RChain releases mainnet as cooperative blockchain project

0:01i'm ashton addison from eventchain for investmentpitch media and fintech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have professor steve ross talbot board member of the archane project and co-op steve welcome to the show it's a pleasure to have you here today it's a pleasure to meet you ashton yeah like we've seen a few of your broadcasts i've always enjoyed them

0:20ah thank you very much well for this interview i'd love uh to dive into you know the our chain co-op if we could just kick it off for those who aren't familiar yet from you know from your words what is the archane project all about and how is it changing the space okay so um our chain is an open source advanced blockchain project and it's run by our chain which is in itself

0:46a cooperative that becomes quite important um its aspirations are to have a a scalable globally secure trusted and safe blockchain that can operate right across the globe achieving transaction rates that either to have not been seen in public blockchains and it does that really by dint of the underlying mathematics on the one side um from which it derives which is what

1:14we call the pi calculus from which the row calculus is derived um and and people might say well what why is that important well if we start to scale public blockchains in a trustless world we need consensus protocols to keep us truthful and it's clear from the use of facebook that truth is in rather short supply and yet many

1:41will act upon it whether they buy things because of it whether they vote because of it but trust certainly is in short supply and it's odd to reflect when you when you reflect back to radio we when we had radio only i mean this was before i was born really but when we had radio we were never really connected as communities that sense of what was going on from the

2:05east coast to the west coast of america you would only get through the radio and you really didn't understand the west coast if you're on the east coast you've never been there so communication has the habit of um really creating empathy between and binding communities together that can be quite disparate and oddly enough with the advent of live tv not just ordinary tv but

2:28live tv my god this was a massive impact on american society so if you go back to the civil rights movement in the usa in 1960s it really got traction on live tv when ruby bridges went to that desegregated school and it was broadcast live on tv and this typifies what happens when we communicate and we trust in that communication because we trusted the tv

2:55we trusted the broadcasters but there's always this notion of trusting some third party and when we get that trust change happens you know the civil rights movement things did change they continue to change and in now in the world we live in today um you know in the social media world centralization has shifted from the tv broadcasters towards social media platforms so we see um

3:21we see um zuckerberg being interviewed by congress and things like this and and those platform providers provide much of the information that many people act on today whether they're buying voting whatever now the advent of mobile phones had a major uptick um this year because we saw george ford die and um black lives matter was it was founded before that but

3:48as a result of that the closeness of that communication and the the timeliness of it we see common cause and people getting on the streets demonstrating and doing all these things and yet you know we question um uh social media platform giants like facebook feeling that there's not much trust in them and yet we continue as a society largely um to trust in our own ability to determine

4:18the truth which perhaps is not a wise thing um in these transformative social media days what's clear is centralization's had its day the rise of blockchain is here and it will and and that will continue to carry on but we need to figure out what we need to trust and how we bind that trust in a digital age so assets on a blockchain don't have to be just entries of what i spent they can be

4:49large blog articles or small tweets they could be a music a piece of music and music video there could be many things if only blockchains could scale which of course up to very recent days they have not been able to deal with that sort of scale and the only way they've been able to deal with it and many of the large corporates do this is they turn the the trustless style up to

5:14ah but i trust one and if you trust one you can scale that's easy we all know that but that is really against satoshi's vision of having trust that's algorithmically derived now if you imagine bitcoin and ethereum having provided that scale if only they could have done that i mean they couldn't technically but wonderful it may sound but actually what

5:38would have happened was we would have seen a load of dowel bumps far more than we saw today because the smart contracting language are not safe and if you go and put a smart contracting language out there on the chain and it's not safe and another smart contracting language um interacts with it another instance of one interacts with it you don't really know what the

6:00consequences may be and we need to know that at the point that we buy a smart contract not after we deploy when we find a dow bug it's another dow bump yeah so um the other thing that's really quite key to to to our chain is the theoretical foundations of it it's no accident that greg um and i don't think i've told this publicly but i will tell you um i think it must have been uh four

6:29or five years ago uh when when before our chain um was created at all and greg was over in london he was at the ethereum conference and uh i met up with him because i've known him for years and we started talking about theory and this blockchain stuff and yeah we both love describing protocols theoretically and and swapping ideas on that and i said somebody should really do a

6:53treatment of of of ethereum and smart contracts because i'm really worried that people are going to deploy these things and they've got no idea what they're going to do and they're immutable oh my god this will be a real problem we'll have to have the most elaborate um patterns out off off the chain to prevent us from going to a smart contract that is causing problems we

7:16won't be able to just decommission it it's there forever somebody should deal with this greg and greg um craig looked at me and he said look at this scribbled some stuff on a sheet of paper as is often the way that he does things and said what do you think i can derive any type system from any type system and he went into greg land and came out and said

7:37actually i'm working on this steve and um yeah and and and so you know it's not a surprise that our chain is the way it is and and it's been done to deal with um how do we provide trust in a trustless world at internet scale for all sorts of applications whatever they may be and and yeah there's a plethora of them that we can perhaps talk about as we go yeah well that's a

8:05great intro steve and you touched on a lot of great points there you touched on the mathematics the scalability which i want to dive into as well the trust and the decentralization of the co-op i guess if we can pinpoint each of those pieces you know one of the outputs of our chain's functionality right now is that it has that high scalability you know how important did you see this

8:32scalability piece out of all of those other pieces that you touched on as a part of the value that our chain delivers and needs to continue to grow um i i think it's that i think it's the key differentiator i mean if if you don't scale and you you deploy smart contracts and you don't bother about behavioral typing actually the behavioral typing's less

8:54relevant because just the number of transactions through it that might cause a problem are much less so it's the old 80 20 rule in in in software but as you scale that 80 20 changes in terms of its focus as you scale the more transactions you have the more opportunities there are for exchanges of messages between smart contracts and the more opportunity there is for

9:20live locks deadlocks and other unintended consequences the typical consequences that cost enterprises are fortune to find they're the hardest bugs to find usually um so you're getting that right um from the behavioral typing side is a requirement if you scale because it gives you protection as you scale gives you safeness as you scale so imagine um imagine the next election in in the usa

9:52you know coming up coming up in november um being on a blockchain um yeah 220 million i don't know exactly what the electoral roll is but it must be a very large number and they all go to the poll on the same day well a traditional blockchain right now or even an elevated one like ethereum could not deal with that um you need to be able to deal with that in real time

10:20so you really do need to be able to scale to ensure that within a say 24 hour period every single person in the united states could hit the same blockchain otherwise you can't have immutable records of voting you couldn't have immutable discourses where people discuss things like they do on facebook and twitter but there's no opportunity if somebody's

10:47done something to undo it and therefore you have a provenance that actually makes you more careful about what you put down there and of course if you have things like that then you can treat all of that information in the social media world as as data that may have value to others and provide a smart contract around it to monetize it so that we're in charge

11:11of our own data it's part of the value that we bring to society but you can't do societal level transformations if you only do 100 transactions a second yeah but you need to scale and you need the trust and safety yeah because you know i would hate it that that we launched anything and it turns out that somebody's vote got missed we're actually launching a voting app

11:38and a deliberation app um for the agm so we will be using our own voting and our own deliberation app to fuel our own agm in october and then we'll be offering that to other communities that want to use it and of course because we can scale it internet scale it really does offer the possibility of having a very secure voting mechanism yeah that's super interesting and it's

12:06great application and i wanted to touch on a little bit on the trust part you know you mentioned scalability and trust and you know you can scale if there's only one person that you need to trust and they're doing all the work but that's really not decentralized and democratized but with the our chain co-op it's one of the only projects that's that's grown that is a

12:26cooperative and has a different more democratic structure to it can you talk about your experience you know you're a board member of the co-op how has the co-op structure uh you know changed the way that the project is growing as opposed to these other traditional blockchain projects yeah i mean that when you look at who's involved in our chain greg certainly but there's several other

12:50people involved in the community um jim white's carver um dan connolly myself several others we all came from w3c you know w3c whilst there is uh almost a sense of a benign dictatorship with tim tim doesn't have the power over everything he seeded the power you know this is the guy that gave up the pattern this is the guy that fought with ibm and microsoft back in the day

13:14um and i think we were all impacted by um by tim's real belief in humanity and the innate good in humanity and that's the same innate good that powers our our innate understanding of democracy it gives the people what they want just because i don't get what i want in a vote doesn't mean that i wouldn't support it i would but i want that voting

13:40voting to be i want that democracy to be participatory or at least have the possibility of it and so our train itself as a co-optive needs to be participatory as well it's not always getting members it's not always easy getting members to participate but we did an ideation workshop recently and that was uh that was pretty good a lot of members participated in that so

14:03one way that we tried to get that participation up and current and and moving is through things like ideation workshops we're going to do a hackathon soon as well that's one that's coming i've seen um but also just changing some of the governance structures of the co-op um uh ensuring that everything is transparent you know that i i remember talking to

14:27miko matsumuri who who was on the choreography working group with me when when when i first met greg and you know and he's quite big as you know in the in the sort of crypto world and i said you know what's the perception of our chain this was probably about a year ago and he said great technology steve but there may be some problems with off-chain governance i think that was

14:48the phrase he used if i knew exactly what he meant because there'd been much in the press and it's a bit like w3c w3c all the transcripts of every meeting are public by definition when you do that you're airing your dirty laundry and and our chain definitely has had its fair share of of dirty laundry airing um but that's and that's very painful and

15:15you know i you know when i joined it was because i trusted um i trusted in the technology i trusted in the people involved um uh knowing that dan was there knowing jim was there not just greg but knowing those guys were there that was quite a big thing um because i know how they work because of all my w3c experience before where you drive to a consensus you try

15:43never ever to have a vote on anything you try to just do it through consensus which is very time consuming you have to be very patient but you have to always have in the forefront of your mind that in a sense as a an elected director you are there to represent the interests of the members you're not there to represent your own interests those actually have to come

16:06secondary to anything that you do you have to go out and that means you've got to talk to people so setting up the various committees to the working groups being on yeah my life is spent on zoom which was very handy because i was highly experienced when lockdown came to the uk and zoom took off here um but but it's it's it's a painful transition i spoke to roger hallam who

16:33was the guy behind extinction rebellion he was from somerset west west of england so yeah you may have heard of extinction rebellion they're a global organization now they started off as a little pod of about six people in somerset in england and little little sort of sleepy place but they enshrined at the very beginning the ethos of decentralized decision

16:56making and so they went from centralized um with a lot of pain to decentralized but what they did was follow those that core principle and that's kind of what we're doing in the co-op today even yeah we're getting better at it we get picked up um it's you know it's a hard process because there's a lot of entrenched behaviors in meetings um but i think it's um it's it's

17:25definitely taking root that's for sure and there's a lot more smiling faces and i would say more active participation than there was probably six months seven months ago when we were probably at our lowest and now it's on the uptick and it's on the uptick in part because definitely in part because of the way that the co-op itself um is run and is held accountable

17:49so that's that's that's really good because you know we end up now having a strong set of board members um uh and you know uh who who who challenge greg i mean greg's often you know referred to as you know the god of our chain uh and yes he is he is he is the founder the spirit of it in many respects but that spirit isn't he's alone it's shared and that's why many of us

18:14joined um and i think now um we can represent our chain every bit as well as greg it's just greg will always have he was the guy that kind of came up with this in the beginning and pulled everyone together and so he always has that that that that very elevated position um but it's no longer it's no longer what many people

18:40were concerned about and this is the dirty laundry you know that it's the greg show it never was in truth in fact the decentralization core of our chain was down to a motion in the board that greg brought to the board that actually would do him out of his own position yeah so greg's greg was always embracing that notion of decentralization believing that

19:03you can't have you know this global computer this platform um of this magnitude that could do all of these things uh you couldn't have it owned by an individual or a company in the conventional sense it had to be with a lot of members who then attenuate what it can do it's a truly you know it's nice because it's kind of like decentralized on the inside

19:31decentralized on the outside and it's not to say that centralization is bad it's just that you know centralization's got us a long way um at the end of the day um but now's the time for decentralization to fill in the cracks that we're now discovering in this digital age and i think archan's got a real shot at doing it i actually sent an email to kier stama

19:55who's the leader of the opposition here in the uk explaining to him without ever mentioning our change um what he needs to achieve the vision of digital democracy um so i send that to him today we'll see if he responds but i have already been working with the leader of the opposition um in this country in the uk and talking to them about the technology

20:17needs for the future very cool steve well we're running out of time here uh what is the best way for viewers to learn more about our chain or get involved with the co-op well come to our chain co-op on the web you can join up for 20 bucks you can go on youtube look for our chain just do a search on youtube most of our um calls are all published as youtube on

20:44on on the archangel on youtube climate and coordination is a really cool one to come to it's quite a feisty little one um but equally the community debris come to the community debris that's what i'd urge people to do because we're going to be demoing our voting act and we're going to be demoing some other really cool apps i think that that really will show off the potential

21:09for our chain very cool well i will leave those links in the description box below for the viewers thank you so much for taking the time steve all the best on the project moving forward and let's follow up in the near future pleasure ashton pleasure thank you very much indeed you