Unitalk | Gavin Wood: My Story with Ethereum – Unitimes

Let’s see how he is changing the world with code.

You have been interested in economics and game theories since childhood, and even designed your own board games. How did this childhood experience influence you? Did your hobbies help you develop who you are today?

As a child I was always both logical and creative. I started programming at around 8 years old on a friend’s computer but before then I would love to play lego, rarely following the instructions, always keen to build when my imagination took me.

As a teenager learning more about the world, this was turned somewhat towards games, both board games and video. I enjoyed programming games and even had one reviewed well in the number one platform magazine. Whether this influenced me or whether it was just a manifestation of something already there, I don’t know.

Compared to the public, they all pay attention to the role of Bitcoin as a form of currency. However, you value the technology as a unique technology stream. What attracted you to the blockchain technology? Why did you choose to create Ethereum at the first place? And why did you later choose to create Parity after leaving Ethereum?

I was never particularly interested in Bitcoin for its economics; they may have been important in its initial popularity but were never of interest to me. When I first heard of Bitcoin in 2011, I dismissed it for that reason. When I examined the protocol and its ramifications again in 2013, I saw something quite different: a means of making economically strong signalling without reference to a mutually trusted entity. This, rather than the (eventually) deflationary economics drew me to the technology.

Ethereum was a fun project to help teach myself about blockchain. I typically prefer to just jump in and start working with a technology rather than study it beforehand. If there’s something I don’t understand that I can’t work out for myself, then I might go to study, but only then. That’s what happened with Ethereum. I set about coding it as a learning exercise (and, actually, partly as a fun holiday project). I had no idea it’d turn out to be something bigger.

There was a vague idea between myself, Jeff and Vitalik that we would stay together and move on from the Foundation into a company to help develop out Ethereum as a platform, but in the end it was just me (though Vitalik stayed as an advisor). During my time at Parity I would have enjoyed continuing in some “ecosystem architect” role at the Foundation, but sadly that wasn’t to be. Nonetheless, I knew I still had more to contribute to Ethereum and the wider ecosystem by the time the my departure came at the end of 2015, and when I chatted to my friends and fellow programmers Arkadiy and Marek, they pitched me with the idea of the three of us writing a fresh implementation from the ground up in a new language called Rust. It sounded like quite the challenge and opportunity to both learn and focus on something new so I agreed.

The Parity that you founded was known to all of the world and you are the first person who write Ethereum in Rust. Currently, there are many DApps on the market. From a technical point of view, how do you evaluate the emerging DApps on the market? At the same time, as a consultant for many projects, what do you think are the necessary DNA for good projects?

I have in the past agreed to advise a few of projects personally but these days tend to avoid advisory; if it happens it’s generally indirectly through Parity. I would certainly not claim to be necessary, but I guess some projects feel that my experience and vision can help them move themselves forward.

I think it’s great that there are people experimenting so deeply with the platform, however I can’t say that I’ve seen a real, implemented Dapp thus far that has made a truly lasting impression on me as something remarkable. There are for sure some great ideas floating around like Gnosis, Melonport, Provenance and Orchid and I think it will happen eventually but I also think that the platform is as yet somewhat under-developed for anything truly great — scalable consensus, dark messaging, fast data publication and a resource-efficient accessible user-interface have yet to be delivered. I hoped that the Web3 Foundation would be able to help with some or all of those things, though of course our hands are somewhat tied as long as our funds remain blocked.

What do you think about Parity’s “multi-signature” wallet issue that caused hundreds of millions of Ethereum to be frozen? What impact/influence did this on you? Are there any potential risks in the smart contract platform? How do you feel about the whole incident? How do you think about “security” in the crypto world?

It was a highly unfortunate incident that underlines both to me personally and to the ecosystem how sharp this “knife” that we created really is. While I wasn’t directly involved in the flawed software, it certainly led me to reflect that I was over-confident in the abilities of those around me and thus by extension, in my own judgment.

These days I’m somewhat more paranoid about whose technical opinion to trust. I leave all operational security decisions to people with appropriate experience and tend to act in an advisory role. Parity itself commissioned a top-to-bottom audit of all “production” software.

The platform itself is full of risk, as you would expect with a nascent technology. While the wallet I wrote back in 2015 is still in widespread use and has had no significant vulnerabilities found, it is a complex piece of software and could yet reasonably contain a critical flaw. The Solidity compiler similarly could do, and in principle, the protocol itself could contain another issue as happened during Devcon-2, only if discovered this time, it would certainly halt the network since it is already saturated. It’s the price you pay for the ability to access this world-changing software in its days of inception.

Polkadot is committed to solving cross-chain technology and is said to be able to solve both cross-chain and scalability issues, which are the core problems of the current world. Cosmos is also a multi-chain blockchain project. So what are the similarities and differences between Cosmos and Polkadot?

Cosmos takes the “instant finality” property of the PBFT-derived “Tendermint” algorithm and, by requiring chains to have relatively small sets of authorities that run it, let them track each other’s authorities and thus be able to receive concise proofs that certain actions happened. This system might reasonably be considered “side-chains for Tendermint” and has the same problems as it.

The three big problems that it does not solve (at least in its principle form) are scalability, governance and trust-free message passing. Polkadot makes significant inroads into both.

The first, “scalability” revolves around security and how that scales. As is often mentioned as a criticism of side-chains (even by its authors) the ability to have multiple chains within a system does not in itself solve scalability if the shared security apparatus cannot intrinsically be applied to all chains without reducing its strength. For example, in a proof-of-stake system, such as that implied by Tendermint/Cosmos, each new chain that is added to the system must provide a fresh economic incentive in order to attract new validators to secure itself. If a chain cannot afford to pay the new validators because it is new and have few users and a low token value, then it will be insecure and open to attack. A form of merge mining is possible, but unlikely to be systematically viable for dozens or hundreds of chains without a complex system in place (that would probably look something like Polkadot). This leads on to the next point.

Having multiple chains be able to talk to each other is useful, but only if they can trust what each other is saying. If chains can have different levels of security, then it’s possible that the validation and “finality“ of one chain isn’t as a valid or final as another chain in the system. Messages that come from the less-secure chain could be invalid. Cosmos works around this by a highly validated “hub” chain, however this has two drawbacks: it introduces a point of centralisation and it restricts the nature of messages that can be passed to only messages that the hub chain can validate. For Cosmos this means nothing more than token-transfer messages. Since Polkadot has shared security between all chains, it suffers neither problem: new chains share the existing security apparatus and the system as a whole becomes stronger and more secure since the value of the DOT token which is bonded to the security of all chains goes up. Similarly, since all chains share the same security apparatus, they can absolutely trust all messages sent from all chains, not merely the “hub” chain.

Finally, Polkadot is architected to have binding on-chain governance. Since all core parts of the Polkadot protocol are written in WebAssembly and stored on-chain, upgrades, rescues and changes can be voted upon with whatever political structure the participants decide. Initially it is a combination of referendums and a delegated council through rotating approval votes. Cosmos has nothing comparable.

Polkadot completed crowdfunding/ICO and locked in for two years in 2017. So far, what are the technological breakthroughs? What stage does Polkadot be now?

We recently released PoC-1, which introduces a basic proof-of-stake PBFT-derived consensus algorithm, networking/chain-synchronisation and a WebAssembly core runtime with governance structure.

We are fast working towards PoC-2 which will an initial parachain environment to allow for shared security between multiple parachains, a better proof-of-stake mechanism involving slashing and rewards and network telemetry.

Going forward, we’re aiming to have all consensus and parachain prototyping wrapped up before the end of this year with next year dedicated to refinement, tooling, auditing, bridges, parachains and, eventually, platform release.

What’s your point of view in terms of governance?

Governance is a necessary function of any system that hopes to survive changing circumstances. Governance was an afterthought with the design of Ethereum, something I feel somewhat responsible for, but would also consider outside of the “version 1.0” requirements. It is largely dysfunctional today (though not as bad as for Bitcoin), and I believe this will cost the network.

While off-chain governance can be enough for a system to get by, on-chain governance radically alters what we can achieve in terms of transparency and inclusion, opening the doors to social constructs that would otherwise be impractical or impossible to implement. We should not be shy in experimenting.

How would you evaluate EOS? Why it’s getting popular, which necessary DNA does it have based on what you have mentioned in question 3?

EOS is an example of what can happen when lacklustre technology is combined with excessive marketing, particularly targeting the ignorant and most vulnerable. I generally don’t think regulation is a great thing for the ecosystem, but if there’s one project that makes a great case to change my mind, then this is it.

I wouldn’t like to guess where their “popularity” comes from. Moving in purely technical circles as I do, I must say I don’t see much of it.

Technically speaking, I know of no “DNA” that it has which is either interesting or groundbreaking. The claims are rather superlative, but from what little I know of it, it appears to be the lead technician’s previous codebase retrofitted to an EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) clone. Not what I would call innovative.

Finally, what do you want to say to programmers who are learning and are about to learn the blockchain? As Blockchain is an open-source technology, would you suggest people who want to explore more about blockchain to go to university for further study or study by themselves online?

I enjoyed my time at university, it’s a great environment to be in for personal development and socialisation. I think it’s a great thing to do and would recommend it to anyone to do once. But if you really want to change the world, then the place to do it is not there.

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