SAITO Community Town Hall # 1 Highlights and Recap

Richard: Firstly, I wanted to do is to say welcome to everyone, this is a new thing for us, these community meetings and something we a re really happy to be doing; we love our community, we really appreciate people who take time to get into Saito, to think about what we are doing.

And to introduce myself, I’m Richard and with me is David. We are co-founders of the project and we thought we’d take this opportunity on a regular basis to kind of update the community to update the community on where things are at and we’ll do that for about five to ten minutes, so going to labor the point.  

I’ll cover general project and David will cover the tech in a bit more detail and then we’ll just probably hand over to people who want to ask anything about the project, where we are at, etc. We compiled some questions from the community, and I think we’ll go over those in the update. We are happy to expand on anything people are interested in as we go.

So, I suppose, kicking out from my side one of the big things to happen in the last month on the marketing side of things we’ve welcome Shirley Qi to a lead role in marketing and outreach. Shirley comes from both a blockchain project and exchange background and it’s really helping us wrap up what we are doing in terms of outreach, we can say that with things like this, the start of the ambassador program, which is rolling out and then hopefully also just an increased muscle behind our outreach both to growing the user core community as well as some activities and about branding and so to get our name in front of more people and entice more people to start thinking and listening to what we are saying and hopefully grow that core community that works well. We also been working heavily to promote some of the things we are talking about later on, web3, etc.

Something we get ask about a lot at the project is partnerships and really the big news in that space is something we’ve been working on for a while and that is the First Milestone Submission for the Web3 Open Grant that we’ve been given has been submitted and accepted. What’s really cool about that classic Saito approach. We didn’t want to just built something academic, kind of loosely associated ideas based code; we wanted to build something you could use and touch and that’s something we are trying to stick to as a project so that means very soon we’ll be able to show you the results of that work which is quite a bit of interoperability with the Polkadot ecosystem’s tokens DOT, KUSAMA and others within the Saito Network, and within the arcade specifically is the place we’ll be really able to exercise what we’ve built there. That’s really exciting and also gives us a lot of wind to go out and get in front of people and show them what Saito is capable of doing.

Similarly and in much the same vein we’ve follows on from that with an announcement a lot of you have seen this week with the Elrond blockchain and group and that idea is really a bit similar, on the same lines to what we’ve doing with Polkadot and the idea there is to work with them to make Elrond assets and tokens first class citizens in Saito wallets and on the network and that makes Saito development much more approachable and quick for developers in that ecosystem, I think that’s a big part of how we can kind of grow in the ecosystem along with building our own thing.

Moving on to just the general project news, obviously we launched on Gate.io, major exchange, very late last month. That was huge for us just in terms of community demand and giving people a good reliable place to exchange fiat for Saito and also just the utilities you get on a major exchange. We do have other exchanges and other listings in process, though it’s not a core concern now that we have facilities for most people that want to use us but is important to keep that moving along and also positively at the same time several exchanges, de biggest of which is Decoin, but also Bilaxy and BKEX all listed us on their own accord in the last month. We like that because it’s great for usage and uptake, but we are not creating whales or spending treasury to achieve that for people, and I think it shows a sign of interest in the project.

So other cool things have happened, one is full integration into Mixin wallet and the chat application they have there, which again give Saito access to a great, large community in a way that we are close to, and the last thing is a bit probably more for the nerds out there if you are interested; coincap.io have integrated Saito into their API, so anyone who wants to get data on Saito trade volume or anything like that, that’s now available by their API and their website. And again, that’s just more industry integration for the project, we are constantly trying to move forward on all those small aspects of getting the project in front of people. So that’s really a quick wrap up of the major things we’ve been doing these last few weeks in general project management, and I think I’ll kick over to David now, who’s going to talk a bit about where we are with tech, the existing network and working on a new Rust implementation as well.

David: I’m going to keep this really short. The first thing I’ll say is we had a blog post that updated with basically where we are with tech and what’s happening last Friday. It has a lot more detail than what I’m going to be able to give you guys over Zoom, so I’m going to say go check it out, read it. I’ll answer any questions that people have, we are basically on schedule. I think the big questions we’ve got is as you can tell we’ve got a lot of things that are coming in and we are trying to figure out basically how to allocate that time and stuff to tackle them in order. But yeah, Rust is underway, the scaling stuff; the numbers, I really like them. We’ve got parallelization in for merkle root generation for anyone that means anything for today. Rust is the language for us, but I’ll tackle questions if people have them. Go and read the blog post.

Richard: I think people can drop questions either into the chat or just unmute and throw questions at us one at a time. I think we are reasonable size group so we can probably just do them by voice and that’d be a great way of getting a conversation going. Is there anyone who has any specific question to ask?

Wesley: I had a question; you can take it. Either David or Richard. I’m curious, I read through the whitepaper and the blog post, everything. In terms of the scalability element. My curiosity is more with the transactions in a short finite period of time, is there any sort of insight as to what the blockchain can achieve per second, and I realize you are taking a different approach, but I was a little unclear in that element.

David: I’d say abstractly, we really don’t like transactions per second as a metric. One reason is that everyone plays games with it. What I believe is that every network is essentially under the same constraints. A lot of peoples will do things like they’ll have layer 2 and they’ll count those transactions under 1. It’s fundamentally about how much data you are moving through your network. The real bottleneck is bandwidth, if we are looking at it for what are the biggest problems to the smallest problems; the biggest problems are network throughput and after that we get down to things like how quickly you can sign transactions, how quickly you can hash data. The advantage of the Saito approach over things like Ethereum is that the data is affixed to transactions, the core nodes, they only need to hash them. So, in terms of the universal constraints that all of these networks face, Saito is going to be up the top. What that means is that the things that are costing us time, and overwhelmingly you can see in the tech update we’ve kind of given you some numbers, it’s loading things into memory (so that’s either we are getting it from the disk or we are getting it from another computer in the network), taking that data and target into a computer object we can farm out, that takes time, and then the second big one is really literally going through all of those transactions, hashing the messages, confirming that the sigs apply. This is the reason for the Rust, basically it allows us to farm this out to as many CPUs as we have. So big commercial machines where you’ve got a CPU with 64 cores, we can just basically burn through this stuff very quickly. In term of the actual numbers with Rust we are looking at processing blocks with 300,000 slips and getting them through in much less than a second. That’s not a real-world example, I think a lot of the TPS numbers a lot of people give are not real-world examples. What you often see is people assuming the blockchain is running at full capacity which mean it’s like “how many ca we do if we got 30 second blocks? What if it took us 30 seconds to process a block?”. That kind of stuff isn’t realistic, so I give pushback onto this question being useful in a really specific sense, but I think it’s a really good question in terms of, abstractly, how does Saito in a comparison of scalability. There’s nothing standing in our way, the only real difference you got between Saito versus maybe some permissioned network is if you have a permissioned network you only have like 10 people that are licensed to participate, you can take some shortcuts because you can do things like round robin and don’t need the system to have the bandwidth to account for the fac that the information might come from anywhere. So in terms of public blockchain we are designed to be, if not the top, right at the top. In terms of permissioned networks I still think we are actually going to be more competitive for a couple of reasons one of which is that a lot of this Proof of Stake systems are doing thing like using NoSQL databases, Saito doesn’t use a database at all and I think this is actually going to give us a performance edge because at scale you don’t want that kind of software standing between you and consensus, you can see that in things like BSC chain, where already the debate between the people saying “let’s scale this bigger!” and the devs saying “we can’t, we literally have limits on writing stuff into the database”. In terms of specific numbers, why don’t we give you guys some specific numbers in maybe about two weeks, I could come up with arbitrary, we are for benchmark testing, we are generating them all the time but it’s usually in terms of select things, like testing various bits loading for disk or processing the sigs in parallel. Does that make sense, Wesley?

Wesley: Yeah, I recognize obviously some of the question that apply to the existing infrastructures and consensus mechanisms don’t necessarily apply with Saito, I’m just trying to obviously wrap my mind around some of these concepts. Obviously, it seems it’s a bit of a paradigm shift in term of the scalability component simply because it seems you guys are obviously emphasizing the data component as the most important element of design while integrating the economics and if you could touch on the economic component and difference that model from say, meta transactions.

David: What do you mean when you say meta transactions?

Wesley: Meta transaction is sort of this concept certain networks have utilized as a way to use a relayer to pay for those transactions that are going on the network from the applications that are being built on it, so your idea or conceptual model, the economic model, sort of has the application or developers paying the fees for the transaction so the end user doesn’t necessarily pay them, and it’s in other networks that they use the relayer for this concept, so when I was looking at the visuals Saito put together, trying to understand the difference between that model and how meta transactions are utilized in some of these networks where apps and developers can use as this relayer account to instead of having to someone to have crypto currency to pay for a transaction on the network it goes directly to the account so they essentially are subsidizing that cost as a developer, an application being built on the network. When I looked at the model it almost seemed as if it was similar to that but at the same time, I couldn’t necessarily differentiate it. Can you explain a little more in detail the difference of the economic model versus the staking secure model that is used in other blockchains?

David: I’d say there’s a couple of issues that I would ease out. You open the question by talking of scale and let me just pull back to some early test we did. A lot of the time if you look at the scalability numbers people are throwing at you they do things like say “ok, so we have a server running on Amazon on the US and a server running on Digital Ocean in Europe and the scalability numbers are, given that kind of infrastructure, what can we do?”. Right now, I think, and Richard correct me if I’m wrong, we are limited to 25 Mbits/s.

Richard: Yeah, that’s out of the box, yeah.

David: So if you are setting out infrastructure you are limited to 3MB/s, something like that. You’ve got to handle all of your connections through that if you are dealing with that kind of VPS commodity infrastructure accounts. If you are on a network that doesn’t pay for infrastructure, you are trapped with those kinds of pressures because people don’t want the infrastructure to become too expensive. With Saito, if you are running that infrastructure, you are getting paid, and so there’s no reason not to update. If we are talking about scalability of the network component it’s kind of the easy answer which is say look, we are paying for it, so we are expecting people to have the money to upgrade and we are expecting that they are going to want to upgrade, because if they upgrade, they can process more transactions and make more money. So it’s kind of like a business on-ramp, where you can kind of start small and then you can grow, because growth and providing services gives you more income to grow. So you can start as a relay node make money just relaying transactions and maybe with those profits you start relaying more and eventually you grow into a block producer. That maybe the first question on scalability I think the second question was really about why would you want Saito instead of a PoW/PoW network where the node that sit between the blockchain and users start playing games with FIFA? and the answer I offer for that is take a look at the original Bitcoin whitepaper and take a look at section 5, a lot of people these days don’t even read the whitepaper. Satoshi gives us a list of things you need to do in the network and the first thing he says is fascinating because it’s written in the passive voice, everything else he told you exactly who’s doing it but step 1 he says “all transactions are distributed to all nodes” and then step 2 is you know, you going to start hashing in the stuff, and if we are dealing with the Proof of Work and the Proof of Stake model and we start getting transaction relayer, transaction processor, we are getting rid of this step. So the question is, well, do we need this step? And a lot of people will say “oh, no, we don’t need this step, it’s the same thing”. If you get rid of that step though, what you are getting rid of is the openness in the network for everyone to participate on equal economic terms, which mean the relay nodes that are standing on the edge of the network, they got to be selling the same thing, and in PoW and PoS, that stops happening because if you are making money off the flow of transactions you can’t share those transactions with everyone so you get a bunch of dynamic that change the economics of PoW and PoS, basically 1 CPU 1 Vote. People are voting on who gets the money from the transactions, that property stops applying and we get monopoly economics emerging. A lot of it is the people who are really good at collecting transactions, they start steamrolling the network. We can see this on BSV for instance. BSV is one of the bigger PoW networks. I think TAAL Mining has grown to control about 65% of transaction inflows and they are not sharing. That’s going to be a monopoly if it isn’t already, it’s more than a 51% attack.

Richard: I think a good way to put that as well is from a user perspective, why are you interested in the blockchain behind the person handling those meta transactions for you? Because what’s your relationship to them? You are paying in fiat or some kind of crypto currency the same way for web services now and you have the same ability to control where your fees go or where your transactions are sent and how they are handled that you do right now when you send a Gmail message. I think it’s a way of using web2 technology to distribute things on blockchains to user but not something you would call web3 or genuine blockchain experience for the uses where for instance they can take their wallets and go elsewhere because they are not in possession of it.

David: It means you can go anywhere to get the services on the blockchain. I mean theoretically in Saito you could say I’m going to sit on an edge node and going to collect payments in USD instead of SAITO and I myself am going to spend the tokens to make the blocks. You know, in Pow and PoS networks you don’t even need to have the tokens to spend to make blocks. The difference I’d stress for that is not scalability but openness and the economics. I mean one big thing to realize is a lot of people in PoW are in denial about this, they assume that if they are building a decentralized system it’s going to stay decentralized, the reality is if there’s like 20 miners out there and they are not sharing transactions, who am I incentivized to do business with? I’m incentivized to do business with the biggest miner. Everyone is. Because they are going to be producing the block as quickly as possible and the smaller miners will not be able to compete. People are creating these systems with monopoly economic pressures, and they are saying it’s ok because we are starting from a technically decentralized and distributed world.

Wesley: it makes total sense to me. The reason I come to the project come on to the project was simply Elrond. I’ve sort of done a lot of analysis on the space in general and my biggest gripe with Bitcoin and some of the other PoS models was economics and the eventual leap towards centralization and the monopolies. It simply encourages hoarding of whatever position of the network is a bottleneck from the economic standpoint, all the resources are pooled in that particular area, it doesn’t allow for fairness of all the participants in the network and you move back into the same model you are trying to go away from in a different capacity. I’ve recently done a published report on the Elrond network and part of the whole aspect was their sort of economic model is very unique as well and trying to differentiate between Saito has done, obviously some of improvements appear to be on the security side of things in terms of the attack. It’s still taking me some time to digest it, the differences, and I get it from a data standpoint, but I’ll have to probably reread these different blogposts I’m interested in hearing some of the information you said it was coming out in a couple of weeks.

David: you can also hit us in DMs with questions in Telegram, I’m really happy to spend time with anyone and explain how Saito works. It doesn’t need to be a chore. Don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Wesley: I absolutely appreciate that and going to be following the project, I’m fascinated with the conversations with you guys because my biggest issue with the whole space and why I’ve avoided it is simply because of longer term economic implications with most of the networks that were designed. Of course it works today, but the question is whether it’s sustainable down the road. Honestly I’ve yet to see a model that, outside of the Elrond network, which I see as the model which I see as the model that may be sustainable, but maybe I’m missing certain points as well, but Saito appears to be very interesting as well. So I’m interested in doing a deeper dive and try to understand the differences and I appreciate you guys taking the time to answer the questions.

Richard: Thanks, Weasley, does anyone else in the live chat got questions, we’ve got a few in the text chat. I’ll quickly answer one from Marc Decourt where he asks about what kind of partnerships we really need in place to succeed in mainnet and I think we have the basis of all of the kinds of partnerships we want there, barring I think a really thriving developer community independent or otherwise, you know,  groups project, and that’s a real central focus for us I think it’s quite simple to answer we; need more developers and we’re working very hard at the moment to get things in place to make developing on Saito as good as it can be.

David: ‘ll take the ETA of mainnet one. There’s people that bring their language into Saito telegram, what we’ve told people is that we can’t go to mainnet until Saito Rust is done, the specific reason for that is that there are a couple of network settings like the block time, how much of the chain reorg we’re going to be able to get away with within 30 seconds, stuff like that where we want to actually be pushing a ton of transactions through the system before we make final choices on that because we’re expecting that some people are going to try to screw around with the network especially as we grow so Saito Rust has to happen for that first, beyond that it’s not really a question where we flick a switch and we are mainnet, anyone can deploy an application to the network today, what needs to happen beyond that is we need to be entirely sure that we can guarantee token persistence, which means we have the system for managing the network upgrades, people put money in staking they withdraw money from staking whatever and no one’s tokens or coins go away, so what is the ETA for that? I’m not entirely sure, I’ll tell you that we’ll be working on it after Saito Rust client is out and you know the timeline we’ve given people for that used to be six months, it’s a lot less now, I guess it’s four and a half or so, so it really depends on us getting the Rust stuff done. Moving on to this and I think one of the bigger questions also is “are there any much higher priority things that come up in tech that might delay that?”. And I think that’s kind of a marketing and business side, but I think it will be obvious to everyone if there are. You know, if tesla wants to build on you know we might be like well, we’ll punt on. [laughs] Or maybe we’ll say back of the bus Elon. Richard?

Richard: Cool, well you know I agree on that. I think for us mainnet is also a community thing we, need a community of people running nodes, to be an open public blockchain that’s something you need and we need to work on that as hard as anything else and that then comes down to stuff David was talking about as well about having a community that can upgrade and keep your chain in sync, make sure that’s working for everyone so those are some coordination issues with the community as much as anything else.

David: there’s a question on staking. The answer to that is also that’s the Saito Rust thing, so when people are thinking about mainnet i think that’s basically when staking kicks in. We don’t think it’s a good idea for anyone to move their tokens off of the erc20 onto mainnet until we’re guaranteeing token persistence I mean until we are, if someone wants tokens on the live network to play around with contact us, we’ll give them to you but don’t move them before we’re promising you that they’ll stay there is my advice. But yeah, there will be a time you’ll be able to stake, it’s a bit like mining.

Richard: we’ve got a question here about krypton from Ash and the only issue in answering that question is I’m not actually very familiar with krypton, so that’s a note in the book to look up what’s going on there.

Wesley: can you attempt to explain the mining component to how it differentiates?

David: Sure, have you guys seen Tenet? We’ll use the Tenet meme example, so this is the meme that it’s like the plot of Tenet, we’re not sure if anyone understands it but we’re just going to boldly go and see; Bitcoin solves two problems, it uses mining to solve a difficulty problem. It’s supposed to be difficult to produce blocks. And it’s got a fairness of payment problem, that it solves by leaning on the difficulty of block production. Right, so it pays the people that produce the blocks because that means that the pay is equal to work and the economic idea, in staking you can replace it, it’s the same thing, it’s the same model you solve for difficulty, and you use your solution for difficulty to solve for fairness. the reason they need the fairness component is it’s a 1 CPU 1 Vote, the economic model is the people that are making money are supposed to pay for the network. This is falling apart in practice and people are kind of actually forgetting why we have fees in the first place, because now we’ve got transaction processors and API and we’re paying extra fees for them so why on earth we’re paying for the network is a great question,  but the important thing is that those two problems are solved in that order and one of the problems is, like I just mentioned, with economics another is they’re using an external market to solve for difficulty and because they’re using an external market they don’t actually have a difficulty function they have a cost function, so you have people say things like you know the 51 attack is way too expensive because you can’t buy 51% of Bitcoin’s hash power. Well, you can rent it as soon as 51% of the network wants to make more money colluding in some fashion or as soon as they can collude without showing their hand in a way that that you know there’s a public crisis of confidence so to speak and realizing that the difficulty functions economic function opens one of the real critiques that Saito solves, which is that we’re relying on this external market for security but the external market is always incentivizing collusion and concentration. So you know maybe you can’t rent but someone who already has hash power, they may only need to be able to rent an extra five percent and also the supply curve of the work function is really what’s keeping you safe so right now with bitcoin for instance the supply curve is pretty steep and it’s super steep because the block reward is really high and so there’s a lot of money going into research and development and there’s a lot of new miners constantly joining the network as soon as that supply curve flattens though and hashing and hash power becomes a commodity it becomes a lot easier to do certain kinds of economic attacks because you don’t have a steep supply curve one example is renting hash power and then making a lot of blocks and using the payments from the blocks to rent more hash power so the fundamental problems with Bitcoin come from, first of all, they’ve got a difficulty function that’s really just cost function and because there’s an economic market involved there are always situations in which the cost function of attacking is profitable and positive and then the second is they’re giving money to people but the people that are getting the money actually don’t have an incentive to do the things that they’re supposed to do because even though we would all be better off if they did individually they’re better off not contributing, which is the collective action problem, but there are two problems there, there’s cost of attack and there’s fairness of payment, and proof of work and proof of stakes solve them in this order by leaning fairness on “we’re only going to give the money to the people that are doing the work” and as soon as they stop doing, that as soon as you start getting the Bitcoin Cash approach or the master node’s “oh, we’re going to take 15% and vote on it or we’re going to take 10% and just get your market to this company” you start opening yourselves to economic attacks from the people that have this extra subsidy. Saito solves the problems in the reverse order, this is really hard to see but if you see it it’s a really powerful way to think about it, what we do is we’ve got is basically a rigged lottery where the people that are collecting transactions from users and getting them to the block producers they’re going to earn disproportionately more in the lottery and so the people that are producing blocks are playing a rigged game and if they’re honest they’re building blocks using fees that are paid for by other people and even though they only make 20% of the fees on average or 10% of the fees on average it’s still profitable for them because a hundred percent of the fees come from honest users but if you’re an attacker you have to be spending your own money and as soon as you’re spending your own money you’re only making 10% of it back, you’ve got a real problem and so in Saito the solution in terms of the rigged lottery is the first solution and it’s a division of payment and it’s a rigged division of payment, where unless you are directly getting the transactions from users it’s going to cost you money to produce the fastest blockchain and that gives us a cost of attack and that cost of attack then becomes the difficulty function, so Saito is basically it’s an inverted version of Bitcoin. it solves the exact same problems, but it solves them in the opposite order and that’s why the solution doesn’t have the trade-offs that this this version does, those issues go away because majoritarian attacks go away and the majoritarian attacks exist in Bitcoin because 51% of the work can always buy up to 100% of the profit and that’s not the case if the first problem you solve is making sure you can only get, if your measure of work includes sharing, so you can never get 100%. I don’t know if that’s followable, I have no idea if that makes any sense to you guys.

Wesley: yeah, no it does make it does make a lot of sense, comparing the two helps quite significantly.

David: you know, you get Satoshi, right? and the problem is, fundamentally with Bitcoin in order to be trustless it needs to pay for itself and the problem people would run into before him is as soon as they need to pay for it they’ve got this external money system and whoever controls that external money system connecting to your new money system is able to control the blockchain and so Satoshi solved that by moving money into the network, one of his visionary insights we can think about it is the blockchain can be money if the blockchain is money right like it can be trustless if it’s money and if it’s trustless it can be money too, so we kind of sidestep the problem just by moving money internal to the system that he wants to support and that gave it the properties that allowed it to be money. Saito does the same thing with this external market for work we say if you’re relying on an external market for work you’re never going to be secure because the economics are going to screw you over because anyone can buy and rent and sell work in this external market and you have no idea of what they’re doing so one way to think about transaction routing is it’s preventing people from buying and selling stuff in this external market because if I want to buy work  from you have to send it to me, if you send it to me you’re signing it to me, but as soon as you sign it to me it’s worth half as much as I paid for it and if I use it to make a block you get paid so Saito, by moving the difficulty, we basically say look you know you’re collecting fees you’re burning hash more, well you could just collect money and burn the money so Saito does the equivalent thing but it gets rid of this external market and by getting rid of the external market and moving it into the blockchain we avoid the problems with the external market there are a lot of really interesting ways economically and intellectually to think about Saito, maybe this will help, Wesley, as you’re kind of going through things.

Wesley: yeah, absolutely it definitely helps David I appreciate all the color around giving different analogies and examples and comparisons to Bitcoin it definitely helps understanding those you know in terms of the white paper, and it gives me a better insight as to what Saito is doing and how it differentiates.

Richard: thanks Wesley, do we have any other questions from the floor we’ve been going through quarts of an hour we’re happy to fill out the meeting time okay we’ve got a question from Ash around why we patented the routing methodology, I’m happy to take that David if you are okay.

I think the it can seem odd that the project dedicated to being open has done, that but our primary reason there is to prevent the technique being used by consortia and other chains in a way that can undermine the public network, the patent will allows us to control how third parties, for instance companies, etc, could make use of the patent to make use of routing work and possibly even use that control to make them fund or support development on the open source network. Saito only works as a large public open blockchain that’s its entire purpose for the project and so I think if the people see the patent they can worry about what it’s doing there but it’s really, essentially, defensive from the perspective of the open source project, was there anything you wanted to add to that, David?

David: I’d say that the, what is it? it’s like 15 or 16 years, we’ve also got a patent on ATR, it’s kind of like blockchain rent done properly, 15-16 years is not going to be anything in terms of what’s going to happen, hopefully it gives us the ability to get people to take Saito seriously, especially as people understand we can hit a certain level of scale ourselves but to get into the petabytes we’re going to need support from companies that have the ability to.

Ash: so, would that mean that the project will be eventually devoted to hosting and facilitating enterprise level projects?

David: oh, enterprise projects? no what I meant by that is like, look, we can get the Rust client and we’re going to get projections out for you guys reasonably soon but scaling on one server with 64 cores is one thing, if we’re talking about actual petabyte scale, that’s like distributed server setups where maybe instead of one UTXO Hash Map you have like 10 UTXO Hash Maps, our team is nowhere near big enough to handle this now, hopefully by the time we get there we’ll be able to but we would absolutely love for a really smart company to come along and say “oh my God these guys have got it, we’re going to throw a bunch of stuff at them and in return if they’ll license this for us to do private network, that would be fantastic, we’re not going to do anything that sacrifices the public network, the public network is our focus.

Richard: I do think as well, adding to that, the public network will be at enterprise scale, it will be certainly capable of handling the kind of things that corporate networks do, the big question is what blend of on-chain information do people want in their systems? because logically long-term things will be a mix.

David: it might also take 15 years for the Proof of Work people to figure out that their networks are kind of doomed, so you know, we’ll see.

Wesley: I definitely share in that sentiment; I just question because in technology sometimes inferior models and technology obviously get adoption and then the question is whether or not the market is smart enough to understand the difference.

Richard: I think we’ve got efficiency on our side, it’s not like it’s a small difference, the architecture in Saito does something fundamental that Proof of Work and Proof of State can’t and that’s create business models around actually participating and growing and running the infrastructure part of the network and to me that that is a  king hit as the industry grows and there are questions of timing but  it’s when not if.

Wesley: I agree yeah.

George George:  How do you foresee the advertising model being implemented? What differentiates it from similar models like BAT’s?

Richard: yeah I think this is this is a cool question and there’s a lot to say there, there’s a lot that gets sort of turned on its head when you start having a network that can handle micropayments, these we call very small payments, and where people are genuinely sovereign or autonomous in what they’re doing so there’s all sorts of crazy things that might happen like there being ad stores where people actually subscribe to an advertiser of their choice and take the lion’s share instead of a tiny, tiny fraction like you do when you use an advertiser in google right now or any of the other available online scenarios, so that’s one model where people install an app that follows them around the web but it’s their app and it has an agreement to feed the money for seeing ads in various places, another model I think is really interesting, it’s like permanent you know disposable wallet-based browsing, incognito browsing, where you could just create a wallet for the purpose of doing one page or one session and have it funneled a tiny little bit of Saito but for having an advertisement in the corner and blow the whole thing away and there’s nothing anyone could do to stop you in that environment you know you can earn two cents every 15 seconds for staying on the page and when you stop you might lose 0.2 Saito a fraction of a slider one day it’d be a Nolan, so there’s a huge number of models there, I think the big thing about Saito is that it gives developers and customers the space to work out how they want that to work, I installed that browser when I heard about it back in 2016 or something, Brave browser, I don’t have any of those initial BAT,  I don’t think, and I loved the idea I always  thought it was a great experiment, but their model is incredibly rigid and essentially requires a full overthrow of the existing system for it to really work for people and is experimental until then. I think giving people a toolkit to go out there and say let’s reinvent this industry and do better by users is a far more powerful way of actually getting change to happen because it can happen incrementally and also in ways that we didn’t have to plan.

David: I just say less theoretically one big question um is do we need the advertising faucet up before we go to mainnet, by mainnet I mean token persistence, that’s a that’s a real question. I think Richard’s answer is it, like BAT is centralized there’s one company, it’s like google AdSense that you lock in at the browser.

Richard: I’m just checking if we have uh more questions happy to take one from the floor while, looking at this longer question from Amid Yazdi.

Amid Yazdi: I have 2 questions. I didn’t want to jump in while you guys talk.

1.Marketing is very important and talks in Saito often gets technical, what are plans to get less technical investors in the project? What can the community do to help with raising awareness?

2.I had a chat with David before 1:1 and you are a great guy also Glad to see you in zoom Richard (we both went to the same uni!). To ask a more personal question, what currently keeps you thinking at night about Saito?

Richard: one of the things I would say is participating at in calls like this, being part of the community, etc, and understanding you’re learning about understanding Saito it’s a bit like the Bitcoin whitepaper and I think for a lot of people Saito, I hope, feels like Bitcoin in the early days, we’re coming to understand what we’re trying to achieve and what we’re doing and just talking about that it can be any piece of this puzzle, I mean, I can imagine it might be daunting to hear David and I talk after years of working together on this and having talked to some of the best minds in blockchain and anyone and everyone in between about Saito for years that obviously we’re conversant but yeah get to know about Saito, come and play on the arcade, be part of the community and I think that really is the best thing that people can do, everything we do we want to make it infectious whether it’s the ideas or whether it’s just having fun in the community playing games or chatting, so I think that’s really the key from my perspective of how people can help from a community perspective.

Ash: why is only 1% of the entire tokens offered to the public?

David: i think that was the IDO,

Richard: yeah, I presume you’re referring to the IDO sale, so angel and early investors have tokens they have taken to those, wound up in public hands and over time things like advertising faucet and other campaigns will be run to release more tokens, there will possibly be future sales, should that make sense, but that was that was simply the IDO. There’s about 25% of tokens allocated to non-project people so far, outside of treasury, I hope that answers that question.

David: We’ve got the tokenomics doc. The IDO is really it’s kind of a marketing exercise the way it works out.

Richard: yeah really, the idea with the IDO is sort of like walking through town gathering a crowd together to go to the new donut shop and let everyone know it’s there, it does have a purpose, it’s fun, it’s not the reason for the project and it did have a wonderful effect for us of introducing a whole lot of new people to the projects and getting them involved and that’s helped growing the community generally after that

David: I’ll open up the Tokenomics doc myself, if people really want to talk about the token breakdown we can, i think like the the core team it’s like 15% or something like that, in case a lot of you guys don’t know, none of this is ERC20, we got a lot of we got a lot of people after the IDO, they’re like “oh is there going to be a rug pull”. We’re here for the long term. In terms of the foundation, when you go out into “okay we’re doing an IDO”, people want a bunch of docs and they want like a clearly delineated breakdown of everything and so a lot of the effort with something like a tokenomics doc is giving people what they want in a way that it also works with what you want to do flexibly, so you’ve got to say “okay well this is what the IDO, is this is how much is  available for the rest, this is roughly how it’s going to be broken down”, the way we think about it is that contributors and devs are people that are building code and infrastructure, strategic partners would be someone like that advertising faucet, where if there was an advertising company that wanted to take responsibility for that or two of them, we could go to them and say “look we’re happy to make sure you guys get the tokens so that you can distribute and we’ll be monitoring” and that’s where that stuff would come from. The rewards are kind of like community stuff so like we might give tokens to people in exchange for playing games or participating, but we know how to do it and it makes sense we might do that. Foundation is just kind of the idea is at a certain point we want something that’s not just us that has control over deciding what should we be funding, we haven’t made much progress with how that’s going to be structured, if we did we’d be talking about it and we’ve been busy so it hasn’t been on the agenda, you know, most  people also interestingly don’t ask us the big picture questions because they’re really concerned about how much coming into the market this week or this year or stuff like that, I hope that  answers the question Ash, you know, we’re not really even wedded to all of these numbers, we’re trying to keep things flexible because we may do something like a burn at some point, you know our focus is on growing Saito into being a if not the major global public blockchain so we’ll see.

Richard: cool, yep, so getting a website update and investors, website is a mid-level priority, part of the thing for that comes to the next question, which is growing the team, as I said we’ve got someone in leading marketing and we’re looking at what we need and what we want in that space. So really that’s about building out the team and bandwidth and reflecting what David was saying, the issue is in some parts people want contradictory things from the project, we could have raised a lot more money and got a lot more investors or whales in who could then be dumping right now for a quick in and out, then we might have given better resource to quickly accelerate and hire a lot of people and be able to waste some of that money, but is that really what’s best for the project? So we are ramping up capacity thoughtfully in that way, we don’t want to create a team that burns through the investors’ money too quick a time, at the same time we are looking at what’s the best way to engage with community and a website update is definitely going to be part of that, but it’s not specifically scheduled yet.

David: yes, I’d say for me it’s more that Rust on the tech side has become a priority, we’re really lucky to have Clay and Stephen, we’re talking about the efficiency gains, Clay has spent the last couple of days really tweaking out block serialization, deserialization. Stephen’s been working on a bunch of stuff too, yeah, so that’s kind of the tech side, while we’re busy with that we’re not feeling under pressure to the web stuff and it’s kind of fallen to marketing and marketing has had the Gate.io stuff, the Elrond stuff came around and we’ve got the Dot arcade reach out too, so it’s in the works, hopefully we’ll find someone who’s [node? 59:59] and we can hire and bring them up. And Richard’s gone [laughs]. Does anyone else have any questions?

Wesley: No questions, but I just want to you know tell you David and Richard as well, you can pass the message around, just to appreciate all the effort to do and launch this, as a it sounds like it’s been a long path of debate since the early 2000s and I really appreciate the whole ethos and openness of the project and it’s part of what attracted to me was how you guys were explaining the necessity for this type of infrastructure for web 3.0 in terms of maintaining this openness, decentralized component and so appreciate all the time and effort that’s gone into it and fascinated to continue to understand the project more and appreciate all your effort and so forth

David: great, well, thank you Wesley, thank you everyone for joining. I guess I can see three questions we’ll give you quick answers.

Emilio: Are there existing dapps now aside from arcade that is running on Saito?

David: I’ll share a link if you want to know what apps are available by default, go  into your Saito.io/wallet you can see a bunch, you can install new ones from the app store, we’re going to have some official community poker on Saito, some things are happening behind the scenes, I don’t really want to talk about yet, but maybe in about a month we’ll be able to uh share some news.

Tucho: What is your favorite game at the Arcade? 🙂

Richard: my favorite game is Red Imperium, partially because I dream of a life where I have time free to have a good game of Red Imperium.

David: I’m still a Twilight Struggle man but Red Imperium is nice. Unless you’re playing with Duke [laughs].

 Richard: I think that’s about the hour so thanks everyone for giving us your time this evening and for being part of this, it’s been great fun, please let us know if you have suggestions, format or otherwise this is obviously a first run and we really appreciate everyone’s coming in and being part of it tonight.

David: yeah, thank you guys.

Richard: thanks everyone.