What is Polkadot? | A Polkadot for Beginners Guide and Intro to Blockchain

we're live hi everybody thanks for joining this is Dan reser from the Webb three foundation and I'm joined here by my teammate Bill Lagoon you're here to talk to you guys about a presentation on polkadot for beginners and really the goal with this is to give a very simplified kind of jargon free explanation of what polkadot is along with you know the background of the Internet and that leading into the formation of the block paint industry let's start off with Bill maybe you can give a quick introduction of yourself and then I can do the same and we can get started sure so hi everyone my name is Bill Laboon I am the Technical Education lead here at web 3 foundation in Switzerland I've put up a slide with some some contact information in case you're interested in reaching out to me I come here after five years as a lecturer in the computer science department at the University of Pittsburgh and loving the sunshine here today and I'm Dan racer like I mentioned I work on community and growth here at the web 3 foundation primarily focused on our two primary brands polkadot and Kusama I recently Kate I started in blockchain a couple years ago actually going on three years now and then before that spend a lot of time in the pharma pharmaceutical industry at the beginning of my career so bill I guess go ahead and get started with the presentation and I'll minimize myself okay uh so just before we start I want to reiterate what Dan said is this presentation is really meant for beginners so if you do hear me use some jargon I'm try not to but in case I accidentally slip up please feel free to hit ask a question and Dan will be monitoring it to see if there's anything that we can help with here so this again is meant for people that may have heard of blockchain or they've heard of poccadot but aren't really sure what it is what it's used for you don't need to have any sort of background in blockchain in order to get something out of this we're really going to start at the very beginning so please feel free to ask questions there are no dumb questions there are no bad questions not much if you don't understand something it's it's my fault so please feel free to to ask so just to give a brief overview of everything that we're going to cover I want to talk briefly about how the internet came about and how it is evolved and the history as well of blockchain and crypto as well as a lot of the similarities between the two we'll also explain what blockchain is the issues with legacy block chains and how polkadot solves them and what we expect to see although it's very hard to predict the future happening with polka dot in the long-term timeframe so let's go all the way back to the late 60s when computers were first created and people first started using them they really were islands unto themselves you had an individual computer and if you wanted to bring information from another computer you put it on a diskette or a reel-to-reel tape or a bunch of punch cards and brought it over to the other computer there were a few experiments with networked computing systems starting in in the mid-60s and the most famous one was was ARPANET and arguably the most popular at this time which connected many many of these different computing sites you'll notice a lot of these sites here are universities CMU Rutgers Illinois some such as NSA are not universities one of the interesting things I found looking on this map that Norse are one of the first non-us parts of ARPANET this first precursor to the Internet was a Norwegian seismological Research Centre I'm really not sure the story behind why that was one of the first connections to the Internet but there you go so something you know I want you to sort of think about in terms of evolution here is that we had these individual Island computers and they slowly were getting more connected throughout the 60s and 70s but it wasn't like nowadays where you you you have a network connection in your pocket if you were in Harrisburg or Philadelphia for instance well you'd have to if you wanted to connect to the ARPANET you would drive down to Aberdeen and Maryland or CMU and Pittsburgh etc and that would be the only way to to connect another interesting thing I want to bring up here when this network first started people really saw it as a way to increase the computational power of these computers they said well if this computer is really good at doing this kind of math and this computers is very good at doing this other kind of math maybe we can combine them to solve more complicated math problems so I think you'll see we didn't really understand what this network was going to be used for when we first created it and in fact very quickly it became apparent that communication was a major part of what people wanted to use this network for there before there was email people would actually basically send files or update files and other people's home directories that people to send messages to others soon after that in the early 70s this was formalized into a real email system and very quickly people started using it in fact queen elizabeth ii sent her first email in 1976 for a long time new email was sort of the most advanced most complicated technology that we were using on top of this this network and then in 78 there was a real sea change where Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf created a serious series of protocols basically just rules that allowed networks to connect to each other and different networks to connect to each other there it was think of it as as an Esperanto a standardized language that all of these networks could use and in 1983 ARPANET which was that the largest network at the time adopted this this mechanism of communicating again think of it as it is develop you of Esperanto or English instead of individual languages there was some generic language that we could all use so now that there was this common protocol we had other networks joining the ARPANET and so instead of just the ARPANET it was NSFNET and DOD met in all of these different networks fidonet that could all connect to each other and talk to each other using the same language eventually ARPANET was decommissioned they're turned off and that gave birth to the Internet they had already made a system that allowed all of these different networks to interact with each other so we've gone from individual computers to computers interacting with each other at networks to now all of these networks talking to each other and once we had this we suddenly see an explosion in the 90s in terms of things that could be done on top of tcp/ip the generic language protocol that these computers were using other protocols were developed such as HTTP which you may have seen if you've ever entered at the top of a webpage you know HTTP colon slash slash whatever this is a protocol built on top of tcp/ip which enabled things like web pages after that we started getting commercialization of the network so we had a Netscape and we had the dot-com boom in the 90s Amazon Google and in fact many of the largest companies now are you know do things that would have been unthinkable back in the 60s when people were first thinking of how to connect the different computers to solve math problems more effectively you know and when you think about you pick up your phone and you share a cat picture you know can you really imagine someone in the 60s doing that or then thinking like oh but the fact that these networks can inter communicate means that someday a company with a strange name of Google will be able to get a lot of data and that's going to help machine translation so I can automatically translate you know Slovakian to Russian or whatever so one of the things I want to show you is that as this as these connections grow as the network grows more people can use them and as anyone can use these networks different things happen that are very hard to predict from the from the beginning but this inter communication and this networking has been very very effective in bringing new ideas into place and allowing people to implement them so if we look really at like this the 70s we had a lot of technology being developed that now helps lay the groundwork for how computers communicate with each other so tcp/ip is just how to networks interact SMTP is Simple Mail Transfer Protocol how the emails get sent to each other HTTP is how does a web page get sent to your computer tools are built that use those fundamental protocols that everybody shares so the apps on your phone your email client your web browser and on top of that what we see are the user applications the social media the search engines the new sites whatever you use your your computer for your phone for whatever you access the internet for really depends upon these lower levels these foundational levels that were developed over time so that is this basic idea I want to get across from you is that this was a slow process of movie of developing fundamental protocols and allowing better communication and how that led to the modern Internet so I want you to keep that in mind as we start talking about blockchain and its history and how it developed so blockchain you know I know it's a fancy buzzword but really all of it is is chunks of data so each chunk of data and this is usually like data that is associated with a particular time period like what's happened over the last ten minutes connected in a chain and distributed among many different computers there's no centralized spot where the blockchain lives there's many computers that are all adding on to this this this chain and it cannot be altered once all of these computers agree on what the next block is so I think a good example and I'm not going to take credit for the credit for this is a poker game so if at the end of every hand everyone records the results of who won the poker game and you know what the hands all were and how much money was put in the pot think of each one of these as a block and after the game is complete you could look through this whole list you know assume everybody is checking and we're writing down in full view of everyone else what the hands were everyone can see everyone can make sure what you're writing down at the end of the game you also can confirm with each other how how the game took place who has how much money so if somebody tries to take out more than that they're owed everyone else can look and say no you started with whatever $100 and you won $200 here but you lost $50 here and you gained $90 here at the end you should have let's say $70 you can't take out a hundred and seventy dollars but this can be done entirely automatically if you are a chess player you've probably also seen this you write down your moves and chess so that anyone can replay that game just looking at the sheet even if they didn't the game itself so if we look at an actual block so that's the basic ideas after every hand think of every hand as a block we could just have transactions in there so this is how a Bitcoin block works for instance so at the beginning and each of these blocks represents one day dan has five million but Dan pays Kevin five million kevin pays bill two million and bill pays dan 1 million that's a block all of the computers can double check each other to make sure that they all agree as the day's move on we see all the transactions and anybody can replay this blockchain and see at the end that Dan has five hundred thousand Kevin has zero dollars and Bill has four and a half million which would be would be very nice for me but anybody can do this anyone can look this is all public and nobody can go back and try to change things if they do trust me that reason nobody can change these things is because this data is not stored in a single place if facebook.com/ went offline there would be no way for anyone to access their data on facebook but with blockchain it's a decentralized network all of the computers that are on the Bitcoin blockchain actually have their own copy their own verifiable copy of the data so it's very very redundant even if half of those computers get knocked offline or 90% or 99% as long as one node as we say one computer is still on with the Bitcoin blockchain it can be replicated again if someone does try to change something it will be your visible to everyone if I try to say or assume that Dan did not pay me 500 thousand so I edit the the data on my own computer to say that Dan actually paid me a million dollars everybody else can verify that that's not true that that was just me trying to you know to cheat Dan out of an extra half a million which I already have four and a half million here why would I do that but everybody can look media we can avoid this sort of situation once that block is in the blockchain it is as we say immutable it can't be changed everybody can verify very easily if somebody tries to change what what happened in the past so we have all of these different computers all over the world all checking on each other to make sure that none of them are telling a lie okay so if I modify my computer here in Canada then the other computers in in Brazil and and Russia and Australia and Namibia all of them can say no you can't trust this this this node don't listen to what it's saying we all know what the real truth is so that's from a very high level what it does but why would a user care about blockchain well one of the really cool things about this is that all of the users on the network can agree on what's in the blocks without trusting each other or even really knowing each other so you can have this this trust lessness that we can I may not trust that a some individual person is going to cheat me at the store like if I go into a store they may give me you know they may lie to me about how much something costs but by virtue of it being on the blockchain we have we have a built in like truth to that we can verify because all of these different computers are all verifying each other all of the time and once that data has been added it can't be modified it's it's going to be very difficult to cook the books if you will to modify like let's say your your accounting in for me you can't go back in time and modify it you can't change what has happened it's virtually impossible for anyone to stop a blockchain from running you would need to find every single node that's run every single computer in the world which is running that blockchain which for you know for most major blockchain networks that's you know tens of thousands if not more computers running this with tens of thousands of copies and as long as you miss one of them the blockchain can keep running and it's already had a question actually on that topic someone else yes what would the Black Swan event that would force a hundred percent of nodes being down so you kind of just touched on that but I guess it would mean something like a complete power outage or is there anything else you could add to that so yeah I can think of some you know really uh Black Swan examples I mean one would be such a major bug in in the code that it modifies the blockchain data itself that scrambles it but even then you know anyone running this code or the the blockchain or has it backed up we'd be able to get back to it like your major nuclear war you know electron electromagnetic pulses that destroy electronics or don't allow them to run I mean really as long as one think of anything that would allow just one computer to survive a network of locking network can survive so again outside of your really black swan' scenarios like you know like a meteor striking the earth that's you know an extinction-level event or such a mess up in code that not only does it destroy all of the data that's already but it already but that's being stored on nodes but also any of that data that's been backed up again it is you when I say virtually impossible I really mean that like outside of really really extreme events the network can keep running now there are things that would cause it to run in a less performant scenario where things might take longer but actually destroying all of that data and and having a blockchain cease to exist would be really incredibly incredibly difficult ok so I hope that answer your question so so finally another thing is due to the fact that all this network excuse me all of this data including your own data can be put on blockchain but it's protected by math that others can't view it unless you want them to it actually can allow us to avoid a lot of major hacks that have been seen so for instance like the Equifax hack in the u.s. a lot of people that had their you know information gathered about them and stored in one single place and once that one single place was hacked then that data was all that data was able to get out it users on the blockchain they actually can store their own data there and interact there but only there only their data is could be even theoretically be be at risk so if I store you if I my Bitcoin wallet and like let's say that I do something really silly and I post my private key like that's that's that's bad I I just lost so if I do something like I don't secure my own data I might lose my own money but there's no way that everybody that's using it could you lose all of their credit card information or their Bitcoin information to the world like what happened with like Target and Home Depot and some of these other hacks that have happened recently users really can own their own own data so with these basic you know pluses in mind that there obviously are some drawbacks to using blockchain technology as well we'll talk a little bit about those we have a lot of use cases out there so instead of having to create accounts on different sites we could have an aw logins or using pseudonyms using our digital identity there's actually some really cool things we can do with digital identities like for instance you may want to prove to somebody that you want to go to a bar and so you want to prove that you're over 21 or 18 or however old you are but why do we need to in order to do that let people know our full name and what year what date we were born you know we're giving a lot of information out using blockchain and using something called zero knowledge proof we actually can do things like prove to someone that were over 21 without actually revealing our birth date or age so there's really a lot of like these really cool tricks that allow us to have these identities without giving out any more information than we need to but you can have all sorts of anti counterfeiting systems in place and we actually see this where different products you know they will register themselves on the blockchain and they'll be digital ownership so anyone can look and prove that you in fact own the IP rights for something or you own a you know an actual Rolex or in and not you know a knockoff copy or something like that because it can be verified on the blockchain we can have your ownership of your own data so you know healthcare is something that we want to you know tell our new doctor for instance like any you know medical history that we have but we don't want the world to know about it we want to let individuals know about it we want to know who has that information how its shared this is also something that can be done via blockchain so healthcare is one instance but there are a lot of places where you might want to share information only with specific people so this is actually a chart from the World Economic Forum about things that blockchain can be used to help with so we have you're voting on the blockchain and other interaction with local governance structures we can create all sorts of financial products on the blockchain so you know Bitcoin obviously is that the first instance people have and they're in their mind of your money on the blockchain but there are many different financial products for example you can loan money to people or swap for different tokens or a rent rent products you can manage other assets there are even more more so smoothly like socially responsible things like there was like there are different ways that blockchain can be used to keep track of pollution and it's hard to again you like alter this like you've got an immutable history of what kind of pollution came out from different plants so whenever you start thinking what is something that it would be very important for somebody to not lie and it also might be important for some people to have information and others not to have it but everyone to verify it then blockchain is a good use case for that so I've already mentioned a Bitcoin which first started in 2009 actually the Bitcoin white paper came out in 2008 and the the the description of it and the actual network started in 2009 and and just like you know our internet talk where there was a history you know we didn't just have Google appear out of whole cloth like you know athena from the forehead of zeus one day there were earlier attempts at creating digital currencies so did you cash for instance in the 80s allowed for anonymous anonymous cash but the merchants the people who actually could accept this money were not anonymous in 1997 a lot of the basic concepts of bitcoin were created by a cryptographer named adam back with half cash but bitcoin really brought every together and we'll talk a little bit later about in 2015 when aetherium came out it allowed applications to be built on top of a blockchain so bitcoin is is a pretty simple application it allows you to transfer value from one account to another aetherium a few years later when it launched allowed you to develop different applications it allowed like truly programmable money and programmable applications on the blockchain and then Dan will be talking about some of the improvements that we are bringing to that with Kusama and polka-dot so remember I said there were a lot of benefits to using blockchain remember you know it's immutable it allows people to trust each other even if they don't know each other it is extremely hard to try to shut down but it also has quite a few problems and I want to go through each of these but very briefly block chains are inherently very good at interacting with each other but they're very poor assuming they're very good at interacting with themselves like on their same chain but very poor at interacting with other networks it's not impossible but it's very difficult just like you know with their poker game it's very easy to keep track of what the cards are at your own table but it's hard to go around to all the other tables and make sure that they're telling the truth as well it can't scale these networks can't handle a lot of traffic and we see them getting clogged up quite often poor security at least for some of these networks if you want to create your own network it's actually quite an uphill slog to create a secure network although Bitcoin and aetherium themselves have very good security on that note why would you want to do that well choosing a single network means there's no customization it's really one size fits all and you may have different needs for what you want to produce or what you want to build on ah poor governance system so it's often very difficult to come to a consensus on the future of the network and what should be done and finally upgrades again due to the nature of blockchain or are actually rather difficult and we'll see why better graphics that I think explains it pretty well so block chains are very good at interacting with data stored on them as long as everybody uses the same blockchain so just like our you know example before we had if everyone is using the same blockchain then we can all check on each other but if some people are using one blockchain and some are using another then interacting between them is extremely difficult and we see many attempts at this but there often are problems and even in a best-case scenario it's very slow they're really meant to trust fully any other data inside their network but are very bad at interacting with other networks without trusting some intermediary like you know trusting someone who's going to take your message from pesos and send it to Bitcoin and bring it back you'd better really trust that messenger so if we you know in a system like this you know see think if we had these different Internet's all over the world so every continent had its own you know there was like North America internet and a South America internet and if somebody wanted to send a message from Pittsburgh to Buenos Aires then they would have to send a message to somebody they know in let's say Panama that person in Panama would print out the message you go across the border go down into Colombia find a system on the South America internet and type it in again it's possible but you need to trust the the intermediary that they're not going to change the message and it's also it's a very slow and awkward and scaling issues so remember I said traditional block chains very resilient but also very slow it's very hard to stop them but they're like tortoises right they're armored but there's they're hard too they're not very fast bitcoin their theoretical max about seven transactions per second but in reality it's more like three or four fury I'm a little bit more than that but visa alone does over 1,700 transactions per second so a single network obviously here is is not going to to work out and we see problems with this by having such a small amount of of scalability for a while in 2018 the average price someone was paying to use the Bitcoin network to send any amount of money was 37 dollars and in fact over the last month from today fees on Bitcoin are up over 800 percent so it's over five dollars last I checked and we've seen similar issues on aetherium where when there are popular applications there's only a limited amount of of space for these transactions to go through and we get a lot of different problems that even can cause people to lose money on these applications and security issues so Bitcoin in aetherium are very secure fundamentally but if you want to create a new blockchain it's very difficult to do in a secure way and in fact we've seen a lot of different attacks carried out there's a famous kind of attack for the 51% attack that allows you again sort of speaking simply here to send money to someone and then take that back right say Ari I'm actually not going to send it to you I'm going to send it back to myself and while a 51% attack would be very difficult to do on Bitcoin and aetherium if you want to use a different blockchain you are very very vulnerable to these attacks and there have been numerous ones that have happened in reality the choice then comes down to either using an existing blockchain you know such as Bitcoin aetherium but maybe it doesn't have all the features you want so you want to have one that's specifically made for gaming or specifically made for finance so you then you could try to create your own from nothing which is very difficult there's a lot of work involved in creating a secure blockchain so it's very hard to customize you either have to not customize at all or really start from scratch governance issues it's very difficult and a lot of these traditional block chains have no way of determining the future of that block chain on chain so you either have a very centralized system with the sort of benevolent dictator watching over the chain and making decisions or a development team that makes decisions or just people interacting you know off chain and deciding on their own using ad-hoc procedures so most of these block chains were not the governance was not really thought out ahead of time and finally we have upgrade issues if you do want to upgrade the software for technical reasons really everyone has to upgrade the software ahead of time so all of these computers and remember there may be thousands of these need to make sure they upgrade the software before this major change occurs otherwise you get what's called a fork so here we see in in black at the bottom the old software somebody it didn't update they're going to see different blocks because there are different rules that their software is going to see then somebody with the upgraded software so if while all of them agree on the previous history since you can't alter this data that's already occurred on the network any network that occurs after the upgrade you may see some people that people that upgrade and have one version of the you know the pink history here while other people see a different version the people that forgot to upgrade or couldn't do it in time and once you have done that these chains are now revelry thundered they are now totally different chains I can't just take the data from the old software and sort of send it over to the new or vice versa either we have to just eliminate all of that that old software and ignore it or the upgraded software has to it has to give up and the people use this the old software so these are quite a few challenges that that that blockchain gives us again a lot of benefits but there are also some challenges so I'm going to let Dan now explain how a polka dot can still can solve some of these challenges all right thanks Bill and I know some questions here in the box most of these I think we'll get to at the end and bill maybe you can take a look at those long going through these slides cool can you guys see my screen yep okay so okay so thanks bill for going through all that now that you guys have a little bit of an understanding of the history of the Internet the history of the blockchain industry and kind of what challenges exist with current networks I'm going to start going through polka dot and how coconuts working to address a lot of these challenges so at the basic level polka dot is a foundational building block of the new web hoping to enable human beings businesses and enterprises and governments to use private and secure applications that don't rely on trusting a third party so bill mentioned a lot about the Facebook and Google and apples of the world and how we are relying on their kind of central point of authority and what what polkadots doing and what I'll explain here and the bid is is how we're building a system that removes the need to rely on trust polka-dot was founded by some of the earliest builders in the industry including Gavin wood who was a co-founder and former CTO of aetherium along with Rob and Peter and a team of people at web 3 and parody so the web 3 Foundation and parody of the two organizations that you'll hear quite a bit as you get into the polka dot ecosystem these are the two primary organizations driving forward polka dot and another project called Kusama the web tree foundation is who bill and I both work for and this is an organization based in Switzerland of around 50 of us around the third or a fourth of our team our cryptographic researchers so these are blockchain wizards that are building a lot of futuristic specifications for how this technology should evolve and then they pass those specifications on the teams like parody another team called sword Mitsu out of Japan to actually use their software development teams and engineers to implement that in the code parody themselves are based in Berlin and as I mentioned it's a big development shop of around 120 people and these two organizations work kind of hand-in-hand on driving polka-dot forward yeah dan I'm not seeing your your slides oh you're not it's showing its showing the crap it's showing the crowdcast screen okay let me sorry i'll one second here we go that's better there we go okay so let me let's see basically what I just walked through was this slide Gavin rob Peter the founders of polka dot and then web three and parody suggest a very quick recap and I know we're getting at around 45 minutes so I'll make this fairly brief and then if you if anyone can stay after the 10:30 my time or after the half hour then we're we're gonna stick around to answer some questions so using the same framework that bill went through to explain to you all the existing problems with current blockchain networks let's use that same framework and walk through the different problems that polkadot is solving and a very simplified manner starting with connecting networks together or interoperability so single blockchain networks include things like Bitcoin the etherium that Bill walked through but also includes custom block chains built on top of polka dots so these will all be singular block chains in the same manner that bitcoin is a singular blockchain but singular block chains are single block chains can be built to do one thing really well so bitcoin does this golde store value use case really really well custom blockchain is built on top of polka dot for example for gaming or for finance or insurance or for healthcare will do one thing really really well because that's what they're focusing on single block chains from the past have also tried to do a lot of different things just okay so platforms like a theory I'm are trying to do everything from gaming to finance running the full gamut of things but they're not focusing on any one area so it's really tough to be great at one thing so that same block team that I showed in the previous slide polka dot as you can see is made up of many of these different custom block chains along this ring here this relay chain as we call it polka dot connects a network of many of these custom-built block chains into one cohesive kind of living and breathing organism as I mentioned before these custom block chains can be built for specific use cases so as you see here in the bottom right these can be built specifically for the Internet of Things or another blockchain can be built specifically for finance another can be built for gaming and maybe in the gaming in the gaming example that blockchain could be built to be super fast but it wouldn't necessarily need the type of you know enterprise or bank like security that I'm a huge banks blockchain would need or anything really in the financial realm and to zoom out even more the reason why we're really excited about coconuts ability to kind of connect all these block chains together as bill walk through you can see that polka dot we'll be building bridges as well to these existing networks like Bitcoin or like hyper ledger for you know the enterprise use cases or to our our other network called Kusama Kusama probably deserves its own entire presentation but just as a quick background Kusama as you can kind of see from the diagram is essentially the exact same code bases polka dot but what Kusama is for is for two things one people who are planning to move on to polka dot will a lot of the times deploy to Kusama first to kind of find tune their technology before moving it on - poke it up and then in the other case there's people who might want to move a little bit faster or take a little bit more risk or maybe have a little bit lower of an economic barrier to getting started and that's another use case that we'll see quite a bit on Kusama so moving on to customization of block chains so block chains on polka dot as i've mentioned are going to be custom-built and optimized for specific purposes so you can think of this like a music producer who uses a many tools including a music equalizer where they can kind of tweak tweak down different aspects of this to change the way the sound change the way the sound works maybe the treble or the bass or whatever you get into as a advanced DJ or producer in the same way polka dots blockchain building framework called substrate is kind of that same idea as the music equalizer it's basically a drag-and-drop pallet system where people can pick and choose what aspects or what features they want in their block chain to specifically build it for a specific use case or to be optimized for a specific industry or application or what-have-you this is this is where it starts to gets to get technical so if you are a developer and interested in kind of how this technology works I would highly recommend checking out I will hide this checking out substrate that IO which is a brand new site that parody just published and it has a lot of really great tutorials explanations documentation and so on now getting into scale polka dot handles transactions at the scale of mass global commerce bill walked through the example of Bitcoin starting from the bottom which has a maximum capacity of seven transactions per second Ethier iam has a max around 15 to 20 transactions per second and these says actual transactions per second so what they actually see on a day-to-day basis is around 1,700 transactions but visa can if they needed to they can process up to 65 thousand transactions per second according to their website polka dot is taking this to a whole new level our research team has found that our theoretical transactions per second capacity so the max at this point is around one hundred and sixty six thousand transactions per second which is over double what visas capacity is but Gavin wood even came out recently and said that this could actually we could see this actually upwards of a million transactions per second so we're really excited about this because we all we all believe in kind of the vision and what we believe the blockchain industry will turn into but we really needed as an industry to get to the point where we can handle you know Visa Mastercard level transaction speeds so governance really there's been two primary ways of governance in blockchain first no governance or kind of the way the network was launched is how it will always be in the case of Bitcoin in 2009 Bitcoin was released and it really hasn't changed a whole lot since then the second example is where a one person or a small group of the kind of original team has the ability to change and tweak the network's future based on what they believe is the right decision where polka-dot is taking this is to a point where the community the the contributors are the actual token holders have the ability to propose things to vote on decisions to even vote on a council of people that are kind of their representatives just like you see in a democratic system and kind of governments around the world right now so polkadots governance system allows dot holders to take part in the network in many ways I kind of mentioned these are ready but proposing public referendum or potential changes to the network voting on those referenda as participants in the in the community and then voting or even running as a council member to be a part of these decision-making bodies that are kind of elected by the community itself now security for security I'm gonna walk through an example here so imagine you're someone named Chad a work from home accountant whose job of course is to be an accountant on their computer at home at their desk but in this case Chad needed a desk but he's actually decided to go out and chop his own wood go to the wood shop and stand and cut his own wood then acquire nuts and bolts and screws and then sit there and go through the headache of trying to build his desk all for the purpose of getting to an end result of just a really plain decent desk for giving his work as an accountant but why did Chad go back and decide that he wanted to get into the wood shopping business the woodworking business and acquiring his own you know nuts and bolts and screws now let's take another example of fat fat as a work-from-home CFO and the need of a desk but he he went about at the smart way he found one that had free next day home delivery and he got it with free triple monitors so he has no you know very low work and actually getting to the point where he can do his job he's he's here to be a CFO beyond his computer at home and that's what he's his specialty is and he doesn't want to waste time and effort going and chopping his wood building his desk just to get to the point where he can do his job the reason why I set that up is because that is how polka dots security model works polka dot makes it super easy for these blockchain teams building their own blockchain to just plug into the existing security system that polka dot has setup and focus on what they do best which is coding and building their blockchain just like the person who went back and you know chopped their own wood created their desk bought the nuts and bolts they spent a lot of time doing something that is not their specialty so we want to do that with polka dot we want people to come in be able to have an existing network of these validators as we call them who have this massive amount of security that they can just immediately plug into and not waste their time going out and trying to recruit a whole set of validators to secure their blockchain so last I want to walk through an example on the ability to self upgrade and abort and avoid the situation like Bill walked through with a fork so take a Shelby gt500 from the 60s or a Tesla they're both beautiful cars they're both very fast they're both highly sought after but when you buy the Shelby on the Left what the car that you get on day one is going to be the same car you get if not a little bit more deteriorated you know after five or ten years but the reason why people love Tesla's one of the reasons why is because Tesla's can actually upgrade over-the-air through Wi-Fi or through 4G and actually get upgrades to their car that impacts the the different abilities the car has such as you know pulling itself out of the garage or parking itself or self driving features that Elon and his team hadn't rolled out so we believe polka-dot has a similar model as that Tesla where it will self upgrade and beefed ultimately future-proof because we will avoid the need to split the network just to you know introduce a new feature or ability of the network so as you can see here on the bottom polka dot as it moves from block 101 to block 102 to 104 an upgrade will really just mean that the whole the whole kind of network or system has agreed that this upgrade will take place and we'll just move right on from 104 to 105 with very little headache and no kind of risk of splitting the chain or dividing the community as we've seen with other block chains in the past so after all the discussion let's paint a little picture about what the world could look like built on polka dot here in the very near future so going back to Bill's example of how tcp/ip and SMTP for email HTTP these kind of low-level based technologies these all enable the application layer of the Facebook's and youtubes of the world in a very similar manner polka dot through our blockchain building toolkit substrate through other things like cross chain message passing which allows block chains to communicate bridges to other networks as I mentioned this will all enable this application layer that we honestly can't even comprehend just like Bill said with people who are creating the Internet and the 70s couldn't comprehend that Google Translate could help us translate Spanish to Portuguese for example a couple of these have already been kind of underway so sub social as an example of a decentralized social networking platform being built on polka dot ekala a team out of New Zealand building decentralized finance software and then brave browsers another example of a company that's going into this kind of decentralized web 3.0 space but one thing to keep in mind is that these type so block chains when we are successful as a block chain industry just like with databases is very successful databases and users ultimately shouldn't even notice that their app uses a block chain so on this slide here the top five the top icons here on the top are the top five most downloaded and used applications in the world on the bottom here are the top five most used databases in the world but people are not choosing to use Instagram or Facebook because they use a my sequel database or because they use a MongoDB database in the same way we will be successful when someone can use a an application maybe it's a decentralized version of Facebook but we don't necessarily want them to know that they're using a blockchain we just want the experience to be just as good if not better as they're getting in web 2.0 applications right now so getting close to wrapping up what does the world look like in terms of use cases on on polka dot and this really runs the full spectrum from consumer to enterprise to government and on the next slide I'll get into some examples of ones that are already being built but just to be brief government blockchains bill mentioned identity land titling smart contract lock it could be very potential use cases on polka dot finance and healthcare or anti counterfeiting are great examples of enterprise use cases that we will see pop up on the network and then on the consumer side this is where you get into the equivalent of a Facebook Instagram snapchat of the world where it's it's going to be end users like you and me or our parents or grandparents using things like social networks messaging platforms that are secure and decentralized or personal finance like a decentralized version of venmo or paypal for example but those things are all great to talk about hypothetically but let's talk about a little bit of the projects that are already underway so the web 3 foundation gives away a lot of grants we've given away over a hundred now and here's kind of a little graphic of what's underway right now which really touches on a lot of those consumer enterprise and government use cases that I just outlined on the last slide so these teams that have received grants from the web 3 Foundation are working on everything you can see on the left from gaming to finance to even robotics and Internet of Things in the enterprise space so this is a graphic there's also if you can if you google web 3 grants there's plenty of information you can read if you're if you are a developer interested in receiving or applying for a grant or if you're interested in just learning more about all these hundred projects here on the right and what they're what they're building right now so that's about it one other thing that I wanted to mention is that polka dots getting very very close within days of beginning our launch process if any of you have questions about the launch and I'm also willing to get into that a little bit as far as how the launch will look but we're gonna be having a phased launch starting very soon that will see rollouts I'm getting to the point where we have kind of full decentralization and launch at the of the polka dot Network so we're getting really excited for that and then for this so we have a bunch of links here that I know you can't click on my screen so we'll be sending these out in an email after this as a follow up for giving you ways to get involved one thing that myself and Chris Hutchinson work on quite a bit is the Ambassador Program we've got around 50/50 split of developers and non-technical people who are joining a group of around 200 people around the world and 45 countries that are really contributing quite a bit to the ecosystem so that's a really great way to get involved as well as you know following us and staying updated on everything so I will let Bill come on too and we can start going through questions if you could use the ask a question button that's going to be easier for us too I see people asking you in the chat chat box but if you get that there should be asked a question at the bottom here up Dan could you click on it yeah well whatever ah thank you yeah all right thanks hutch always telling me to ask questions yeah I'm just going to go from the top down but I since I'm not the host I can't click on them so yeah if you can just click on them I for me first one sure thanks all right so to just so this is asking about actually building what we call what we call a runtime so I don't - I'm happy to talk to you about this offline at least what I know I'm not a street everyday developer myself but I know different level different palettes are operating at different level of the runtime so I'm not sure why specifically balances in session one is considered one timing one it's not but I'd be happy to send you links about that I just don't want to get too much of the detail right now this isn't meant to be a non-technical thing so just so for the for the next one also from the same person so yeah so substrate is the way for people to develop their own block chains remember that we said they're sort of right now only like a two divergent ways of doing this you can start from scratch or you can use an already made one substrate is I like to think of it as like the Ruby on Rails or like Wix where like you anyone can just as Dan said to sort of you know bring different palettes and make their own kind of blockchain so regarding a runtime upgrade we can actually look at Kusama for some of these practical runtime upgrades for instance the number of validators so that think of them almost as like miners on Bitcoin the ones who produce the blocks we there are trade-offs between having more and fewer of them the more we have the more decentralized the network but there are some technical issues that would make producing blocks a little bit slower in that case and so one upgrade that we have done a runtime upgrade was actually changing the number of validators on the network so that's done by a vote in fact I think there's a vote right now on Kusama for increasing the number of validators and once people vote on that that they're actually voting on a function call they're voting on new code to to change that to change the network and that is a runtime upgrade there have been other runtime upgrades that we've done I want to say we're at around around 40 or something I can't remember off top my head on Kusama to other things like adding registrar's so like adding people that are authorized to do to registration and provide digital identities to people so if you go actually there's a site a poke assembly you can see some of the discussions on previous referenda that it were runtime upgrades all right so I'm going to go to the next one here polka dot is like an agency or corporations so yeah but remember this is an analogy he's not saying it's actually a you know an agency or a corporation but yeah so that what you would do if you want to make a change to the network is issue a proposal I actually have a whole talk and how the governance system works but you can propose anything you can propose to change the entire code of the runtime you could just something you could propose to add a new block chain into the network or you could propose although I don't think anyone would vote for you to give yourself a million new tokens to do this there's there's a standardized process where you submit this proposal for a vote in a formal manner and people can second it and then it becomes a referendum and people can vote on it and if a majority of stake agrees with your proposal it will take place so there are all kinds of things that that you can do with that all the way down like I said to modifying the runtime itself replacing all the code but it's done in a democratic way and I have one thing to that too Gavin's been using a word called agency also to refer to the fact that the users have the influence or power so kind of a different definition of the word agency but it's kind of referring to my slide about how you know the network actually has the ability to have a voice or an influence on the governance versus what we've seen in the past where you really don't have a voice and the way the network moves forward yeah okay so back in the 90s and the web was released you had to buy a dedicated server or run a second phone line so we do offer there is light client support so you don't have to run an entire polka dot node to use polka dot or an entire Kusama node to use Kusama you can obviously and we support that anyone can do it however we also really I would say this is this is really from the engineering side there are a variety of ways to interact with the network besides just running your own node so you actually can create transactions offline you know if you want to do it entirely offline and then take it to a node just like our hypothetical distributor from Panama going to Columbia you can do that you can what I assume most people are going to use are these third-party providers so their applications will let you interact with it just like if you think about it you you aren't directly interacting with Facebook's database right you have this nice web interface and then it sends data to a database behind the scenes and you know what we see is that a lot of these networks like you a call a networks a current test net you know there's no indication that it polka dot is running behind it I go to a web site i connect my wallet to it they use polka dot in the background so I think we're doing doing the same thing that you don't have to host a note on your portable laptop you know there are third-party providers that allow interfacing to polka I understand Kusama chain is pre polka dot is it possible Kusano will become official polka dot chain then that's not really in the plan whatsoever you know but you know Kusama was released right is now in the hands of the community we as the web 3 as web 3 Foundation have no control over it so well that's we what we envision is that Kusama is going to be that the testing ground that's how we we plan to use it but remember we don't have any control over it so there are a lot of yo Kusama maximalists out there that really like Kusama and they want to interact with it it really is someone said it's the Wild West we're doing all sorts of interesting experiments on Kusama right now like the society rate fits it called the fraternity so if you get a Kusama tattoo you can get Kusama tokens so you can just do a quick search for Kusama tattoo I'm sure you can find find that and put on chain proof that you got this few sama tattoo we envision polka dot as sort of the more stayed solid older brother or older cousin of polka dot and it's been designed that way so Kusama decisions are made very quickly the governance goes very very fast things change very quickly we so in terms of like the official polka dot chain yeah we made polka dot to be slower more staid more conservative and that's what you know how we continue are going to continue to support it but again both of these are going to be decentralized so an official polka dot chain you know it's really going to depend upon the users okay so next question would it be possible for a quick comparison to cosmos so this would be difficult to do without getting too deep into the technical side of things we actually have a page on our wiki if you just go to wiki polka dot network there is a in search for cosmos we have a whole page but I'll say from a very high level cosmos does do some similar things they really a work on having a block chains interact with each other the main difference from a you know a sort of 50,000 foot overview is that in a cosmos these chains are really independent they don't share security the the onus is on the individual networks really to have you there system of security their own ways of interacting and cosmos really is focused just on the interoperability Pokemon on the other hand we're really trying to be more of a one-stop shop where we can provide this this cross chain compatibility we can provide this shared security so that all of these different networks that are produced can all share security together instead of worrying about it individually and also a substrate that you know where we have a framework for developing your own chains and adding on to polka dot that's not really something that causing this has you know they have they do have their own software development kits but I would say the big again high-level overview is that the chains are more independent in cosmos which has benefits and drawbacks okay so the next question notwithstanding the differences in technical approach what differentiated from solid interrupt so I'm not that familiar with solid interrupt they know that's Tim berners-lee's project so I think based on what I know though I may have difficulty explaining it in non-technical terms but really that seems to be more of the format of the data that can be shared between applications not really like that the truth or false myths of it I said that you do handle what the blockchain so it's really meant at the application level how do we share this data at sort of a universal format whereas that is less of a concern with with polka dot now it's part you know every we will have that this interaction but it's really going to be at a sort of a more fundamental level where we have as opposed to sharing from app to app it's really these apps that all share to the blockchain us but I think you know again based on what I know which is not which is not a lot there are very similar goals in the long run the differences really are like the technical approach to how we want to you know we all want to see more share data more decentralization it's you know what is the approach and there are you again like no technical you know there are drawbacks and benefits to any kind of technical approach you make to it but I'm not familiar enough to really dive deeply into interrupts them so it's all it I'm sorry a two-part question here an estimate on transaction fees well transaction fees occurs in dots so I can tell you average transaction fees on Kusama right now are point zero zero one Kusama for most ordinary transactions the concept of transaction is a little bit more complex than that on Kusama or polka dot so giving a specific number is going to be difficult transaction fees will occur in dots just like they occur on osama's we don't know exactly what they're going to be yet but I would estimate in terms of absolute numbers less than in Kusama x' but it's hard to it's hard to say but again right now it's point zero zero one Kusama for an average transaction fee currently compared to the complexity of using it oh sorry I'm the second part to that yeah where was that okay I got moving you yeah I see it compared to the complexity of using aetherium will the new X get how will be you ex get friendlier for average Joe and Jane this is so this honestly this is a problem and in all the blockchain space and it's something that you know we are working on and one of the ways that the UX gets friendlier is if we have these specific interactions you know so I think one of the problems with using something like meta mask again meta mask great tool don't get me wrong I use it all the time but you know it's meant to be everything for anyone right my crypto can call any or my crypto can call any contract or meta masking call any contract and you as a user are focused on being able to do anything and even now like our current UI it really allows you to do anything if you want to and I think one of the things that we really want to focus on just like our pair of our like the different blockchains a pair of chains as we call them that connect to the network will have different topics and different focuses we will have different you eyes for different things you'd want to do with the blockchain so like theoretically you know you know think of it like in the old old time right you had a whole time like when I was when I was 20 your you had a command line and you do all sorts of things from the command line it's super powerful but it's also you know very difficult and very hard to understand whereas now like you I look at snapchat or whatever and I press a button and it puts cat ears on me or whatever the latest filter is you know I just press a button because I can't do a lot with that I can put cat ears on myself but not anything else and I think that's one of the keys to UI is making sure that we do one thing and do it well and by having these different chains and different you eyes for the chains then I think you are you I we're gonna we're gonna see that improve okay ability to connect legacy networks will there be an ability for block chains than them devised this consortium block chains utilizing Kearney at the indiana POA to be connected to polka dot yes so there are already there are things i in our grant program for connecting you know any of these like TOA networks and because we already have experience with this this is something that I believe is on our roadmap we with the bridges and with the the system that we have most of these legacy block chains can be bridged to polka dots now the one problem is you know that is sort of a you have to do one and then another there's not a standard to just sorryi bridge to a block chain right it's Britt yeah I've build a bridge for this I build a bridge for this I build a bridge for this but we are seeing and you can you look this up in the in the grants people building bridges not just to to the the POA networks but also you know we're talking about Kusama Bitcoin a theory it you know if the etherium per se main that and others and really any traditional blockchain as long as we write up but people ran out to code for it we can bridge to all right uh last last one our validator shared across pair of change or does each chain need to build its own network of validators miners so the validators this is sort of a terminological thing are shared between all of the different chains so the validators are the ones who produce blocks on the main what we call relay chain the chain that sort of connects all of these other chains that are the others build however these individual chains will also need to develop something called Co laters and Co laters send the data really true the validators so they are the ones that are going to communicate from your network to the validator somebody is going to have to let the relay chain know what's happening on your particular chain so there's actually a variety of ways that this can occur they can be built into the nodes of your chain you could do it in this sort of proof of authority way where certain nodes are allowed to be Co laters you can develop like an economic system to incentivize people to send this data to the relay chain there are actually quite a few different ways that you can do this and so the validators remember they're on the relay chain they're not on the pair of chain everyone shares them all of the different pair of chains but each individual pair of chain needs co-leaders to send the data as to figure out what's happening and to receive data and so they are going to have to each chain is going to have to have a network of those alright that was the last one so Dan has put our contact information you please feel free to contact me on on any of those and I'm happy to answer your questions cool well does anyone else have any questions or I know we've gone like 18 minutes now so appreciate everyone who's still here and hopefully you learned a lot from this presentation today all right thank you everyone cool okay have a good day or good night

Channel: Polkadot

Views: 250,179

Keywords: polkadot, polkadot network, kusama, kusama network, bitcoin, ethereum, blockchain, startup, decentralization, fintech

Id: kw8eu2VadFA

Length: 76min 4sec (4564 seconds)

Published: Thu May 21 2020