Join us for the 7th Saito Community Town Hall 7. We’ll have loads of updates, answer questions and, likely, cats!

The post Saito Community Town Hall 7 appeared first on Saito.

Highlights begin here.

1. Who are your competitors in crypto and what’s the strategy to outperform them?

We still have a unique approach – Saito consensus is not implemented anywhere else, so in that sense we don’t have direct competitors.

There are quite a few competitors in the ‘ideas space’ around scale. Polkadot, for instance, solves scaling issues for the relay chain, but passes on all other issues to parachains, while groups like Solana and before them EOS juiced up speeds by centralizing validation.

Other sharding solutions split up the problem to push it further down the road, but lose fundamental properties like ‘universal broadcast’ – being able to send a message to anyone on the network without any help or dependence on anyone else.

2. How important is the community for Saito team and what steps will be taken by team to keep interest of community & investors intact?

Our community is everything. Saito is like bitcoin or ethereum, and is nothing without a community.

The community is amazing – you just have to look at how the saito ‘red card army’ on twitter supports everything we do/announce.

More than that – the community is doing a _lot_ creating docs, making NFTs, promoting Saito… This is maybe the most amazing achievement of the project and something we will keep supporting as best we can.

3. As Saito is a layer One Blockchain, what is the Problems with other Blockchains? Why do You think users will need another Blockchain?

As mentioned above – Proof of Work and Proof of Stake pay _only_ for the security mechanism. To avoid web 3 collapsing back into being just like web 2 we need to pay for everything the network needs from consensus. If it is not, it is subject to ‘capture’ by anyone with power or an advantage in the system.

By rethinking what consensus pays for, and making that robust, Saito can provide infrastructure, pay devs and service users at scale – without closing off access or becoming corporate owned.

4. With many Blockchains, we have seen the issue of 51 % Attack, how do you plan to solve that? Can You give us an overview?

We love this question, obviously.  51% attacks feel like they might be inevitable in blockchain, like maybe natural something like democracy.

There are actually two reasons that PoW and PoS suffer 51% attacks. First, all the work/stake that does not ‘get used’ each block, just vanishes for the next block. The second is that the block creator gets paid for creating the block, and so can use this reward to ‘go again’ with their attack on the next block.

In Saito nodes need to collect user fees attached to transactions to make a block. When a block is made, the fees attached to other transactions, not put in the block, these are still valid ‘work’. AND, when a block is produced, one of the nodes that contributed to putting transactions into the block gets paid. Not the block creator. 

Together this means, that when a node creates a block, other nodes are already have some transactions and fees for the next block so the attacker is behind the honest nodes, and, most importantly we didn’t just pay the attacker to keep attacking the network.

This is maybe in the weeds, happy to talk more about this separately for anyone interested.

5. Please tell me some significant advantages of your platform over PoS and PoW, and how it can strengthen the security for users? What improvements or acknowledgements have you gained so far?

Along with all of the above – the biggest advantage is that Saito can actually be very simple, as it’s solution is not smart contracts, sharding, zk snarks or other ‘heavy tech’. 

Very early on – we got a javascript version pushing two 300mb blocks per minute across the pacific and staying in sync. 

Since then Saito networks have supported millions of transactions, and we have created exciting software on top of the network that gets people coming back.

6. 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?

This is a common misconception because we have worked closely with the web 3 foundation and have many partnerships and friends in the polkadot ecosystem.

We have received and completed a web 3 foundation grant, for example. 

In the end, Saito can be a massive part of the polkadot ecosystem, providing infrastructure to great projects that don’t have infrua to support them for free.

7. I Read in your Website that currently you are working on a Rust Implementation of Saito Consensus that will form the backbone of our next testnet(s). Will you Please tell me More about Saito Rust Implementation ?

The Rust client and Rust consensus are steps to making Saito ‘data center ready’. As the network grows and throughput increases, we would need to move to things like binary blocks (rather than json). 

At the same time – we have been refining and improving how we implement Saito Consensus in code with each update and refactoring of the code.

The Rust client represents our most efficient and robust implementation of Saito Consensus yet.

Changes like moving to binary for all network communications, and the extra strictness of Rust cause some issues for the rest of the stack, like games. We are working through those now, as well as settling our more detailed tech roadmap for the year.

8. What’s your vision ultimately? What is the project trying to achieve in the longer term? 

To deliver the promise of Web 3.

People talk a lot about decentralization and often assume that a decentralized network will be open and user owned. This is, sadly, not true. There are many decentralized networks that are not open at all, and where users are mere customers – or worse they are the product.

Users are freer and have more power if they use keys they control to access systems and interact. Similarly tokenisation allows for users to share value autonomously and without permission.

But this is not Web 3 by itself. If we look at the best examples we have currently they are subsidised by volunteers and companies. For example, Uniswap simply does not work without support from Infura and their servers.

Volunteers don’t scale. At some point they will not support paying for a large scale network. Which leaves companies. With scale, costs will increase, and over time we will see Web 2 business models creeping in. 

If we want a Web 3 that stays open at scale, we must solve issues of paying for the underlying network from consensus. This is what Saito does.

9. How do you deal with pump and dump investors who just buy and sell regardless of the technology behind it? In other words: how do you plan to gain the trust of all kinds of investors?

The answer to this is to get on with building a community and a track record. 

We have an amazing community that understands and supports Saito, our goals, and objectives. This buffers and protects the projects against the ups and downs of industry trends and markets.

When that is tied to a track record of building real code, and being honest and open about what we are doing – it becomes clear that there are much better ways to be involved with the project than making small profits day trading a token.

10. What’s your next move to expand your project & where did you see yourself at the end of year 2022 ?

We have recently published a detailed roadmap covering 2022 and beyond. 

Technically we are working on our rust ‘data center ready’ client, working on tools to let developers easily integrate third party cryptocurrencies into Saito and Developers tools to make it easy to build apps for Saito.

In terms of growth, that is driven by two main things – community and collaborations. The Saito community is amazing and is spreading the word about Saito globally. It is growing in size but also commitment and passion, which makes us super happy. We are brining on community management 

Integrating other cryptos into Saito – in a way similar to the way polkadot tokens are already integrated into Saito applications will allow us to engage on a deep level with projects throughout the industry and simply demonstrate the power and value of what Saito brings to them.

On top of this we will continue to communicate as much as we can about what we are doing. We are really pumped about 2022.

For more updates, please do follow Saito’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

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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.

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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).

For more updates, please follow Saito on Social Media:

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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

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 #4 Highlights and Recap appeared first on Saito.

We are very pleased to share that the AMA was a huge success, and Richard got to answer many awesome questions. To those who missed the AMA and to those interested to learn something about Saito, stay tuned as we curate his answers in this AMA recap.

Transcript begins here.

Q1: What are you hoping to get out of the partnership – why does it matter to Saito?

When you start a project like Saito, all you want is that someone notices, and pays attention. When you start to build a community, it means everything to the project. I am really excited about the partnership for two reasons.

One is to join our communities together; to introduce the Saitozens to what is happening on Sifchain, and to meet all the folks here and let them know what we are doing. 

The other is pragmatic. When I got into bitcoin (2013), exchanges were just starting to take over and dominate the space. And we took it for granted that companies like Huobi and Bitfinex and Okex would dominate the space. Some of us were into Bitcoin as money, and others were more excited by the idea of web 3.0./ That was the real draw for me.

No matter what you were interested in, you were stuck with exchanges and centralized infrastructure for most things though. Now we have real innovation going on creating decentralized (and affordable) ways to transact and share monetary and other value.

Glad to be bringing more options to our community.

Q2: Can you tell us a little about Saito – you are a web 3.0 project?

Like I said before, when Bitcoin came along, it was cool to have independent internet money, but what struck a lot of us was how amazing it was to have an independent network, one that could pay for itself. That, really, was the birth of the ideas people call ‘Web 3.0’… a user-owned and independent web. Problem was that was, that Bitcoin barely scales, and it was pretty clear within the Bitcoin community that this was an issue.

The first ideas for Saito were formed during the ‘blocksize war’ when the bitcoin community was splintering and Ethereum was new on the scene. David, my co-founder, had a unique take, and asked a question most people ignored: .’If we can scale technically, web 3.0 still involves huge numbers of servers in data centers, who is going to pay for that…?’’ 

Proof of Work and Proof of Stake pay only for mining or staking. Both rely on volunteers to run the actual network. Individuals for BTC and Infura for ETH, as examples. Saito is a different kind of blockchain – a network, not a distributed ledger – that solves this problem. Saito pays routing network nodes for their work, not miners or stakes. So it scales economically. This is important for web 3.0 as it lets us keep everything independent.

We have a live network that demonstrates how this comes together at satio.io/dotarcade,  where you can use Polkadot tokens on the Saito Arcade.

Q3: What are you most excited about at the moment?

A few things. We did an IDO earlier this year, it was a real wake-up to just how much is happening in the industry. As a project using decentralized tools like Uniswap, and not Sifchain rather than exchanges etc. is, for me, part of the Web 3.0 vision coming true. We are starting to see real services, things people can use to live, interact, run businesses etc. emerge. Combining these tools with some of the more boring uses for NTFs – like certificates of ownership, or status etc…

These come together to give us the toolkit to build the real-world applications and services people need… and want from Web 3.0. Saito being part of this is super exciting for me. Again, building the dot arcade stuff and seeing how we can support other projects to ‘stay open and stay Web 3.0’ is really motivating for me. So, really excited by the maturing of the industry and the variety of projects and ideas out there.

Q4: What are people building on Saito? How does that work without smart contracts?

Saito is quite different from what most people in this space are used to.

It is simplest to understand Saito as a network – not a database, or information store.

Users on Saito are identified with keys they create and own, and applications they use can use these to establish on and off-chain encrypted communication. The important thing is ‘universal broadcast’ and having enough space in transactions to send real data.

The first of these is an essential feature of Bitcoin and all real blockchains.

You can send a message (usually money) to anyone on the network without permission, you just send it to their key. If you can do that, and your message can have enough information in it – you can perform a key swap (technically a Diffie Hellmann key exchange) with anyone on the network and no one can stop you. This is a critical part of Web 3.0 – the basis of the independence you can bake in, so the businesses, no matter their model or techniques cannot lock users in. None of this requires smart contracts, and, in fact, would not scale if they were introduced. You can get more detail on how Saito works at saito.io so won’t go further into the weeds.

Q5: Tell us a bit about your roadmap and what is coming up for Saito? Any sneak previews?

There are a few key areas we are working on. First is the ‘data-center ready’ client. An update and battle-ready version of the node software. At the same time, we are continuing the work we did to create the dot arcade to extend our ability to support other cryptos and NFTs simply and easily in Saito apps. 

We are also really dedicated to growing and serving our community. Our partnership with Sifchain is part of that, and we plan to keep up this work, picking up development partners and growing our base.

We also don’t take our eye off the everyday things, like growing our team, and the people contributing to the ecosystem.

Open Questions

Q1: If a crypto newbie came and asked you “What does Saito do?” how would you answer in simple terms? Also, do you think the problem Saito is trying to fix hasn’t really started appearing?

Saito is a high capacity data network that pays for itself.

Is the quickest answer.

The cool bit of the question is actually part two, as, they totally have.

Some examples:

– The Bitcoin scaling debate and people arguing about the size of blocks.

– Miners in the PoW space hoarding and selling transactions to make money.

– DPoS systems close off openness in networks to allow closed groups to distribute profits to themselves.

– DAGs and other structures losing important features like universal broadcast in the name of scaling.

– 80+% of ETH transactions being gate kept by Infura…

These are all things that Saito predicted – and they are all things that undermine Web 3.0 from working.

Q2:Could you tell us about your Saito arcade, is it some kind of game?

There are a bunch of games available on the arcade.

We initially built them to show off what the network can do. The interactions in games can be super, super complex, often more complex than in business applications etc.

So, – if you can build a game like Twilight Struggle, you can build just about anything.

I wanna test it, it seems like a trend for the blockchain games.

Q3: Please tell us more about use cases on your chain, it seems the most important thing for network

A great example to understand the kind of thing that Saito can do is:

Imagine you have an IOT security camera you set up to watch your house or family.

Anything like that, – now, – requires a third-party company you just have to trust won’t look into your stream. With Saito you can very simply set a wallet on the camera and on your phone. To connect – the phone just sends the camera an on-chain message, with its location on the open Internet and its part of a key swap.

The Camera sends back info about where it is, and it’s half of the key swap.

The Camera can now encrypt a stream – off-chain – and send it directly to the phone.

No need to trust that some dodgy admin at the company will watch the feed, no need to trust that the company will keep operating and not brick your hardware when they turn off their servers. It’s this kind of thing that we will need to make web 3.0 work.

For more updates, please do follow Saito’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 X Sifchain AMA Recap appeared first on Saito.

The event aims to gather ecosystem projects who are actively building Web 3.0 to discuss progress and the future of Web 3.0. The event will also be a forum for Web 3.0 projects and communities to showcase their work. Leading thinkers and builders will share practical experiences of building Web 3.0, talking about how to use technology to create trustless systems for universal participation, sustainable business models, and rethink relationships between developers, users, and money in the token economy. 

Participants attending this event will learn where Web 3.0 is, the challenges it faces, and about its potential to change the future. Attendees will see practical products by well-known projects, connect with industry experts.

Saito co-founder David Lancashire said, the industry is developing very fast so we are holding this event to bring leading projects here to share their expertise and insights with users. 

The event features a diverse lineup of the projects including  Polygon, Neo, Phala, Polkastarter and more. Don’t miss Saito co-founder’s thought provoking presentation: Openness Not Decentralization! to get you rethinking what you thought you knew about Web 3.0. 

Don’t miss out! Register Now!

The post Saito Network To Host Building Web 3.0 Online Event appeared first on Saito.

David presented to a panel arguing that It’s Openness Not Decentralization That Matters in Blockchain. The Saito co-founder argues that the properties that people believe come from decentralization actually stem from openness – the inability to exclude people from the chain.  He continued that openness is not free; we need to pay for open data flows that support it and allow free competition in the network. In the original design, bitcoin, volunteers took care of this work but as these networks scale the responsibility for doing that needs to shift to for-profit firms in the private sector and as it turns out economics has a ton to say about the massive problems that computer scientists are running into doing this. This is what’s happening with the peer to peer network right now. In every scalable blockchain miners and stakers do not want to run the network. They are letting their responsibility for that be handled by other people. This is the Ethereum network where everybody is free riding on Infura.

There are three kinds of solutions in the blockchain industry. The first is the emergence of networks that return to volunteer provision and these networks can be open. Anybody can join but they cannot scale beyond the point that volunteers will provide infrastructure. The second solution is we can invite the free market to pay. But, the private sector will create barriers to data sharing to create opportunities to profit. So we will end up with these scalable networks that are permissioned networks that are dominated by monopolies in the network layer that’s what we’re seeing with Infura.

Saito replaces mining and staking with a form of work where we can route work which adds cryptographic signatures to the network layer and it basically pays people for the work that they do efficiently collecting money for the network. So it’s a non-extractive form of work otherwise the network has the same properties as POW and POS.

The post Saito Co-founder David Says Openness & Self-sufficiency Matter in Blockchain at Blockchain Research Roundtable Event 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:

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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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