ETH++: A roadmap to (real) decentralization in a world of centralized power | Devcon SEA

hello Devcon sea vitalic is is a very rough act to follow so thank you for everyone who stayed to talk about decentralization today um so today we are going to talk about deconstructing the nation state which is how the last kind of panel ended so that ends up being perfect and in this talk we're going to cover kind of a bunch of different concepts at a at a pretty rapid fire paace so we're going to start with how does eth die how does eth go to zero why are we actually on the road for some possible Futures in which this blockchain and this system which we all love just like doesn't do as well anymore how can we save it what is the formula for that what does this have to do with E3 which I think is a meme you're going to be hearing a lot about in the next few months few years Etc what are the Technologies we can use we just heard about program uh programming privacy and other things like that what else can we do what can you the attendee here at Devcon and in the space uh do to help this and then what am I doing about all of this and where do Technologies like tees come in so let's get right into it I'm going to start a little bit funerary today so I'm going to talk about what I consider to be the two most disturbing pictures in the ethereum news cycle the ethereum space today at least to me and to my dream of building a decentralized system together with you all um so the first one is from this paper called regulating decentralized systems evidence from sanctions on tornado cache paper published by the New York Federal Reserve authors listed below and in this paper they go Fairly deep into analyzing tornado cache and sanctions enforcement on decentralized blockchains um kind of enumerating various power dynamics choke points and other levers in the system uh and then studying how effectively they can kind of manipulate these levers of power to do things like stop Technologies they don't like um Technologies which for example many people here uh may have different feelings about so um actually let me go back to that if I can figure out the clicker um yeah so an interesting thing about this picture is it shows the approach that as the nation state game escalates as we really go deep into this mission of decentralization that various kind of centralized parties take on these things we build and it's very simple it's about control it's about the boxes of control and it's about how to leverage them and make sure we put as many X into these boxes that we see here um as possible so that's the first disturbing picture the second one uh so this is a graphic that you can go browse yourself online the uh URL is up there uh I can't read it from this distance but uh benj dd.com AWS there we go and here you can go through the various different AWS data centers worldwide and kind of view different uh AWS to AWS latency pictures um in a very real world this is the topology of the internet of the networks on which we're building our Technologies today uh so you can see on the left there you have us east1 which is the most popular AWS data center for crypto deployments uh and the lighter the color uh or sorry uh I guess they change the color scheme but I think the blue lines are things that are like approximately on the order of under 400 milliseconds uh the light blue line is is kind of or maybe it's under 200 and the light blue line is over 200 Etc um but you can see there there these very clear corridors of latency and power that we've built why is that well because that is where the data centers are that is where the economic activity is that is where in many cases the users are that is where companies want to have their servers and want to build their infrastructure um that is where the capital is and the investors and all of these pieces of the puzzle and so we've built a power overlay using the latency structure of the internet on top of that and this is what it looks like um so we exist in a world where there are two fundamental realities the first one is that much of the world's power is already centralized that includes military power economic power geopolitical power Social Power and more um and on top of that the disturbing trend is that centralization begets more centralization so centralization is an accelerationist Loop onto itself uh this is present in markets through phenomena like economies of scale or Winner Takes all it's present in Zero Sum games such as trading it's present in auctions Etc so when you have one sort of centralizing vector that tends to bring all sorts of centralization into various aspects of your system something we really want to avoid if as we said before deconstructing the nation state is it all on the radar for this project so what I would say that given that we are in these situations we have to stop yoloing uh protocol proposals and upgrades uh in terms of this power Dynamic and this topology on which we exist and instead we have to start treating distribution of power globally as a first class goal for the next chapter of eth how can we be intentional about where we're pushing power in the system this is much much more important than the performance of the system fast block times throughput latency anything like that because if you have those things without having distributed power you've essentially just reinvented the systems that we were trying to escape this whole time those performance systems already exist um otherwise we come back to the reality where much of the world is centralized and centralization beget centralization so instead in of that let's stop yoloing protocol proposals and treat distribution of power globally as a first class goal in E3 okay I'm going to exit the infinite Loop and instead go to the infinite Garden so this is an actual picture of my grandmother growing her own infinite Garden um and I think the solution the exit to this this Loop is planting our own Gardens building our own systems so let us all together kind of brainstorm this infinite Garden of power distribution and think about very intentionally carefully and together about where we want power to go uh I'm going to give you one troll idea and I'm sure you're going to hear many more over the next few weeks but this is going to be E3 done my way uh this is the best hatching GIF I could find that was free Shout Out Wikipedia Foundation but it is very cute um all right so in my opinion these are the four pillars of e3 as I see it and I say pillars because these are actually non-negotiable properties if either of these four things any of these four things are compromised on we will fail to achieve the goals of cryptocurrency we will fail to achieve the goals of ethereum and as I said in the beginning of the talk the price will obviously be zero regardless how much institutional interests or ETFs or Etc we're able to create um so these four pillars as far as I see them uh number one pillar is permissionless and I'm going to explain each of these in Greater depth uh number two is distributed from a technical perspective and a computational perspective number three and this is the most important property by far is geoeconomic decentralized and we're going to Define that very carefully shortly and number four is neutral Builder efficient um so what are these pillars let's get into it well the first one is permissionless this is something we should all have at least a little bit of context on in this space but specifically um I slice it with thinking about me and how me is expressed in the protocol because that's what I work on so for me what permission lessness means is that any actor is able to express their value or preference into a block at any point in the block construction process um and that value is able to percolate to be expressed through the process and into the system uh you might note that this is actually the same as many definitions of censorship resistance essentially if you pay a fee you get in is one slicing although there's a lot of kind of details there um okay other than permission lists we must also make E3 distributed so this one is pretty obvious to this means taking computations that right now require one big computer or one big server and breaking them down into small pieces that we can then distribute kind of all over the network and all over the world um without doing this it's hard to imagine how to decentralize if you require a huge computer to do everything in one central place that's inherently not decentralized um all right this property as I said is the most important geoeconomic decentralization I'll spend a little longer on it um so this specifically is a is a very specific notion of geoeconomic decentralization saying that collocation in the protocol must yield minimal additional profit so this is not saying hey we have a note in France and a note in the US it's not saying hey we're on three of these AWS topologies of power we're on three of these links or five that is not geoeconomic decentralization geoeconomic decentralization is saying that there's a Level Playing Field in your system for people who are participating outside of those existing corridors of power outside of those existing latency links outside of that game theory we've created with AWS and those people must be able to participate as profitably and as meaningfully as the people who are sitting in New York as the people who are sitting in Japan collocated with binance and Etc if you reduce the participation of those systems in the network in the iterated game as time passes your network collapses to these Central points of geography and power and then you lose any hope censorship resistance or any of the other properties you want all right so those properties sound great can we actually build that well this is my troll road map to uh get there uh it's a little bit oversimplified but hopefully it communicates the point so I believe right now standing from today there are two things or or or kind of two broad pushes I want to work on the first is to teifi everything why teifi well we're going to get more into that in a second but basically tees allow us to distribute the computation so remember when we said before the one big computer becomes many small computers tees give you the trust apis to make that possible with untrusted parties operating these small computers and once you have this distribution you don't have decentralization yet but at least you're able to start pushing pushing this infrastructure and pushing the power to the edges of your network and outside of those lines of AWS those lines of power that we have today so after we teifi everything we have to start in a cycle doing two things the first is pushing this power to the edge as we deconstruct the computation as we modularize it we push and then the second thing is also to reduce the power of actually tees in our system so tees are not a silver bullet they're not you know a magical solution to everything they give a lot of power in the system to Intel they take it away from that graph that I showed you earlier with AWS and move the needle a little bit more right now towards Intel and Nvidia and AMD and other Hardware manufacturers so while I would argue that's better than only having kind of trafi latency corridors determine the evolution of our Network it's still not perfect right and there's a lot we can do using other cryptography including what we've heard on the panel before uh using using other alternative te approaches open tees uh things like that to sort of remove power from the te itself as well so I think it's a two trck approach once we have the platform to distribute and push things to the edges we then have to actually start pushing things to those edges and I'm going to cover how you all can help with that shortly um but also start kind of eroding that Core Power that we've now built up in moving this needle to this other party which is Intel um so I'm going to ask for your help please uh so please give me your arms or if you don't have arms just your body give me your soul sounded kind of dystopian so I'm not going to ask for your soul uh but please give me your help in this and how can you all help with this well if you're a Dap developer if you're an infrastructure developer if you're a user ask yourself how can we for our our uses what we're doing what we're using the protocol for how can we get power off of these corridors of power that we see here can we use endpoints that are in different locations do they meet our needs can we deploy our server somewhere that geographically makes sense for the change we're trying to create in the world rather than defaulting to us east1 on AWS because it's the first thing that happens when you click launch are we able to make that change as a space I think everyone needs to spend some time thinking about what am I doing and is it actually helping centralize power onto these power corridors or is it actually helping push power out to the edges uh which is what actually underlies the long-term value of decentralization and cooperation and even the price yes um okay so going back to this graph uh um well one obvious thing you might just say is oh we have many boxes why not just have many of them just sign or have some sort of list where the proposer is forced to sign well the reason is very simple because it doesn't actually solve the power distribution problem it's not a meaningful solution to censorship in any way right um if in your metag game you collapse to a state where the system itself is very centralized no form of technical papier-mâché technical decentralization Etc even though it feels really good to us as technologists it feels great to just say like hey we can just do this and it solves the problem does it I mean let's let's let's think about it for a second um so certainly on binance Smart chain it would not and in general what I would say is censorship and power dynamics and the way our money works these are political problems we're not going to Tech Tree our way out of these problems we need to have deeper conversations about where the power is in our Network where we're building power in our Network and how we iterate that towards a place that works better for us um that being said that doesn't mean that as technologist we can do nothing our job is not to make it worse so please also help me in that if you're participating in this space do not centralize power back to those corridors um and remember today we already live in a world where much of the world's power is centralized and centralization begets centralization so I think this is really existential to eth we're at the point where we have a choice as a community of do we start pushing the power we've built out outside of AWS or do we concentrate it seeking ETF inflows seeking Stock Exchange listings seeking trafi participation and concentrate the system to the very corridors of power that we thought we were disrupting um so to get actual decentralization well the definition is very simple it's how much have you pushed this to the edges um and I wish it was something that could be easily Quantified but unfortunately it's not and that's just something we have to live with a few more things I have to say so the first is um this is a little bit spicy and a little trolly I think we should reject the ethereum endgame so the ethereum endgame for those who know it specifically is a slightly older probably like somewhat out ofd post so I'm kind of attacking a strawman here basically saying that like hey is it really that bad if we have these big centralized machines doing things specifically for meev but then we kind of keep them honest with the rest of the network we keep that lightweight and everything I think that's defeatism personally I think we can decentralize all the things and I think as long as you have a central Corridor of power a central source of concentrated power any sort of system on top is not going to be able to meaningfully police or control it uh so we need to actually decentralize all the things that require the big machines as well um doing a deeper dive into how this relates to censorship resistance um so censorship resistance is a very interesting topic traditionally in the academic space it says that if you create a transaction that assume you pay the fees you'll be included within some number of blocks that number is called Delta it's called the censorship resistance or synchrony parameter um so one question I have for us as a protocol is what Delta do we actually need and how do we VA value various Deltas in the protocol against other properties we care about like power distribution kind of uh Geographic decentralization Etc uh because as you push Delta to zero you actually get Fair ordering out of the the censorship resistance definition right if you need to be included immediately as soon as your transaction is sent well what does that mean for the person that's on the other side of the world how does that stack up with them what if your Delta is below the network limit how does that then get resolved into the protocol how do we weigh collapsing these tradeoffs against other centralizing effects we can create in the meev space that maybe help us build this robust geopolitical base and actually allow us to push power back into the edges so I think the most dangerous thing the space can do right now is essentially fetishize and Chase one block censorship resistance at the expense of all of the core properties that will actually provide geopolitical robustness and censorship resistance in the long term I think we haven't had a conversation in the community about how to weigh those two things together uh so let's do that please before we start yoloing protocol updates uh and let's do that in a way that addresses this approach to to censoring our networks um so what we need for decentralization is real Global meaningful distribution of power that sounds great Phil but we all know there's certain things standing in the way of that um so the first one is what I call ux fenel this is a web 2 mentality that you need to make things faster and more addictive for your users if your users aren't addicted if they're not running on your treadmill if they're not generating returns you failed you're a bad person you're a bad founder no that's not the way we build web 3 applications I'm sorry uh right if you chase ux fenel you chase the dragon over and over and over again to the end State well now you need 50 millisecs now you need 10 milliseconds now the mind can perceive 5 milliseconds we've gone down that path in web 2 and we We've Ended up with users that can't meaningfully interact with the technology these zombies that just are kind of fed these inputs right how many people like that here nobody likes it right so let's stop that in web 3 please enough um yeah seriously another one I want to talk about and this is a little bit mean to the EF so I feel a little bit bad whenever I talk about this but napkin research um and I tried to choose a slightly fancier napkin this time instead of like a like a dirty napkin or something but I think do a lot of our research discussions very informally and without even having deep conversations about what are principles what does censorship resistance mean to us what does this protocol change mean how do you define it I think we can do a lot more I've written a blog post about a few ideas I have but I'd love to talk to people because I think the problem with napkin research is when you have a room this big the napkins become a flood and it becomes too easy to Lobby too easy to capture the process too easy to get kind of YOLO protocol upgrades and bad ideas shipped into the L1 we all care about so let's kind of upgrade our napkin uh the problem is if you combine napkin research with ux fenel that's pretty bad situation so uh that that I think is how eth goes to zero it's the combination of n napkin research uh and ux fenel eroding the decentralization we've built so carefully um and leaving US Open to capture to co-opting and to rebuilding the systems we sought to evade so in all of that the exit must be globally distributed power there is no alternative the alternative is0 eth say it again and again and again please in the mirror let's move beyond the napkin um this is a table that I have from a talk I gave at eth Denver I encourage you to look it up it talks about all the technologies that we have including as we talked about kind of programmable encryption and there various trade-offs for deploying in these contexts that we have in distributed protocols including who would break them including rent VES including Geographic decentralization which I think is the most important row here uh we need to jam more about this and fill this table out more unfortunately I don't have time to go deep today but please check it out and let's discuss more uh okay I'm going to leave you with one sound bite yte well they give us the theoretical maximal performance for taking all of these monolithic things we have and distributing them so we can push to the edges and at least for what I care about which is the meev context we can iterate the security there and for your dap if you want to do this the recipe is simple build demand distribute the infra to where your demand exists natively to it and then scale your network from there as for what flash Bots is doing we're doing so many different things in terms of teying everything pushing it to the edges creating platforms for you all to push things to the edges more there's a lot that's going to be coming out in the next few weeks so the only thing I can ask is for you to stay tuned or find me later and please don't forget that that I need your arms so that we can get out of this power dystopia all right thank you very much everyone all right philli well well well napkin fentel and arms that's quite a fascinating presentation but nevertheless let's go right through our Q&A we got about 4 minutes left is there any value to centralization at all or do you believe everything in life should be decentralized what do you think philli yeah I mean I think for example uh government is fundamentally centralized right and many people find that valuable in many contexts I think you know like uh for example my laptop is like a centralized Computing hub for myself I don't necessarily want to decentralize that I think it really depends on the application I think decentralization is useful where you want cooperation across differences and that's actually where the power and censorship resistance comes from the more different people that are cooperating under the same ENT and the more each one walks away feeling like yes that was fair that was a just outcome the more robustness the more censorship resistance you get for free uh and so I think in those cases it's it's it's not centralization is is harmful but in other cases it totally does make sense excellent thank you very much all right I see people voting and up voting the up voting the questions right at the top with five votes tees are Peak centralization three us companies a local device zk's viable alternative take it a away yeah so we can have a deeper conversation about ZK zks don't allow for the kind of like Interactive Group computation that you need to do in a lot of consensus protocols or for example me or transaction processing so maybe like kind of at the edges of like okay if I show you a proof maybe you can run this more limited algorithm yes but at the core it's not really the same Tech or the same abstraction I think all of the entries in that table ZK MPC fhe tees Etc cryptoeconomics they can all chisel away at the centralization so it's all about using which one is appropriate for your app maybe your app is already centralized maybe it doesn't need go decentralization then why would you use a te right um Etc so like I think it's about putting as much as possible off tees and making tees also able to be kind of more trusted by having open tees and things like that in the future but yeah it is it is a centralization risk for sure all right excellent question excellent answer sir how do you think centralization risk of staking compares to the rest of your pillars uh I'm not sure what centralization risk of staking means uh if it means like basically the stake set becoming more centralized or the fact that staking exists centralizing the coin Supply I think there's many like slices of staking and centralization um I think I think yes it is kind of implied by the rest of my pillars in my worldview like if we have permissionless and distribution and specifically geod decentralization where it's fair for you to participate no matter where you stake I think you get less stake centralization so I would say for me it's like Downstream of the pillars if you want to slice it there I think it is a totally valid thing to have on the table say like we don't want centralization into the stake set all right we got one minute more let's try one last question with six up votes te solve every problem that was previously described in the programmable cryptography session why aren't more people promoting them not only do they solve all the problems but you can use them together to give you defense in depth to give you various optimizations and things like that we're building like a lot of stacks to help people do that so I think a lot of people are promoting them I think people are afraid I think people in crypto and in life and in general they love binaries either tees are broken and they're useless they're garbage we need to burn them down or they're the best thing ever and like they cast every opinion on te into one of these two buckets the reality is much more wants they make sense for a lot of applications they don't for many others um I think people are promoting and using them and seeing success using them actually basically everywhere they make sense um so I do think you will see more people promoting and using them over time definitely in time to come ladies and Gentlemen let's give our speaker another big big round of applause thank you very much Phillip