On September 25th, we met Gavin wood again in Haidian District, Beijing. People in the industry must be familiar with him. This entrepreneur who once co-founded Ethereum with V God, wrote the Ethereum Yellow Paper, invented the Solidity language, and founded the Ethereum client Parity, this year because of his new business——Being regarded as Polkadot, a competitor to Ethereum, has become the hottest figure in the blockchain world.
Recently, he is traveling around China, and last night was at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The next day, except for Odaily, his morning time was full of interviews from several media.
Before the interview, I had a small exchange of pleasantries. This time I was with the boss Mandy. As a loyal fan of the animation "Rick and Morty", after learning that Gavin wore clothes with the same theme at the Shanghai Blockchain Week last week, Out of self-consciousness of the fans, Mandy informed Gavin of the "bad news" of the animation producer's death. Gavin didn't know it, and it probably hit him hard, so he talked a lot with us.
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The internet hasn't "growth"
In the article "Why We Need Web3", Gavin wrote this sentence: The Internet is like a giant baby, it has aged but never grown up. He once said that the Internet already has a large number of users around the world, but because of structural flaws, the Internet has never really taken on the responsibilities it should fulfill.
Gavin re-interpreted this point of view, he said that although the scale of the Internet is getting bigger, it has not "growth". In layman's terms, "When a child grows into an adult, it not only means that ta has more rights, but also means that the importance of ta's role in the world is also increasing, and the impact and consequences of his behavior are also greater; correspondingly, You should take on some specific responsibilities.” In Gavin’s view, the same is true for companies. Once a large company has mastered user data, once the data is leaked, there will be direct consequences: privacy is leaked, and users’ lives are affected. In addition, , when the data is in the hands of some unauthorized people, it may be misused and abused.
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Libra and web3.0
Gavin also expressed his views on the attempts of some traditional giants to embrace web3.0, such as Libra.
He believes that Libra is indeed a decentralized technology, both in terms of technology and legal environment. But it is "authorized and license-based", which means that users cannot freely use Libra, and developers cannot freely innovate on Libra.
On the other hand, "Libra is backed by a group of centralized companies, all rooted in the territory of the United States. So Libra is a very US-centric service, not a single company-centric service." Unfortunately, Web3.0 is an international concept rather than a national concept.
This is why web3.0 needs blockchain, because blockchain provides people with super-sovereignty instead of relying on the authorization of a certain government.
He used the law as an example, "The basic criminal law is like this: everyone can't murder each other, and they can't attack each other. The law is our code of conduct, and everyone needs to act according to the regulations. But if there is no judicial jurisdiction, then the law doesn’t work very well.”
If you want to act in accordance with the laws of New York, once there is a disagreement, the two parties need to fly to New York for a trial, but this solution is very troublesome, transportation is expensive, and lawyers are also expensive. If the blockchain is used, everything can be resolved through smart contracts.
How to imagine 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 and does not need to do the drudgery of running the server, so developers can focus more on "development" rather than "deployment and operation".
In addition, encrypted assets are also an important part of web3.0. Because of their existence, development activities and economic activities are still encouraged without authoritative institutions.
Websites like Facebook profit by grabbing users' attention, but in web3.0, no application can really control users' attention, because everything is done on the user's side. In wen3.0, we create an internal economy, users can use tokens to purchase services, but they can obtain tokens through various channels, such as mining, such as contributing our attention and data, in exchange for other services.
"We can imagine a more consensual Internet," Gavin said.
For web3.0, Polkadot is a platform to promote innovation. In Gavin's view, "This ecosystem is not lacking in imagination. Sometimes it lacks the ability to execute and lacks infrastructure; in addition, the current innovation is A low-level innovation." What Polkadot does is to ensure the security, privacy, scalability and basic business logic behind the application scenarios.
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Cosmos and Polkadot
Although the comparison between Cosmos and Polkadot is an old-fashioned question, Gavin's answer this time clearly exceeded our expectations.
At the Wanxiang Blockchain Summit last week, Jae, founder of Cosmos, said that "more than 40% of PoS chains use Tendermint." We asked Gavin what he thinks about this, and whether Substrate has the same potential?
Gavin first stated 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, damned lies and statistics”. He believes that although Cosmos is relatively faster in cooperation, it is important What matters is not the number of chains, but which chains are connected. Substrate is the best tool for chaining in his mind, and will become the best production tool, and he is happy that Substrate is ready.
Regarding Cosmos, Gavin said that Tendermint is not a new technology, and Parity has been implemented a few years ago. The idea of Cosmos is executed relatively quickly, but it is indeed a simple technology.
Gavin believes that Cosmos has not completely achieved "de-trust". In his opinion, Cosmos Zone has no other choice except to use the same consensus mechanism, that is, Tendermint. "So you can't innovate on the consensus mechanism. You also have to use the Cosmos SDK. It is precisely because of these infrastructures that you can deploy blockchains very quickly and bridge each other through the Cosmos hub. You can also issue coins. This is where Tendermint is useful, but It only goes so far, because Tendermint is simple, so it's limited."
In Cosmos, since messages and tokens need to be exchanged between chains through the Cosmos centralized hub, the prerequisite is still that everyone needs to trust the hub. "This is not trust free, nor is it There is no need to trust (trustless), but constraints (bound)”; in addition, in Cosmos, because Zones do not share nodes, they will not share the same security guarantee. So Gavin believes that "Zones cannot talk directly to each other, nor can they trust each other. Only the hub controls the symbolic balance on each chain."
Therefore, in Gavin's view, it is not a highly scalable chain. "If a system wants to be scalable, it must be able to expand and support multiple blockchains without adding new nodes or adding additional security." Polkadot has achieved precise "scalability" , There is a verification node pool in Polkadot, which ensures that different chains can be verified at the same time for a period of time.
Gavin added that from the perspective of technical foundation, the assumption of Cosmos to solve the problem is that the whole world is a blockchain using the Tendermint consensus mechanism, and everyone is willing to trust a Tendermint central chain, and everyone is willing to be in these Tendermint Transfer tokens between chains.
In contrast, Polkadot's vision is: "If I have a new idea about the blockchain. I don't have to think about verification nodes, and I don't have to think about security. I just want to quickly deploy a blockchain. This The blockchain needs to run fast enough, and it can also be directly interconnected with all blockchains in the Polkadot ecosystem, including Bitcoin and Ethereum."
Gavin also complained a little about Token, "Forget about tokens, I know that tokens are an important part of the decentralized system economy, but that's all." In Ethereum, tokens are used as an internal economic means to Paying miners' wages and transactions, they exist as a means of collecting fees. In this regard, Gavin also introduced to us Polkadot's new idea - Parathread (parallel thread). Unlike parachains that need to bid for slots, Parathreads Only a small amount (approximately 10-100) of a fixed amount of DOT is required for use.
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Edgeware is brave
Recently, Edgeware, a well-known Polkadot ecological project, can be regarded as very active. In mid-September, the Edgeware team once launched the mainnet, but two days later, it declared a "failure": the mainnet that went online two days ago was downgraded to a testnet, and then a comprehensive on-chain test will be completed and all problems will be "solved" ' and then back online.
We also asked Gavin for his opinion on the matter. Gavin emphasized that the current technology is still in its early stages. Edgeware is brave and took a risk, but it didn't work. If Kusama is launched, they may be more rewarding.
Gavin said, "If I think it will be successful, then I will definitely launch the Polkadot mainnet, but we are not there yet. We have taken a risk-averse approach. If we cannot guarantee more than 99% stability and Security, the main network will not be launched, but Edgeware may only have 50% certainty, and they are better at the application layer.” From an operational point of view, Gavin believes that the established roadmap can be implemented based on facts Adjusted as appropriate.
But Gavin also feels that if Edgeware tried to do this a year ago, it would have been worse, so it also proves that over time, bugs are constantly being fixed and technology is constantly maturing. Initially Polkadot said it would be in the third quarter of this year, and the team is currently trying its best to improve and trial and error, and may launch the main network in the fourth quarter of 2019 or the first quarter of next year. Developers can try something on Kusama to experience the efficiency of Polkadot.
In addition, for "Parity used the ETH in the frozen wallet to participate in Edgeware's Signal airdrop", Gavin said that it is very reasonable. He believes that Edgeware's approach is to restore the ownership of the frozen ETH property.
Odaily senior analyst Li Xueting and Polkaworld Pang Xiaojie also contributed to this article.
