subodh conducts research into the formal verification of distributed systems, and his work on the automated formal verification of smart contacts has drawn international interest.

I called up Subodh because I was looking for someone to explain an approach to writing software called the actor model. The actor model essentially involves sandboxing tasks in such a way that complexity is minimized and all behaviors of a software system can be known under all conditions.

Currently the actor model is applied to the management of telecommunications networks through the Erlang language, and also in secure servers. Understanding the way robust distributed systems are constructed assists in the assessment of platform designs and gives us a view into the future of the ultimate distributed system - the Third Web.

Dominic Tarr is a hacker who resides on a sailboat, usually found in New Zealand's beautiful Hauraki Gulf. In recent years he has risen to fame as the creator of the Secure Scuttlebutt protocol, Scuttlebutt for short. Scuttlebutt is comprised of a standardized message format and a subjective append only log stored locally by users.

The first application has been a multi-client decentralized social media platform that is an absolute joy to use, and I encourage everyone to download my favourite desktop client, Patchwork, or Manyverse for Android. As an autonomous software system, like Bitcoin, Scuttlebutt rewards the provisioning of resources to support the network, only rather than a point system and money myth, Scuttlebutt offers something far more valuable, conversation. This mostly covers the origin of the protocol but I will definitely conduct more interviews with Dom and others close to the project, which is today one of the most impressive, and well used decentralized applications in existence.

Visit scuttlebutt.nz for more information,

https://twitter.com/thethirdweb

@ecfGe81VMJ3iko5++/KfD51omfNtLSd50nS1omUyj/Y=.ed25519

History of Secure Scuttlebutt

The name is coincidental. It comes from an old amazon paper describing a subsystem of the amazon dynamo database that used a gossip protocol.

Gossip protocols are robust because, like human gossip, messages can be passed through third parties ensuring that if a network is disrupted communication can still take place.

However as the message is passed from party to party there is the opportunity to manipulate its contents. This is easily countered using cryptography

What is secure scuttlebutt?

Came from looking at the problem of getting two databases to store the same information.

Dom was looking at building something like IPFS he called Cyphernet

Cyberspace is the space made by signals, cypherspace is the space made by algorithms

Hyperlinks tell you where to go to find a piece of information, a hash is the primary identifier in cypherspace. The hash tells you what the thing is once you have found it but not where to find it.

With hyperlinks the server can give you anything. With a hash you always know you have the right thing but another system is required to help you find the thing.

Dom found that in private software development there was an incentive to make poor software because that results in more billable hours for the service industry

This is because software contains a power structure encoded in it

Today we live in an age of digital feudalism

From reading the Dynamo paper and learning node.js dominic became recognised as a distributed systems expert.

This was the toolkit needed for the data replication he imagined.

After presenting at a javascript meetup people responded well

He got a job at a company, nearform, to build a distributed database. Through this project the idea for secure scuttlebut emerfged and dom gained the skills he needed to build it

Disappointment with blockchain

There is so much potential in cypherlinks - hashes and signatures - an opportunity to create a “third web”

In the early days of the internet everything worked so well just being free, why would you make everything cost money?

Insisting on strict ordering makes it really hard to “get life done”

Additional third web projects

IPFS

Dapp

Git

Gun

Swarm

SSB

Maidsafe