Okay, yeah, that's it. So please welcome Sherman and her talk about... Yeah, no, no. My computer did something. Thank you. Yeah, thanks also for inviting me to speak. We had some discussions around lunchtime. For those who don't know me, I'm Sherman. I started the blockchain hub here in Berlin and share the co-working space here at the Ethereum office. And so what we do basically is blockchain advocacy. And sometime early last summer, I got caught up in the doubt and was one of the curators together with you and Fabian and a few other people. And I guess that is the reason why I started thinking about all the problems around the unknown unknowns and blockchains. And this is why we're here today because well, most of you are aware of what happened and we'll talk about it today. We're also seeing what's happening in Bitcoin right now with the block size debate. And so I'm hoping that we can have a joint discussion around those thoughts that I had. And yeah, so it's the first time I'm talking about this. I hope it's not too incoherent. So basically, what are the thoughts? We all grew up around the promise of the blockchain and words like trustless trust and disintermediation. And so I guess why I got interested into blockchain in the first place is because what I saw from the very beginning was this really potential of that technology to disrupt governments. And we saw it in the first use case of Bitcoin and it really is an impressive use case because it's the first decentralized autonomous organization or corporation. It's a bank without central banks and bank managers. There is no central entity that controls it. And that is impressive. We've never had such a thing in this shape and form. So why can't blockchain disrupt governments because of the fact that machine consensus on a peer-to-peer network can radically reduce the transaction costs of cooperation? And by that also eradicate a huge dilemma that we've always had and still have in this world is what we call the principal agent dilemma that you have in companies as well as in government where for those who don't know the term the agent for example the manager is representing the interests of the shareholder or other stakeholders, the principal and if there are information asymmetries there is the potential of moral hazard on purpose or not on purpose. So there is time lag, information lag in decision making in traditionally top-down organized companies and we very often have these principal agent problems and we have the same problems in politics and in representative democracy and with bureaucracy. So when blockchain came around that really gave the potential to disrupt governments because everything, you have the rules and the code but only until something goes wrong or only until we need a system upgrade. So I guess blockchain is really really good to reduce bureaucracy radically but only in the case of known knowns and known unknowns but never in the case of unknown unknowns. So one of the use cases of course was a very good example last year with what happened with the DAO however we would like to call it whether it was a hack or an attack, an infiltration or a halt for something happened and there was no procedure of how to react to it. And so machine consensus is great but it has limitations in three instances and I welcome you to criticize this or to enhance this list. So conditions that change over time. We're seeing that for example a very good example is what is happening in the Bitcoin community when it comes to the block size debate for example or what happened also with the advent of mining pools. We'll talk about this later. Human error, that was something that happened with the DAO. It was human error, obviously there are tools around that, formal verification is a very powerful tool to make sure that this doesn't happen anymore but formal verification has also its limits within what the system can find. We discussed about this quite a bit and AI one day might be a solution around this but AI might also be the source of the problem because there's always better AI to exploit potential attack vectors. And then information asymmetries and I think this is very very important because the assumption in the very beginning was that everyone's interest is well aligned but in the Bitcoin network is a huge network with many different stakeholders and certain interests are well aligned but other interests are not so well aligned. As we can see for example in the block size debate so in complex multi-stakeholder environments like the Ethereum network or the Bitcoin network where miners or mining pools have very very different interests than for example a company like Consensus building on top of it they have different economic interests. One wants transaction costs to go up and another one wants transaction costs to grow down. So oh I'm sorry I'm going back. Okay so the question I guess the question is always hard fork, soft fork or no fork. So many people say no fork in many cases. So in the case of the DAO and the post DAO attack Ethereum hard fork my question to you how many people did really understand the ins and outs of what was discussed whether to not fork well that was quite easy but to soft fork or to hard fork and how to hard fork? Was it five people who really understood all the details? Was it maybe 30 people? I don't know how many people would you say? I mean there were two levels to understand right and the first level not that complicated was it? Which level do you refer to? Yeah I mean there were a lot of different actions and the first main transaction or not really transaction but the balance shift was not that complicated right? Yes but the question is like there was this huge discussion around to fork or not to fork and if to fork how to fork. So how many people would you be comfortable to say really understood the ins and outs of the whole debate over this 35 days that we had until the community had to come to a conclusion to decide whether to be on the side of the chain or to be on the side of the chain. So that really is a question so probably we cannot answer it conclusively my guess was talking to a few people maybe three to five people fully understood it a group of 30 people understood it very well and certain aspects of it and the rest was trusting this group of people. Is that fair to say? Is there any opinion on that in the room? Fabian, any opinion? How many people really understood the ins and outs? I didn't say that! So the question is how many people really understood the ins and outs of the whole post-dauer attack, ethereum, hard fork, soft fork, no fork discussion. 30% of the people understood. Or maybe even less. So my assumption was five to 30 people. Five people really fully fully understanding everything and 30 people understanding well enough. That's difficult. Why do you have those five days to make a decision? Okay, that's a very long story. I'd like to explain it to you maybe later. Yeah, that's not... Okay, so why am I asking the question? Okay, maybe let's go to the next one. So the implications of the soft fork, there we can definitely say that a few people understood it. Because, yeah, it was a little back in the end, right? Yes. Yet it was a very important part in the decision-making process to decide that the soft fork, why a soft fork wouldn't be viable. And so two few people, you mean how many people would that be who really understood? It depends on the time. In the beginning perhaps two people and after that 30. Okay, so the question here of course is having the promise of the blockchain being a trustless trust and decentralized of course is how decentralized is the system if currently and that might change in the future. Only 5 to 30 people in this whole network really understand the ins and outs of such a great discussion. And which is fine and which is fair enough and which is part of the process probably because blockchain is still in its very early stages but the term trustless trust, we have to be very careful when we use it because it's true until as long as everything is okay, it's not true anymore as soon as we need the system upgrade or there is an edge case where we need to take action because in this moment we need to trust the experts. Same as for the Bitcoin block size debates, Andreas you are here. What do you think, how many people really can follow this whole debate? Start talking about me. Yeah, I don't know.  There's a lot of people following the debate but that's the same question, how many people understand it? Really, so you would say only 10 or 20 people in the whole Bitcoin Ethereum ecosystem? Okay. But that's of course just another thing. No, I thought that it would be a bit more than in Ethereum because it's an older network. I'm a bit surprised that you're saying but in any case, I mean this is an estimation, right? But it's really just a handful of people. And I mean on Bitcoin there's also not that many developers but I think we need to be the developers to understand it. Do you think that was... So in the end what I'm trying to say is in the beginning we didn't need consensus. In the beginning when Satoshi defined the white paper and then it was implemented there was very little need for consensus. As the system is growing and the stakeholders are becoming more when you over time see that you need to change the protocol you need consensus. But this consensus finding process, not everyone is an expert so we still need to trust real people there will be centralization around the experts. So why is it important in the case of unknown unknowns? When unknown unknowns occur? When conditions change over time? When unexpected things appear we still need to trust the design architects of the blockchain networks and the few developers who understand everything and we can try to make an educated decision but we still need to trust them. The next question is... I'm so sorry, keep going up. So the myth of trustless trust we will still need to trust experts. There's always the debate whether blockchains or public blockchains are open source so based on meritocracy if you put enough time and effort to understand the code you can understand or learn coding or learn the blockchain protocol and the language is building on top of it you can understand it but there is limitations to meritocracy because as long as we don't start teaching coding in kindergarten there is only a limited amount of people who really have the skills or the talent to understand what is happening in this field and so yes in theory the code is open source yes in theory there is such a thing as meritocracy but in reality you need to spend most people would need to spend enormous amount of time and effort and maybe lack the talent to really be able to do that especially based on our current education system so all I know is logic I think this is why we are building blockchains because they are very very powerful once you define a rule set and because it is auto enforceable it is very powerful it reduces a lot of transaction costs but it reduces those transaction costs because we have the transaction layer we have the peer-to-peer network and on top of this the transaction layer this is where we define the rules to the game in the economic models based on game theory we define which actor gets which incentive to do what in the network in order to model this consensus layer we need to make certain assumptions about the behavior of the network participants and these assumptions can be true or not and mostly there are probably some standardized assumptions and you need some halt tolerance tie to it what if these assumptions are not true what happens in the case of unknown, unanticipated or irrational network behavior of the network participants and basically and I had a lot of discussions also with Vlad about like the Homo economicus like you need to make some standardized assumptions and the assumptions are mainly based on the idea that network participants will make rational decisions based on profit maximizing their own interests as a network participant for example the miners but if we for example look what happened with Bitcoin Bitcoin's consensus layer was originally designed by Satoshi based on the notion of simple game theory the idea was that every miner running a computer would profit maximize his own interests based on running one or two computers the consensus layer, Bitcoin's consensus layer does not account for cooperative game theory what happened after a few years of the existence of the network that we now have mining pools so the reality what Bitcoin was designed to be much more decentralized than it is now because the assumptions that were made on the consensus layer turned out not to be true because now we have mining pools and a handful of them are concentrating almost half of the network so this is one of the unknown unknowns that evolved over time so the term topocracy and consensus I see like one of the biggest dangers in my opinion around blockchains, state of the art blockchains as they are designed today is everything is okay as long as the protocol runs but the moment we need to modify the consensus layer the moment we need to upgrade the system the question is who gets to vote and who has the power to vote for an upgrade now that's very different in Bitcoin and in Ethereum it's very different it depends on whether we're talking about a soft fork or a hard fork and it's also very different in the Ethereum ecosystem when we look at decentralized autonomous organizations and the token governance rules they are very independent from each other and particularly in most cases more money in the fiat world buys more voting power in the Bitcoin world it might be indirectly well through hashing power the more money you have the more hashing power you can buy and the more vote you have in a forked discussion so in the case of unknown unknowns and given the fact that we come from a world from extreme wealth inequality what does it mean for the decision making process in such cases it means that certain people have more impact than other people is this the kind of how do we want to deal with those situations okay I'm going to skip this and the last thing that probably we saw that decentralization or trustless trust is a myth to a certain extent if we don't have necessary decentralized information communication and transparency tools and we saw for example during the DAO hack in a very short period of time decisions had to be made we were communicating on social media networks like Twitter like Reddit etc etc a lot of discussions were happening in parallel some different networks very often it was hard to distinguish the troll from the expert and we were using social media tools from the web 2 to make decisions in the web 3 so one of the biggest problems was to decide who is an expert who is a troll so for many of us for insiders it was a bit easier if you know certain people who you might call Bitcoin maximalist or who have certain stakes in other systems you might understand that but an average token holder might not know that so it's really hard to distinguish in the decision making process in the discussions happening on the different social media channels who is an expert, who is a troll information aggregation is a huge problem very often I remember we had our DAO Curator Skype channel and we're 12 people there even among those 12 people a lot of the curators didn't know what another curator had posted before because it was like the information and the opinions were all over the different networks and it was really hard to keep up to date with the discussions even among the curators and so if we want to make blockchains happen and work well for situations of unknown unknowns we need to put decentralized information aggregation and visualization tools where you might get like pie charts where you get information of okay expert opinion is more distributed but you know like with one click you would know that 50% of the experts said no fork 30% said soft fork and 20% said hard fork and then you could deep dive maybe into their blog posts and read up on why they said what they said we don't have those tools yet and it's the wild west of information and it's hard to make an educated decision especially when you're not an expert so why am I doing all saying all these things I think Vitalik wrote this excellent blog post on the meaning of decentralization and what he wrote was he tried to break down the different levels of decentralization so the question is how politically decentralized is a network meaning that no single entity controls it how is it architecturally decentralized meaning that no there is no infrastructural central point of failure and basically blockchains are politically decentralized more or less depending and architecturally decentralized but blockchains and this is why they're so powerful in reality are logically very centralized because code is centralized and it's deterministic and and has really no it is really hard to to write code for unknown unknowns so currently we're in the situation where we deal with these unknown unknowns with on the fly human intervention as we saw with the Dow and the post Dow hard for as we're seeing also now with the block size debate in Bitcoin and hopefully in the future I think in order to really be able to say that we live in a decentralized world where we don't have centralization around expert opinion we need to make sure that we visualize power structures in these distributed networks that we have mechanisms for governance beyond code and possibly also governance mechanisms on the blockchain level and we need better information and communication tools and we need centralized arbitration systems and I think this is very important because if we don't have these things the coders of today will be kind of the trusted third parties in the decentralized network that we have to trust so we need to make sure that we make these decision making processes much more visible and code better understandable and yeah I would like to conclude that if we assume and this is a bit I'm saying that seeing that blockchains are might be the future constitutions of our future societies as citizens and as consumers alike the more services we start building on blockchains the more the blockchain protocols will become our constitutional foundation so we have to make sure that they're flexible enough and stable enough but also inclusive enough so we can really talk about the decentralized decentralized world I wouldn't talk about trustless trust because I would assume that doesn't exist really okay thanks what do you mean by making code understandable it's a term of taking people they could tell to make it privatization or other type I guess both so having better human readable code would be great we're discussing this at lunchtime I don't know how possible it would be great to have human readable code but the problem also with these huge networks is that the code is very complex even if you can't read it there is a limitation to fully understanding all the implications of all the different modules and aspects of the code how hard is it to from your point of view to fully understand the interaction of a smart contract with the Ethereum virtual machine or how many people could really understand it the more complex a smart contract gets it depends on the complexity of a smart contract I think it's not just about being able to understand but if you're able to understand instead of invest the time and read it so the problem is also at another level what you're talking about is delegation delegation of time so even if I would be interested or even if I could understand the code even if I were interested to learn it do I want to invest the time to a-learn it and then study every protocol change that is being discussed or do I prefer to just trust the opinion of someone else I mean it drops in time as if you do completely different things so I may think about smart contracts which are more isolated but still there I mean so who of you has ever used a smart contract and who read the full code you see from my side I was pretending to focus on the next step because if I must invest time to be able to cook all I need to invest time and I lose the focus on the result and I prefer to focus on the which one is the next step so I trust to think about which one is the next step doesn't the same go for a legal contract you know that you read the full scale of a legal contract at the side yes I fully agree well I think the problem isn't really in reading the whole contract and not being able to trust anybody because life is always partly about trust the difference between blockchain and the old world is not that nowadays in the blockchain world you don't trust anybody because in the end you always have to trust people because you can't read every single smart contract and every single program based on that smart contract but the difference now is that you can choose who to trust and who not to trust in the old world you have to trust banks because there's no alternative nowadays you can be your own bank and probably even in 50 years everyone is using blockchain but everyone will be its own bank because people will choose to trust centralized services but if you really want to you can be your own bank and with smart contracts it's the same if you really want to you can read the whole contract and you can understand it and you can maybe program your own smart contract so the problem is something that you always have to trust someone the difference is that nowadays you can choose who to trust and who not to trust but how is that difference to what he said before like in many cases for example a legal contract you're talking about the bank now but a legal contract I read it I think I understand it but it's code it's just fuzzy semantics where other people study seven years and became lawyers and then they had to practice another a lot of years so right now in theory I also have the possibility in theory I should understand what a contract says but in practice or I could write my own let's say contract if I want to buy or sell a house yet I don't do that so how is this system that we're creating now so much more different apart from where it really disintermediates and makes clearing there are certain instances where blockchain really intermediates it gets rid of certain I would say agency problems principal agent problems but it creates new principal agent problems and I guess this is what I was trying to say we shouldn't be so naive as to think that we're this is the tool to solve all problems that we have around human conflict we will be able to radically reduce many many many transaction costs but we're creating other principal agent problems and we're very often probably not even aware of there are a few let's argue is there any testing approach to verifying where the system is a whole it's lovely if I use secret software or trustee software some existing software where it goes through some kind of classification on which level you mean the smart contract level on the blockchain level on the blockchain level I don't so I'm a smart guy it's really I do formal verification it's really hard to test attacks before your contract is attacked because you don't know how it would be attacked so you cannot test it that's the unknown thank you yeah so suppose we all agree that we need some governance now the question is do we agree on what governance what kind of governance do we need is there any obvious solution that wouldn't maybe be complete but it's better but it's obviously better than what we have now I'm in fluid democracy but you probably have other ideas I mean blockchain really isn't it's very very very big step we need more sophisticated governance rules on chain and off chain as well I think everything that you do on chain especially if you do it on the consensus layer is too rigid so I think we need to learn from the current political world or system that we have where we have a constitution and the constitution just in most countries is very it has a limited rule set defines a very limited rule set the basic rule sets of how to interact with each other and everything else built on top of it so I guess this is what partially the blockchain the ethereum ecosystem resolved trying to make the simple laws on the smart contract layer and the the consensus layer of the ethereum protocol is kind of the constitution the question is and I'm not expert enough whether the protocol could be even regulating even less because every time we need to make the system upgrade we need super majority consensus which is really hard and some people say that we should yeah forks are good so the minority protection happens by fork the people who don't want to to upgrade they stay on the old chain but in reality that is not an option when you have vested economic interest on one side of the chain so a lot of people will go on the other side of the chain in spite of the fact that they're against maybe the decision because they have vested economic interest on the other side of the chain and I wonder how like where do we protect the minorities on the block chain I don't see that yet liquid democracy is the thing that you were referring to I think we need to have more liquid democracy tools on top of block chains we will see that happening for the Dow there was a liquid democracy proposal just that Dow then never happened but we're already seeing the first proposals to have such explanations there was another question around here somewhere I had a kind of retort of questions to the audience who remembers performing a full technical inspection of the aircraft before boarding it so I'm not sure if anyone knows that but well yes that's true yet the aircraft is a different system it's a different security it's a different proposition and so on and so on well the thing is it's not only a different system the thing is if you really don't trust the airplane you don't have to take an airplane but a constitution of a network so I think here's where we need to start to get a bit more realistic of what's happening so in the very early stages of blockchain it was an opt-in system and it still is so first there was Satoshi he wrote the white paper and for many for many reasons many people thought that was a cool thing and they opted into the system and it was better because it was money without banks without bank managers without central banks etc etc etc but as the community is growing in the Bitcoin network in the Ethereum network and many other blockchains you have more and more people who are now part of the system they're stakeholders and they opted into a certain code but when we're talking about protocol upgrade because time changes and there are conditions changes or all of a sudden there is a bug now you have to come to a consensus it's not an opt-in process anymore you're already there and how do you reach consensus and how do you make a decision in a system where you're already in the system on the airplane if you don't trust the airplane or the technology behind it you don't take the airplane but when you're already in the system when you're already on top like blockchains are the virtual nations in the future I would say and we're probably going to be like citizens slash consumers of various blockchains and I don't think that the decision is quite fair I've got a question because you said we clearly need data systems and so my question would be looking back at the DAO and the post-DAO folks do you really think that how the events unfolded was such a bad system because in my view we get quite a constructive discussion 35 days or whatever and then after that we had convergence on one solution there still were some people who were not kind with that and they saved on their old blockchain and now they have Ethereum Classic and while I would never use that they still are happy with that and that's fine so we even had so in the end everyone was happy so is it such a bad system right now? No, I'm not saying it's a bad system I'm not saying it's a bad system at all I mean I think it's we're experimenting with a great tool that has a lot of merits but it also has limitations so what I would like to discuss more that actually limitations system has in order to be yes in order to also build good workarounds or improve the system recognizing the limitations that it has and having better governance tools and information aggregation tools around it so when we need to make decisions about protocol change we can actually make a decentralized decision because the promise of the blockchain was to create a decentralized world yet we're seeing that it is much less decentralized than we initially would have liked it to be it's true for Bitcoin for other reasons than it's true for Ethereum many people would criticize or had criticized the Ethereum Foundation to make unilateral decisions and that decision making was intransperence and it was done behind closed doors and I think I don't think that it's true but I think because of intransperency an average token holder an average user or an outsider could have this impression so we need to make a better job on making these decision making processes more transparent more inclusive and then it's really also more decentralized and we really need to rethink the token governance rulesets on if we want to create them identity based or token based we're creating a world where more money buys more influence so this is definitely a discussion I would like to have because this is not decentralized in my opinion decisions wise is good just buy a gun and just tell you well isn't that the claim of blockchain it's useful but not necessarily good well I'm not saying it's good or bad I'm just questioning the claim of blockchain not an unstoppable machine that no single entity or no small group of people can take down or manipulate I mean this is what I understood was the claim I'm not saying it's good or it's bad I'm just questioning whether the reality of state of the art blockchain is true to its promise which was actually to be very it's equally possible to use it for surveillance and control or yes I fully agree but I'm not sure how that's a different discussion I feel I really fully agree with you that is a bit I think a different discussion just to go back to that decentralization there's a lot of pressure on acting more democratically can you repeat that I didn't decentralization was a positive pressure on acting more democratically in the blockchain world just generally but also what I wanted to go into so you said two or three people understood what was going on with it I'm not as well read as most people are in terms of blockchain what was going on with it half for soft form with a no form this is my estimate how many users and how many services currently operate on it I think you're one can answer that question I would say what would be like individual services that built on blockchain using smart contracts what kind of things that would lie on not too many mostly proof of concepts but I guess you want to have a ratio of how many users or how many stakeholders do you have versus how many people the problem with the Dow hack is that they managed to exploit the smart contract in a way that it was unstoppable because it was already right so surely any debate about any constitutional structure for the Ethereum network should be one of the most debated things in history well it was very debated during these 35 years it should be far more debated far more understood before anything of that this is what I'm trying I mean this is one of the reasons why I'm writing this because I feel that we are creating this very powerful tool which can be used for good because Xenia has been just stating it could also be the ultimate control machine and I feel that we're not and there's already so much economic interest building on top of it currently we're everywhere in proof of concept stage there is no really running applications that are critically running applications that I know of running on top of Ethereum I hope there will never be a critical system people use Ethereum as a currency although it's extremely volatile isn't that stupid it's not even a currency or it was not intended to be a currency as opposed to Bitcoin so what is happening right now is that a lot of money is pushing into the Ethereum network is for the sake of this argument I feel that a lot of companies are pushing a lot of money and they're building more and more currently they're just testing it but as they're building critical applications on top of that and it's we're not even done building the constitutional layer or the foundations but lastly is one potential answer to move towards a multitude of base blockchains and the more base blockchains there are the more options you have this is a possibility so I guess nobody knows what will happen but the the way I'm seeing it unfold is that we will probably live in an internet of different blockchains and there are already some startups building some blockchain interoperability Cosmos Polkadot so we will see but probably it's going to go into that direction but there are consensus it's even more critical and I don't know who was at the Polkadot or at the blockchain meetup a few weeks ago when Cosmos and Polkadot were presenting I felt that basically only Gavin understood what Gavin was presenting and two people understood 50% and the rest maybe 10% so I don't know it doesn't need to be understanding right the hope of internet of blockchains is that I can, I mean you mentioned earlier about when I buy so when I sign up to a blockchain of buy some currency I'm agreeing to that consensus but the great thing about blockchains is it's very easy for me to convert to a normal one to convert my currency to a normal one so the hope of an internet blockchain is that I can easily, if I don't like how the consensus is changing I can easily go and change to a normal one if you only have cryptocurrencies yes you can easily change if you're a company but if you're I don't know if you're a company I'm thinking of consensus one of the biggest players of startups building on top of Ethereum so I would think that when a hard fork happens and the more critical those startups or the more advanced those startups become and the more critical the services are that they're building on top of it I think they won't be as flexible as a simple token holder who can opt in and opt out by simply selling the currencies so there are different network participants with different vested interests but they can build an application in a blockchain in an agnostic way I mean they get consensus chosen to focus on Ethereum blockchain but they can easily focus on others as well I'm not quite sure how easy that is we have very easy obviously GroupStock allows you to compile absolutely the other part of Bitcoin blockchain so but in general I think what you're saying is you have two big questions one our decision made in groups of people this is an age-old 2,000-year-old question and people are still figuring that out the other thing is what you can do about that decision execution so the gentleman up here brought up you have choice in the system so for example if the network fees go up which can be looked at as a tax on your transaction when that tax goes up you can switch to another network it can happen right now with Bitcoin and Ethereum now if your tax goes up on your property and you live there which you brought up you have to move to another country much harder to deal so if you have to draw up these systems you can get your level of choice and competition against the world that we're coming from the fastest period and that's why we see continual growth and of course the decision-making aspects still need to be some level of improvement but with that choice we can I fully see also blockchain definitely is an improvement over the current state systems we have here as well so to your point about the refutation since there's two basically two layers, the smart contract layer and the consensus layer maybe a lot of people can read a smart contract and it's easier to understand but far less people could understand the consensus layer so to your point it's probably going to keep centralizing in that fashion so what are your thoughts on how reputation should work in that sense in the sense of how can we is it a subjective thing that we trust someone because maybe we read their blog post or something or is there any thoughts on making that reputation well I mean the cool thing about blockchain is that we can now start building identity based reputation systems but this is also in the making so I'm hoping that as we have better reputation systems we will have better solutions for Web 3 decision-making but I don't distinguish between the consensus layer or the application layer, we will need I mean a lot of the problems that we have in Web 2 nowadays, all this debate around fake news is because we don't have reliable reputation systems so we need to really start building them I mean the internet already promised decentralization and it did to a certain extent decentralize information but now we need to start building this other layer and reputation is key to that are there any ideas of how consensus there are a lot of identity providers that are already also building on on reputation systems and are you here, you look on are you left, yeah you should talk maybe to you later they're also building, it's not pure blockchain based, it's linked data and blockchain but reputation is probably also something usually you guys should talk okay, last question is there any other question, one more comment question and then maybe we should move on in terms of reputation and voting I would suggest people will get a sort of hedge fund called Bridgewater Associates this is the largest hedge fund in the world they have a great system where they have a matrix of believability based on track record obviously that requires you to have identity so over time as people make decisions or make statements their believability is increased or decreased and that becomes a reading factor on the votes essentially so if you think about it, we have to have votes on one side to make decisions about governments and then we have the polls on the other which are essentially people who know nothing on the internet don't know anything about what's going on they have a very good system which has helped them become the largest hedge fund in the world where they, people's votes are reading based on their believability but obviously they have to do that what are they called? Bridgewater Associates Bridgewater Associates where you now they don't have a paper but for example, mobility matrices or phony systems okay so Jessica I guess that grows well with hedge funds where you can directly or actually can you directly assess the impact of a decision on some goal that's the first comment and the second comment is what would be the goal to be in a blockchain at all what do you want to optimize where do you want to go, that's not clear well it's simply making a decision so if you're a hedge fund and you say do I bet 50 euros going to go up and as a group of analysts that come together before this decision is made and they say I believe the euro is going to go up that's my vote they record that vote and then as time pass the euro goes up and those analysts over time develop a track record of being accurate and that's their believability that increases in their vote waiting that increases still it's a system where you can determine whether a person makes good predictions in that case with financial markets you have predictions but even if you're an inventor or a software engineer you have a design decision you have a conversation that goes on with other engineers we implement this feature and we do this well I believe we should do this because of this I believe we should do this because of this and over time people lose decision making process where their talent or skills can be either proved to be prescient and their believability they move on to their believability interest that's their belief but what you can do in this sense but how do you stop associating becoming something like that black mirror black mirror black mirror black mirror right now black mirror but basic family that's what we love doing track record standpoint this is Bridgewater Associates the largest hedge fund in the world most successful hedge fund in the world this is like Michael Jordan investing his processes might produce good results for say 40 years I don't know about that I think he's talking about the notion of black mirror making videos and it becomes a more social thing of rating a person and therefore you can destroy a person's reputation when you become a social engineer you're going to go through short results and it could be possible for financial stuff because it's based on numbers but how do you make decisions in such a company in this situation in this situation obviously all the analysts who go into the meeting or people that are on it they all they know that somebody said in fact all of their meetings are recorded and the tapes are made available to everybody so that's all consensus but obviously it's within that ring of this specific hedge fund if you had the entire internet you could raise some data well thank you very much and that's what's going on