Sovereignists vs. Globalists by Adrian Brink | Devcon SEA

[Music] [Music] perfect oh they're up thank you very much um so today on the last day of Defcon I'm going to talk about sovereignist versus globalists this is very much a talk that should get you to think about the ethos that we all follow behind building in the space and what specific sort of implementations we should be optimizing for so first of all the goal of the space is to be Sovereign it is to be able to control your own assets to freely move around to have sensorship resistant assets Cesar resistant assets the this is fundamentally the goal of the space is to be Sovereign um and with that I would start that a single decentralized network is still centralized um and we'll do nice Q&A in a sec on whether you agree with this but fundamentally if there's something a single of something you cannot leave right like a single of something can always become compromised so a single decent network is still actually very centralized um from a physical perspective it won't survive World War III and this is sort of like I I think when you think a little bit about this problem like neither ethereum or Bitcoin or any other Global consensus is really going to be surviving World War I that it just seems unlikely that we're going to spend a b bunch of bandwidth on global consensus for magic internet money uh when all Global fiber has been cut uh from a social perspective it can be captured um and so as a result we shouldn't design blockchains like a single one world government quick show of hands here who thinks that a single one world government is a good idea yes this is always zero and so no one ever seems to think that a single one world government is a good idea and so we shouldn't be designing our systems sort of in the vein of there's a single Global Security model to rule us all um because fundamentally different people have different requirements for the security models um so my parents live in Germany they trust a local government they want something that the local government can sort of interject and revert this is fundamentally the trust model they care about if you live in Argentina you don't um You probably much more prefer Global Security independent instances um but you still want to like if you travel to Germany you still want to be able to roam into the local security zone for myself I prefer like the etherum mean it over my local government right but sort of like security and the security model that you care about is a fundamentally personal choice and we should be designing these systems to work for everyone in the world and not say well everyone must have the same notion of what security that they care about um the really important part here though is we need to comp uh maintain composability and allow applications to roam so it's not a vable a viable option to say well everyone install like the next 500 iPhone applications in order to like be compatible with all these different security environments phones in the real world actually did this really well where I could buy a phone in Switzerland it still works here it still works in the US it still works in China right like I can use the same fundamental interface uh to interact in many different uh specific security models this also brings me to why we want to be thinking about this from a scale-free network perspective and why this is the only true scalable way to do this with local Sovereign security because fundamentally State should only only be collocated together when it's valuable together um like not all Financial transactions in the world need to be under the same security model they should be under different ones where for example we like physically in proximity so all Financial transactions in Bangkok should be like locally settled to Bangkok and this is also the strongest argument for why this will always be faster than Solana like Solana can never beat us here because like they cannot violate the laws of physics around speed of light so like if we do local settlement we will always be the single possibly fastest thing um and yeah you only want to have to opt into collocation of State when you actually have the need for it because it's expensive um and so yeah the basic example is that users in applications can roam between instances so sometimes I want to be on global ethereum sometimes I want to be on local Bangkok but I can use the same fundament interfaces and the same type of applications to roam across all these different security models um and this leads to a very nice other thing is that everyone becomes their own chain because we can like get rid of of the weird abstraction barrier between uh users and chains where users are just one out of one chains U for example like circle is a good example of this circle no matter how hard they pretend not to be is a blockchain like they are the blockchain that issues usdc on a one out of one key fundamentally when I think about why I joined the space seven years ago it's because we want to build for World War I like we want to build World War II resilient infrastructure because fundamentally the world is becoming more unstable it's becoming very multipolar at the moment and so the infrastructure that we built in the past sort of won't survive a dedicated attack like all our past infrastructure was built around PX Amana um and it's not resilient enough so we need a replacement upgrade for existing coordination infrastructure because on world on day one of World War III Global connectivity will just stop uh this is I think this needs to be treated as given that Global fiber is going to go away and most satellites will drop out of the sky um the the other thing to consider is that um privacy we need this not to like height something but fundamentally for National Defense Community defense like think of privacy as something that you need to have in order to protect your community from the outside world um yes so I will quickly skip over this um but fundamentally local instances must work regardless of global connectivity and so you want to be as local as for quiet but as Global as possible depending on the underlying physical networking characteristics that you find uh one of the best examples for this is oh if you're in this room you're in charge very fundamentally you should be running your own notes you should be running your own infrastructure if you sit here you have to provide like digital infrastructure for your parents and your local community uh no one else is going to do this a good example of this is ham radios in zuk where a bunch of volunteers formed the ham radio club that Pro uh provides 6 hour emergency backup like within 6 hours they have emergency backup coms online um to in case connectivity drops in zuk where I live in Switzerland so they have like these trucks with generators and antennas and they drive to the mountain peaks in order to restore local area networking again for emergency services that's a quick TDR a single decentralized network is still very centralized and a single Global Security model is fundamentally terrifying um and fundamentally you have to run infrastructure if you lie relying on Fury you're doing it wrong and privacy for National Defense yeah we've got to be building World War 3 resilient infrastructure as a framing thank you very much thank you very much Adrian so if there are any questions please raise your hand I will toss the mic to you don't worry it doesn't hurt soft again doesn't break let's go almost all right but um besides the Suk the network uh what are the possible practical implementations of this U approach um for example if we lose connectivity we should still be capable of forming a local coordination effec your local on demand chain to just use within this room right like even if we just wanted like outside of the World War III example but in the more specific example we want to play trading game or we want to do local trading uh we should run this on our own chain here because this is going to be the single fastest thing you can do like whenever you care about latency you want to really strongly consider what kind of state you need to collocate next to each other and like if you need to have fast Laten or low latency you need to be as close to each other as possible good question by the way are there any more questions foran have one you got it on the back how do you deal with the double spend problem if you can't reconcile Global State um so you can tag State and again very good question actually most people don't think about this but so you can tag each individual piece of state to be and I skipped over this in the slide to be controlled by specific state controller and for example if you want to do local settlement and we currently have all our state in global ethereum we'd move it temporarily into s of into the custody of the local state controller and this could be a blockchain run by I don't know the 100 people here uh or like the 4,000 people at the conference and then whenever we want to tear this down we can move our state back out uh this requires a little bit of thinking around how you do state layouts in these like databases that we ended up calling blockchains uh if you want to learn more about this I suggest looking into the anoral resource machine um which is a very nice resource model where every individual piece of state it can be complex State as well like a smart contract is actually tagged as individual utxo that can be moved around to different controller instances very cool thank you very much Adrian so our next