Rethink Trust 2018: Yonatan Sompolinsky, Interview
Recording: Rethink Trust 2018: Yonatan Sompolinsky, Interview
Yanni's thanks forum is in Tolkien like few questions for us and first one what is your role in like blockchain economy and what kind of career path like bring you here to work in with a blockchain thank you so I've co-founded dag labs which is a project to implement protocols that were developed in the academia so I started that academic doing thinking theoretically about launching protocols and recently at the end of 2016 I've started thinking how to implement them in production so it's it's a transition from industry to academia from academia to industry the role of dag labs is I guess to redo satoshis proof-of-work paradigm so there are many many new innovations in watching ecosystem and watching space there are like the next step or the the next generation blockchains but we are more our main task is first to do correctly or more optimally satoshis work ok thanks and now a lot of hype around blockchain so what do you think like their real business problems that we can solve with the blockchain well first today is the market is still dipping and so we have quiet we can work this is the best time for builders you know we are we're getting less attention from other people so we can just concentrate on our work can you repeat the question so what does it mean like business problems that we can solve is a blockchain yeah so this is a question you know when the entire community is trying to figure out it's amazing how this you know there's such a such a big large market cab in such such a big hype and yet it's not very clear I don't think that blushing can solve existing problems as as much as it can invent new ways to cooperate and to facilitate corporations between different parties so I wouldn't if you want to solve today's problem then centralized databases and centralized technologies are best that's you can see you know AWS will probably forever be better than any other such systems but there are ways to version allows for ways that to cooperate which weren't before one one examples programmable money which technically you can implement you know on a centralized server but if you want it it doesn't happen it will never happen in you know when centralized financial servers and institutions so this is just one example so I would focus on financial assets financial Internet of value Trent value transfers that's what we are looking at ok thanks and you're talking with like a lot of customers a lot of potential customers at the would as they are like well it is expectation of from the blockchain plot from products a key you can provide so actually we're not talking to a lot of customers and you know when people are looking for products when we are talking to these two these large corporations they have their innovation team so you know we met a large Chinese corporation know a roomful of people that just ask you what's the use case for for blockchain and the truth is again for these traditional institutions I'm not sure that blockchain presents a solution as it may be presented as a threat and so there are two levels of efforts there's one effort which is you know our every company has its own effort to improve the technology and then there's the effort of the entire community to to get adoption to figure out the use case so in that we are part of a larger community and any and there's there's no real competition there entire community together is looking how to bring it to a mass adoption I had to bring value to end-users and build customers and in our project we are currently focusing on just improving the technology and just being aware of the problem so you know we don't we don't have this manifesto of we believe that you know that everyone should use blockchain or that you know every merchant and point-of-sale should use Bitcoin payments or even Bitcoin lightning I personally use just credit cards and it's perfectly okay so we're not pushing for that for replacing current use cases more for seeing how we can improve improve new cases a new user experiences that are not are not existing today okay and what is like main technical may be another kind of challenges that you face it and work at this blockchain so in our project the main the main challenge is how to scale up the system while preserving the trustless and decentralized assumptions so again it's very easy to scale the system if you're giving up on us lessness and the centralization so i would say you want to think carefully who are the users that you're targeting what's there I would say trust preferences whether there are kind of users like the crypto community that they really want to verify every trans every transaction or at least to have a protocol that formally verifies things and then there's other layers that handle these and then or you're targeting more users which really really don't care about what's happening behind the hoods behind the scene they just want to have a good user experience so once but but but if you only look at at these users then then again credit card will will be the best thing for them so you kind of want to find a good trade-off where you are still meeting the standards the correct standards of the of the community of the technical community and still serving and optimizing for the right user base that's the main challenge that's where we're going right now okay thanks and now on the hiring market like a lot of new position connected with a blockchain so what do you think like the main skill set of the specialist which is we need it like to work with blockchain that's a great question um so I can say from our perspective in Dague labs what you want to have in a company and this again I'm an academic so don't take don't take take it with you know with a grain of salt you want to have one or two experts in in the technical in the code base in the technical details and you know that have followed blockchain and crypto for at least you know at least a year preferably more then you have these one or two or three experts and then the arrests should be just very good software engineers with knowledge and networks in distributed systems also in systems so you know when you don't need a whole team of watching experts usually you want just a few very few that know blockchain and then the rest of the team should be just no very good devs okay thanks and what do you think like as a community we can do like do not start like blockchain winter-like to develop like blockchain and enterprise to develop election Enterprise I mean like hmm we hear from one side some hype and from another homicide we we have some real challenges real problems and so on so what can you do is community to solve this real problems and do not support this just kind of hype around blockchain yeah I don't know I'm not sure these things can be solved I currently feel that you know I'd say there's a lot of attention through mark corn market cap and when this when corn market cap dictates the attention then you know the the companies that raised lots of money will track their attention so it's it's kind of a gain of a game of market cap so you it's hard to beat that but I would say what we need to do is to develop more standards about what we're looking for in a project what we're looking for in a protocol because currently the community is very fragmented in the sense that you know I was I was in several conferences and they you have these a panel it's almost look looks like a market place where everyone says here's my solution here's my protocol here's my protocol and it's sort of there's no clear standard what what are the metrics you want to measure you want to measure with against and what once was how do you vet a project how about a protocol so in this in this ecosystem we're trying to say okay here's here are the standards here's the way the right way to do things and it doesn't really it does matter for us personally but doesn't really matter who wins as long as there's it needs to be one winning standard or maybe very few winning standards and that's why you asked what's our role in the project we wanted users the proof of work based layer in the right way we hope to become a standard for that layer there are many players in layer two there are many players in proof of stake but there it's there's no clear standard where proof of stake is something some people think proof of stake is a certain implementation Casper or something it's no Yost like boost deck is not clear what it is proof of work is more known everyone sort of agrees what the what the term refers to so we're trying to - no - to win on this standard and to create a standard for the community once you have standards then any wonder stands what the competition is about what the game is about what we need to improve how to vet new proposals it becomes more clear okay thanks and last question so what do you think about recent conference so far this conference was very impressive very well organized I didn't feel here the hype at all I felt that people came here just you know good atmosphere I don't see a lot of hype and people pushing business cards to your face I know I really enjoyed it so far I'm looking forward to the continuation of it okay thank you very much