Jim Dolbear on privacy and the XX Network

0:00I'm ashtin Addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have Jim Dole bear the president of elixir and The XX Network Jim thank you so much for coming on the show it's a pleasure to have you here today thanks Ashton you're very welcome let's kick off the interview by learning a little bit more about the purpose and

0:20the vision of elixir and the XX network first of all how did it start and what were the problems that you were looking to solve when you started the project well you know the it all started in late 70s or early 80s I mean David Shum who's the CEO of the of our organization really identified with some other people that the digital network as it would be

0:47adopted you know over the ensuing decades that there would be problems problems that are with privacy and problems with using the network for people to live their sort of normal lives and I think he was like you know maybe 20 30 years ahead of his time so what we what we have done is to address the problems that he identified you know in the early 80s mm-hmm yeah I read

1:17David Trump's background and he helped with digit cache and cryptography way before block chains you know had existed in this modern time so I guess some of those concepts are now able to become realized now that we have more of the distributed ledger network no it's a good point so so he invented some cryptographic some math which was unprecedented but it involved large

1:46numbers so the things that he's famous for blind signatures which are which we use and mixed networks which underpin all the privacy privacy protecting characteristic Eric turistic sub elixir and are part of Tor all that you know was he published in the 80s but the the network and the processing power

2:14you know computers generally wasn't sort of up to it to in terms of processing the crypto crypto involves large numbers so really what happened was we had to wait a little bit into the mid 90s to see some of the things that he had invented really you know come to fruition and that included digit cache you know the the original digital currency which he invented using double

2:44blind signatures from the early 80s hmm very interesting so there's the elixir which I believe is the communications layer and then there's the xxxx network which is like the blockchain protocol itself maybe could elaborate on you know what exactly is elixir and how does it fit into the xxxx network yeah yes so so David I think correctly had identified

3:10privacy or confidentiality or the ability to participate in freely as a citizen and democracy as is really the ultimate challenge you know sometimes people talk about the United States as kind of the grand experiment and people forget that democracy has not been like hugely successful the broad sweep of history and you know check your history books right and so David I think really

3:41realized like this is critically important and we need to look at how computers and and digital networks how they will impact democracy so what he realized and I think if you check is there's some archiving online in 1994 at CERN he gave the keynote address the first world wide web conference and

4:08basically what he said is this network is going to be huge people are going to want to be present on the network and they're going to share information their wine they're gonna want to support political causes they're gonna want to buy things what's gonna be critically important is to have currency to drive the ecosystem of the network and Tim berners-lee who

4:37is the second speaker said it's gonna be like Alexandria but on steroids the biggest library in the history of the world and people will get smarter they'll you know diseases will be addressed information sharing will be unprecedented it's gonna change the world and kind of both of them were right what happened at first is what Tim berners-lee said there was enormous

5:06amount of information on the network that had never been available before and people were you know accessing libraries from around the world but then what happened you know over months and years is what David had kind of warned against in the mid-80s and he famously said in 84 85 you have this digital network and the way the network is defined which is all

5:30of the addressing is public what's gonna happen is that you're gonna have a big advertising driven marketing driven corporation and they're gonna aggregate this information and they're gonna control who sees what and they're gonna monetize the network and he really said that it's amazing he said that in 84 85 and you know that you have Facebook and Google that's what

5:53happened very interesting and the xxxx networks been out for a little bit I believe it is in its public alpha stage right now how long has the project you know taken to get to this stage good question so basically so you can see from what I've been talking about so far we started with privacy and the first implementation of the elixir see Mixon came out of an academic assault

6:22consortium and it was in 2014 2015 2016 so we actually had a software client that ran on a smartphone and it was done between some US universities and European universities and we created a commercial entity in 2000 set almost three years ago and started commercial software development around bringing this what we call well

6:52it's an accelerated mix and I can explain a little bit how that works to bring this privacy layer to the blockchain because nothing like that it ever existed and so that's how it all started and then as a second step we said oh well you know if we want to make this privacy make elixir work the list elixir project work we're gonna have to have a sister project a consensus

7:18protocol which addresses the protection of privacy and the selection of nodes to run the C mix Pro the C mix oft where which hides the information the metadata for senders and receivers of messages information and exchange of value we're gonna have to develop a consensus protocols to make that work so we

7:47started in stealth and then we moved a team to the Cayman Islands because we had visa issues really we had a bunch of very bright Portuguese cryptographers and so practice which is the sister project is on the face of it a traditional consensus protocol it provides for a digital secure a quantum secure digital currency but also it

8:16deals with bringing it as a distributed network of nodes to consensus and it also provides a solution to elixir to select teams and to meet some privacy criteria so it's it's sort of like our traditional blockchain plus it helps elixir mm-hmm yeah David mentioned the four pivotal foundations to the success

8:46of the network you know obviously privacy and security sounds like there's a lot of focus but also speed and scalability and this is something that other networks have are still working on with Bitcoin and aetherium both looking to be more scalable than they are right now has the elixir team been able to focus on those areas as well yeah well I think you know

9:08the whole thing is not going to happen without you know the ability to meet the needs of consumers like real people and that means speed defined is sort of latency which is I pick up my smartphone I do what I need to do in it and I I get closure or say it's a settlement of a payment or sending them a message in seconds because if I don't do that

9:35doesn't work it's gonna be a niche thing mm-hmm so so on the one hand I spent the first I don't know how many minutes I'm preaching to you about privacy and so on but it's all for naught if the thing doesn't work from a you know high-speed functional way so what happened was David and I have worked together for a while and I you know and remember him

9:58saying this stuff does not work I know I invented it and what he meant was the the crypto involves really large numbers and when you start adding in computers which you need to do together you know a decentralized distributed network that will support a consensus protocol you're gonna have real problems I mean this stuff is just gonna be really slow so he had this breakthrough

10:30which we call pre-computation and so for the privacy layer what we do is we set up the decryption and the encryption prior to the prior to a user actually needing that framework so basically we have teams that have set up a framework and then you and your smartphone you just you know you use your app to address the the X X Network and it's all

10:59set up for you that's why we can do it quickly otherwise we'd be in trouble and the the pre computations you know saves its orders of magnitude it's a thousand times faster and that and then so once we had that set up when we developed the praxis protocol with the team in Cayman we went to some probabilistic security structures and also found that we could have some group

11:30signatures and their webinars that explain this in detail which people could access you know from our site either from praxis dot io elixir dot IO and also we're in the middle of a coin offering so there's a coin site which is xx – coin dot IO but and also it's on YouTube but basically what we figured out was that we didn't have to have

12:01bilateral signatures between each node and each node we could have a group a group signature and achieved the same the same security outcome and so we in the same way that we managed to address the the issue of speeding up computation and elixir with pre-computation on the

12:28Praxis side we had a breakthrough on how to hand how to deal with kind of like a fast consensus protocol and we needed to do that or else we just could not be able to provide a high performance solution you know on smart phones and the truth is everybody knows this is what we've been struggling with as a as an industry or as a movement you know people usually call it scalability so we

12:54think we've done it and we sort of like challenged people to ask its questions look at our materials our biggest challenge is to get people to so sort of like what we want to say is we've done it check to see if if it's real and so that's our big challenge right now is to engage people and to get them to really look at what we've done yeah that's great well you have the public alpha

13:22network right now what's the development timeline roughly looking like for a baby network and then the full main net so we started the Alpha Network is by definition its third party node operators and they operate you know on five continents but they are under our control which is to say the the sent that the protocols that the part of the protocol which is

13:48decentralized hasn't been implemented yet so that said everything is sort of like on the runway because we went through a process starting in I think it started actually in January of 2019 of a public process for selecting beta node operators and we you know went through a public review of criteria and such and

14:15the endgame is we have 600 beta node operators who are on deck and so what we're doing right now is getting them organized so that we can deploy the first instance of the consensus protocol and we believe we'll be able to do that deployment that is to say the beta implementation of the XX network in the first half of 2020 so like months from

14:44now and right now we have one of the things we did which i think is distinctive is that we released an app which we call the XX collective app and that's a an app that people can download download on Android and Apple on iOS to kind of track what we're doing and one of the things on there is a real-time dashboard for the performance of the

15:12alpha net of the XX network so you can see the thing operating in real time on third-party nodes and so you know we're trying to make it transparent like look the thing is working and we'll do that with the beta node implementation as well that's great Jim you mentioned that there is a coin sale going on right now I'm also curious if you're looking for

15:35more developers or other team mmm and how can they all find out more information thanks so much for asking about that yeah we're in the middle of what I don't know so we have 6,000 members or of our collective the xxxx collective and we have a we've been interacting with people on an email platform as well and so basically what we wanted to do is to give people the

16:04opportunity to you know interact and get involved early we'd spent you know a year and a half two years we really flown all over the world trying to meet people and share what you know share with people what we're doing and so the first step we did something called we call it you know an initial public sale it's kind of like an ILO and what we wanted to do was to get a broad base of

16:33people and so far we've had I think over 400 coin investors in over 50 countries and we're trying to get them in early before we have you know the run up to Maine that and I think it's really important and distinctive we've had no venture capital sort of like Silicon Valley institutional investment we've kind of you know made a go of it to kind

17:02of go to the people and and that's what we're doing right now and we've been at it for a couple of weeks and we have another phase coming in in this next week but it's it's the xx coin and the information is at xx – coin do the only twist which is kind of unfortunate is because of the instability and immaturity of US law we've had we really can't take you know money or purchasing

17:34from us so-called US persons so that's a bit of a an unfortunate thing that we're not not happy about and we're hoping we'd be able to remedy that in the next couple of months as the laws of all mm-hmm that's great Jim well all the best with the XX network it sounds like you're well on the way and I will leave those links for the developers to follow

18:00for the release of the beta network down in the description box below as well as the XX coin sale as well and that's all the time that we have for the interview but I appreciate you coming on and taking the time and let's follow up in the near future thanks so much Ashton really appreciate the time