GreenWeeny: Hey hey everyone, I’m excited to have Richard Parris here with us for this text AMA! I know we have a lot of Saito maxis here, so I hope you all are as excited as I am. Welcome, Richard!

I gotta warn you, there’s a lot of Solana maxis here as well. So you are kinda in the lion’s den.

Richard: I grew up when there were only Bitcoin Maxis.

GreenWeeny: How quickly the crypto space is changing.

Richard: Tell me about it.

GreenWeeny: Anyway, I really appreciate you taking the time to be here again and I’m looking forward to this discussion!

Richard: Always happy to chat Saito with the communiteh.

GreenWeeny: Awesome. To start off, can you introduce yourself to the people here who don’t already know who you are and what Saito is? How did you get involved in crypto and how did Saito come to be born?

Richard: So, Bitcoin Maxis, from when that’s all there was. David and I were both in the Beijing tech scene from 2007-2008 or so. CTOs of our relative startups. We kinda knew each other from tech but met properly through the BTC meetups in Beijing. Think he started going in 2012 and me in 2013…

This is really relevant to Saito for two reasons.

– For me when I saw Bitcoin for the first time I was at least as interested or more interested in Bitcoin as a messaging network, Web3, as I was about the money thing.

– We watched as scaling became a side topic, then a central topic to something that ripped the community apart.

Saito was born out of these two factors. Wanting to build an independent (no owner) network that created a space for genuine P2P applications and something that could scale to do it.

GreenWeeny: Cool. I’m curious, and I think others are too, what brought you and David to China? Correct me if I’m wrong but you are from South Africa? And I believe David is Canadian?

Richard: I was born in SA and grew up in Melbourne, Australia. David came out to do a Chinese language study semester/course which was part of his studies at Berkeley. I was working in tech – Risk and Compliance software in banks in Australia after studying Philosophy and Mathematics for… well, a long time. So I was after something more challenging and rewarding than… deploying software in banks. China was a stop on the way to Europe looking for a new role. It’s been 15 years now. Lucky as the Bitcoin scene in Beijing was awesome from 2012 to 2017, most of the biggest companies, exchanges, miners, etc. were here.

GreenWeeny: One of the common misconceptions about Saito I see is that newcomers think it’s a “Polkadot project” or “Polkadot token.” Can you explain what kind of role or roles that Saito would like to play in the Polkadot ecosystem?

Richard: So the Web3 Foundation/Polkadot Ecosystem collaboration has been really great for us. It’s gotten the project in front of a lot of folks and given us opportunities to present and talk about Saito we would not have had otherwise. But it’s a collaboration, we are independent.

In the end, we would like to do some reclaiming of Web3 as a concept from the Polkadot guys. Gavin Wood has done a pretty good job of ‘owning it’ but it predates even Ethereum as an idea. It is an idea we are committed to though. Saito can help dot ecosystem, and other PoW and PoS chains by providing a data network that is independent. This is important as no one has a solution to this.

When you use Uniswap, you are hitting a lot of Web2 architecture. Client-server websites that are owned and operated by companies or projects even individuals. It’s not their ownership that is really at issue, though, it’s that you can’t move between providers. And even when the platforms are open source – to create a competitor you have to overcome commercial and technical moats. Saito aims to move to genuinely peer-to-peer options, breaking apart interfaces from data stores and infrastructure providers to end that. And make it possible for people to transact, play, work, etc. together in an entirely P2P way without any trusted third parties.

GreenWeeny: Great. I know a lot of different blockchain projects talk a lot about Web3. (Solana, Ethereum, Zilliqa, DOT, etc.) Why did you all choose to work with the Polkadot community over other major blockchain players?

Richard: One reason was the grants scheme. This gave us a way to reach out and collaborate on something. Another was the openness of the community and their quick understanding of how we could help. As the parachain project mature, Dot (substrate) devs are starting to look to deployment. Many are Eth devs who have moved on. They reach for tools like Etherscan and Infura and they just aren’t there for Dot. Folks have written the software, but no one is providing free service. So, they see the need for Saito very quickly.

GreenWeeny: With the Rust client joining the network by EOM, are there any other big happenings coming up that you can talk about? What’s the next big step for Saito? Anything you can hint or sneak peek at?

Richard: I think the biggest thing we are working on is making it simpler to integrate ‘any crypto’ the way we did DOT/KUSAMA for the Dotarcade. This will be huge in allowing us to take Saito to other communities, and to have real collaborations. It is also the first step in getting builders to create apps that have real users and build their businesses and business models around them.

GreenWeeny: How would you explain what Saito does to someone that is new or doesn’t know much about crypto?

Richard: There are a lot of different ways and the best depends on their approach to crypto. A good one is to play ‘spot the volunteer’. With every PoS, dPoS, and PoW network (all others we have spotted) there is a volunteer group. In BTC, it’s the P2P network nodes. They are not paid and BTC is consequently restricted to the capacity that volunteers are prepared to provide. In ETH it’s Joe Lubin and Infura – that provide essential services to make Eth dev possible. In a lot of chains, it’s the center handing out money for these things, to make it possible. (Juicing staking or validator rewards beyond fees). Saito fixes this. It creates a network where everyone is paid, and anyone doing anything useful can be profitable. There are other ones, but that’s a good way to start.

GreenWeeny: This is a great answer. I know that’s one thing new people in the community struggle with a bit is trying to break Saito down Barney style to people not in it yet!

Richard: Starting with what it does, functionally, internally is wrong, because most of the industry is just tweaking versions of this, but not in a way that changes the fundamentals, so it’s harder to get to what’s revolutionary about Saito.

GreenWeeny: Speaking of diving a bit more into how Saito works functionally, let’s do this question from our member, Midnight; Is there any concern about a few big players running multiple nodes and dominating Saito, causing the same centralization Saito seeks to solve? If that is a concern is there any mechanism to prevent this?

Richard: https://org.saito.tech/saito-co-founder-david-says-openness-self-sufficiency-matter-in-blockchain-at-blockchain-research-roundtable-event/

https://wyomingblockchainstampede.sched.com/speaker/shirley124

So, David has spoken directly on this in a couple of places. Saito believes there are always centralizing pressures. Fighting them head-on is a battle against physics and economics, that you can’t necessarily win. Our approach is to ask – why do we want decentralization and how do we get that?

It turns out that if you ask the first part of that question a lot of folks are assuming decentralization is good in itself. But the SWIFT network, for example, is decentralized, but not at all open. It’s banking, not blockchain. What we are hoping to get from decentralization is mostly openness, the property that anyone can participate, no one can be blocked from entering. And self-sufficiency, that the network operates for and by itself, so it is not dependent on anyone to keep going. Here it’s important to see that properties that almost no one talks about, like universal broadcast, are important. I can send a transaction to anyone on the BTC chain, or ETH by their address alone. No one can stop me. This is a super important property – and one that is lost when you go to sharding and to DAGS and other BFT structures. And looping back around, if a network is always open, then if someone does come in and start dominating, at least it is always possible for others to enter, so the ground is fertile for natural decentralization. I encourage folks to follow up on that piece and video from David, they make this point better than I can here.

GreenWeeny: Yeah I’ll leave those there for people to wrap their heads around after reading that answer! The next question is from Supah.sol; How will you attract developers to Saito to build on your platform? What is your pitch if a developer asks why they should build on Saito over another blockchain?

Richard: Dollah, dollah bills. By that I mean, the ability to have a functioning business model through the code itself. Once upon a time, people were excited about ‘micropayments’ with crypto. This was seen as a huge part of Web3, and allowing providers to create great software and get paid for it. Saito transactions can fit in whole transactions from other networks and can even bundle them. This gives nearly infinite variety in was that payment can be part of activities, even at tiny levels within Saito applications. An example would be a game where the publisher gets ‘cents’ per play. Or a music blog where the blogger splits the streaming fee directly with the artist. Best of all, if that’s ad-driven, the user got 100% of the ad revenue and used that to pay the artist and the blogger. (Right now, it costs Google less than 1% of what they get to provide the service and they pay around 5% to the host).

It’s going to be the ability to do this AND not worry about the infrastructure, just get your software out there and users hit the nodes of their choice, that will win the day. Bootstrapping this is a large part of the roadmap.

GreenWeeny: Graham from the Telegram asks; (King) Richard, are you surprised at how the community has grown around Saito? I see other projects that have been around far longer without anywhere near as much buzz.

Richard: Yes, and no. No, in that we have long been pointing out that Saito now is like BTC in 2011. If people agree (and they seem to) then of course people are going to get excited about that. I am surprised about it though in some ways. You never know what something will look like till it exists, so I had not anticipated just how cool the community would be. And, how active. It’s also been an ‘it never rains then it pours’ thing.

We’ve been at this for a long time, especially in crypto time. So even though we have been sticking to our guns, confident that what we are doing will appeal to folks and to not water it down, to stick to our path, it’s still surprising when it happens. It’s created a massive buzz in the project and the industry. And it certainly gets the founders and team pumped.

GreenWeeny: That was one of the biggest things that stood out about the Saito community when I first found it. How active and not shitcoiny it was. Love it

Richard: Us too.

GreenWeeny: Great. I think these last two questions should be pretty easy. The first one is from Mose: From listening to a few of the townhalls I gained the impression that you guys are a bit wary of CEX listings (forgive me if this is an incorrect presumption on my part). I’m aware of the recent developments regarding Pancakeswap liquidity so I have to ask, what other plans do you guys have regarding making the Saito token more easily accessible?

Richard: Good Q. We are wary in as much as there is an assumption that Binance=riches for everyone. Price growth for us, I think, has come from the adoption of the fundamental ideas. An exchange does not do that for you. Listings, traditionally, involve dumping big tranches of tokens on exchanges that they dump and or hand out for the resulting volume. Unless you execute that well, or you do a metric ton of shitcoining, it is a burden on the project moving forward. We are talking to exchanges and connections in the industry and looking for CEX options that don’t have those negative effects, and doing things like talking to funds about providing liquidity for listing – rather than dumping more Saito into the market. We are also talking to groups like Changelly, who have lower fees but centralized buying options. Our strategy is to work toward lower fees for purchasers, fiat on-ramps, more integrations with other chains and ecosystems creating more ways to convert, and trying to minimize the amount of SAITO being dumped into the market while that happens.

GreenWeeny: Thanks Richard. I know wen CEX is always on people’s minds. Love to hear that you all take the protecting investors approach.

Richard: We don’t hate CEXs but a listing needs to be a net and long-term gain.

GreenWeeny: Last question! From our favorite Saito maxi, JOJ (Georgex5): In the recent roadmap, you defer the matter of releasing or burning mainnet tokens until the era of the “Real Economy,” what are the factors that you foresee determining whether the “real-world Saito economy” will need more tokens distributed or otherwise burned?

Richard: Big George! Talking above about business models for builders and the economy, you can see we have a bootstrapping issue. Saito does not have a block reward, by design, it’s how we solve the 51% attack and the economics generally. But this leaves us with a challenge. Making node operation profitable out of user fees from the beginning. We have a few ways we can approach that. One is as an initial sponsor – running some community nodes with project money. That will be a necessary step to get folks going but does not solve the longer term problem of boostrapping the economy, getting the flywheel spinning. An advertising faucet is a great way to do that and will be one part of our strategy. This would create a way to give users tokens to spend on the network, for using the network. These could be project ads, just notices and the like, but would also hopefully move to being commercial at some point. Real advertisers buying Saito to give to users, to pay fees.

Now, it’s quick to see that if that kind of system is too generous, you are just dumping tokens in, and creating inflation. If it is not generous enough, there won’t be enough impact to get anything serious happening. So, these programs will need monitoring and careful execution. (We anticipate that they will be done well enough that some major holders, not just the project will do this kind of thing.) What percentage of tokens are needed to make this work? it’s hard to judge. As that becomes clear – burning tokens will be a powerful way to increase the good effects of things like the faucet. Hence this needing to be done at a later stage. Hope that sheds some light.

GreenWeeny:  I believe it does. Thanks! And with that we’ll go ahead and wrap up

Richard: Thanks everyone!!!

GreenWeeny: Thanks so much Richard for taking the time to be here. Great questions and great answers, and maybe a few new Saito maxis.

Richard: Yes, this was a really great AMA. Solid questions. I hope good answers.

GreenWeeny: Would love to do this again sometime. I really enjoyed it.

Richard: Let’s do it. And let’s get Mr. Lancashire on the Pod if we can! He has a podding background and a voice for radio.

GreenWeeny: Great! I know we’ll be in touch so we shall figure something out! I know we’d love to get Davit onto the podcast.

Richard: He has a podding background and a voice for radio.

GreenWeeny: He really does haha

Richard: If you want to learn Chinese and like listening to David, popupchinese.com. Just saying, you can mainline David there.

GreenWeeny: Good to know. Thanks again Richard! Looking forward to speaking soon.

Richard: Thanks again everyone – great to be here. Loving my status.

GreenWeeny: If David comes in here, we’ll give him the same

Richard: Excellent.

The post CryptOasis AMA Transcript appeared first on Saito.

What is happening with the liquidity removed from Uni?

Richard Parris: When we IDO’d we put about double what most projects do (or about double what our advisors were saying) into liquidity on the SAITO/WETH pair. Since then, we also added the SAITO/USDT pair. With price action on ETH and SAITO this means we have about 5 to 6 times the liquidity needed to ensure smooth transactions and stability. So, we have removed some, in anticipation of providing some or supporting liquidity on Pancake and to have money in reserve for CEXes or other opportunities that come along.

Where are the commissions earned on Uniswap as the volume has increased significantly being used?

Richard Parris: These, in part, are the bulk of the liquidity that was removed. The part that we don’t re-deploy on BSC and other platforms will go to paying project costs like wages.

Is any support for the BSC pool coming?

Richard Parris: Yes, we are working on a model that supports and rewards the community as much as it can. The project actually makes decent money with liquidity on Uniswap. With BSC we want to make sure that that it’s not just providing cheaper trading but also provides earning opportunities for holders.

This has been slightly delayed by hiring, but it is coming.

Can you give us some staff and team updates?

Richard Parris: Great question, sent out two offers today; Developer and Product Manager. We are working hard to expand capacity, in part because we are also tightening up plans.

Speaking about CEXs, Gate.io is a relatively small CEX. How likely is it for Saito to be listed on a bigger CEX before the end of the year?

David Lancashire: We haven’t focused on it aggressively and specified in the roadmap when we think that needs to change — we know what we can move forward with and have options if and when we decide it makes sense.

Just pulling back, a lot of people focus on CEXes because they’re primarily interested in price activity and if you’re building something like a meme-coin that is basically what drives things. We’re obviously concerned that Saito is a good project for people to support, but there’s also a huge difference in terms of engaging with exchanges, to what extent you need them and they need you. I think right now the balance falls towards wait-and-see while we keep executing. It can be the difference between an exchange buying its own liquidity or asking for a significant listing fee.

Richard Parris: Gate is not tiny (it’s top 5 or 10 depending on measures). We are not against listing at further exchanges. But we need to know it’s going to have the impact folks want. Listing on a big exchange can horribly damage a project if all it creates is an unpredictable pump and a bunch of paper-handed holders leaking liquidity into the market. So, we need a partnership and to be sure that the exchange will work with us long term and frankly not ask for an absurd ransom.

Most roadmaps provide some high-level dates. I noticed that this is not the case with the roadmap that was released yesterday. Don’t you think this will have a negative impact on the community?

David Lancashire: OK — so there are two explicit dates — the first is when the network software updates to support the dev work that we’ve been doing for the last few months. The second is the date when token vesting stops and we have a zero-inflation token. There’s a reason that the stuff that touches token distribution or meta-incentives is pushed off until Era 2.

If anyone really wants us to put dates on the end of Era #2 or anything after, I don’t think that’s realistic. We can talk about what we are thinking tonight if people want, but it has to be a more substantive discussion than “why isn’t there a date on stuff more than a year out?”

Richard Parris: We will always do our best to provide as much clarity as we can about dates and progress. Sometimes that means not saying things that we can’t back up. With Rust on the network, we will be quickly gathering information on progress and what is left to achieve.

It’s important to remember two things:

• It’s not just development, we need to build and bootstrap a community and an economy around Saito.
• No one has done specifically this before.

So, we will try to be open about what we know and can say with precision.

Richard Parris: (I like this – everyone is getting the David take and the Richard take.) Proof of Founder Alignment.

Can you give us more information about the partnership with Elrond?

Richard Parris: Next steps with this will be part of the workaround extending crypto integration beyond Polkadot. Polkadot got the first call as part of the web3 grant, but we are planning to extend this work to Elrond and other ecosystems in the future.

Could you elaborate on how Saito would facilitate the actual usage of other blockchain’s P2P networks, such as BSV? Presumably, on the longer timeframe, do you expect Saito to simply engulf these more crude economic systems?

Richard Parris: David will have a differently nuanced take on this, but for me, the question for say BSV, like any token with a permanent ledger, does the complete ledger offer value to your users? If it does, then there is space on top of Saito. Similarly, if you have an EVM that delivers value for users in itself.

For other layer one blockchains, the economics mean that the future is limited.

David Lancashire: I don’t think we really know how PoW will play out in terms of what happens when the supply curve of hash power commoditizes. And BSV has powerful on-chain scripting capabilities that we will not have for a long time, so there are a lot of different ways that they can help us, and vice versa.

Over the long term, BSV is showing that our critique of network centralization is dead-on. TAAL is stealing the whole show, and it’s now being leveraged to “unlock” tokens that are unspendable on other chains. I don’t know why people think that this sort of taxation of the token holders is going to magically stop. It’ll continue because that’s how to make money. One way that Saito can help is by creating a counterbalancing application layer that can’t be dragged into monopolistic control. Maybe that will help. The application doesn’t need to be locked to the token transfer like with something that runs purely on BSV, so Saito can help create a world where people still get the benefits of using a PoW-coin without suffering the drawbacks so much.

How can you help other blockchains with the Saito consensus?

David Lancashire: I think the most practical short-term aim is ELROND Arcade. POLKADOT Arcade. BSV Arcade. Work to get the applications running with the communities that care about Saito. Promote the use of their tokens and promote adoption of the platform. Use these communities as a stepping-stone for onboarding other cryptos. This stuff is in the roadmap. I’m not sure how explicit it is. But the idea is bringing these other communities to a more polished suite of apps that have had UI love because we’ve gotten enough Core dev sorted out it can continue while we turn our public-facing focus to the UI side. A lot of people say, “how can I earn Saito tokens by running a routing node.” —> “Fork our software suite, hook up a crypto you want to support, and get people using Saito” is a good answer

With a lot being said about energy use. It would be great to have a one-liner about why Saito might be better in that regard.

Richard Parris: I loved David’s answer to a question on Twitter – get more bandwidth by paying for bandwidth, not by setting the couch on fire. Saito incentivizes efficiency and despises waste.

Would you guys bother if Saitozens advertise Saito on social media?

Richard Parris: Quite the opposite. Nothing makes us happier than seeing ‘independent’ talk on Saito.

Is there an official name for the Saito consensus? e.g. Proof of Transaction?

Richard Parris: We used to use Proof of Transactions – but you know what, people call their ‘fancy consensus’ “Proof of X” because they want it to sound official.

It is important for blockchains that block production is expensive – there has to be a cost. People grok that and come up with a ‘Proof of Something’ where the something is supposed to be hard to get, or fake, or gather, so that’s supposed to make block production expensive. But that does nothing to solve the fact that if you can use revenues from block production to get more Something – the whole thing is broken. You can pay for your something with something and we have a 51% attack or worse. The way to get out of this is not to have a Proof of random expensive thing, it’s to use the only thing that is scarce and valued, internally in the network. Transaction fees.

Saito is quite deliberately not a ‘Proof of’ consensus.

We are more and more on social media. How can we help?

Richard Parris: Original content. Does not have to be a novel or a 20,000-word blog post. Something original and genuine will stand out – much more than an army of drones or paid shills.

Without a block reward, how are tokens being distributed? And how is it being approached to minimize excessive bag holder dynamics and unhealthy future implications?

David Lancashire: “yes.” And our challenge is not only doing this without stepping on a landmine but doing it in a way that deals with drive-by-shootings from people who don’t understand Saito. Practically, this is one of the reasons the roadmap doesn’t tackle tokenomics or anything that touches rewards or subsidies until everything has vested and we are zero inflation. We only want to be releasing tokens through any mechanism if it makes sense for Saito. that necessarily involves not undermining things we have already accomplished, including community and existing distribution. in the meantime, we are doubtless going to get FUD from people about tokenomics, but we can deal with that.

Do you have an idea about the staking percentage?

David Lancashire: We’re trying to keep the staking tables open, and we don’t know what percentage of mainnet tokens will drift into the staking tables. If you mean ROI for staking? that’s one of the reasons we are starting it in the #2 era. Before then someone can put tokens into the staking tables and Rust Consensus will support it, but without tokens flowing out into the network there won’t be a ROI. So why will people do it? My thinking is that in Era 2 we’ll probably start with a small-scale incentive for staking that comes from the token treasury, but nothing major. Enough to incentivize participation on a growing scale — and bring on stakers who then have an incentive to increase their incomes by marketing and promoting. Once we’ve got a functioning ad faucet that is reasonably secure against being gamed, the ROI scales with network usage and we’re in a position to turn on the tap and actually drive adoption. That can’t happen until we know everything works.

Has there been any discussion or planning regarding jump-starting the network once it’s live to get other projects to build on top of Saito?

Richard Parris: Yes, a lot. Set one is extending the web 3 work we have done with Polkadot to handle a variety of chains and tokens. That will let us get people started building and discovering the business models, and most importantly building userbases.

David Lancashire: We’ve done some exploratory work in the past with outside parties. There is the DHB supply-chain work. There was another Australia-focused project. That stuff is still ongoing, but it isn’t moving quickly because we don’t control those companies and you’re generally dealing with underdog firms that don’t have huge budgets. Do we want our progress to be depending on outside businesses having viable business models on the blockchain? I don’t think so.

There’s a mix of opinions about how quickly we need to get Saito to the state where outside developers will feel really comfortable building on the platform, and whether that will drive growth. The roadmap has us focusing on our own application suite — particularly the Arcade — for the next era in part to get the polish and documentation and software build-upon-ness that we can make it easy for outside devs and it isn’t such a leap of faith.

In one of the townhalls you mentioned that you want Saito to be easily usable by developers so that they can quickly develop something. When is work on this (i.e., making easy-to-use JS libraries) going to be done?

Richard Parris: As David mentioned above, you can develop now. Framework integration will come as part of the SDK work. The issue there is that React, Vue, and friends are the end result and expression of web 2.0. Everything, including your data, is behind a proprietary API. To re-use these in a genuinely web 3 context, you have to rip them out of their standard mode and bring them into the client/user side and have a block-API-UI model. If you don’t, you have web 2 reality with web 3 overhead.

David Lancashire: Every single dev has tried to develop on Saito like it is a web2 app that pulls JSON from somewhere. We know it’s hard, that’s why dogfooding with the UI-facing developers has to come first, and we’re focused on that Era1 as we push the platform up to React, etc. standards. We’ve got to move from having these application demos that are showcasing what is possible to something that people can build on without feeling like they’ve wandered into a weird and unholy API.

When can I start to develop applications on Saito even if it’s not production-ready? Is this possible at this point in time? if it is where can we find information on getting started? SDKs, etc.

David Lancashire: yes. https://github.com/saitotech/saito-lite

Windows isn’t a good install platform but Linux and macOS are reasonably easy. You can ping me if you have any trouble and I’ll help you get a local install running. Then you can uninstall or install any of the existing mods and play around with building your own, or grabbing a task to help out with if you want to contribute (we have a bag of stuff we could use help with, like N > 2 group Diffie-hellman is not coded, but that unlocks on-chain TG and is just cool to have).

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The post Fireside AMA Recap appeared first on Saito.

General update

• The Ultimate Saitozen campaign successfully concluded, and winners should’ve received their prizes by this point.
• In the time from the previous Town Hall, the Saito community has seen explosive growth.
• The Building Web3 event hosted by the Saito Network was a resounding success.
• SAITO has been listed on Sifchain
• The Saito team secured a partnership with Anyswap, in which they have provided a bridge to move Saito tokens from Ethereum into the BSC.
• *The team has continuously been looking into the best ways to make it easy for the community to obtain Saito as well as reward them for holding (via liquidity pools, farms, etc.) while steering clear from shitcoinery that would dilute value (such as airdrops).
• The third vesting period concluded without issue; the Team has connected with our supporters to find the best ways to promote Saito.
• The second and final milestone for the web3 grant has been submitted.
• Two new developers have joined the Team.
• A new game, Wuziqi, was added to the Arcade. It was developed by Richard and his son to showcase how easy it is to develop apps, Saito.

Tech update

• As the second milestone of the web3 grant has been delivered, the team is now working on strategies to integrate with the Polkadot ecosystem.
• Rust continues to move forward; networking still needs to be completed.
• The In-Browser JavaScript version has been upgraded to keep up with the improvements on the Rust version.
• Improvements from the Web3 milestones and the Rust client have improved the gaming experience and organic traffic for the gaming aspect is picking up.
• Two new games were hinted at in the works.

Questions

Raja: The current circulating supply is much smaller than the max supply. At what time will supply be increased?

David: The token distribution and supply are the way they are because of the way the IDO had to be handled with Polkastarter, that community expects that kind of breakdown. That doesn’t mean we know for sure what exactly we are going to be doing with the 70% that’s allocated, we’ve got rough carve downs, we don’t even know necessarily if these tokens are going to be released. What we don’t want to do, however, is commit to a public strategy for releasing them that is counterproductive to the goals of what we’re doing. That might be something like a really bad pay-to-play strategy, where you buy traffic, and you buy a two-month pump and then the tokens dump because you flooded them out to people who aren’t using the network. The roadmap is going to talk about tokenomics but to give you a sense of what that is; we’re looking at having the token supply increase relative to usage on the network and activity, we understand that token price is something that is a really powerful marketing tool, and we think it’s important to be sensitive around that. 

I’m not sure how much more specific we can be other than there is a portion that’s the community foundation, we have no idea how we’re going to manage that, we’re hoping to work with you guys and set up some kind of foundation, it’s not something we’re dealing with yet because people approach these questions when they’re thinking about DeFi and they’re treating Saito like a DeFi thing instead of what we’ve really got, which is we’ve got the Bitcoin distribution problem but we don’t have a block reward, which it’s a challenge, but it’s also positive because I think people are beginning to realize, especially in the last two weeks, that we don’t have a block reward with extra Saito hitting the market every hour, and the activity and the interest really are being driven by the expansion of people learning about what we’re doing. 

You can expect details, the broadest picture is the faucet that we’re really interested in is the advertising faucet, we want to be bleeding tokens out to people who are using the Saito network through an advertising network, so if you’re using the Saito applications and you install an advertising module, you are now slowly getting tokens in because we’re showing you ads. Ideally, we can spin that off onto a separate company or get someone who’s not the core team to independently manage that but for that to work, we need to get the applications and the usability to the point that people are actually coming and that’s why we’re particularly happy with the organic growth and we’re looking at this stuff.

I think the people that are really concerned about this are coming from a DeFi background and they don’t know what we’re doing and they’re new to the project and they’re like “hey, is there a rug pull coming?”. Six months ago, we got a lot of that on the night of the IDO and there were questions because Saito was just a token people didn’t understand. The important thing is that we get the circulating supply and the distribution strategy in tandem with the growth strategy so that it pushes the network instead of crippling it. We’re not interested in committing to something we don’t need to unless we know that it’s rocket fuel behind us, all of us. I will say focusing on that short term might not be productive because token persistence needs to be there for every token in really small amounts before people should be worried about anything like that and we’ve still got time to go before that.

Trevor: The Saito BEP20 token contract is from Anyswap and not the Saito team, are you guys releasing a BEP20 Saito later or will you use the one from Anyswap at BSC?

Richard: This is a really important question and the first thing we’ve had to do is make absolutely sure that the Anyswap contract is secure enough to be involved with it. We’re happy on that account but we’re still treading carefully because of these exact questions. Our biggest concern here is it suitable for the community? are we putting people at any risk are we exposing them to any situations that aren’t good for them? and that relays into what’s good for the project, so we have no objection to locking up some of the ERC20 Saito as a BEP20 Saito of our own contract making if that’s going to help people.

Our next step is to survey folks set some thresholds for how much Saito we want wrapped on the BSC chain before we think it’s worth putting project time and resources into pursuing something there because I don’t think anyone on the project wants us doing a big effort to get something to happen and then it’s not serving any big purpose for the community or the project. So obviously usability and safety, security first then is it a need that the community has? and we have to balance that with obviously the core dev and those sorts of things but also with looking at centralized exchanges if that’s more suitable for people and other partnerships. So, no objection to a BEP20 Saito token, obviously we have a completely secure smart contract, we could do that with that we’ve already used for the ERC20 but that’s time and resources and execution we don’t want to necessarily deploy until we know it’s going to help enough people to make it worthwhile.

George: Token permanence wen? Rust wen? Staking wen?

David: We need to get this Rust out and Saito-lite Rust, it’s a private repository now, so once they’re live and they’re capable of supporting, we need to throw them at each other, we’re going to need a bit of time to make sure that they’re not imploding and then when they’re smooth enough we need to be able to migrate the Arcade and the transaction volume onto the new software client. I don’t know how long this takes, bear in mind we’re onboarding new developers at the same time we’re probably going to be dealing with refactors of various components at various times, what we’re looking at is bringing the token permanence on basically the same way that Kusama kind of does it with reaping. You guys can think about it let us know what you think, because this is a useful thing for us to be talking with you about. The idea is that we will be guaranteeing token balances on the network at a kind of falling level, so someone who has a big balance in the staking mechanism; if the network gets reset we will guarantee that those tokens are there when it’s reset but we don’t need to worry about someone who has like a 5 Saito token balance, so that kind of stuff doesn’t need to slow us down, and what we’re looking at is we’re trying to figure out does this work? how does it work with things like the token release schedule? and when we can be saying look we’re going to be guaranteeing various levels and how quickly it falls so that’s the general approach and I think the dates get fuzzier the further out we go.

Richard: That’s one of the things you can say, kind of like quantum physics, the more definitely you give a date in software development the more you have to pad it for security and you’re still at risk of overrunning it because software development requires the iterative working towards the point and you discover things along the way, that’s just the way it is, so what we are most keen on doing first is getting the messaging out there, what the stages are and as much information as we can about timing on those as we can, letting people know what targets are, etc. We want to be as open and transparent as possible, but we need to be careful with messaging because things get away from you as soon as you say something in this field.

For those who missed the live meeting, you can view the town hall recording here.

For more updates, please  follow Saito Network’s official social media pages:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaitoOfficial

Telegram: https://t.me/SaitoIOann

Blog: https://org.saito.tech/blog

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Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRUhZVAUH4JyWUFmxm5P6dQ

The post Saito Community Town Hall #4 Highlights and Recap appeared first on Saito.

General Update

• The Ultimate Saitozen campaign has been launched to explore different approaches to take when generating community and engagement beyond giveaways.
• The Ambassador program continues to roll out, a few quality people (particularly from the community) have been brought onboard. We want to extend an invitation to people who want to represent Saito independently and talk more broadly to the community and would like assistance to do it.
• DOT arcade has been out for a month and work is being done on generic crypto support so that more tokens can be easily incorporated with Saito as the underpinning layer.
• There was collaboration with StackOS (The Ultimate Saitozen is running on their infrastructure)
• Saito’s ramping up hiring, new positions are being open at https://org.saito.tech/jobs/ If you or anyone you know is interested in taking part of the future of blockchain please let us know

Tech Update

• Work is currently being done to move from Saito Classic (a basic implementation of a single node, with routing work and a golden ticket every block) towards adding the pieces the production network needs, the biggest three being:
  • Automatic Transaction Rebroadcasting
  • Networking: Saito nodes now have fully binary channels, as opposed to JSON
  • Staking Mechanism is being put in place
• Rust Client progress is still on timeline and is expected to be done in two months and a half.
• Once the Rust Client is completed a new updated Roadmap will be released detailing what comes next, including things like Token Persistence.

Questions Section

Sergeant Saito: What are the possibilities of a Saito mobile app?

David: It’s a question of whether we are prioritizing when Rust is on the network and what our priorities strategically be. We can do a lot of this stuff, but if we are doing that, we are not doing something else.

Richard: One of the things to look forward for the Saitoverse if for third party developers getting involved and putting out their own apps. We’ve built mobile wallets before, and we think this is something that will either come organically through partnership or will be something we’ll prioritize when it becomes the best thing for growing an userbase and community.

Globalnode: Regarding Marketing/Promotion of SAITO, and the pending release of the full protocol. What’s the strategy of hiring internal marketing team member versus a PR firm or team to handle independently, potential larger reach and increased efficiency?

Richard: We are building a base capacity now, we need to make sure we have the ability to execute things ourselves or to instruct and work with a firm, where we need to, in a way that honors what the project is about and that’s effective. An example would be what we are doing with the Ultimate Saitozen, we need to find out the kind of fun outreach that gets any traction. What works for us and what doesn’t so that we can then start measuring metrics, etc. We don’t want to blindly spend tokens, because spending tokens means more whales, we can get more investors, but they are going to be dumping at some point.

Without throwing cash around in a silly way, how can we find out what’s worth spending money on that has a net positive effect in terms of getting the word out. In that sense, as a project rather than a company, I don’t think a large PR engine sits that comfortable inside the project so we might be more likely to use different thing and we might also be more likely to look to much more community-based ways of doing things organically.

David: What I see is that most of the PR firms in the space treat your token like a shitcoin and don’t focus on the fundamental value question. I would be open to hiring one, the challenge is that it’s hard to get people that understand Saito. I don’t think our growth strategy we can throw at a PR firm, what I’m hoping is that by generically adding support for cryptos much more easily, when that is rolled it will be a lot easier for people to understand the value of Saito because it will connect with third party cryptos in a tangible way. I’m hoping that the narrative that we have will get better moving forward and that will allow PR firms to understand us more easily. I don’t think we should do it for another two to three months because I think that the stuff we are talking about will happen by then.

Globalnode: Regarding UI/XD, what strategy is being implemented for the roll out of 2022 level web3 experience, with all the graphic bling, and usability requirements needed to put the SAITO NETWORK in the best possible light/position in the market?

David: The strategy is to make the games as best looking as we can, we bring in designers to improve on it within the structures of what they can do, and we see if integration with third party cryptos can get us promotion and integration into other crypto communities and spread that way. I personally think getting web3 cryptos integrated is more important than flashy design, but I’m perfectly comfortable with us hiring for graphic bling as well.

Richard: We should remember that the Arcade is principally a showcase to show what the network can do. The game stuff developed out of us asking ourselves “How do we get enough traffic?”, people doing real things in the network to test it and stress it. We got to be very careful about over polishing things, since that makes people think that’s the product. On the other hand, if it’s not polished enough, people don’t spend time with it, and we don’t get the usage and testing we need. Particularly with the Rust backbone and nodes running on Rust, with the extra capacity we get out of it, stressing them is going to be really hard.

David: We can get someone to redesign the site so that it looks better, but if they start touching the Arcade and the applications, then suddenly, we got more tech work that hits us. We are punching on this right now until Rust and web3 crypto integration are done because at that point we think we’ll have a better onboarding flow for people.

Greenweeny: Curious about what brought the team to Beijing? Any particular reason for choosing that city as your HQ?

Richard: David and I came to China before crypto. We met through the Bitcoin community in Beijing, so in a way we owe a lot to the community here, especially in the early days when it was pretty insane and cool. Right now, David is Thailand, some of the team is still in Beijing, but we are not operating in China. We are not a Chinese company; we are an international project.

Finesto: With so much exposure to China, how will Chinese regulation negatively affect Saito?

Richard: China’s regulations have the same impact on us as it does on other projects in that impacts Chinese users and what they can do. We are not DeFi or shitcoining like crazy, so we are not doing anything that the regulation is aimed at curtailing. For us, the impact has been mostly what the regulations have done to markets and people’s general attitudes in the industry rather than impacting us specifically as a project. Yes, we should be aware, as anyone that is here, and be very attentive to what the authorities are doing and the regulations, etc. but we are quite confident that’s not an issue.

Biko: This will be a very broad and open question, but what’s your main concerns about Saito? In the sense of development, tech, marketing, everything considering Saito. I can’t name a lot because I don’t understand the tech on such a profound level, hence my question to you!

David: for me, it’s that we are really struggling to get people to understand. We can explain the problem in a straightforward way, but because of the way the industry is, they don’t care. They don’t care about their blockchains having these problems, they are not interested in making solutions and that puts a greater burden on us. We can deal with it, but in means in some ways we have a longer roadmap because we need to make these things ourselves.

When people understand, they get very enthusiastic. You can see it with the people that have stuck around and really dug into the ideas over the last 3 or 4 there has been a realization of how people don’t understand these problems. It’s great for to see people coming around to our way of looking at things and acknowledging these are real problems.

Markus: Do you have any idea when I’d be able provide a Saito node? I’d love to play around with it. Also, is it theoretically possible to build my own JS Saito app?

David: You can run a Saito right now and you can build apps on it. If you don’t know how to do it, send an email to me at david@saito.tech and we’ll walk you through it. If anyone’s interested in this, let me know what you want to develop, because you can build and deploy and depending on what you want to build, we might be able to help as well.

For those who missed the live meeting, you can view the town hall recording here.

For more updates, please  follow Saito Network’s official social media pages:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaitoOfficial

Telegram: https://t.me/SaitoIOann

Blog: https://org.saito.tech/blog

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/HjTFh9Tfec

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SaitoIO/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRUhZVAUH4JyWUFmxm5P6dQ

The post Saito Community Town Hall # 3 Highlights and Recap appeared first on Saito.

David: You are confused because you think public goods exist in the same form in every network simply because they exist in that form in Ethereum. This is not true: no-one considers staking a public good, but there are incentive mechanisms in which it could be.

Vitalik: Of course I consider staking a public good! It just happens to already be incentivized in-protocol because it is easy to measure.

David: This is wrong, Vitalik. The benefits of staking are excludable in networks that measure and pay for staking. They aren’t public goods in those networks by definition.

You don’t get to call something a “public good” because you think it has diffuse social benefits. Lots of things have diffuse social benefits. The term “public good” refers to a specific type of good with a defined set of properties which leads to market failure by making defection-from-provision the dominant strategy for profit-maximizing actors.

Staking can be a public good, but not if you are measuring it and paying for it. That introduces excludability as only the participant who has staked is eligible for the payment that is provided to induce staking. If you want to make staking a public good, you have to design a mechanism where you need it for security but either stop paying for it or distribute your fees to everyone equally regardless of whether or not they stake.

Vitalik: By this logic, is scientific research not a public good once the government starts paying people to do it?

The benefits of staking are not excludable: each staker’s staking helps secure all transactions on the network, and there isn’t a realistic way for different transactions to pay for different levels of security (people have tried to come up with designs that do it, it ends up being way overcomplicated and breaking composability and allowing profitable small-scale 51% attacks, and so is not a good idea). So each staker’s staking really is a public service that confers non-excludable benefits to all network participants. The protocol compensates for this service by issuing a reward for it, but the existence of that reward doesn’t make it not-a-public-good anymore, much like public goods elsewhere don’t stop being public goods just because a government or philanthropist pays for them, or someone happens to enjoy the warm moral fuzzies for building and releasing them for free.

David: People call government-provided services “public goods” because they’re lazily invoking the justification for government provision, not because government-provided services have the same characteristics as public goods. A government dictates who is obliged to provide and who is eligible to receive.

What determines whether something is a public good is basically whether there are benefits to provision that are exclusive to the provider (excludability) and whether others can avoid contributing if that is an option (openness). It’s the simultaneous existence of those two properties which creates the problem.

>The protocol compensates for [staking] by issuing a reward for it, but the existence of that reward doesn’t make it not-a-public-good anymore.

Yes, it does. You have a private payment for the service. The benefit you offer is excludable. You cannot call ETH staking a public good if the term “public good” means anything close to what it does in economics.

>There isn’t a realistic way for different transactions to pay for different levels of security (people have tried to come up with designs that do it, it ends up being way overcomplicated and breaking composability and allowing profitable small-scale 51% attacks.

You keep saying that things are impossible. They’re not. As above, you just don’t understand the problem space because you are conceptualizing this as a technical issue instead of an economic one.

You need to sacrifice either non-excludability or openness to fix this problem. Fixing non-excludability is only possible on the incentive layer where value measurement happens and is broken. This is why all of your upper-layer technical solutions only work if you add closure to the network.

Closure defeats the point of having an open blockchain and introduces economic attacks, which is why you are running in circles. The only solution that won’t drag you around this way is adjusting how you measure and pay for value. You’ve said this is impossible and I gave you an example up above. Pay for fee collection and your consensus mechanism will incentivize the private sector to do whatever it takes to maximize fee throughput. If documentation is needed, you’ll get it.

How do you implement it? Not easy. In practice you need a way to measure fee collection and payout that cannot be gamed by the block producer. And it also needs to simultaneously preserve the spam-resistant and cost-of-attack properties of PoW/PoS so that participants can’t just game it by driving money in circles.

Hard, but not impossible.

Ersikan: I don’t really understand your point. You say that, for example, Ethereum should first start to modify their consensus layer so that people are incentivized to do Y instead of X, but isn’t the consensus layer a government protocol to decide which changes to add to the ledger?

David: It is an incentive structure. Governance mechanisms require closure. Closure adds trusted-third parties. The entire point is not having those.

Ersikan: Why would governance mechanisms require closure? And what do you mean exactly by closure?

For example, in the coin voting governance system criticized in this article, if anyone can propose to make a change to a setting in the smart contract, and every token holder can vote according to what they own, there are no trusted third parties. The security of the vote is insured by the security of the underlying Ethereum blockchain. Where are the trusted third parties? At most, the nodes of the blockchain and the consensus layer are the trusted third party, but nothing in the governance protocol itself involves trusted third parties.

David: Governance mechanisms that solve collective action problems require closure. Vitalik is talking about a collective action problem concerning public goods provision.

The underlying reason is that with non-excludable (public) goods you cannot force those who consume them to pay for their provision so there is a natural tendency for people to overconsume and pass costs into the future (tragedy of the commons) or underprovide and pass costs to other participants in the present (free-riding). A lot of people (including Vitalik) mix these problems up and get confused because they imagine the problem is just a failure to pay, not the fact that closure is needed to induce provision.

Another example is quadratic voting. Using it to encourage users to subsidize public goods that provide diffuse benefits only works if participants cannot vote to pay themselves so the mechanism requires a closed slate with non-open gatekeeping and compulsory participation, because as soon as anyone can nominate themselves for payment, the Nash equilibrium shifts back to everyone voting to pay themselves with their own money, and public goods continuing to be underprovided.

Vitalik:  This is actually not true; QV/QF works totally fine even if you allow voters to make and vote for proposals that say “voter X gets Y coins”. Only voter X would vote for the proposal, everyone else would vote slightly against.

David:  Nope. Your Nash equilibrium is not everyone else playing nicely while X votes to pay themselves. Every letter of the alphabet has now introduced a proposal to pay themselves and is supporting it with all of their votes.

You have not found a solution to the tragedy of the commons. You have begrudgingly permitted one additional farmer to put one additional sheep on the pasture while denying that ability to every other participant in the system. Adding a trusted third party (you, the gatekeeper) is a known solution, but it isn’t an acceptable or open one.

thetagodfather: What innovations at the base layer would you add to help address the stated problem?

David: You have to eliminate the discrepancy between the value that participants can extract from the network, and the value that they contribute to the network. This is not possible if you have a fractured incentive structure.

The most important change at the base level is adding cryptographic signatures to the routing layer so that the network can measure who is doing the work of collecting transactions (fees) from users and routing them further into the network. That information on who is doing work and its objective value to the network is then available to consensus and you have a shot at solving the problem.

Routing subsidies can be hacked-on. The real challenge in solving the problem for good is turning this form of work into something that has the security properties of PoW and (to a lesser extent) PoS and can regulate block production. The only known solution intersects with POW and not PoS, so making modifications to Ethereum would require its own developers to understand the problem. The requirement to burn energy in the PoW version might be something that could be replaced by a form of token burning in a PoS mechanism.

For more updates, please do follow Saito’s official social media pages:

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The post The Saitozen Voice Deluxe – Part 2 appeared first on Saito.

David: The sad thing about this write-up/essay is that it shows how clueless the ETH developers are about economics, particularly in terms of how they think about collective action problems and public goods.

Public goods exist when, despite the fact that overall welfare is maximized when we do Y, everyone nonetheless does X because that is what maximizes individual income regardless of what others do. Thus, the tragedy of the commons where people put more sheep on the pasture because they are better off *regardless* of what others do. Or the free rider problem Vitalik is describing here where everyone mines/stakes rather than fund protocol upgrades because that maximizes my income regardless of what others do. Vitalik is missing something fundamental about economics and it is astonishing no-one is correcting him: people pursue individual interests not group interests. He is running into a public goods problem because his incentives are pointing to the wrong place.

The source of this problem has nothing to do with governance structures. His problem is not created by governance structures. And it is not solved by governance structures. All a governance structure can do is add more problems by further distorting incentives and inducing more complicated ways for people to avoid spending money on Y. Making matters worse, “governance” structures necessarily require adding forms of closure (i.e., closed voting rings, etc.) which is pointless if one is supposed to be designing an open system (i.e., a public blockchain).

Vitalik: I’m quite aware that [people will pursue individual interests], and this issue is exactly what both this post and many other posts are about! So I don’t feel like I understand your critique here.

About the solution you propose:

X = network security. Y = research, development, education, documentation, community building. Incentivizing X is easy because X is easy to measure. But how do you measure Y? The difficulty of measuring Y is exactly the core reason why this entire problem is hard.

David: The critique is that all attempts to solve this through the creation of meta-layer governance structures are doomed to fail because they (1) add closure, and (2) create complicated and game-able incentive structures to solve problems created by complicated and game-able incentive structures.

You are dealing with problems caused by openness (non-excludability). That is why they are creating problems that take the form of public goods provision (goods which are non-excludable and non-rival). You have to stop seeing your problems as technical patches and go back and read Mancur Olson to understand what they actually are; he explains why all solutions to funding public goods (i.e., your network) that do not align your mismatched incentives on that layer require closure, cartelization and monopolization. Technical complexity will only make these problems worse, and the market will add this closure as a last resort in the absence of any other solution.

[Rather than “how do you measure Y?”], a better question would be “what you are measuring?”

I suspect the reason you assume this problem is unsolvable is that you are treating the challenge as a technical problem of paying for specific activities (“research, development, education, documentation”) rather than measuring and paying for value. If you pay nodes for value, you solve the problem on the most fundamental level because you suddenly have an incentive structure cannot be gamed; the only way to extract more wealth is to provide more value to the network. That eliminates the problem without the need for closure/monopolization/Cartelization.

I have no idea how you can pay for documentation. But the value users get from the network is directly quantifiable in the fee they pay to use it. And that means that the value the network provides the user is also quantifiable in the same way. In fact, you do have an objective and quantifiable starting point for measuring the value that nodes contribute to the network and compensating them in proportion to value contributed.

You won’t make progress until you stop going down technical dead-ends. You should be able to see the form of work that is needed, and your challenge is to turn this into something that has the same security properties as PoW and PoS. But pay for that and if education/development/documentation is needed to get more fee-flow, you can bet your life that the network will fund it. And if it is not needed then you shouldn’t be paying for it anyway because you are just creating a complicated and game-able incentive structure and killing yourself that way.

Vitalik: OK, so for the sake of argument let’s accept the claim that value is adequately measured by TX fees as given (I have quibbles with it, but we can ignore them for the moment). Even still, how do you know to what extent a given action contributed to those TX fees? In the case of mining, you can measure not only the fact that mining happened, but also exactly who contributed how many blocks to the chain at what time. With writing documentation, or development, or research, you cannot measure this.

[When you say “the network” will fund it if it’s needed to get more fee-flow], who is “the network”? There is no agent called the network; there are a bunch of various actors (miners, stakers, transaction senders, potentially coin voters). Who specifically would fund the public goods, and how, in the absence of an explicit governance mechanism issuing rewards, would they internalize the benefit of doing so?

David: >Even still, how do you know to what extent a given action contributed to those TX fees?

You don’t. You simply intuit the fact that X produced value to the user by virtue of the fact that the user handed them money. How did they do it? Perhaps they provided edge-node access infrastructure like Infura (congratulations, you are now paying for infrastructure and killing free riding on Joe Lubin). Or perhaps they developed software or provided documentation and support for developers. Perhaps they are a small shop and get transaction flow simply because users value the fact they aren’t Google (congratulations, you’re now quantifying the value of “decentralization” to your users).

You cannot see the actual work that is done in the same way you cannot see miners actually pushing electricity through ASICs. You measure the output and intuit the existence of the input based on the need for participants to do the work to make money in a competitive environment.

>With writing documentation, or development, or research, you cannot measure this.

Of course you can: if you want the docs or development or research then use the endpoint that belongs to the person producing them. Free-market firms do this every day, it is exactly how documentation, development and research activities are typically funded by investment banks and corporate software shops.

Some activities won’t be funded, but in that case they are by definition extractive and siphoning off value (i.e., you are creating a free-rider problem and possibly circular economic attacks by paying for them). Not paying for stuff that induces economic problems is a feature. And at worst, even if you can find one or two examples of public goods that persist, you’ve reduced your problem space from a “we are failing to pay for practically everything of value and the providers of that stuff are enclosing and monopolizing our network” to “we can pay for everything except X.”

>Who specifically would fund the public goods?

What public goods? You now have private goods being provided by a functioning market and no problems with under-provision, market failure, or central economic planning. The entire point of having a solution is that it eliminates the need for public goods.

You are confused because you think public goods exist in the same form in every network simply because they exist in that form in Ethereum. This is not true: no-one considers staking a public good, but there are incentive mechanisms in which it could be.

This is a digression as the original post was simply pointing out that there are systemic problems with the way ETH devs approach collective action problems by treating them as technical issues that can be solved without addressing the underlying incentive mismatch. The point here that we actually *can* measure value was simply an example offered to rebut Vitalik’s claim that it is impossible to objectively measure value in the network if it is not mining or staking. All nodes participating in consensus have full access to transaction data. We may not know what activities were performed in exchange for the fee, but there is no question we can objectively quantify who did how much work.

If there’s an epiphany that ties these two streams of thought together, it’s that once you shift to paying nodes for the value they are providing to the network, you will by definition only be giving money to those who bring more fees into the network than they extract, eliminating the possibility of defection (“consumption-without-contribution”) without adding closure. You don’t have public goods problems in this system because there are no public goods: asking how to pay for them misses the point.

To be continued in Part 2 of the Deluxe Edition of the Saitozen Voice.

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I’m having trouble wrapping my brain around the issues that SAITO solves, and it’s primarily because I’m unable to relate it to real life examples of how things are traditionally. Can anyone explain it to me like I was born in the 1950s?

POW needs volunteers to do non-mining work in the same way Halloween needs volunteers to do candy-buying work. Scale means volunteers stop doing this stuff as costs rise. So the work needs to be done by for-profit firms. POW and POS networks think this will be fine because their networks are decentralized.

Try to think of a business model that will pay for the network infrastructure nodes to serve data to users and collect fees for miners/stakers that doesn’t increase fees, lower security, or introduce cartels and monopoly economics. Try to find a business model that makes for-profit firms behave like volunteers. There isn’t one.

The free market HAS to add closure to anything it pays for, because otherwise you have a public good and market failure. But closure makes a blockchain pointless and uncompetitive.

Saito fixes the problem by noticing and fixing the underlying problem: the fact that participants are incentivized to do only a subset of the stuff we need done. Suddenly an open consensus algorithm can provide all of this network activity without the need for the free market to fail-to-provide or provide-but-cartelize it.

The solution requires switching to measuring and paying for the collection of money. The challenge is giving this activity the security properties of Bitcoin since we are now burning money directly instead of indirectly through hash power.

I know this is discussed in the whitepaper, but I am wondering what exact purpose staking serves in consensus? Is it just extra security?

Classic Saito assumes we have a golden ticket every block. But we can’t guarantee that because golden tickets are found in a random process that involves hashing. And any difficulty which produces an average of 1 solution per block will sometimes produce 2 golden tickets per block and sometimes 0.

Assume we have 50% of the blocks dropping off the chain without a golden ticket. Either;

• Their tokens drop off the chain and we have deflation, or

• We recapture tokens and redistribute them as a block reward. But if we are redistributing them as a block reward, we are giving free money to the block producer.

Charging money to produce blocks and giving a large block reward? Systematic problem.

Having the staking component allows us to solve 1 golden ticket every N block, and the variance just sorts itself out over the long run. It doesn’t matter if we produce 0 golden tickets for a bunch of blocks because over the long run it will work out.

The blocks that aren’t paid out immediately get paid out when the next golden ticket is found.
If a golden ticket solves payments for 2 blocks, the random number is now picking 4 winners (miner, router, staker, staker-block-router). Even though the network is spending a smaller percentage of its overall revenue on hashing, generating a golden ticket that pays you off (your routers, etc.) at profit becomes exponentially more expensive.

The beautiful thing is that the cost-of-attack rises above 100% of fee throughput in most situations. I think our expected cost-of-attack is currently 125%. The cost-of-attack falls to 100% (i.e.an attacker can at best recapture all of the money they spent) in the situation where the attacker controls 100% of the staking table.

Basically, staking is treated the same way that mining is — a mechanism to pull funds away from block producers rather than as something that controls the pace of block production. Very different than POS.

And we obviously don’t lead with this, because if people don’t understand Classic Saito, they won’t even have a clue why you might want to do this (and most people can understand the mechanism without seeing this potential problem). Shorthand benefits anyway:

• Exponential increase in hashing difficulty

• Halving of energy spent hashing

• No problems from natural variance in golden tickets being “found”

Can we do anything with the Rust client yet? if I run it on my local machine, would there be any way to interact with it in a browser app or something?

We’re working on the networking API right now, once that’s done you should be able to get two nodes to connect to each other. After that we’ll start integrating it with Saito-lite and you should be able to get the JS demo apps to send TX to a rust node(with a bit of effort)

It’s a bit unclear how much effort that will be, the TX and block format has changed so Saito-lite will need significant changes. It may also be possible to simply interact with Rust at the network level. But you’d need the other side of the connection to at least be able to serialize/deserialize blocks and TXs and sign TXs.

Are there more exchanges listings in your roadmap? is any work happening in that front?

Yes, we are in on-going discussions with exchanges. As noted previously most exchanges will list projects for a fee and some kind of distribution for their users. That obviously negatively affects token price. The size of these fees and distributions is generally bigger with bigger exchanges (we have been listed by some smaller exchanges without action on our side). Exchanges also tend to reduce or drop these if there is sufficient trading volume, or buzz around a project.

 I think there is also an assumption from some that an exchange listing necessarily has a positive impact on price. This is not true. Without promotional and outreach support a listing does nothing. So, we need to balance how we spend money and time between promoting the project and growing our community and lobbying exchanges.

Can new Saito tokens be minted or are we fixed?

There’s a multisig around the smart contract. it is possible to mint more although it isn’t unlimited as burning is required to withdraw to mainnet and there can never be more tokens in existence that exist in the token supply.

Total token supply is fixed at 10b long-term on mainnet, and the network is intended to be zero inflation and zero deflation.

That isn’t a promise that there will be 10b tokens. But it is a promise there will not be more. In terms of the ERC20 everything involving it is publicly visible. Will say that if we were interested in rug pull, we would be doing things quite differently and I would be doing a lot less coding.

For more updates, please do follow Saito’s official social media pages:

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The post The Saitozen Voice – Issue #5 appeared first on Saito.

Check out the full transcript below.

Richard: Thanks for joining everyone, great to have you all here. The format for today will be a quick update from me on some kind of general stuff quick tech update from David, then a new kind of feature just introduce someone from the team which will be Clay, and then we’ll get on to the real purpose of the of the Town Hall which is open question format, you know, letting people dig into the project, find out things they don’t know.

There are some questions already in telegram and I’d really encourage people to drop questions into the chat so we can get a sense of what people are wanting to know and so we can kind of flip between different people on our side make sure it’s not me droning on or David getting most of the words in. So, kicking all of that off just a kind of quick update on where we’re at; on the marketing side the first thing I’d say is I hope you’re seeing more of the project around and about, we’re really trying to expand what we’re doing in the marketing space. Some of that includes more of things you would have seen before and some of that is experimenting trying new things some really great stuff come out of community as well, like the guys putting together the voice the citizen voice, just sort of recapping and bundling up some of the great stuff that’s happening in community and making that available and digestible to people. We’ve also done some stuff I kind of think of as flag waving type marketing, you know, it’s not so in-depth but it’s just getting our brand and our name out there, trying to pick up new people and let them see that we’re there and hopefully pick up some of them as a sort of converts and we’ve seen that with kind of twitter competitions and the arcade photo competition. We’re just really trialing stuff there and seeing what works and what gets some traction for us.

We’ve also been trying some new stuff around dot arcade, just trying to push into Polkadot communities etc. Again, you know we’re trying to sort of make sure we get our voice out more broadly than we have before and to different communities and things and anyone who’s got any ideas of ways we can reach out better to community there we’d really encourage them you know hit us up in telegram make suggestions we really love that.

And then the last probably biggest thing that’s happening as well is that we’ve started working with some new people in the ambassador program, so we’ve been uh advertising that for a week or so, we’ve got some people who’ve come in, most of those people are from our community, they’re not totally  new, and they’re involved in other parts of the crypto space or forums like reddit etc., and we’re working with them to help them get that Saito message out more organically and into deeper into groups where it’s hard to enter as a stranger and jump in.

So that’s really a broad update on marketing and we’ll be able to answer any questions in more depth later in in the main section. Before we move on to text some quick project updates, one is we got listed on ZT so it’s always good to have another exchange and we hope that keeps up for the next while, other just big functional news; the second tranche, what there was of it that hadn’t gone out already of the seed and private investment round tokens, went out about a week and a half ago, that wasn’t too much to go out and went out without an issue so it’s a while before there’s any more token release and on that note we um have made some updates on medium and on our blog if anyone’s interested in details and we will be moving basically all of the treasury tokens to gnosis vaults in the next few days; we’ll have announcement about that, and that’s really just a security measure particularly now that we’ve well and clear that second charge and bettered in what our spending and things are around the raise money as well, so the only thing really to note there is you’ll see an announcement about that just to be completely clear to community about what’s going on with treasury movements because people should know that

So that’s a quick update on the project announcements and then I’ll just kick over to David for a quick tech update.

David: I’ll keep this really short and if people have specific questions, we can talk about them. As people know we’re in the middle of a bunch of stuff the big thing is the Rust implementation, you guys will hear from Clay in a bit, he’s done a lot of work with this. If you’ve noticed the username registration is working a lot better now than it used to, he also had a bunch of pain on that.

Richard: We just throw the bugs at Clay.

David: Yeah, he gets the unpleasant ones. But yeah, we’re about halfway done. We started working  on networking which means getting multiple nodes connecting and we’re moving beyond the classic implementation of just a golden ticket paying a miner in router and we’re moving towards the golden ticket now paying multiple routers kind of cascading backwards, so there are a couple of big things that need to happen um and but you know we’re on schedule, I think is the important thing and anyone who’s got questions, you can fire them off or just follow what’s happening on GitHub.

Richard: by popular demand from community wanting to see someone that’s not me and David talking to them occasionally, we thought we’d introduce you to someone new in the team this Town Hall and that’s Clay; so I asked clay to just sort of quickly introduce himself and then again the point of this meeting is more for questions later so we’ll get around to those as soon as we can.

Clay: Hi everybody, so my name is Clay, like Richard said, I’ve been on team Saito for I think over nine months now. Prior I studied electrical engineering in school, and I have about 15 years of software development experience. I’ve done a little bit of everything, mostly web stuff but prior to becoming more blockchain entrepreneurial I was at google protecting their ads ecosystem on a team internally called Ad Spam externally called Ad Traffic Quality, where we basically have to detect all the fake clicks on all of Google’s ad products, so that was a lot of responsibilities. It was a cool experience and I learned a lot; it was like big data ML sort of stuff, but after that I got really into uh blockchain and surprisingly at google there were very, very few opportunities to get into that space, so I had a startup with a partner here in China where we were trying to do a platform like turnkey solution for enterprises to enter the blockchain space trying to target rewards programs and things like that and we ended up going separate ways because there was a disconnect between me and my partner and one of the big problems we ran into was actually technical. We couldn’t, the things that my partner wanted to do, I kept trying to explain to him you just can’t do that on Ethereum, I felt like we were selling something that we didn’t really have and so  while i was doing that I ended up running into David in a WeChat chat group and we were arguing about something about bitcoin and bitcoin cash I think I bucketed him as a BSV guy initially because he was some principled arguments about bitcoin cash and most of people that were  trying to speak in that sphere at the time were, there was a big disconnect between the bitcoin cash and the BSV people so we ended up meeting for a pint here in Beijing and David talked to me for like an hour and a half about Saito while the rest of the team were being more normal.

David: one lesson there is that Saito a lot easier if you have beer.

Clay: Yeah [laughter]. So at that point I was still stuck in my in my other partnership but I knew at that point that if I ever was able to exit that and looking for something cool to work on in Beijing that Saito would have to be it, so as soon as I was available I joined the team and it’s been a great experience so far, we’re really doing cool stuff here so it’s great. So yeah, happy to answer questions if people have them.

Richard: I see one question here from someone saying you know they’d love to see us talk more about these 51 attacks, etc.

I’m actually seeing the telegram group, there’s news of a big 51 attack today but I haven’t actually followed it today, I’m a bit busy preparing for this and other things, so I’m not sure if anyone could give us more information on that but I do think that that’s one of the things that does present us with chances to talk about you know what is different about Saito out there.

Clay: that’s very interesting, I’m curious what are these 51 attacks that are happening because we should know more about the space but we’re just building Saito all the time, so we don’t always know.

David: someone’s gunning for BSB so they just keep reorganizing whatever TAAL does, it’s actually kind of funny

Richard: is that what’s happening?

David: yeah, it’s just a hash attack and all of the miners are now leaving, so anyone who’s not TAAL is now fleeing for the door which makes the attacks easier so, it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

David E: Clay, where did you learn rust?

Clay: So I had a quite a bit of experience, I had once upon a time done a game platform in C with embedded Python and I learned a lot of systems programming doing that and then obviously at Google everything’s very low level you’re dealing with pushing bytes around but I did not know Rust prior to joining Saito and Richard and David were keen on using that so I’ve just spent some time up at Saito learning it here but, you know, once you know enough languages it’s easier. I mean Rust is very unique and there is a steep learning curve, but I love it, i think it’s a great. I mean, it’s by far my favorite language now. I think it’s just so cool.

David: it’s got the most helpful debugger, you know?

Greeny: I’m sorry if you’ve answered this question in the past, but why did you all choose Rust over other languages?

David: JavaScript runs in the browser, right? but it’s using one CPU and what that means is that as the block gets bigger and there’s more and more work to be done, more and more cryptographic stuff to be done, you get a limit on how fast you can process a block because you’ve got one CPU to do it.

You can optimize and trick your way around it by doing things like taking that block dividing it into 10 chunks, sending it to 10 processors and then they do their own stuff, the problem is that there are all these trade-offs that you can’t avoid. Rust is so beautiful because on a fundamental level it’s designed so it’s really easy for us to do something like read the block into memory and then it sits in that space of memory and we go to like 10 CPUs, 20 CPUs ,40 or 60 CPUs and we say each of you guys take some of this work and do it. So Rust is much, much better for parallelization and that’s really great because as blocks get huge you start to hit bottlenecks reading them into memory and moving just that size of data around and we don’t want to be doing that multiple times. I think we’ve shared some numbers; we can share some more, but basically Rust is outperforming my expectations of how fast we can get things. I think Clay’s comments as well play like mine and he’s blown away

Clay: I think the only other reasonable choice would maybe be Go, but the simplest answer is we want to get a low level language, we want to get something that’s compiled and where we’re doing real systems level stuff and we can push bytes around to really just squeeze out every bit of performance from the machine and as far as like Rust versus C++ or Go would it’s just a bit of a subjective choice but one that i definitely agree with just because Rust really lets you do low level stuff but without a lot of the sacrifices you would have to deal with C or C++ at least. I don’t know Go so well but it’s just a really great choice because it gives you the best of both worlds, I feel like we’re able to be really productive, almost as productive as you would be in JavaScript as far as just getting the functionality down but then it’s like 40 times more performance if you’re going to use 40 CPUs.

Emilio: how is the dot arcade different from the regular arcade?

Richard: One way to answer that is it really isn’t. The reason I’m saying that is the point is that it’s demonstration of being able to simply develop In Saito and then use code that you’ve written in regular standard web format to do things with other cryptos is a lot of work doing in other ways. So, the idea is really that it demonstrates how simply that you can slot other cryptos into the into the Saito ecosystem. The difference is right now it’s supporting Polkadot ecosystem tokens and in future we hope to expand that a lot more.

David: I’d just add that the um it’s really milestone one of that grant proposal that we got into the Dot people we can probably spin out milestone two anytime, I think we’re waiting to see how the outreach with the dot arcade stuff goes because partly it’s a marketing effort. You know, see how receptive that community is. One of the questions we’re thinking about post getting Saito rust up is exactly what’s the best way to make it so that we can really easily add stuff because the way we are doing things with Dot is really custom to their hardware and their servers and there are other ways that might be easier and more flexible, but yeah like Richard says is going to be pretty much the same as the normal one, the question is really when we get that second milestone in and when people can practically come with other cryptos.

TheAltz: How actively engaged are the VC investors and do they have any actual say in the direction or project or are they completely silent/hands off?

Richard: the real answer to that is it’s really varied. So we’ve got, for instance, the seed investor who is a really early supporter who’s now with a new fund that they’ve set up, that have come in again who David and I tapped for advice and investment quite on a regular basis so you know we will talk to them for advice and feedback. They have helped us find staff they have helped us structure the IDO, etc. Really daily activity, we’ve got other investors who have put some marketing muscle and things like that behind us and help amplify our messages and we’ve got others that really are very much silent partners and that’s something where we’re working with, is getting the most out of them, it’s a two-way street we need to push them to do it and it’s really changed, I think, in the space, we got a lot more investors in the recent rounds who are investors with something they bring to the party with whether they’ve got communities that they can message into or they help us with outreach and marketing, so yeah it really is very varied but we’re looking to get more out of all of our investors.

David: I think it’s something we’ve actually been focused on finding out for the last two to three weeks, we’ve been proactively reaching out to people and figuring out who’s helping with what sort of thing, because different kind of investors also mean different obligations to the project. Like Richard said it runs the gamut from like our lead investor in 2017, those guys are amazing, to a smaller person that might have got a smaller allocation because they run a blockchain promotion group or something, so it’s different.

Richard: yeah, we’ve been blown away by some people and we’re less impressed with others let’s say that as well.

Just looking through other questions, George George George George George George is saying that he’s considering becoming and applying to be an ambassador and I would say to anyone in the community if you’re interested in being part of that program, let us know, we’re not um expecting specific things, we want to find out what people can bring to the project and we want to work with them to make sure that’s rewarding and fun and exciting for them so seriously don’t feel like there’s some kind of threshold that maybe you don’t qualify or whatever, we’re happy to talk to people and it’s not wasting our time or something you can’t do, if you’re if you’re already participating in Telegram, that’s great.

Pawel: How Saito will revolutionize ecommerce?

Richard: I think the whole purpose behind Saito and the core idea of web3 is to get away from various technical and financial systems that allow incumbents to monopolize and to control what users or consumers can do. What we’re hoping to do is be part of doing that, letting people use keys online to be their identity and to own and maintain their identity and not have to give that away to the credit card company or to Amazon to be controlled on their behalf, so we’re hoping that we will see things like open marketplaces and I think that will start with things like content aggregation and stuff like that where people use site tools built on Saito to use crypto and micro payments and other things to share revenue with producers directly and other people like aggregators who are doing something useful for them rather than it being Spotify, google music maybe, one or two other services and you just have to hand over everything to them and that’s what you’ve got.

Thanks everyone for giving us your time this evening for being part of this it’s been great fun and we really appreciate everyone’s coming in and being part of it tonight.

For more updates, please follow Saito Network’s official social media pages:
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The post SAITO Community Town Hall # 2 Highlights and Recap appeared first on Saito.

Would someday other dev be able to use the Saito blockchain to create their tokens in the same way Ethereum and BSC are used today?

A smart contract EVM is really just an application that runs on a blockchain. Install the EVM atop however many nodes you want and they can process transactions set to specific addresses as inputs to contracts.

That stuff runs naturally L2 on Saito. When will we get around to this? That really depends how it falls into the hierarchy of things that needs to be done and when it becomes a priority. Definitely not soon in my opinion. We can chat about this in the townhall if people want.

You explain Saito as a solution to problems that other blockchains don’t even recognize as problems. From what I hear/read, I think e.g. Vitalik is a very smart guy within the Ethereum space. Why wouldn’t he see these problems? Are they really that much of a “thing”? Will they be in the long run?

What the ETH guys tend to do is see a problem with POS, notice it exists in POW, and conclude it must be a universal problem. Practical examples of this are the “scalability trilemma” and “sheep-and-wolves” problems.

Vitalik has written about some economic attacks that Saito solves, particularly discouragement attacks. He doesn’t wade down to the economic level very often, perhaps because — as he wrote on that occasion — these classes of attacks are “a cheaper way of attacking a consensus algorithm” and “one of the hardest classes of attacks to come up with defenses against.”

The question I’d ask is why has there been zero progress on those problems in the last three years and if the ETH guys consider these problems a priority? As far as I can tell, what they do is declare the problem as unsolvable in order to remove it from the list of things they need to worry about. The scalability trilemma has been invoked to justify practically every bad design decision ETH has made.

Part of the problem is lack of understanding of actual economics. But part is that when development communities attract people who see economic problems as technical problems they attract “experts” whose solution is central planning.

In Plato’s cave, Socrates explains how inaccurate perceptions of problems within Blockchain lead to complacency in addressing them. Only by actively seeking out the truth can one arrive to the wisdom that is Saito

What are the weaknesses/downsides of Saito? I understand some of the downsides of BTC and ETH (or rather PoW/PoS blockchains) – and I can’t quite believe that Saito is as perfect as you say it is. I want to, but I’m still skeptical could you expand on that?

I’ll answer your question as best I can, although my experience is that when people ask this question what they often want is reassurance that Saito exists in the same spectrum of “technical trade-offs” as other projects. So before I answer with something specifically, I want to comment on why this is not true, with reference to what was new about Bitcoin.

Before Bitcoin was invented the trade-offs that applied to early forms of “digital money” were caused by the fact that the interface with the objects that held real value were outside the control of the networks themselves. You needed trusted third parties to handle the interface with those assets, and usually also the government to sanction them having access to the banking system. Bitcoin “solved” this problem by putting the “value” in the system under the direct control of consensus. The “trade-off” space that existed previously no-longer applied because there was no need for a trusted-third party to manage the money-interface.

Saito does the same thing with cost-of-attack. The addition of cryptographic routing sigs allows our consensus mechanism to increase the cost of producing blocks (and collecting payments) so that it is always expensive for people unless they are using work generated by fees that have been paid for by other people.

The trade-offs that exist in PoW and PoS exist because they have external markets for work (hash/stake) that permit costless transfers and anonymous laundering of work in ways that enable economic attacks. Saito changes the game in the way that Bitcoin did — something that used to exist outside the network (cost of attack) — is shifted in Saito and put under the direct control of consensus itself. Economic attacks disappear because the consensus algorithm can see when it has been transferred and assigns a penalty that you can only ignore if the fees don’t come from you.

In terms of specific issues?

The hardest technical problem happens if we assume that people are willing to burn money to attack the blockchain. At this point PoW and PoS are dead, and it isn’t clear why Saito needs to worry about economic irrationality and no-one else does, but let’s take this seriously.

Some people will argue that the security of PoW is driven by the fact it is hard to purchase miners (i.e. pretending that hash-rental attacks or miner-collusion is somehow off the table). I don’t personally buy this story at all — if the supply curve of hashpower is what keeps PoW safe then we can expect PoW security to collapse as the block reward falls and the R&D costs of producing more efficient miners require more and more money over time (see CPU market).

But what if it’s true in the short run?

Saito addresses the problem by using routing policies to force attackers to produce blocks in sequence (spamming your peers with blocks at a specific depth doesn’t get them routed, so it isn’t a viable attack). And we require chains to have a certain number of golden tickets per N blocks in order to be considered valid — so that it isn’t just a matter of spending money. You also do have to burn hashpower.

The fact that we require a certain number of tickets per N blocks (rather than every block essentially being a golden ticket) means that the cost of spamming the network is lower at the tip of the chain than in other networks. Or potentially lower, because higher fee throughput and scalability means that there is more money to pay for the golden ticket mining.

We already know that Saito costs far more to attack. But what is more spam-resistant? A network with X in fee throughput that spends all of its income on hashing, or a network with Y in fee throughput that spends 25 percent of it on hashing? It depends on the scale and throughput of the network.

Why did no other blockchain come up with a similar solution?

Why did no-one else come up with Bitcoin? This isn’t an easy problem to solve. And the solution is counterintuitive — it requires both the cost of and payout from producing a block to float according to information that does not exist in POW and POS.

And you have to solve two problems, because what is the use of scaling routing if you’re stuck with a permanent ledger?

Do you fear someone else implementing your ideas faster?

David: My last business in China was copied. So – yeah – I used to be afraid of going out and talking to people and trying to get them to understand and then just being copied and jettisoned. That was one of the big reasons for the patent application.

These days I’m a lot less worried. It’s legitimately hard work to think through the mechanism and most people are lazy. And someone copying us would probably be good for us and we would outcompete them anyway.

What type of projects that can be developed on the ecosystem outside of gaming. If someone were to develop a consumer product requiring transfer, collecting and holding of consumer data, How would one go about qualifying the type of projects to develop on Saito let alone any blockchain ecosystem?

When you meet a friend, scan a QR-code on their phone to get their publickey and add them as a friend in your keylist. Use Saito to run a Diffie-Hellman key exchange over the blockchain. There is no MITM attack. Do this with 500 people? Have them create off-chain spontaneous communication channels over IP. If you need group encryption you can do N-player Diffie Hellman key exchanges so everyone in your group has the same encryption/decryption key. Replace wechat/facebook/telegram/whatever. Use plain TCP/IP communications for most data-heavy actions. Retreat to on-chain communications for payments and for things like IP-address updates that are hard to handle otherwise.

This sort of thing is possible in any network where people can communicate and exchange signed messages. But to be useful it needs to be scalable, as we’re sending a lot of transactions. You’re definitely not going to build a decentralized version of wechat on a network that can’t break 100mm transactions a day.

For more updates, please do follow Saito’s official social media pages:
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Blog: https://org.saito.tech/blog
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Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SaitoIO/
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The post The Saitozen Voice – Issue #4 appeared first on Saito.

With the completely different approach to economic incentives and security, what are the potential weaknesses/challenges to bridging the gap past the point of circular attacks? In other words what ideal is Saito giving up to realize the other ideals of this approach?

A superficial answer would be something like: Saito sacrifices the freedom for nodes to conduct sybil attacks against each other in exchange for eliminating the 51% attack or we sacrifice routing nodes’ ability to sell future-income flow from the work they do (i.e., rent hash / stake) in exchange for the ability to pay nodes in the routing network. Are these trade-offs? Not really.

A deeper answer is that much of the “technical trade-off” schtick comes from PoS devs who know they are introducing problems but need to justify them and so argue that their compromises are equivalent to problems in PoW. Adding a round-robin PoS network adds finality by creating a closed network layer around block production, for instance, but merely moves the 51% attack to the open voting-layer that wraps the block-producer-set. PoS conceptualize their problems as technical rather than informational/economic, so they don’t realize that the cause of their problems are deep irreconcilable problems involving incentives and openness at a very fundamental level — if the incentives are bad, you can’t address the problems they create without a mechanism of closure or governance that can prevents people from taking advantage of them. And those mechanisms that add closure add problems if the entire point of the network is its openness.

From a Saito perspective these devs are playing a nonsensical game. They move the openness elsewhere (we’re voting on who gets to participate in our closed system!) and call it a trade-off. They invent new words for closure (governance) that don’t carry as much baggage. Or they arbitrarily change economic variables to force changes in incentives and necessarily sacrifice openness there as now developers are dictating spending instead of an open and competitive work-production mechanism.

There are these problems getting caused by issues they can’t fix — like differences between “who gets the money” and “who does the work”. And they need to add closure to solve them in specific cases, but that turns them into permissioned networks. So they move the openness elsewhere through technical chicanery. And you can’t do that — you can’t trick market participants into understanding their incentives because they only care about ROI not about how it is structured. So they are stuck just moving the problem around and adding layers of wrapping and redirection and complexity because they can’t simultaneously have openness and closure and need to have both.

No-one has come up with a critique of Saito that does not apply to Bitcoin. The worst I’ve heard is that you can spend money to attack the network because there is no external market (for hash or stake) sitting between us and the right to produce blocks (although that isn’t even strictly true, because we can also do things like require chains to have a certain amount of golden ticket support etc.). So there is the possibility of these economic attacks, except they are much, much, worse in PoW or PoS, as cost-of-attack in those networks is half of fee-throughput in those designs, and Saito is much more scalable and so can promise much higher fee-throughput generally. More money to secure the network and more efficient leveraging of that money to generate cost-of-attack.

We can talk about this if you want. Or anything else you are concerned about. Most people don’t like to think about this stuff because they black box “mining” and “staking” as magical boxes that provide “security” instead of circular economic engines that turn money into more money (and can be gamed in various ways). I think once we take seriously the reality that building a blockchain is building an economic system (i.e., where fees buy work and ROI is the motivation for workers to generate work) then Saito may be the only blockchain without fundamental tradeoffs. I haven’t seen another design that just works the way

Any thoughts about Miner Extractable Value with respect to Saito? I was wondering if the dynamics we see at play in Ethereum would be discouraged in Saito consensus.

Smart contracts are L2. Saito consensus doesn’t have an opinion on what happens L2 — it’s just data attached to transactions to the L1 blockchain. If reorganizing those in plaintext allows people to cheat, maybe L2 EVMs could switch to expecting users to submit encrypted data of some kind. That would probably require some kind of closure to be effective, but it’s more of an L2 concern than anything we are really focused on.

Is the present Saito website running on the Rust client or will it be transferred once it’s finished?

Rust Client isn’t going to be full featured like the current JavaScript version. It won’t run applications. Just manage consensus and maybe have a very lightweight wallet. As part of the dev effort, we’re evaluating different kinds of changes and upgrades too. These changes aren’t necessarily huge, but they mean that once we get Saito-Rust done, we will have to upgrade the JavaScript version so that they agree.

My guess is that we get Rust running and upgrade the JavaScript version and basically pit them against each other. The applications and stuff keep running on JS and we see where we are and what our priority should be.

How is governance quorum met? What is the mediation process for upgrades added to protocol layer?  (Such that upgrade 1 and upgrade 2 benefits different groups of people but cannot both be implemented).

I’m not sure it is even theoretically possible to prevent people from forking — if someone can change the code, they can surely change whatever meta-rules that prevent forking.

Do you mean burning money and trying to create a competitive fork that way? it is possible, but it is also possible in networks like Bitcoin — an attacker with 51% of hash power can switch back and forth between mining on two chains and create deep reorg-thrashing attacks — as soon as the honest network starts building on one chain, switch to the second. and then back.

We have a couple of strategies available that can really ratchet up the cost of block production. But I think our core strategy has to be maximizing the cost of that attack rather than making it impossible by adding mechanisms that also make it impossible for the honest network to burn attacker tokens and fork defensively if needed.

I suppose the goal of “governance” would not be to prevent people from forking, but to discourage it by having some form of mediating disputes but I don’t really like to talk about “mediation” and blockchain in the same sentence

Yes, if we have a mechanism that we can use to mediate disputes that does not add closure, why not use that mechanism to determine the longest-chain and avoid the need for mining/staking?

I don’t think Saito’s approach locks us off from using any sort of meta-consensus mechanism. The expectation that we can do this sort of thing seems to be a PoS thing — seems to require us to have already accepted that voting mechanisms with majoritarian attacks or halting attacks are OK.

Is the information on https://www.crypto51.app/ accurate? Theoretically it would only cost $1,159,031 to 51% attack bitcoin? this seems rather cheap, what is actually stopping people besides cost from 51% attacking BTC if this is theoretically how much it costs?

It’s worse — all those numbers are conditioned on the assumption that an attacker needs to buy or rent enough new hash to find themselves in control of a majority over the existing hash.

The problem is that 51% of the hash exists by definition since 100% of it is already hashing. So the cost is < 0 by definition. People are worried about chain reorgs a lot more than they’re worried about incumbents monopolizing the chain by quietly discriminating against outsiders in ways that slowly centralize/cartelize the chain.

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