Last week, the founder of PolkadotGavin WoodBe a guest blockchain investment mediaReal Vision, and Associate EditorSebastian MoonjavaThe conversation lasted for more than an hour, and we chatted in depth and simplicityInnovations of Polkadot and Kusama, and why Polkadot is a bet against blockchain monopoly has attracted a lot of attention in foreign blockchain communities.

first partfirst partMainly discussed:

• Gavin's history of creating Polkadot

• The problem Polkadot wants to solve

• How abstract is Polkadot?

• first level title

SEBASTIAN MOONJAVA：Hello, Real Vision viewers. I'm Sebastian Moonjava. Today, I have a very special guest, Gavin Wood. He is the founder of Parity, Polkadot (Poca), Web3 Foundation and Ethereum.

SEBASTIAN MOONJAVA：Tell us a little about yourself, your background, and how you got started in this field.

GAVIN WOOD：Ok, long story. I went to university for a Ph.D. in computer science, but I've always wonderedGame theory, social science, political scienceparticularly interested. These are public topics that are often relegated to the back burner, but of great depth. Back in 2011, I noticed a thing called Bitcoin, but I didn't really dig into it until 2013. Around the same time, an old friend and I started a company that developed software for lawyers to help them draft contracts, kind of "dumb" contracts, written contracts.

In late 2013, I was talking to some people in the London Bitcoin community quite often. One of the people I met was Vitalik, who had just finished Ethereum's original white paper. I was trying to find something to do in my spare time, so I said"Okay, let me help you write it into code". Ethereum has grown a lot in 2014 and 2015. I amThe first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Ethereum Foundation, it was basically me making sure that the project actually went live, and Ethereum did go live on time in mid-2015.

SEBASTIAN MOONJAVA：You are the main force.

GAVIN WOOD：PolkadotPolkadotfirst level title

The problem Polkadot wants to solve: make rapid innovation possible

SEBASTIAN MOONJAVA：What is the overall goal of Polkadot? What problem does it solve?

The problem with current innovation is that if you want to build a new blockchain and build new business logic, you have to do a lot of work for relatively little return.

The problem with current innovation is that if you want to build a new blockchain and build new business logic, you have to do a lot of work for relatively little return.

What Polkadot does is that you can save a lot of complicated work when building a blockchain, allowing you to quickly build a blockchain. For example, quickly establish a community and quickly utilize various components of other blockchains. The way Polkadot does this is by connecting, which allows you to connect with other blockchains.

Polkadot also frees the blockchain from having to build its own security.

It is very important for the blockchain to be responsible for its own security. For example, Bitcoin uses the famous mining mechanism to ensure its own security. This mechanism consumes a lot of energy, and the energy consumption scale may be equivalent to the amount required by some small countries.

Many later chains that use Proof of Stake (PoS) need to invest a lot of capital to ensure their own security. The problem is, there are many different proof-of-stake chains, each doing their own thing, and then the capital must be distributed among these chains to protect each individual chain, rather than being pooled together and using the entire capital base to protect Protect all chains. This is also one of the key problems Polkadot solves, allowingUse the same capital base to secure many blockchains focused on different fields.

SEBASTIAN MOONJAVA：Can you be more specific about how these chains share security? i often hear"parallel chain"The word, can you tell me how the security of the parachain is different? How does the parachain obtain security from Substrate, and what is the difference from the way Ethereum handles it?

GAVIN WOOD：Essentially, there are two different situations here. One of them, you can see it as,Polkadot is a bunch of different blockchains, a bunch of independent blockchains doing their own things. Then, at regular intervals, every six seconds, these blockchains are allowed to send messages to each other.There is a point in time during which they can communicate with each other. The rest of the time, they were doing their jobs, sort of like traditional office workers, they spend an hour doing their own things, filling out forms, writing memos, and doing a few other things. At the end of the hour, they might have some communication, they might have a meeting or a phone call or something.

It's like these blockchains, we call them parachains, they go away to do their work for 6 seconds, and then come back to talk to each other, exchange messages, and catch up with each other's progress. So how are they secured? Are they shared security? Well, all thanks to this one chain -The relay chain, which we call the heart of Polkadot. This chain has a bunch of validators. These validators, as I said before, they all need to be bonded, which means they have pledged funds behind them. If they misbehave, they lose those funds, so they are trustworthy in a sense.

Trust here means that validators are not acting solely in their own self-interest. Because if they misbehave, they can lose a lot of money. These validators work in batches. If Polkadot advances at the right pace, then maybe within six months, Polkadot will have about 1,000 validators. What we did was divide the validators into 100 groups of 10 each. In each group, each of these 10 validators will be randomly assigned to one of these parachains, and we expect about 100 parachains.

first level title

The level of abstraction of Polkadot is much higher than that of Ethereum

SEBASTIAN MOONJAVA：Many parallel chains may appear in the next few months, obtaining security guarantees from the Polkadot relay chain. Can you give me an example of what these parachains do? There can be all kinds of parachains, right? Can you elaborate on the possibility of these parachains?

GAVIN WOOD：OK The best thing about parachains is,The way I designed Polkadot from the beginning was to make it as general as possible. Like we learned in our first computer science class, we make Polkadot as abstract as possible.We're really trying to get away from anything too specific.

SEBASTIAN MOONJAVA：Is it more abstract than Ethereum? Because people usually compare in this way: first Bitcoin, and then there is a more abstract Ethereum. Will Polkadot be more abstract than Ethereum?

GAVIN WOOD：yes,Polkadot is much more abstract than Ethereum. Back when we were trying to promote Ethereum to the world, it could indeed be said that Ethereum was more general purpose than Bitcoin. Bitcoin's scripting capabilities are relatively limited. You can attach certain conditions, some script conditions, to bitcoin payments, but there are probably relatively few conditions. With Ethereum, the scripting conditions you can create become much more useful and flexible. You can do things like loops in it, and the point of it, a computer scientist should know, is that you can generateTuring completeness。

This allows you to do all kinds of crazy, weird and wonderful experiments on Ethereum,But Ethereum has a big problem. This is called gas, gas means to measure the amount of calculations done to complete each thing. Every transaction is measured. Measuring means that every instruction must be counted, and these instructions are very small things, such as adding these two numbers, or doing a lookup in memory, every instruction must be measured, this billing method Very, very expensive.

which ultimately meansRunning complex programs on Ethereum is very expensiveIn Polkadot, we have no concept of gas, we have no concept of accounts or account balances.

In Polkadot, we have no concept of gas, we have no concept of accounts or account balances.We don't have any of those ideas -- just like Ethereum has ether, every computer program you write and upload to Ethereum has to be associated with an account that holds ether. Every time anyone uses that computer program, they have to have some ether to pay Ethereum to run the program for them. But Polkadot is not like this.

In Polkadot, this matter becomes very simple. The team behind the program uploads the program. This program is made into a blockchain. This program is actually a very large program that contains all the different business logic for one application, or possibly many different applications.Once the money is paid, the billing ends. From that moment on, users of this computer program don't even need to know about Polkadot, they don't need to know about DOT tokens or anything related to it. What they care about is basically what the business logic of this chain is.

Once the money is paid, the billing ends. From that moment on, users of this computer program don't even need to know about Polkadot, they don't need to know about DOT tokens or anything related to it. What they care about is basically what the business logic of this chain is.

SEBASTIAN MOONJAVA：first level title

Maybe you can compare it with the 1C0 that happened on Ethereum. On Ethereum, ICO is used to try to raise funds to build a certain project, which is obviously different from Polkadot's approach. Because if I understand correctly, the process of issuing parachains is actually what you mentioned before. The team pays to obtain the lease right for a period of time, so that it can run its program stably. Can you talk about the difference between the two?

GAVIN WOOD：OK We now generally avoid using this term, as it may lead to some misunderstanding of what the matter really means. (Translator's Note: The initial issuance of a parallel chain is referred to as IPO. In order to avoid confusion, it was later renamed as a parallel chain lease issuance PLO, which is now usually called Crowdloan). Well in fact,What is the process of parallel chain issuance?I mentioned leasing earlier. Polkadot has a finite number of slots, and there should be around 100 when Polkadot gets on track. When the parachain is running, it can occupy one of the seats.

For example, among these parachains, there is an interesting chain called Acala. They are essentially trying to build a decentralized financial chain, which is compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine, so everyone can easily transfer their Ethereum programs are uploaded to it. Acala can also do various other things. It has a stablecoin on it, and some other features. Now,If these people want to get a slot, then they have to pay a rent, which roughly means that they pay more DOT tokens than anyone else in the world willing to stake for the slot.The point is, those DOT tokens don't go anywhere else, they're just locked up. They cannot be transferred out, or do other similar operations.

Those DOTs don't go anywhere else. They're still sitting in the lender's account, that is, in the account of the person who puts in DOT tokens, these tokensTo be locked for 6 months or longer, these tokens will not be finally released until the lease expires. These tokens are not going anywhere, but 100% are placed in the Polkadot system. They cannot be penalized or have their balance reduced.

SEBASTIAN MOONJAVA：So this is different from what we saw in the 1C0 in 2017, in this processDOT will not be exchanged out.Let me reiterate what you just said, these tokens are just put there and will not move. Instead of saying, I will give you these DOTs, and you will give me other coins at the same time. It's just that some projects need security, and I also think it is a good project for Polkadot, so I locked my DOT to support this project.

GAVIN WOOD：Yes, it's just a way to measure the value of a project. The value of a project is measured by many people, by how many DOT tokens people are willing to lock up to support a project, but these coins are only locked up for as long as the project becomes a valid parachain. Once the project loses this parachain (slot), these tokens are released, and the holders of these tokens can use them normally again (to be precise, this process cannot be called return, because it implies that these currency has left the account).

Of course, maybe Acala, and other parachain teams, do not have these DOT tokens themselves. What they're trying to do, in a nutshell, is say to the different DOT token holders in the world, "Hey, put down your DOT tokens—Stake your DOT tokens to sponsor us. Don't give them to us, just put them behind our chain, behind our project to support us, as long as our chain can become a parachain. "

Maybe you do it out of good intentions. Maybe you're doing it because you think it's a really worthwhile project. Maybe you're doing it because the project will bring you something, it might give you something on-chain like a receipt or a record that can be used for some kind of benefit in the future. Now, we call this whole process"Crowdloan", because it’s basically you saying to everyone, “Look, please lend the system some of your tokens so we can launch our chain and get one of those slots and run on Polkadot at the same time.”

The key difference is that ownership of these tokens never leaves the crowd. everyone stillOwnership of tokens is preserved, tokens are simply placed behind the parachain to support the parachain. Once it is placed behind a parachain, it cannot be used for other purposes such as staking, or to support other parachains, and obviously cannot be sent (transferred) to any third party.