Consensus Lab is basically dedicated to building consensus protocols for Web 3. So what's Web 3? If we go from the inception of the internet in the 60s to Web 1.0, that was basically posting read-only content by those people who knew how to post the content to Web 2.0, which we have now with different social networks, clouds, and so on. But when we have data basically siloed in mostly centralized cloud provider, there is a wonderful sitcom paper, this year best sitcom paper in 2021 that says that half of the internet traffic is basically governed by five institutions. And Web 3 is going towards decentralization, right? So decentralization, in a sense, and I will define decentralization in more details later during this talk. But this is basically a set of computer systems, a set of computer programs that basically build decentralized internet in a way such that you don't trust in principle any single component. And this is what is emerging today. And consensus lab is essentially looking into building a layer of strong consistency and a bit weaker consistency is also in the scope of consensus lab that would power and that would act as a backbone of Web 3. So this is the best I could do for a one-slide goals and visions. So consensus lab is supposed to be a go-to place for scalable consensus and decentralized systems R&D. So yes, we are part of protocol labs. And yes, one of our goals is to impact Filecoin and IPFS ecosystems. As you know, one of the protocol labs has several projects. But one of the most well-known ones are Filecoin, which is incentivized content addressable storage and IPFS, which is the same but without incentives. And there are several other protocols. And there is a lot of Web 3 projects that is actually using Filecoin, IPFS, but also DRAN, the libp2p, and many other projects that come from protocol labs. So consensus lab is definitely dedicated for impact in Filecoin and IPFS, but also the entire Web 3 ecosystem. But part of it is actually collaborating with academia. And there are many friends, ex-collaborators. And I hope future collaborators here on this call today and among the registrants who were basically the target audience for this event. And we plan in consensus lab to foster collaboration in academia and other Web 3 projects through different grants. Like these would be more classical funding schemes. But what we are also keen looking into and very much interested in are decentralized funding and incentive schemes of which there will be talks in the following months from PL. But also we might scratch the surface of these discussions during the panel. Consensus lab as protocol labs is working in the open. So there are not necessarily, I wouldn't say not exclusive, but not necessarily patents. So we are not interested in patents. We are interested in open source. We are interested in sharing the knowledge and the code among different projects and different people and basically building the decentralized Web 3 together. In the consensus lab, this is not going to grow to hundreds of people. So as you will see, consensus lab does grow fairly fast. So I joined in the end of June, 2021. So end of this year, July, so maybe three months ago. And we are growing pretty fast, but we are going to stop growing at some point. So the members of consensus lab are essentially going to do also what I'm trying to do. And in discussions with many of you, I also mentioned this. This is trying to leverage our connections and our collaborations with the academia to basically build together and also incentivize this collaboration for building together these consensus for decentralized web. So we are looking for the impact beyond Filecoin ecosystem for the entire Web 3 and maybe reinventing the whole collaboration in the open. So this goes in the direction of the thing I mentioned towards, for example, changing even the peer review systems later on and things like that. We'll discuss this. This is just the beginning. So just to give you a flavor of where we are going. More technically, so this was on a higher level, but more technically, if you look at decentralized systems today, consensus is the bottom right. There are two things about consensus. So if you have basically here, I borrowed the next two slides from Juan Stokes where he describes basically the problems that motivate formation of consensus in protocol labs is that there are distributed application potential today is very, very high and the hopes are high. But basically when you channel this through consensus protocols, and there are more efficient protocols than the one that I mentioned here, but classical ones are Bitcoin with seven transactions per second and Ethereum with 15 to 30 transactions per second. Basically, but these total order services, if you proceed them like that, they are most of the time bottlenecks in the system. And depending on your goals, you can put even the best consensus protocol and it's still going to perform basically how a single machine performs, unless you do something else. So that's one. So one thing is about sequencing the transactions and basically establishing total order and addressing these bottlenecks. But the other is also transactional smart contract execution. So we see in smart contract systems such as Ethereum, smart contract execution is sequential from distributed systems basically decades of research. We know how to, we have an idea how to address parallel execution in centralized system, where you don't have the difficulty of not trusting other nodes in the system. But this is also a problem. So if you split this into ordering and execution, there is a problem here in my previous work, which I did inside here, I kind of, inside IBM, inside the IBM teams, we tackle this in the context of permission systems, such as high privilege of fabric, but in principle, in permissionless system, the situation is much more complicated. And we are looking at the same problems here again, right? But what are the requirements? Okay, so like what are the use cases and what are we optimizing for if you want? And there, when I had an idea to join protocol labs, I was like, okay, we are going to apply some really, I was recently working on efficient, high throughput protocols. I know other people, other groups were working on highly efficient protocols. We are going to implement really nice scalable consensus and we are mostly done. Well, except that Juan had this nice idea, which I really liked, which is, okay, let's forget about a single blockchain. Let's talk about web three requirements as of porting web to work close to web three. And then suddenly you talk about billions of transactions per second. You talk in some use cases, you talk about data center latency, so milliseconds or tens of milliseconds finality, depending on what is the application doing, then you might be talking about Earth consensus or like the city or the urban area consensus or so on. But you still want to have like unlike in web two, unlike in centralized, internet and centralized cloud computing, you want to have this security against nation states and hackers. For example, the Bitcoin has and so on, right? So if you have this bunch of goals, then you need to look at the problem a bit differently, right? And this bunch of goals motivated basically how I view what consensus labs should be doing and how we structured work in consensus labs. So how do we get there? It's clear kind of if you're looking at the billion transactions of second, that one of the key problems is not going to be the scale only to scale a consensus, a single consensus protocol. So if you look at each of these lines and these circles as a single blockchain name space or the state space, or you can call it a sharp, then you will be talking about multi-sharded system that of course has its own, we know this from distributed systems for a long time, has its problems in the context of decentralized system security related problems, but also consistency related problems. Like what happens to cross-sharp transactions? And for example, if you are sampling the membership of a parent shard into a child's shard, how do you protect against the attacks of the power dilution and so on? But you might not be sampling, you might not be partitioning the state, but you might be looking into some other things and we will have some very interesting talks just after my talk during the sharding session about this, but we are certainly not looking into a single blockchain system. I think we can agree on this. Then depending on a particular shard, you're not looking into a single consensus protocol either. So ideally we don't want thousands of consensus protocols because currently I mean, I can only mention a few that are production ready, right? So they don't halt, will not name particular blockchains that halted recently, but there are many implementation that just halt for some reason that they're not proven. And in the industry, there's just several projects that are really proven when it comes to consensus implementation. So we are not going to expect thousands of those, but we are going to expect a few of those and they're probably going to differ, maybe not, right? But currently as the current design goes, they differ with respect to number of nodes. So you have different design choices. For example, with less than 100 nodes, you would go with a certain family of protocols. If you have tens of thousands of nodes, you might go more towards randomization and so on, right? I'm not saying we should go that way, by the way, for these techniques, but I'm just illustrating what's the case today. But then again, for individual implementations inside the shards, then you have a separate set of challenges. So what is the performance? What are the trade-offs? What is the security? How do you do civil attack protection and so on? How do you prove things correct? So we are talking about formal verification, model checking, are we talking about distributed testing? How is this done? And this is all something that's like the research is there, but when it comes to production and powering, if you imagine powering systems at the scale of web tool, we don't have production protocols that are at the level of similar systems that power web tool, for example, and classical strongly consistent systems that we use in threshold tolerance, for example. And the third thing is this execution, right? That you mentioned earlier. So of course, if you have whatever we build in the first two pillars, I would say, and if you have then sequential execution, the way it's mostly done today, this is not going to go far, right? So we are going to have to look at parallel execution, maybe even computation of our arbitrary data. One thing to think about there is, if you do federated machine learning, where you don't have the machine learning data style or the inside single data center in control of a single, let's say, social network provider, how do you do this, right? Especially if you couple it with encryption and privacy, which I'm not focusing on. By the way, this is what I should mention. So there, consensus lab is one of the four groups that are looking deeply into these bringing cutting edge research to development areas. So we're looking into basically what I'm discussing now, but we have three other groups that are looking into more topics like zero knowledge computing or just applications of different cryptographic primitives to blockchain. And one group looks at crypto economics or more from a game theory perspective. Of course, we work together. Like I cannot look at these problems that I'm showing here without considering those, but I'm focusing on these now, right? So just do that. You don't think that I forgot other things to mention here. There is also the need to support, I don't know, web assembly, virtual machines, maybe Ethereum virtual machines, maybe some other virtual machines, right? So if we write a so-called smart contract instead of simple cryptocurrency transfers, the situation gets complicated, right? And we got that far basically as things stand today, but there is a lot of work to be done. And essentially consensus lab is focusing on these three things. So we are dividing our work. We are building single systems and we are interested in basically building these systems together with, again, with the other partners, as I mentioned before, but focusing on these things, right? And these are the three vertical pillars of consensus lab.  These include security, which is pervasive. Also, how do we implement things correctly? How do we prove them correctly? This is also pervasive if you're interested for consensus lab and so on. So essentially this also covers many of the sessions that are consensus day sessions today and tomorrow. And I'm very happy that basically we got such a response from the community. So all the papers that we got were extremely relevant. I don't know if that was one or two exceptions that was not relevant to what we as a consensus lab are looking at. So that wasn't really great. Consensus lab takes this perspective of connecting the dots approach. So again, because it's about web bringing web to work across to web three, the idea is not to look at these problems from the perspective of a single blockchain project. So it's not about here scaling file coin consensus, but it's really like, okay, can we think about the whole space, the whole blockchain, whole decentralized system space and build an engineer system such that for example, you reuse things that are built by separate, by different teams. And my impression of the current situation when I was moving from permission world to permissionless world is that web three projects, largely not exclusively, right? Protocol labs is working a lot on collaboration across different teams, but largely they are, they appear as islands of research and development among maybe competing teams, whose blockchain has more transactions per second and so on. So I think we should need to step, take a step back and basically look at, like imagine that you're a systems engineer, each of us is a system engineer that's supposed to build decentralized internet himself. Like how would you think about the problem? And of course then later on, you wouldn't build a decentralized internet yourself, but we will collaborate. That's by the way the challenge that we're going to talk about, how do we do it? But this is the thing, right? So you're not building a single blockchain here, like how would you change the world? How would you put all things together? How would you connect the dots? That's the approach that we would like to emphasize and that we'd like to work towards. So in this context, I would like to also take a step back to look what we have done so far and to have a look, especially from the consensus perspective, like what's there today and what do we have and what can we use in a which way? So basically this needs to start from proof of work, right? So we cannot avoid elephant in the room. And as we were kind of trying to improve certain things that you see in red here, that are normally seen as drawbacks, then we were going more towards Byzantine fault tolerance and proof of stake protocols. So Byzantine fault tolerance was something that exists for 40 years. So I did my PhD actually, I started my PhD 18 years ago on Byzantine fault tolerance consensus. I defended my thesis one month before launching the Bitcoin, so this was there. I mean, these protocols were there, they were not as advanced as today, but they were there, but they were for some reason, they were not deployed. And as we will see, there are certain reasons why this is the case and why this is still the case. But proof of work, I mean, it has very high energy consumption. This is undebatable, right? So currently it's larger than Poland. It's 0.1% of world's energy production. And the consensus itself, if you look it from the computer science perspective, I mean the guarantees are not much, right? So the throughput is not much, the latency is not much.  And there is no finality, right? So depending on your perspective, you can, certain things are actually good, but we need to see like in this progress of replacing proof of work, like how far did we get? And we got some new applications, right? So we got smart contracts, we got decentralized finance, but what we also got is probably a huge confusion on the market. So I did a snapshot of CoinMarketCap today and this lists 12,000 cryptocurrencies. So the question is, are these all decentralized? Are these all useful? Can we, what do we do with this? Like what are we building here? And here in a recent paper that I had, so I'm really, really thankful during this call, I would like to thank Stefan Schmidt and Seth Gilbert for inviting this position paper that I wrote for bulleting of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science Disability Computing Column. It appears this month. And I have basically looked at these things that also I needed to look at to position, basically my view of how consensus labs should continue research. So this includes like, what is Bitcoin actually doing? And is it sustainable in what it is doing? How do we define the centralizations and are we trading in some key properties in this quest for green, very efficient performance? Are we doing something that we shouldn't be doing? So the rest like 15 minutes are about these topics, right? So in that position paper, I went briefly to see how, because there was no, I had an impression that there was no consensus in how do we define decentralization. Then I found a nice text paper by Carmela Trogozzo and others, there was George and Danez Hary-Halfin and I'm skipping one other author, I'm sorry. So, which defines very broadly, decentralized systems as a subset of distributed systems and I like this definition, I think it's very good. Where multiple authorities control different components, but no one is fully trusted by all. So I think this is a basic definition. I think if a system, if a distributed system doesn't satisfy this definition, we shouldn't call it decentralized. This is what I firmly believe. But then again, it doesn't distinguish like global scale permissionless systems such as Bitcoin from a four node, you know, four organizations which run a BFT protocol. So we need other facets of decentralization. And then in the literature, there are several of them, right? So there is resilience, which we know from photo and computing. This is our typical F or T. In blockchain world, it's typically called Nakamoto coefficient. It's basically the same thing. Like how many authorities the adversary needs to compromise to subvert safety of liars or liars. This is our again, F or T in the classical system. Other decentralization facets include like governments, you know, is somebody who controls the updates to the software, how easy is to submit proposals and so on. So they should be like there are certain parameters that I won't have time to go in. But in my paper, there are some pointers, including to certain other papers that go in even more depth. Whether protocol skills in protocol incentives, like is it incentivizing participation from inside the protocol, by giving, for example, block rewards or transaction fees and so on. And there are certain aspects that I'm not focusing on, but which is very important. So we saw this with the outage of a certain famous social network yesterday. So I think we can network level is always important, right? So we cannot forget that. But since we are just to focus on more distributed systems aspect, then we are focusing on these facets that are in black, right? So one very known one is openness. Like whether the system is permissionless or permission. And here we have a classical definition that permissionless systems are roughly speaking in English, those in which anyone can participate. So participants essentially self-elect themselves into the system. And in permission systems, there is an authority, you know, centralized authority or maybe decentralized, maybe existing members, let new members come into the system. This is also possible, which elects participants. Normally we would say that permissionless systems are more decentralized than permission, right? But is this classification expressive enough? So for example, our old permissionless systems equally decentralized. And then basically what I proposed in that paper is a refinement of notion of permissionlessness. Permissionlessness, if I may put it like that. So this is called equal opportunity of inclusiveness. So I was lazy enough to copy, paste the definition here, but there are essentially two properties that a system which satisfies inclusiveness or provides equal opportunities needs to satisfy. Needs to satisfy resource symmetry and genuine openness. So resource symmetry says just if me and George bring same resources to the system, we'll actually have the same power roughly speaking, right? So our maybe expected rewards will be the same. So the system will not distinguish ourselves, the two of us based on our identities, right? And it's easy to see that, you know, this applies to permission systems in a sense that no permission system will be resource symmetric because it's permission, right? So if I'm out of the system, then regardless of how much resources I have, I'm not equal participant as one who is in the permission system. But it doesn't really apply to tell us the difference between for example, proof of stake and proof of work. To both proof of stake and proof of work, you would get resource symmetry. What you don't get, as I will briefly argue later on, is this genuine openness. In certain permissionless systems. So basically the property says that system cannot reach a state in which it is not open, which is not permissionless. So specifically a new participant investment that would match an investment of existing participant must never depend on the action of the existing participants. And I think this is the property that captures the very difference in decentralization between proof of stake and proof of work, which is important basically depending on the use case. So we always need to watch the use case, for some use cases it's not important, for some use cases it might be important. But basically proof of work systems are inclusive and this is what the paper continues to argue about. So basically if me and George bring the same mining power into the system, we're going to have the same power and same expected rewards, right? And it's genuinely open. Like even if someone, imagine someone controlling the entire power in the Bitcoin mining, as computing power essentially grows outside the system, as we as humanity invent, just have breakthroughs, like this beat moves low, this, just the computing power, historically I cannot prove that it will continue like that, but I think it will be difficult to find the computer scientists that don't agree that our computing power will actually continue to grow. Be it like parallel computing with quantum computing you name, right? And that grows and that computing power is free to join the system. And there is nothing the existing participants can do to prevent new participants from joining the system. We can assume free like, for semiconductors, if we need to build and wait from China semiconductors, there is nothing that theoretically prevents you to build your own semiconductor facilities and so on, right? For the same investment. So just the rules of the gamer are kind of different from proof of state. In proof of state, there is resource symmetry but there are genuine openness not so much. And I think this captures this main difference. So if existing participants have 50% of the state assuming non-inflationary state and they are unwilling to sell, new participants can just not ever reach the existing participants power. And in my opinion, this captures the difference, right? So it captures the difference that in the end proof of state systems are kind of more similar to permission systems in a sense that they can reach that state. Arguably some are not yet in that state but if you're looking at a very long-lead systems like we are facing with decentralized systems and options, this is a pretty fundamental difference. So okay, I mean, again, we should evaluate the value of inclusiveness depending on the use case. And I would also argue that if Bitcoin use case is a payment system, then it's not worth the energy that it's spending, right? So yeah, it's nice to have an inclusive payment system. And maybe we can scale Bitcoin on layer two and other layers, but maybe inclusiveness is really not worth this energy that we are spending on Bitcoin. But what I'm proposing is to consider a different use case for Bitcoin because it's actually not the payment system. It was marketed as a, so it was marketed, it was basically in a published, you know, white Satoshi's white paper, it was called peer-to-peer cash. And what happens if you think of Bitcoin as a decentralized money for humankind? So what happens if you imagine the world in which this becomes actually dominant money? So this is the thought experiment that I was talking to myself for few months ago, like few months ago, and basically trying to imagine the world in which Bitcoin is the money.  And actually the results for me at least profound that I decided to share it with the community in this paper, right? So basically it needs to do with the current fiat monetary system. And I'm not going to talk about preferred players. So we know that, you know, banks due to continue on effect and so on are close to the source of money and these things. I think this is very well known. I want to talk about different incentives under the fiat monetary system and under the Bitcoin monetary system that actually are going to justify the energy expenditure of Bitcoin. So in Keynesian economics, these are basically I have, this is the economics that basically the economic theory and one of the most famous economics that drives the monetary system that we have today and the economy research that we have today. And basically there are a few interesting quotes in the long run, we are all dead, which kind of suggests that nobody here is focusing on the long run. It also talks about silent inflation. This is the cetacean in the lower left corner and so on. So economic growth is the key thing. So your business in order to be recognized, it needs to grow. You're measuring this growth in the fiat currency and you need to spend. So these are the characteristics that shouldn't be too strange for all of us in this current monetary system. So I try to summarize what happens in like one slide in the current monetary system and definitely we have an inflationary system. So governments and central banks, they create money and commercial banks, they also create money because they don't have fractional reserve bank. Let's not go into reasons like is this justified or not? It might be justified. For example, we had COVID crisis, many businesses fail, governments maybe needed to print money, let's not go into good guys and bad guys, right? So it's just what happens in the system, right? So if you have an inflationary system and you have somebody who can print money, it turns out historically that they actually print money for one reason or another. What happens to incentives of people and businesses in such a system is because you have silent tax by inflation, people are incentivized to do two things with the savings. So either to spend or invest. And if you invest into businesses, they basically need to grow again, measuring this fiat, which means that they get, need to get more revenues and more profits which basically promotes consumption and spending. So this is very like almost like first order logic and it goes with Keynesian economy well. So if you read basically the goal of Keynesian economy is to promote consumption as well. And what we have is the economy is what we have today, right? And this is orientation to short-term profits and no long-term outlook. So basically, then this is my claim. I don't have a proof for this, right? But my claim is if eight billion people live in this economy, then basically this is what caused over pollution and basically damaging the planet. And I would like just to ask you to look at the different thing. So let's look at the Bitcoin monetary system and its incentives. So in the Genesis book, there is an interesting motivation. I think all of you know this, but let's repeat it briefly. So in basically when country on effect showed last time, this was in 2008, basically there was a failure of economic system and certain players will bailed out. These were the banks, right? There is the cover page of the times that Satoshi put into the Genesis block. And this is basically because governments were first bailing out the banks. This is the effect of country on effects for people organizations who are close to money. They benefit from the money first and money is not evenly distributed, right? To all the people. Bitcoin monetary policy, we have something else. And this is, this didn't change in the inception of Bitcoin. So we have 21 million Bitcoin, which are divided in 100 million smaller units. And we have halving basically 50% of all Bitcoin were mined in the first four years, then another 25% until 2016, then another 12.5% and so on. And we are switching to Satoshi. So basically block reward would be less than Bitcoin in 2032. And last Satoshi will be mine in 2140. By the way, it's really interesting how someone comes up with these incentives until 2140, but that's a separate discussion that we might, if we were at the conference, I would be happy to discuss during the coffee break. But very, very interesting. Supply over time, we are here, right? So we are like roughly 90% of the printed Bitcoins. So there will be no more. So what are the incentives? Like we saw that incentives in the current system are to spend. So what are the incentives in this system? So it may be seen as a volatile investment. If you look at comparison to Fiat money, yes, it's volatile. But if you just take the opposite look, of course, then Fiat is volatile to Bitcoin. There's just a matter of perspective. We know this from Einstein, right? So just what's your system of reference in these things? So, but what does it do on long-term? And you can see this when you zoom out from the price of Bitcoin compared to Fiat currencies. When you zoom out, you see that encourages long-term savings, but this argument is not necessary. So it's just because it's a closed system. So in Bitcoin, you trade, you basically just transfer Bitcoins among the people who accept the game. And it's a closed system without any relation to the outside world, in a sense. Then as the network adoption grows, it's more and more people adopt Bitcoin and you expect this to happen because people recognize the value, then the value of these Bitcoin growth. So it encourages basically saving and holding. This is known as hodling. So some people don't, even if they don't think like that, usually, because anyone of us can trade and basically the hodling term came up as this is actually a hilarious post on Bitcoin talk forum where kind of a bad trader calls himself a bad trader and immense the term hodling. Very interesting.  And because the savings are preserved in time, there we get personal freedoms and time back. So essentially, you're not scared that if you work and you saved in Bitcoin over time, you're not scared that somebody can devalue this money. And basically you're allowed to do with this, whatever you want. You're not forced, for example, to invest in other economical player or in other businesses. For businesses growth is practically meaningless. Like, can you grow your revenues infinitely in car debt money? No, you cannot. So what you need to focus, especially since these customers now go basically for them, this money is scarce. And if this is money for the whole humanity, they might not give it that easily as they do it now. So what businesses need to focus on is providing customers true value. And the success, arguably, is not going to be measured or businesses in future is not going to be measured in revenue or profits because that doesn't make sense actually. It's going to be measured in the network effect much like it is today for networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, I would say Filecoin and others. So those that actually change and impact people lives they're more valued than others. So society changes completely. So if a billion people are more incentivized towards savings as opposed to spending, you have basically the whole behavior of the whole species differ. And basically decided to bother you with this argument because I didn't hear it repeating much. And for me, this was the turning moment where I felt like like in matrix basically waking up when I understood this. After I need to say, I was not very smart. I looked at Bitcoin for 11 years basically since it was invented. But this was the turning point for me. So equal opportunities of Bitcoin does not mean economic equality. We should be aware of that, right? So Bitcoin provides and proof of work provides economic equal opportunities but not necessarily economic equality. However, these economic inequalities are much easier to address in Bitcoin system than in current monetary system. So we have remittances as an example. So you don't need to go through intermediaries to transfer money from wealthy and members of the family to poor ones. And this was one of the motivated use cases for El Salvador adoption of Bitcoin as little tender just a month ago. If you have enough Bitcoin like more than others you can easily figure this out.  And if you think it's easy, if you have billion dollars there are less fortunate countries in which billion of the local currency is not much. I was, I had a unlock which I don't want to talk about much of holding actually a bill of 500 billion local dinners in my head. So that depends on like how lucky you are where you are. But if you're in the non-inflationary monetary system it's easy to see if you have more than others. If you have more than others maybe you can give and donate and help other people. And also you can do Bitcoin proof of work mining anywhere on earth. Economies of scale apply. It's not easy to mine on laptop anymore. It was by the way, it's not anymore but now, you know, if El Salvador mines on a volcano like this car started on geothermal energy or if in Africa very basically I have a list here of renewable resources they're actually spread across the planet very equally unlike some other resources that we are relying on today such as oil. So I would stop here and invite you to read the paper and just to say that we need to think about things in a context and Bitcoin is not a payment system. So Bitcoin is just the money if it succeeds it's money for the human kind of the future or otherwise it goes to zero that there are just two numbers for Bitcoin. And the world in which Bitcoin becomes dominant money is actually very nice work. How do we go about economy in that world is might be a kind of a challenge because we don't know if we are afraid of deflation of the economy we might want to give governments the power to change monetary policy and so on. The thing is, there are economic theories about it. So in 1936 there was a paper by Henry Seymons from University of Chicago that was called rules versus authorities in monetary policy. And it was that's an amazing title, right? So it's definitely what Bitcoin does. And I find this reading Friedrich Hayek. So Friedrich Hayek is a Austrian school economist Nobel Memorial Prize like the fake Nobel Prize in Economy winner from 1974 for his works and the Constitution of Liberty from 16th actually talks a lot about welfare state in the deflation of the economy. So I recommend this reading. And basically he claims that arguments advanced by Seymons in 1936 are so strict. This is a quotation that I'm using in my paper are so strong the arguments. The issue is now largely on how far it is practically possible to tie down monetary authority by appropriate rules. But noticed like nobody as I get nobody's bad nobody's good. Let's take this position. It was not possible before. If we have seashells as money somebody would bring more seashells. If we have stones somebody wouldn't bring more stone. If we have gold somebody would bring more gold. If we have fiat money as paper money somebody would bring more paper money. If you didn't have technological solution to prevent somebody bringing more money until Bitcoin. So basically now you have. So there is a technological solution in which you cannot possibly attack and you can double spend if now comparing to the power of nation states, right? So you need somebody who controls more energy than Poland to double spend the point. But as we know, you cannot change the supply even if you do that. So even against the most powerful attackers you cannot change the, in the presence of most powerful attackers you cannot change the monetary policy. And I think as a humanity we should use this because of the technology we have a solution to the problem, which was discussed in thirties. We should think about this in that perspective from my view. So what I propose next is basically to embrace Bitcoin as the money of our future because it's good for humankind and planet Earth. And I try to argue there are more arguments in the paper. The question going back to decentralized computing is what do we do now? So I'm definitely supporting research and reducing energy expenditure, but without trade-offs. So okay, if we have proof of stake that might be useful, but not for layer one. Might be useful for something else. Let's use it where it's useful. For layer one, if we want to improve Bitcoin let's not focus on trade-offs. Let's not sacrifice security in decentralization. Let's find something that's not weaker if not stronger than Bitcoin or prove some impossibility results here. For other things, until we do that let's leverage Bitcoin slow but very secure proof of work on census to secure the rest of decentralized internet. Because if there is no nation state that can attack effectively, maybe except few but not maybe not for a long time, like in future. Let's leverage that security to help with security of other parts of this big decentralized system that we're building. And in that context, I'm inviting you, I'm almost out of time but I will invite you to essentially continuation of the talk in some sense, where Sarah will zoom it tomorrow in the checkpointing session. We'll talk about securing membership and stake checkpoints of business in full torrent and proof of stake blockchains by anchoring them into Bitcoin. So basically what Sarah will describe is the idea that we have and that we are building and I'm inviting anyone interested to join in the context of our open collaboration, of course, basically anchoring membership and hash of the, like checkpoints of the state of a proof of stake network in the top route enabled top route is important when it kicks in in November in a top route enabled Bitcoin. And we, for example, if we need to store the actual state somewhere proof of stake network could build its own content available storage or use file coin and IPFS. And by this you can easily prevent easily as the quotation marks prevent long range of tabs that are also some one other thing that's basically plaguing proof of stake. So this is tomorrow, 5 p.m. UTC presented by Sarah. I really invite you to join this talk. So basically now we're sharding in our back to consensus law goals in our sharding scheme. Maybe we do checkpoints of, you know, the stop level consensus into Bitcoin but we continue scaling, like leveraging security for Bitcoin with continuous scaling. All the other again, coming back and finishing all the other talks and sessions that we have in consensus days are very, very relevant, right? So essentially we have today sharding then we have scaling and performance we have stronger security and the final session will be on peer to peer communication and efficient mem pools. Tomorrow we have the session on checkpoint that I already discussed and basically on eventual consistency and so on. So I'm again thanking you so much for these contributions. I think this is really important. I think these are really interesting as individual contributions and I would invite you whenever you hear the talk to think how we can use it in the context of a global decentralized system, right? And there will be no mark or no protocol labs no, no, anyone to tell but like we need to work and collaborate as a community towards this but we need to have high level goals in mind like really important goals and basically these goals. So let's build a future that decentralized collaborative and good for humanity. So with this advertisement of our group and basically the announcement that we are also growing and hiring I can take some questions. Thank you so much for your attention. I hope this was interesting. If controversial, that was also the goal. So in the definition of genuine openness for proof of stake, the antecedent was that that the person who is holding the non-inflationary token they might not sell it to the other person, the newcomer but by not selling it isn't that person depreciating the value of the token and harming itself? Like should there be some crypto economics flavor in the definition of genuine openness? That's my question. Maybe as you will see the definitions in English. I think not. I think there is a fundamental thing still. I am encouraging also in the paper formalization of what's going on here. The main difference that I want to highlight if I'm holding 50% of the stake and I'm not willing to sell it that's whatever is my motivation even if this take depreciates that's different from me holding 50% of the mining power and not be able to do anything to prevent you from bringing the same amount of mining power in proof of work. If you see the difference. Yeah, that difference is clear but the consequences are not accounted. If you are not like if you don't allow someone to take part in the staking process by giving them the stake in the market then that stake will devalue and there is no incentive from Alice's perspective to do that action itself, right? It's open. I wouldn't answer this it requires deeper economic analysis. For me it was sufficient to see that there was a difference. Fundamental one. So yes, I agree that proof of work is definitely more inclusive than proof of stake but what I wonder about is about the symmetrical because we can already see that there's a tendency of there's energy prices are very different in certain regions in the world. So that to me in a certain place I me investing the same money into it won't have the same result as someone else where the energy prices are significantly lower and obviously someone already holding a lot of hardware when the GPU prices were not as insanely high as currently also had to have invest significantly less than I might have to invest now as the price has increased. Absolutely right. I did have a disclaimer that I sneaked in which I was assuming for proof of work a fair market for energy and computing power to just to make the argument. It's a bigger thing. So of course you can also say, yeah but it takes me time to produce the semiconductors and so on that they're different. They're different ingredients to the game. I completely agree. Which still doesn't so at the fundamental level if you imagine like the ideal world like if you see me like this if you're building a game in which you see me like this right. So basically you would have clear difference between proof of stake and proof of work as games. And of course in our world there are different economic parameters that play into and that essentially impact the calculation a bit whether what we want to calculate but in my opinion they don't impact the fundamental difference between the two games. Yeah, fundamentally there's a big difference between the two. Yes. Yeah. I had a second small question which was to a later point in the terms of the money spending in compared fiat to cryptocurrency where from my experience in different crypto communities I've seen like people being more likely to spend cryptocurrency on all kinds of things being at pyramid schemes, NFTs, games, gambling completely random stuff compared to fiat. That's the thing. So I'm not saying everyone is incentivized to save. It's just that if each of one of us is essentially is a bit so I mean these people in order to make that argument you need to say that these people who are gamblers in the cryptocurrency world wouldn't be gamblers in the fiat world. And I don't think this is the case. I think that like if you look at individuals if they actually save a bit more resources in one world compared to other they don't need to do it relatively to each other but just compared to themselves to their copy in another world. And you multiply that by eight billion you're going towards this conclusion.


Hello everybody. Thanks for coming to learn a little bit about identity. I just watched Sina talk and I've actually I read Sina's work and it's awesome and I think that it was what he talked about was at the kind of the technical level how we're gonna actually implement this stuff with this technology is super important and a lot of super cool use cases there. However this talk is a level or a layer up. Talking a broader sense about identity, what exactly are we trying to solve when we say we have identity problems or the identity on the internet is broken or Ethereum doesn't have proper standards for identity. What does all of that mean and then what is kind of the mental or conceptual framework that we can apply to kind of solve this problem. So I don't know if you know since this is kind of just an identity talk but this is actually under the design track here at DevCon and before I dive into that a little bit about myself I work on Uport. I'm product designer. I've been working on Uport for a little over a year and we do self-sovereign identity work and a number of things. We have a mobile app, we have developer resources, we do the ERC thing and try and submit standards and make suggestions about the protocol but ultimately our vision is to bring self-sovereign identity to the world in a practical, usable and universal way. Something that even is outside of Ethereum because people have real identities outside of Ethereum too and creating a silo inside of Ethereum isn't going to work and we want to make it a standard and not a standard in the sense that we submit something and it becomes standardized in code but a standard way of operating in the world where people get decentralized identities in an accessible way. So why is this in the design track? Well as a designer we typically one of the questions I always ask I think a lot of other designers kind of ask it is are we solving the right thing first and then are we or are we building the right thing and then are we building the thing right and a lot of times I think that things get conflated in this space around identity and we say we want to solve Ethereum's identity problems. Now I think on Uport we want to use Ethereum to solve some of the world's identity problems and those two things can coexist but they are not exactly the same and you can think about them in different ways and if we only solve Ethereum's identity problems we're at risk of not making this whole thing accessible and universal and we're at risk of rebuilding Web 2 problems into Ethereum. So I want to focus on that and I want you to picture some of the people and picture them maybe this is in five years 2023. Take Sarah for instance so imagine this is four years in the future she is now having to flee Myanmar or some conflict zone and she received aid before as a UN refugee the last time she had to escape and during that time she got a decentralized ID and the UN issued her a claim saying that she has refugee status and they issued that to her Ethereum address right she returns once the conflict has kind of settled down she returns home. Now things degrade again socially and she is now at risk again and the government wants to persecute her and people like her and now they can identify her incredibly easily they just have to look at the chain right they can verify that she indeed is the type of person that they're looking for right and now because she received aid and that was put on chain immutably tied to her forever she is now exposed herself some privacy lost privacy lost protection and it was good at the time but nobody thought about the long consequences of what you're doing and what you're putting on chain and when you tie it to a self-sovereign ID. So that's the type of thing we want to avoid and these problems are all over the place. In Texas I'm from Dallas they're using the churches right now in Dallas have made an agreement with the local immigration police and the police force in Dallas that says if an undocumented immigrant presents a parishioner ID being part of the Catholic Church that they can get easily just by going to the church they the police won't enforce immigration laws upon them for now and so this has become controversial and all of this stuff and this is something that could be done and put on chain however if you put it on chain if though if the situation changes you've now put that person at risk the same thing happens with somebody who maybe you're working in the adult industry you're on spank chain right and you're a performer and you receive reputation and accolades and tokens and all this stuff on spank chain in the future maybe and now you can't separate that persona from the rest of your life in the real world you're being able to correlate all parts of your life together and being one single person in every single context is like not a natural way that humans operate in the world so I'm going to establish some context and we'll talk about problem I'll present a solution so the first thing is how do actual people think about their identity so like I said you have these different places where you interact in the world you have a professional identity of a family your friends your different people at least slightly in all of these contexts but you're able to move information between them all but you can keep some things private from some groups right and these are really there is no essential quality to identity identities kind of like this emergent thing there's no root basis this is what philosophers have been debating about forever Hume John Locke Descartes they've kind of found that there really is no core atomic unit yet online we need a core atomic units so that's that's kind of what we're wrestling with so if you imagine all these different phases of identity all these different spheres of influence you have they just they numerate and they come together and they overlap in interesting ways they form you and that's his unstructured data that we're trying to put in tables and rows and that's a way I like to think about this which is good it's a hard problem to solve start from the individual which we just kind of talked about and move out words into these layers of abstraction called social digital decentralized hopefully sovereign so socially how do we what happens when identities interact with each other regularly well I think this is where you establish something like reputation and reputation is just identity times time right so as an identity accrues information about itself and other people can see that information they can make judgments about that identity and that's what we call reputation so that's really what we care about when we talk about all of this identity I know that you port isn't explicitly a reputation system but having an identity the reason you want one is so that you can get a reputation and you can do something with it you can leverage it so we care about identities in so far is that we can predict their future behavior whatever information helps us predict their future behavior becomes reputation that's what people want to leverage that's what we need to give them the ability to control that information set let's see what's next so this applies to crypto blockchain because it's fundamentally a peer to peer technology you have identities interacting with each other if you didn't then there'd be no reason for this to exist now Bitcoin I'll talk a little bit more about what it did for this problem later but it's only one half of an economic trade right it's one of the assets you want you want to get something for your Bitcoin and that still requires two parties to interact and that has to be mediated by some reputation and trust to perform the full action of giving somebody Bitcoin and getting whatever it is you want from it so probably seen this movie Indiana Jones he's trying to do what I essentially would call an atomic swap in the real world but there are no atomic swaps in real life right you see it all the time and something like like a imagine a prisoner swap the reason that there's so much overhead there and all of these contingency plans are made it's because both parties can't guarantee that both things happen at the same time right and when you can't guarantee this because it's not code in the real world you have to have trust that trust is based on the reputation so you care about who you're interacting with so if you're buying mangoes on using blockchain right there's you haven't solved the trust problem by just using blockchain you've moved it you've to other places you've made it but and you still haven't solved the trust problem in the actual physical moving of the goods between participants maybe there's some like Sina was talking about way to stake your reputation and use some game theoretical concepts to enforce these things over time but that's a probabilistic approach still you're still trusting that people will care about those things so the role of identity is often overlooked when we think about the mechanics of trade and that's I think kind of the reason why identity is important in this space so everything is reputation in my opinion and reputation is trust that's what gives rise to trust and so I have this really this is supposed to encapsulate just how hard the problem is and it's this crazy word vomit of a sentence that kind of illustrates exactly what we're dealing with and then we'll move into some of the more tangible things after this so identity is this amorphous contextual dynamic property that interacts with other identities to give rise to a sea of probabilities that we refer to as reputation and when an interaction happens an exchange of reputational information occurs the result of which is some amount of trust between the participants and determines the amount of friction that needs to be added to this interaction for it to be successful that is what that all meant those previous slides but this is really hard to put into computers so that's the problem and what is it like to be online what's the state of this problem as it exists today especially digitally where these problems manifest themselves most often well we know these companies they are our overlords and among others and their information is siloed we know this this is why we're probably all sitting here is because this is the problem that we think about a lot they they have made some the thing that is interesting about what they've done is they've made it easy in some regards they've created an incredible user experience on the front end of the experience it's the long-term consequences the externalized consequences from these actions up front therefore from that good UX that is the problem so how do we keep that good part but solve the long-term consequences I wanted to point out that when we talk about like something like Facebook and what their business model is I think what their business model is is reputation as you do more things on Facebook your reputation your history goes up on Facebook and the switching cost then goes up it makes it harder to choose a different platform and that's how they lock you in right raise your hand if you have a Facebook account even though they've been hacked and even though we hate them right I still have a Facebook account and I have all my privacy settings on but I don't really know what to think and that's because there's nowhere to go with my information they don't make it easy and they want to not make it easy so we have to solve that and that's where Ethereum comes in and an open identity standard comes in that can solve that problem while we keep the great UX so this is from a researcher named Rebecca Ricks I always always bring it to these presentations because it's just so crazy this is a graph of what happens when you make a transaction on PayPal and all of these nodes are the different companies that's that transaction metadata gets sent to let it play out for a second and on her site you can actually see which metadata each one of these parties gets since they've acquired Venmo I'm sure this is happening with Venmo too there's probably even more things and it can only just goes on and on so that's that's the state of how your of your identity how it gets spread around today I'll go ahead and skip because it there's a lot so web identity is not the best thing we can do it's done a lot of good things in some ways and we need to preserve those like I said but Ethereum could solve some of the some of the problems at the root of it all one thing that has happened in the real world with regulators is something called GDPR so if you're not familiar with it and you're working on these problems or you're handling user identities this is something to be aware of GDPR is a lot of it's a European regulation it's a general data protection regulation I think I might have one of those words wrong but basically what it says is gives these it establishes these rights for users interacting online the ability to move your data the ability to request and know exactly how it's being used and one really critical one which is which is the right to erasure which is the ability to request that your information be deleted and and if the company doesn't comply with this they're in violation of GDPR and they'll attempt to enforce this law and it's I think it's a fine of 4% of revenue for the year or 20 million dollars or 20 million pounds so it's it could it could really screw up whatever you're doing as a startup Facebook went so far as to separate all of their user data that's European into an entirely different location in the world they built a whole new data store just for European information to separate it so the way that applies to blockchain is do not put personal identifying information on chain those stories that we that I talked about before about the refugees immigrants people who work in marginalized or or stigmatized communities when you put their information on chain forever it reduces their control it puts them at risk and generally a theory or an axiom is that decreasing the privacy of the community increases the marginalization of at-risk groups and that's something if we really want to build an open financial system we really want to do all of these really world-changing important things we have to keep that in mind now before we build an identity system that de facto excludes them so GDPR is an attempt to do that with regulation I know we all don't really like regulation and we you know scoff at it and maybe we'll just ignore it but the spirit of the law is I would say good it's trying to return rights to all of us right and protect us from the overlords we talked about so what do we need to do in this new system increase privacy like I talked about preserve that flexibility of being able to be different people in different contexts so the ability for you to be your professional self on LinkedIn and your social self on Twitter or an even worse person on Twitter and be a model on Instagram be an influencer somewhere else be a gamer somewhere else we have to preserve that flexibility you don't want to be that same identity in every place we need to facilitate the portability so that's the that's the switching cost problem we've reduced competition when we increase these switching costs it creates a inefficient economic market for this data and for identities we have to ensure recoverability I'm not going to talk a ton about that today but obviously you don't want to have a fragile system where if you just lose your key which people do all the time as we know you lose your life right lose every access to your health records and all of your accolades and all of your reputation it cannot be that fragile has to be resilient at the user level and we have to improve accessibility the ability to get one of these identities do you have to be living in America and have access to the nicest phone and everything to get a decentralized self-sovereign identity I don't think you should have to do that because that is again a de facto marginalization of some groups so we should re-biddle it and that's where we get to what is you know self-sovereign identity exactly and how what what what are the mechanics of it well self-sovereign identity is when an entity kind of define it I think this is my own kind of working of the definition there really isn't a standard one in the industry of what exactly self-sovereign identity is but this is the way I've been thinking about it which is an identity is self-sovereign when the entity to which the identity refers retains the most control over any given aspect of that identity they don't retain complete control I don't think we want a system where you have complete control over the data or the or you don't have the ability to give up some control voluntarily right this is the ability we would need that for something like liquid democracy that we want to do right the ability to have somebody do something on your behalf right so in these situations the identity just needs to have the most control over any of these interactions when Facebook issues you and identity and identifier they have the most control you have some control but they have the most we have to flip that paradigm so there's kind of these principles that were put forth by Christopher Allen an identity researcher that I liked I'm not gonna go through them all and explain them but you can see this list the two that two of the technologies we have now Bitcoin and Ethereum address and fulfill some of these principles in different ways and the last two minimalization and protection are largely what this talk is about and that's that last piece kind of a self-sovereign identity that we that's really critical to figure out it can make or break this whole thing so Bitcoin what did it do to I just want to recap what it kind of did in moving self-sovereign identity for because it did some important things it made existence go up right you could generate a key on your side you didn't have to ask anybody that gave you control the ability to generate your own identity means you're in control of it and that that fulfills one of the principles transparency because it's the we have our immutable ledger that everybody shares you have transparency over how many identities are in the system at some level of transparency of what is happening with those identities which transparency again it kind of conflicts with privacy right so that's that delicate balance and I'll get to it in a second but I think that's something that we can we can address at the UX level and then persistence the ability to not be deleted from that ledger not be censored not be kicked you know you can be kicked off of Facebook or Twitter and everything you've done there is gone and for some people that's a really big deal that's a huge part of their economic viability in the world so then we have Ethereum and that brought us smart contracts and that did some more things that fulfilled these principles it gave us the ability to access other identities in a in a more complex way then it gave us the ability to consent to certain things perform a variation of different actions on the data and and and broadcast our intents about our actions to the world portability it gave us the ability to you know we've done a bunch of stuff with linking smart contracts together and storing lots of keys and in controller contracts or registries and this gives us this ability to move data around but keep that persistent identifier and then interoperability when we when we that's why we want to establish kind of a standard way of doing this so that we have this interoperability and and what Ethereum has done with smart contracts and us all having the same protocol has been great for interoperability so that's good and like I said the last two things left are this minimization minimization is a principle that when I share information with you I just need to share the very minimum amount of information that is needed to reduce the friction in our interaction and the classic example is going to a bar you want to prove that you're 21 you just need to prove that you're 21 they the bouncer does not need to know your full name your birth date your address your picture your height your weight whatever else is on there that is oversharing and that's not consistent with these principles of minimization so we need that flexibility and ID cards are not flexible they have that you can't you can't dynamically augment the information on a physical card right so that's why and the same thing kind of happens in in in Facebook when you hit login with Facebook you hit share my information this is this is where the UX becomes important because we all over share every time we do that right we say you get access to our contacts get access to all of our friends and that's what the Cambridge Analytica thing was they didn't actually do anything they may have done a couple of illegal things they did a lot of unethical things and one of those things was using kind of UX dark patterns to get people to over share and consent to things they didn't mean to and then taking advantage of that and so that falls on designers to have some perspective and some ethics around how to handle the sharing of data and the way identities take actions online so what's the solution well at Uport we think the solution for a lot of this is this idea of verifiable off-chain claims using things off-chain that are signed by your identity so they're rooted to the integrity of Ethereum but they preserve your privacy while still maintaining the ability to interact with other identities improve things about yourself you're able to control the amount of data you share which fulfills the minimization and because it's off-chain you have that privacy and you have more protection over your identity so the way we do this is supported by something called decentralized identifiers and I won't get into a ton of the tech no cold part here and well I got I got zero okay well I'll go fast decentralized identifiers I won't get into a ton of the tech but suffice it to say it's this long string it's your Ethereum address propended by a method and basically what a decentralized identifier allows us to do is create a resolver that lives somewhere points to where your data or how points to an object called a did document that has data in it and that can tell that can be keys it can be rules about keys and it could also be endpoints of telling the person that is looking for something about you who to ask where to ask and then that can point to something like you point where now the user is able to consent to things granularly and we fulfill some of these things in in a in a couple of ways this is kind of the UX portion so the some of the design principles at this level are one are consent so the ability to selectively and actively disclose things passive disclosure is a problem that's when you grant somebody access in perpetuity to some amount of your information and you just forget about it we all forget how many things we've subscribed to we all forget what the terms and services and agreements that we've entered into are because it's too much to digest in the moment we there is no future where we make users we expect them to read all of that information that's just not going to work and the legal system will take advantage of that if we don't design the experiences correctly so the next is transparency so we like to tell our users when they're doing something that is going to end up on chain most people this is this is a hard part because I think it's something that people are going to just have to learn kind of the way they had to learn certain things about the internet but there have we have to do a good job of educating the distinction about what's going on chain and what's staying off chain and how that relates to their risk so knowledge we track activity that happens right so I can't tell you I have no history anywhere centralized of everything that I've done and all the data I've shared with people using a paradigm like this you can easily have that repository on you at all times and you can be sure of the actions you took in the past and what you've done which I think is really important security reputation in interaction so this is the screen is us not recognizing or seeing a suspicious identity since there is no overlord the system needs to be able to identify and tell users when they're taking potentially risky actions and interacting with identities that they don't know it's gonna be in it's gonna be at the application level to do this right it can be done through blacklist it can be done through certain things like a reputational floor or ceiling of some sort but we have to tell we have to message this to users and then privacy this is non corollability which is one of the hardest and trickiest problems it's the type of thing when we talk about trust graphs and and and reputation and identity emerging from interactions that we watch on chain we have to reduce the core corollability of our identities right or else that all of that division where we get to be different people in different contexts goes away so one thing we do at you port is we want to create a new fresh aetherium identity for you with every interaction or give you the choice to right so that you can separate everything you're going to do in that session from the rest of your identity then just a final little recap so that was kind of the UX principles this is a recap kind of what we've covered which was a lot identity is an amorphous blob reputation is really what we care about reputation is the basis of trust decentralized IDs return control of reputation to the user and with control comes responsibility not only for the user but for the people designing the interactions right we are supposed to the designers of the way all of this manifests itself at the user level there in a way they have to put their trust in us right at the interface level if you haven't read anything about dark patterns they I would encourage you to these are UX things that unethical teams or designers do to try and get users to do something that is not in their best interest but in the best interest for the application and the stakes have just gotten really high when it comes to that right you can screw your whole life up now in a single interaction and we can mitigate all of that risk at the UX level that's why designers need to be thinking about how to handle identity and all of how to handle reputation in their platforms and think about how they can keep things off chain and do a lot of these things that we we just covered I think that's in the spectrum of things that the designers of these applications should be caring about and should be thinking about and with that I thank you for sitting through all of that that was a lot


There are now ample statistics to show that flip classroom methods that for their self-paced materials use notes and textbooks can already provide superior grades for the top-end students, for the mid-tier students, and for the low-tier students. They also provide better passing rates for minorities. They also provide better attendance, better student responses, better conceptual development, better improvement of knowledge across a course, and better grades in subsequent courses. In other words, flip classrooms have already been pretty well tested to work well. Now because a lot of that research has been done on courses where the self-paced materials are based on textbooks and provided notes, it's clear that a lot of those benefits are based on what you could do within class activities when you don't have to introduce new content but just help students engage with it. However, we're still going to take a few minutes to look at what's known about making that self-paced learning efficient and effective. First of all, it turns out that we need the textbooks and the provided notes. Written material is typically the best way to present the most detail, and it's also the fastest way to skim to find a particular discussion of a specific topic, and it's often preferred by non-native speakers or students with other accessibility issues, and so it's essential to have these resources available for a course. On the downside, reading a textbook can often seem very impersonal, and that ultimately leads to a loss of student engagement. There are some things that are just naturally more engaging live, like inspirational discussion or demonstrations or movies and dynamic models, that kind of thing. One final problem with just using textbooks and provided notes is that it's very hard to embody uncodified knowledge in them, so it's much easier to model problem solving and your general approach to things live than it is in written form, and so if we want to do all these things live, then in a self-paced learning setting what that really means is we want to do it using videos, and of course the absolute cheapest way to do something like that is to simply record your current lectures or classes. And if you've ever actually given this a go, if you've ever recorded yourself giving a lecture or a class, and then watched it again afterwards, then you might understand why we do not recommend this method. Watching or listening to those recordings afterwards is typically very torturous, and not just because you see all those minor mistakes that you made, because while they might bother you, they won't bother the students, but mainly because it's just incredibly slow. The information density is really, really low and it drags on and on. And there's also typically a lot of repetition and filler precisely because you're trying to hold the attention of a range of people for a long time. So in other words, when you're giving live lectures or classes, you're optimizing your delivery for constraints that you don't have when you're actually delivering those videos online.  In a real live lecture, students have to turn up whenever the lecture is. They can't turn up when they're feeling awake and ready to learn something. In a real live lecture, if people are finding that it's going too slow, they can't just increase the speed of delivery. And in a real live lecture, if students are finding it really difficult or if they miss a point, they can't pause it, go back and watch it again and work through it and get to the point where they actually understood what you were saying in that previous section before listening to what you say after that. And all of these things mean that students interact with online videos very differently into the way they interact with lectures and classes, and we have to design our delivery of those videos slightly differently for that reason. So of course, the first key point is that the information density has to be very high. Don't leave large gaps. Try to resist the temptation to repeat things too much, and if you have to write things down or do a demonstration, then cut out all the craft and make it happen as fast as possible. The advantages you get from this is that the final result is enormously more rewatchable. When you watch it the first time going slow doesn't hurt too much, but if you're going to rewatch a section of some video, then having high information density is critical to have that experience be tolerable. And the second key point you have to take into account when you're making specially made video content for your self-paced learning is that you need to have regular breaks. You need to have chances for the student after they've watched something to respond to some question. And so what you do is you have regularly spaced short videos interspersed with questions. And of course, regularly asking students questions is standard best practice for live lectures and classes as well. But in this case, you're actually getting to ask every single student a question every single time. So between every video and the next video, you get every student to respond and make sure that they're really following what you're up to. Now the last few years have really seen the advent of MOOCs, the massive open online courses that deliver all of their content online and they have no in-class activities whatsoever. Now of course, because they're hamstrung that way, they've had to do a lot of research to find out exactly how to make this work. But one of their advantages is they have literally hundreds of thousands of students that they can do randomly controlled A-B testing on. And so they can tell what kinds of videos produce superior engagement. And the answer that is the videos ought to be between four and nine minutes long with a sweet spot around about five to six minutes. And that's all you absolutely need. All you really need is high information density, short videos with questions in between. If you want to go for all the points, then you should have some talking head, preferably in a collegial environment, and some talking over slides, but not at the same time. So not a little box with your head talking while you write over a slide, but one or the other so that they don't distract from each other. And finally, the talking over slides ideally should be handwritten, although of course there's a very small effect there.


Happy Friday everyone. I'm Jason Laduke from Evil Genius Leadership Consultants, and this is Geeks R. Sexy. Every 4th Friday of the month, I take over from Michelle Davis and talk about Las Vegas businesses and how to be successful with your business and your life here in Las Vegas. We've got a great bunch of guests for you today. Later on, we're going to have Shamara Walker from SWHR Consulting coming on, and Bianca Vallejo from Green Valley Smiles Dentistry is going to be on. But first, we've got Dana Berg. She's a Proctor Gallagher Consultant. She's going to tell us all about what she does. I've got my red, white, and blue on because it's Memorial Day weekend. We're going to have a beautiful weekend here in Las Vegas. Dana, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here today. Thank you so much, Jason. I really appreciate you having me here. So you have a very widely varied background. You spent a little time in the Army. You've done some things in real estate. Tell us how you came to Las Vegas. Tell us how you got to where you are today. Well, I came to Las Vegas almost 18 years ago. We moved here. My ex-husband got a job down here. Absolutely love it here. But you're right. I have a varied background. I've been in the military. Thank you for your service, by the way. Thank you very much as well. And as well, I've been a nurse for over 25 years. And I've been helping people all my life. And that's how I got into the self-development industry and helping people to change their lives. Excellent. And so you are in self-development. You're helping people with their mindsets and helping people achieve their goals through developing healthy mindsets. If I understand what you're doing correctly, how is that varied experience, that path you took, that story? How does that help you with helping your clients get to where they want to go? Well, truly, when you live in different places, when you experience so many different things, you get a real wide range of having to adapt. To adapt to certain situations, different people. And it's truly helped me to understand others in different cultures, different situations. But we're all people. We all need help in certain ways. We all think, right? We all exist together as one. We do. We do all need help in certain ways. And I think a lot of us, especially in the business world, as new small business owners, we feel like we need to have it all figured out. And really the best thing we can do, whether we're a small business owner or working for a larger company, or even just in our own personal lives, is, one, recognize that everyone needs help. We're not alone out there. And it's okay to ask for help. We need to go find someone. I was listening to a podcast on the way up here. Last night was my niece's high school graduation in Phoenix. So I drove down there yesterday. And then first thing this morning, I drove back so I could be here today. I was listening to a podcast on the way up here. And they were talking about on this podcast how, just because you're going through something for the first time, doesn't mean that thousands of people haven't already been through it. So leverage your resources and find someone who's been through and can help you with things.  Yes. Yes. And I had never heard of that until the first time that you and I sat down a couple weeks ago. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what a Proctor Gallagher consultant does? Okay. Well, Proctor Gallagher is Bob Proctor and Sandra Gallagher. And Bob Proctor, as many of you may know, has been in the self-development industry for over 50 years. I mean, the man learned from Napoleon Hill and Earl Nightingale. He and his partner have created an amazing program, Thinking Into Results. What it does is it's a complete success program. So it doesn't matter what you're going through in life, where you want to be, it helps you to get there. It's truly a success system. Okay. Because success is a system, but it helps you to retrain your thoughts, okay? Because how we think will determine what we do. Now, success, success is defined differently by everybody. Is that part of what you do in Proctor Gallagher? Is how people find their definitions of success? Are there guidelines for what success is? Tell us a little more about what success is in your view. Well, success is a progressive realization of a worthy ideal or goal. Okay. So success is defined by whatever you think it is, whatever is important to you in figuring out what your worthy goal is. That's really great because one of the things that whenever I work with clients or speak or work with kids, I always talk about what I talk about is success is bringing about the good you want to bring in the world. It's not necessarily money. It's not necessarily cars. It's not necessarily having a successful business. You know, sometimes success is being a great dad and a great husband to somebody. And if I can help someone do that or you can help someone do that, that's an even higher calling than helping somebody make a lot of money, I think, right? Absolutely. I agree. So tell us a little about what you provide your clients. We talked about a little bit what the focus of the system is and what we're after, but how do you provide your clients that help to get to that success? Okay. So what I do is I facilitate the program. The program is a six-month program to get through. It actually takes you that long to go through every single one of the modules. And a repetition is key. We go over things over and over and over again so that you can help retrain your thinking to have that success. And every step of the way, every week I meet with my clients whether on phone, online, and we go through it. How are you doing? What's going on? And help reinforce them or accountability with them as well. So if I understand the program right, there's a little bit of we get in started orientation, a little bit of goal-setting, a little preparation of the battlefield as we used to say in the Air Force. And then you're jumping right into lesson one.   We're going to come back to that kind of thing. All the lessons are intertwined. Okay, that's great. The first, the last, they all relate together. And truly it's six months to get through it. But just as a diet or exercise, you don't just exercise for six months and then stop and decide that you're healthy. No, you're going to continue on. You learn from the material and you keep studying it and you keep learning and applying it to your life. So how does one of your clients, after they get to the end of six months, how do you help them maintain that accountability for sticking to what they learn? Because we all know it takes anywhere between, you know, the numbers vary. I'll go by myself. It takes me anywhere between 60 and 90 days to build a good habit, right? Bad habits all pick up like that because I'm human like everybody else. But to build a good, you know, they say some people are as short as 20 days. It could be as much as 120 days. But it takes time to build good habits. What comes after the six months with your client? Well, I encourage them to continue it. They have lifetime access to the program. Okay. They have lifetime access to the program or the physical actual books. And I truly continue with them. I will say, you know, if you need help, keep going. But they've developed habits at that point from going through the program and watching the lessons twice a day. And so I encourage them to start a new habit every month. Okay. Start a good new habit every month. So in this program, there are two video lessons to watch every day? Yes. You actually go through the same. You'll take two weeks on each lesson. Okay. And watch that same thing twice a day. Okay, okay. Twice a day repetition. So there's some repetition to it. You're not trying to absorb new material every day. It's reinforcement. Got it. Reinforcement, reinforcement. So just as my mentor, Bob Proctor, he's actually been studying and reading Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill every single day since 1961. He reads a part of that book every single day. That's really great. That's really great. It's important to have those touchstones. I don't think I have a book or something like that that I go to every day, but it's important to have those touchstones in our lives. Something to go back to and ground us. I think that's great that he not only does he put this into his program, but he actually practices what he preaches. Absolutely. And that's part of it. You have to continue to do that. He's an amazing, amazing individual. Well, tell us something about who your ideal client is. Who are you really trying to help out there in the community? Honestly, everybody. Because everybody can use this material. It could be taught in schools. And it's truly one of my dreams to get this out to the schools and teach children that they can do anything they want and to have that mindset. Awesome. Awesome. Can you tell us about a specific example when, you know, let's leave the names out to protect the innocent. But can you tell us about a specific example where you help the client with this program? Absolutely. You know, a lot of people base things off of money. And one of my clients actually in five weeks earned what she had earned in the last year. You know, just by changing her mindset, setting her goals and being very specific about what she wanted to do. That's amazing. That's amazing. I can tell from personal experience running a business, you have, you know, it's slow in the beginning.  And that feels really good. And then, and then the important thing is to stick with what you're doing, right? To go back and reinforcement, not, not celebrate and then, you know, let it all go. So that's great. And I love that there's so much reinforcement in this program. So we've got just about a minute left. Please tell us, please tell our viewers how you can, how they can get in touch with you. We've got a couple of viewers on the Facebook live who are putting in some, some, some wonderful comments. Fantastic. Thank you. Yes, you can reach me on Facebook. My Facebook business page is life in balance by Dana Berg. Or you can just reach out to my personal page as well. And my website is danaberg.com. Okay. And you are on LinkedIn as well. Yes. That's how, that's how we, well we connected through Katie Watford, who was a guest last month, but we found you on LinkedIn as well. And so Dana is out there on all the social media. I'm Jason Laduke. This is Geeks are sexy Jason Laduke from Evil Genius Leadership Consultants. And we will be right back with Shamara Walker from SWHR Consulting and learning how and why as a small business owner, you should be thinking about your human resources, even if you don't have anybody working for you right now. We'll be right back. Thank you.


Hello everyone, today I'm going to be launching five new features on my website. The first feature is a Calendly calendar. In this calendar, it's going to allow you to meet with me online to set up an appointment. If you're having difficulty passing the CPA exam, if you'd like a free consultation, now you can schedule ahead of time so we can meet online, whether it's on Skype, whether it's through WhatsApp or a third method. That's one. Two, it's going to have my course recommendation. Any CPA course recommendation I have for you, it's going to be on my website. Three, it's going to have FAQ sections about the website, about my services. Four, it's going to have a review section which will show you the experience of prior users of my YouTube and my website. They share your experience with you. Five, it's going to have a blog post where I can add more information. Those are the five features and it's going to have a sixth feature and you're going to be the most interested in the sixth feature. It's going to be launching a week to 10 days from now. I'm still working on it and you are going to be very interested in that sixth feature if you are an accounting students or CPA candidate. For now, study hard, good luck. Take advantage of the summer. Take advantage of the quarantine, especially if you are hiring date has been postponed till January. Many students have their hiring date postponed till January. Knock out all four sections by the end of the year. I'm here to help you. Let's work together. Check out my talent Lee. Make an appointment. Stay safe and study hard.


If you can read English, you must also learn to write English and to write effective sentences, effective paragraphs and later on the principles that you learn now will help you to write longer essays, longer papers. Writing is not easy, especially in a foreign language. Motivation is in fact a process. It is done in a series of steps, in a series of stages. And it is a skill that comes with great effort, hard work and practice. But if you want to learn to write, you can. Now it is your motivation.  If you are not interested in writing, you will find it very difficult. Now the first thing of concern in writing is content. That is what you have to say, your ideas, your thoughts and feelings. Unfortunately, some students are so self-conscious about the rules and about making mistakes that they do not focus on what they want to say. I am not saying that rules are not important. Rules do matter, but not at the beginning stage. And students in Pakistan have a fear of English, especially writing. That is why because they have never learned to write, they resort to learning model essays and answers to questions by heart. It is your attitude that is very crucial, that is very important. It is your attitude that will determine how much effort you will put in learning to write. You learn to write, it does not come off itself. It is something that you practice. Now we will begin with a paragraph. A paragraph is a series of sentences about one main thought or idea or point. The paragraph is like the sentence in that it must concern itself with one thought. Now some ideas can be adequately treated in a single sentence. Others require fuller treatment which is afforded by a series of sentences, that is the paragraph or a group of paragraphs. And sometimes you elaborate your thought in a number of chapters, in a number of sections and sometimes even in a book and a paragraph. Typically it starts with a point and the rest of the paragraph provides details to support and develop that point. Now if you remember your earlier reading lessons, this is very much like your reading lessons. You remember that in your reading lessons we looked at paragraphs and we said that every paragraph has one main idea and supporting ideas. And you were asked to look for the main idea and look for the supporting ideas. It is the same thing in writing. Your goal in writing a paragraph should be number one to make a point. Number two to support that point. And number three you arrange that material, the main point and the supporting points in an orderly arrangement. We will talk about this in greater length next time. And number four your goal should be to write error free sentences. Now let us take the first point. It is best to state the point in the first sentence, right? The sentence that expresses the main idea or the main point of a paragraph is called the topic sentence. The topic sentence is a general statement and the other sentences provide support for the general statement. If you recall at the beginning of the course you had a lesson or two on identifying the topic sentence and its supporting details. Now number two to support the point you need to provide specific reasons, examples and other details that explain and develop the point. You have to take that point further and how will you take it further? You will take it further by giving reasons, by giving examples and other such details. Number three you can organize the support in a paragraph in two ways. You can use a listing order or a time order. In a listing order you use words like first of all, secondly, next, in addition, etc., etc. And in time order you use words like first, next, finally. Now if you remember your earlier lessons we had plenty of practice in these things. And number four if you use correct spelling and follow grammar, punctuation and usage rules your sentences will be clear and well written. Now look at the following two passages. Notice how the topic sentence which is underlined is supported by the sentences that follow. The first passage is written by a student. The second by a famous English writer. Now you notice how in both these passages the writer makes a point at the beginning and then goes on to support that point with specific evidence. And that is what we are going to concentrate in this lesson. In this lesson you will see samples and I shall give you practice in writing the topic sentence and the evidence. And at times I shall give you the conclusion and you will write the evidence. Now I will read out the first passage. My neighbors. The new family that has moved in next doors is quite a noisy family. Ever since they arrived we have not had peace and quiet for a day. The young daughter is the loudest person I have ever known. She pops out her head every half hour from her bedroom window and screams for the old man who works for them, cries of Babaji, Babaji resound in the area. Babaji is a word in Urdu and Punjabi which is used for an old man, cries of Babaji, Babaji resound in the area. Then the whole neighborhood can hear what she wants Babaji to fetch her from the market. As for the other children they are no better. Screaming and shouting at the top of their voices they play hide and seek late into the night and their dogs barking loudly join them in their spot. As if this is not enough just when the neighborhood is about to turn in for the night loud stereo music blares from their house shaking and rattling everyone's nerves. I think we need to call a meeting of the other neighbors and do something about this. Now I hope you noticed that this passage began with the sentence the new family that has moved in next doors is quite a noisy family. The first sentence makes it quite clear that it is a noisy family. This is what the reader expects that what is going to come up now after this sentence will elaborate on that noisy family. And you notice that it begins with the next sentence tells you that they have not had peace and quiet, right? And then the evidence of it being a noisy family is provided by the writer. First the writer he or she talks about their daughter. What is it that the daughter does that makes it a noisy family? And then you are given evidence of the cries that she comes up with, right? And the next thing is the other children. What is it that the other children do? And you are told that the other children are no better. And you get evidence of what the other children do. What do they do? You are provided evidence that they play hide and see they scream and they shout and they do it late in the night. The next evidence is that it is their dogs who are equally noisy so you can imagine. I mean you can build up a picture in your mind. And then the writer goes on to tell you something more about the noisy part. And that is that there is music loud stereo music when just when everybody is thinking of going to bed. And you are told how loud it is that the neighborhood it shatters their nerves. And the last concluding sentence in the concluding sentence the writer says that it just shows how desperate the writer is about the noisy bit.