Gavin Wood: Cosmos is not enough to trust, not enough to expand

On September 25th, we met Gavin wood again in Haidian District, Beijing. The insiders are no strangers to him. This entrepreneur who once co-founded Ethereum with V God, wrote the Ethereum Yellow Book, invented the Solidity language, and created the Ethereum client Parity, this year because of the new cause – is considered Polkadot, a competitor of Ethereum, has become the hottest figure in the world of blockchain.

Recently, he is running around China, and last night was the Tsinghua University Station in Beijing. The next day, in addition to the Odaily Planet Daily, he was filled with media interviews in the morning.

Before the interview, I was a little bit cold. This time I was with my boss, Mandy. As a big fan of the animation "Rick and Morty", after learning that Gavin wore the same theme in the Shanghai blockchain week last week, Out of the fan's consciousness, Mandy told Gavin's "defect" that the animation producer died. Gavin didn't know it. It was estimated that he was "very big", so he talked a lot about the truth.

The last time I met with Gavin, we interviewed Gavin about some of Polkadot's private placements and kusuma's latest information. In this interview, we focused on web3.0 and Libra, and the inevitable Cosmos, and the recent Edgeware; especially on the topic of Cosmos and Polkadot, Gavin not only talked to us about Cosmos, but also with us. Said his thoughts on "Trustless Trusted Network".

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The Internet does not "grow"

In the article "Why do we need Web3," Gavin wrote the following sentence: The Internet is like a giant baby, it is aging, but it has never grown up. He once said that the Internet already has a large number of users around the world, but because of the structural flaws, the Internet has never really taken up the responsibility that should be completed.

Gavin reinterpreted this view. He said that although the size of the Internet is growing, there is no "growth." Explicitly explained, "When a child grows up as an adult, not only does it mean that ta has more rights, it also means that the role of ta in the world is also increasing, and its actions have more impact and consequences; accordingly, You should assume some specific responsibilities.” In Gavin's view, the company is the same, the big company that has the user data, once the data is leaked, it will have direct consequences: privacy is leaked and the user's life is affected, in addition When the data is in the hands of some unauthorised people, it may be misused and abused.

In addition, Gavin also cites Alipay's example. "If I am in a rural area, the network connection is not very stable, then payment is not convenient, because you have to connect to Alibaba's server to complete the payment." Gavin believes that the Internet is nothing but "The combination of the decentralized nature of the Internet becomes a very central service." In the Internet world, people rely on centralization for reliability and stability.

Libra and web3.0

For some traditional giants trying to embrace web3.0, such as Libra, Gavin also expressed his opinion.

He believes that Libra is indeed a decentralized technology, both in terms of technology and the legal environment. But it's "privileged, license-based", which means that users are not free to use Libra for free, and developers are not free to innovate on Libra.

On the other hand, “Libra is behind a group of centralized companies, all rooted in the US territory. So Libra is a very US-centric service, not a single company-centric service.” What's more, Web 3.0 is an international concept, not a national concept.

This is why web 3.0 requires a blockchain because the blockchain provides super-sovereignty rather than relying on the authorization of a government.

He uses law as an example. "The basic criminal law is this: everyone can't murder each other, nor can they attack each other. The law is our code of conduct. Everyone needs to act according to regulations. But if there is no justice that can be uniformly followed. Jurisdiction, then the law does not work well."

If you want to act in accordance with New York law, once there is a disagreement, both sides need to fly to New York for trial, but this solution is very troublesome, the traffic is expensive, and the lawyer is very expensive. If a blockchain is used, everything can be solved with a smart contract.

How to think about web3.0?

 

In Gavin's view, for developers who are interested in new things and new thinking, the advantage of web3.0 is that the application is "decentralized". In web3.0, the process of building an application is like doing A pure algorithm, only needs to be designed correctly, does not need to do the chore of running the server, the developer is thus more focused on "development" rather than "deployment and operation."

In addition, cryptographic assets are also an important part of web 3.0 because of its existence, so that development activities and economic activities are still encouraged without an authority.

Facebook-like websites take advantage of the user's attention, but in web 3.0, no application can really control the user's attention, because everything is done on the user side. In wen3.0, we create an internal economy where users can purchase services with tokens, but the channels they receive tokens are diverse, such as mining, such as contributing our attention, contributing data, and exchanging other services.

“We can imagine a more consensual Internet,” Gavin said.

And Polkadot's web3.0 is a platform for innovation. In Gavin's view, “this ecosystem is not unimaginative. Sometimes it lacks the ability to execute and lacks infrastructure; in addition, the current innovation is A low level of innovation.” What Polkadot does is to ensure the security, privacy, scalability and underlying business logic behind the application scenario.

There will be more such infrastructure in at least three years. “We will be able to host decentralized applications that scale reasonably, and we will be able to use them in secure and decentralized wallets, browsers, etc. This is probably not happening on mobile phones, but instead On electronic devices, even laptops alone; there will be privacy services that provide identity authentication; developers are free to do whatever they want without worrying about Facebook or the US government going to shut them down."

Cosmos and Polkadot

Although the contrast between Cosmos and Polkadot is a common problem, this time Gavin's answer is clearly beyond our expectations.

At last week's Wanxiang Blockchain Summit, Cosmos founder Jae once said that "more than 40% of PoS chains use Tendermint". We asked Gavin what it is like and whether Substrate has the same potential?

Gavin first said that he was not surprised by this data, and then quoted Churchill's famous saying that "there are only three kinds of lies in the world: lies, damn lies and statistics". He thinks that Cosmos is relatively faster in cooperation, but important. It's not the number of chains, but the chain of links. Substrate is the best tool for his hair chain and will be the best production tool. He is also very happy that Substrate is ready.

For Cosmos, Gavin said that Tendermint is not a new technology, and Parity was implemented a few years ago. Cosmos's idea is relatively quick to implement, but it is indeed a simple technique.

Gavin believes that Cosmos is not completely "de-trusted." In his view, the Cosmos Zone has no choice but to use the same set of consensus mechanisms, Tendermint. "So you can't make innovations in the consensus mechanism. You also have to use the Cosmos SDK. It is because of these built-in infrastructure that you can deploy blockchains very quickly and bridge each other through the Cosmos hub. You can also send coins, which is where Tendermint is useful, but It’s just that, because Tendermint is simple, so it’s limited.”

In Cosmos, between the chain and the chain, because the Cosmos centralized hub is needed to exchange messages and tokens, the premise is that everyone needs to trust the hub. "This is not trust free, nor is it There is no need to trust (trustless), but bound (bound); otherwise, in Cosmos, because Zone does not share nodes, it does not share the same security guarantees. So Gavin thinks that “the zones can't talk directly, and they can't trust each other. Only the hub controls the symbolic balance on each chain.”

So, in Gavin's view, it is not a highly scalable chain. “If a system wants to be scalable, it needs to be scalable to support multiple blockchains without adding new nodes and without adding extra security.” Polkadot has achieved precise “scalability”. There is a verification node pool in Polkadot that guarantees that different chains can be verified at the same time.

Gavin added that from a technical basis, Cosmos's problem-solving assumption is that the world is a blockchain that uses the Tendermint consensus mechanism, and everyone is happy to trust a Tendermint centerchain, and everyone is happy to be at these Tendermint Transfer tokens to each other in the chain.

In contrast, Polkadot's vision is: "If I have a new idea about the blockchain. I don't have to think about verifying the nodes, and I don't have to think about security. I want to quickly deploy a blockchain. Blockchains need to run fast enough to connect directly to all blockchains in the Polkadot ecosystem, including Bitcoin and Ethereum."

Gavin also whispered Token, "Forget the token, I know that token is an important part of the decentralized system economy, but that's it." In Ethereum, token is used as an internal economic tool. Paying miners' wages, as well as transactions, as a means of collecting fees, Gavin also introduced us to Polkadot's new vision, Parathread (parallel thread), and parallel chains need to bid slots, Parathreads Only a small amount (approximately 10-100) of a fixed number of DOTs can be used.

And when the transaction needs to be accelerated, Parathreads will be woken up, paying DOT for the blocks they process. Once processed, Parathreads can sleep. In Gavin's words, it's a blockchain and smart contract. It can also be upgraded to parachain. Let each development team use the Polkadot relay chain to provide a buffer ramp for the parallel chain, allowing the “retired” parallel chain to survive, and the team can pay for what they need.

Edgeware is very courageous

Recently, Edgeware, a well-known ecological project of Polkadot, is very active. In mid-September, the Edgeware team once launched the main network, but after two days, it declared “failure”: downgraded the main network that was launched two days ago to the test network, and then completed the comprehensive chain test, all the problems were solved. Then go back online.

We also asked Gavin about the matter. Gavin stressed that the current technology is still in its early stages, Edgeware has the courage to take risks, but it has not been successful. If Kusama is launched, they may be more rewarding.

Gavin said, "If I think it will succeed, then I will definitely start the Polkadot main network, but now we have not yet reached that step. We have adopted a method that tends to avoid risks, if it can not guarantee more than 99% stability and Security, the main network will not be launched, but Edgeware may only be 50% certain, they are better at the application layer." From an operational point of view, Gavin believes that the established roadmap can be based on the facts in actual implementation. Adjust as appropriate.

However, Gavin also feels that if Edgeware tries to do this a year ago, the situation will be even worse, so it also proves that over time, bugs are constantly being revised and the technology is constantly maturing. Initially Polkadot said that in the third quarter of this year, the team is currently trying to improve and trial and error, perhaps in the fourth quarter of 2019 or the first quarter of next year. Developers can try some things on Kusama and experience the efficiency of Polkadot.

In addition, Gavin said it was reasonable for Parity to participate in Edgeware's Signal Airdrop using ETH in the frozen wallet. He believes that Edgeware's approach is to fix the frozen ETH property ownership.

Odaily Planet Daily senior analyst Li Xueting and Polkaworld Pang Xiaojie also contributed to this article.

 

Source: Planet Daily

Author: aloe

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