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Self deleted his Twitter account and then undeleted it
So that was that was like the most exciting thing that happened this week as far as I'm concerned
Other opinions are available
Asaf from secret is with us this week and he's being so stoic that he is actually frozen
He's actually like we all know he's elite hacker. He has literally hacked his own webcam and frozen it
He's actually just you know bustling around doing some chores. I'm sure
Can you guys hear me?
Hey, we can hear you. Yep. There it is
We can hear you but we can't see you
I'm definitely moving
You're frozen in a relatively handsome if somewhat confused pose
So, you know, that's it's up to you what you want to do about that knowledge
So
He decided to leave
Actually a reasonable reaction to what just happened. So
Yeah, we
We I really yeah
So cool crypto like my thing that was a bit weird and there are a bunch of other funny things that happen
So the figment thing was that this week as well?
Well, hold on we've got a little bit more to talk about with crypto like mo because there was stuff that brought this on
I'm pretty sure what brought this on was like day one. He goes
All right
I've sold all my utmost and I've sold all my Juno and I've sold everything because they're going nowhere fast and then like 12 hours later
He goes I have 10,000 Juno. It's going to the moon or whatever and people were like, are you serious right now?
You just said you burnt everything and now you're like like talking it up. What is going on?
And then he closes good Twitter account and then brought it back now
So and well, yeah, and then he brought it back. So I guess he paper hands twice
Does he have what I I think I'm blocked by him so
What
Was he like the jokes on you I definitely have 10,000, you know, what was the what was the summary there?
I mean, I think that he like shadow brought himself back because I think there was something of an announcement whenever he left and then he just kind of quietly slid back in like undeleted his account
He's probably like, oh, I have I've got a bunch of followers. I don't want to get that account out
Yeah, I might find some other way of writing them in future. I don't know. I saw the phrase soft rug recently like in the last day
Related to fan fury. I was like, that's an interesting
As a new term, but
What was that? Wait, what was that one?
So it the context is a project that builds on a chain does like I don't know if they actually did an airdrop or they promised an airdrop or they were
They built up their kind of marketing presence on one chain presumably with the project promise of an airdrop or something like that. And I think now going archway. I want to say
So essentially, yeah, it's kind of like I guess it's like
Not delivering on a on a sort of implied thing. Yeah, it should really be a pre rug shouldn't it? It's like a pre mark. It's like a pre rug. It's like before the rug
Before the rug could even happen. We just we just we just actually we just taken the project has gone this way. You can't you can't see it. You don't know it goes to another school.
Well, I was informed of a self rugging recently I had a meeting with team today and they're like, yeah, you know, we were part of this team and the two founders, you know, they decided to rug each other because they like stopped trusting each other and they both decided to sell like simultaneously which got rid of all the liquidity and run themselves for an active project. Well, so then we kind of went and did a different project.
Like where do I invest in that? That's great. Crazy crypto funding 101. But you know, VCs are bad man. That's right. That's right. Accountability to investors. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Or something. I mean, yeah, there's a time and place for everything, isn't there? But you do. So crypto like this is a really cool thing.
So crypto like this is the spreadsheet, which those of the those who are regular listeners will know that we refer to you a lot because we are very professional. It's obviously more of a character at this point, I think than a natural reality. But we the sequential entries like crypto like Moe's gonzo crypto like Moe's back. Why did you go in the first place?
I was like, sometimes we're because we're in very different time zones. Sometimes when I don't know, I when I see a thing that I'm like, I didn't know that happened. So I just type why? Why was going on here? And then that's how we build up content for the for the listeners of this show. So follow up from last week.
Obviously, you said I was very angry about how the show ended. But I did some more looking around about the consultation for the digital pound, sometimes informally, I had thought, called Britcoin, because that was like the thing a few years ago. It was super cringe. It's obviously super cringe. And you should only ever say Britcoin really ironically, with full hatred for whoever thinks that that is a good name. But apparently,
Did you wait? Did you moniker that?
No, it was like, it was like, it was a theory thing years ago, we're very, very lame, very kind of, I guess, right wing economically. Belens were just like, we're just like, ah, the best thing will happen after Brexit, we can do lots of exciting new things like Britcoin. And it's just like you go fuck yourself. Anyway,
Would you prefer something like a coin or something like that?
The sad thing is, it's just facetious enough a name to merely to maybe actually be the correct name.
It's not bad. I mean, it could be worse.
So, all right. But the thing I found is that so apparently, this whole consultation thing about digital pound, that civil servants who are against the program and think it's like, whatever their objections like it's pie in sky thinking, it lets in, you know, because the thing is, it's actually not going to be a cryptocurrency in all likelihood, but it's just, you know, people who are sceptics of the ability to deliver all that sort of stuff, have instead called the project shitcoin. I read that in a paper.
I read that in a paper. I was like, now that's a name I can get behind. And we already know this. We've seen since 2016, the pound is one to one with the shittest coin. So it already is. It already is like definitive shitcoin. Yeah, great name.
And the best thing about that, though, is that there's like I don't know if you've ever seen in the thick of it or in the loop or something like that. Like, they're apparently pretty accurate as to what behind the scenes of British politics is like with maybe a bit more swearing than reality. Right.
But the fact that a civil servant would just be like shitcoin completely can believe that is 100% believable. The best bit is, I reckon whoever's calling it shitcoin does not actually even know that that's a thing in crypto. So it's just.
Right. Right. It was just thought it was. It's just emergent behavior. People are just going like, this is a shitcoin. And you're like, it is. It is a shitcoin.
What else would you call it? You suddenly turn into Jeremy Clarkson there for a second. It is a shitcoin.
Anyway.
But if it doesn't de-pay, they can call it whatever the fuck they want. Right?
Hey, if we can pay our staff in it, that would actually be like if I could use it here, if I could actually if I could IBC that shit, if I can IBC that shit, if I could actually use it like in real in real life somewhere, like they can call whatever the hell they want. Britcoins.
You could call it whatever. You can't deliver Matthew McConnachy there for a second.
Ooh, that reminds me before we don't have the USK exploit on here. Yeah. I'm going to add that to the sheet right now. USK exploit. Put one more flexible stablecoin on there. USK.
One more slightly elastic stablecoin. USK DPEG of the week. Right. It's been, isn't it a few times now. Yeah.
Is that true? I didn't know that. I thought either or maybe it was not DPEG. Maybe it was more exploits than DPEG.
I'm not sure of either of those. As far as I'm aware, this is the first exploit of the USK contract, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. We'll come back to it later. Hopefully, maybe who knows.
In death of a member of project Tombstone has a name. Okay. We've had no tombstones this week, so we've got to talk about cyber security, haven't we? Oh, and Rama in the chat has said, I guess this is in reference to the soft rug, kind of like Lovana did with their NFT side of the project. Yeah.
Yeah. That was legal concerns, wasn't it? Something like that. They spoke to their legal team. Somebody probably said the word security and then that was that maybe. Hard to say. I heard something like that at the time.
So are we going to talk about 103 and 104 on the hub? Because that's maybe the biggest drama du jour because that all sort of spilled out into other chains, didn't it, over the weekend?
But do we have to talk about it?
I mean, do you want to? I think at this point, I'm going to say mood of the room is like, yeah, maybe fun confio?
Maybe. Well, I think the 103 drama was how many different ways will they be funded? Right? And are there concurrent ways and who has the prime and who's picking up the spare? And first, like, oh, this group isn't going to fund it. So we started this other one.
But then the first group back said we are going to fund it. So then we do the second one. Like, I think that's where that's coming from. Right? Is like, is there a budget and is there a budget of need? And is there a makeup of the solutions that fit into that need in an orderly way that people understand what the hell is being funded?
And I think the answer to that probably right now is no, or at least it's pretty murky. That's kind of what I see in LLS.
Well, to me also, what I find is interesting is how the conversation is completely surrounded like their expenses. The conversation is totally, well, your expenses are met. How could you possibly need more money?
Yeah, right. Well, it might just happen that we have other projects that we want to keep going with, with doing CosmLosm and there's backlogs we want to hit. But God forbid we have anything of a rainy day fund or something.
No, yeah. People want to, everybody wants everyone to make the bare minimum so they can be successful. Right? So I think that's just like slightly human nature in some sort of sense is question.
Like people have never had an organizational budget and they look at it and then also the way, we talked about this before, but the way that these teams present their numbers are such, they're awful.
Like they just do a really poor job of like actually laying out where the dollars are going and also talking at a greater level in terms of what this enables and what that is like runtime needs and what it's related to growth and what is this.
Like they just do a pretty poor job of that. And then the teams that, and then the groups that are funding those don't, like we talked about before, is they don't restate those in any sort of way that makes it easier for the, for people to make decisions around it. Right?
And especially when they overlap and they're all mixed up, I think it becomes a lot of confusion.
Yeah. And I think there's a tough point to it too, where, you know, Confio is integrated with several projects and or teams. Like, like, I don't know what their interaction with T grade is necessarily, but I know that's come up.
And I know that they're kind of used in tandem with T grade. My understanding is that they, they don't own T grade, but they were like the developers that were commissioned to build it effectively. Right.
But it's not really clear what all those different interactions are. And then of course we have Win now, but my understanding of Win is it's more of an Ethan thing, not a Confio thing.
And so how do all these things kind of intertwine? Not that they really fault, not that I don't, I do not fault them for not making everything 100% clear because I probably wouldn't have thought of bringing that up in the first place when you're talking about like the single entity, but there's definitely, it's a little opaque.
Yeah. For what it's worth, I think Wind is, is two developers from Confio and they pay Ethan for consultancy. There is some interaction there, but I'm not sure. Yeah. I know Ethan is obviously involved and he's involved in the design, but I heard that the actual, whatever the incorporated, whatever the entity is that Wind is going to land on, because they are putting one together.
I don't think Ethan is actually involved in that entity, although he has worked as a developer on Wind. I think it's, I was about to say a name and then I realized I don't know who's docs and who's not, so I'm not going to say anything.
Rama says Ethan and Milan down in the chat.
Okay. So Milan is docs. Okay. Right. That's the other thing is like everybody's involved in everything, right? So you have different project owners or team members that have like three or four other side projects. And so like the idea of like, oh, we need this money for this team, even though the members of that team might be on different, like it's goofy, right?
But again, that doesn't mean that the numbers aren't correct, but people try to be able to, like then everybody turns into a judge and jury around what does it take to run a business when people have no understanding of how much it takes to run a business, right?
Or, or what it also doesn't, it also doesn't help the, like the numbers involved are very from the hip and also, yeah, like when somebody says to you, oh, it's about $2 million. You're like, okay, so it's not $2 million. And that instantly sounds, it just trips the like bullshit kind of alarm.
But the thing is it probably is $2 million. It's probably like $2.17 million or something like that. Right. Right. And, and, and like, like there was a whole thing. And we've had this as well, to a lesser extent with like how and the stuff we've done.
People like being like, where's your roadmap? Why haven't you done more stuff? What are you doing? Right. And you're just like, look, okay. And I kind of, you know, when, when Confi are like, oh yeah, $2 million for a year or whatever it was, is our, is our burn.
I was like, yeah. I mean, last time I worked for a startup that was VC funded, it was, I think our burn was 200, 200 grand a month on base salaries plus, it was basically 2 million pounds. So a bit more in dollars was the yearly burn.
And when, when we were looking like we were running out of cash, everybody got me redundant. That was because it was just like, you look at numbers and you're like, we're not going to bring in the amount of income to cover those salaries in the next six months.
So we have to cut everybody loose now. Otherwise we're going to run out of money completely in six months. So that's the other thing that people maybe don't know is that you're, you're on a decision making cycle where, depending on what jurisdiction you're in.
Right. And they're Europeans. So I, I'm kind of vaguely assuming a place where you have to give notice and you have to pay people during their notice. So that's obviously the case here. You know, you're okay. So like one month notice times every person.
So you've got to make a decision one month before you running out of cash. And then you've got to, you know, if you want any chance of surviving as a business, when times get like existentially tough, like existential risks to the business stuff, you know.
The other thing is I think, which I think we might've mentioned before, but that these types of proposals should be funding output, not teams. So they should be funding specific types of deliverables, not teams.
This, this Confio one is about teams. It's all about, Hey, we have 10 people and this is our burn rate and we think we need 25. And by the way, this is going to support Cosmwasm and Cosmjs and quote unquote, many other related repos.
Fuck all that. Like tell me what the budget is for Cosmwasm for the next two years and let's fund Cosm. Cosmjs, right? Cosmjs, whatever it is. Right. Nothing can happen without Cosmjs. Put two up. And if the people don't want Cosmwasm and they want Cosmjs and that's what they want to put in and we want deliverables associated, then put that as say exactly what it takes to be able to deliver Cosmjs for the next two years.
And then, then put that up for proposal. This is funding teams. Like it's not, there's no deliverables in here. It's just like, Hey, we got a bunch of people and we do a bunch of shit for the thing. And, and they do, they do great work. I'm not, I'm not bad mouthing the team or the, or what they do, but that's not how you fund projects.
Like if you go, go into like any business, like, Hey, we want to, we think we should enter this new business area, but that business area would be, here's what we get out of it. Here's what the cost to be able to get there. And it's very specific in terms of what we're buying, right? And what the deliverables and milestones on.
There's like no milestones in here. Again, this is, this goes back to, this goes back to like a general, we don't know how to run projects or we don't know how to run engagements. We don't know how to run like deliverables over a period of time to get from A to B. And so just, just throw us 96,000 at them. And we're going to support all this type stuff. It's too nebulous. Like it just, anyway, like that's a real, it's a real, real challenge. I think.
I really liked the way you put that because I've been thinking and struggling with this a little bit lately because the way it's kind of being presented is it seems like companies are forced to be for lack of a better word, public in cryptocurrency rather than being, you know, public versus private. It's just public. If you want funding, you need to be a public entity, but being a public entity then gets into like the securities area.
And the way it's being treated right now with a lot of these proposals is as if they're a public entity when the reality is they're not, they're a private company that's providing public good.
These are small private companies. Like even if they're like, like Confuio, they're like, oh, we've got like 15 staff. You're like, so you're, you're a small startup size company.
Like these are not, these are not big, yeah. Like you say, they're not big public companies. That level of transparency is.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like go ahead, Schultz. What are you going to say? We're going to finish.
No, no, that, that, that, that was basically is that we're talking about these little companies. And so like, there's this desire for this utmost level of transparency. Oh, where, where all your funding going towards? Like, yeah, I can tell you how much I spent on relaying this month or whatever.
Is it, should people be able to request how much I have spent? I don't really, I mean, I guess if, if you're talking about funding me for specifically relaying, then yeah.
Then yeah, you're right. Then you could produce a report to show that, right? You know what your fees are associated with that, right?
Yeah. But there's this expectation of transparency, I think is just such an interesting conversation within the space of private companies.
Yeah. But, but again, like I think it does come back to the idea of inexperienced individuals and groups having responsibility for treasuries that they should not have responsibilities for.
And, and how this goes to a general populace of saying yes or no. Like, I mean, let's move to 104. So Notional puts out that they, I forget what the request was. It was.
Or 40,000 Adam per year for three years. All right. So they wanted three year funding. I was going to bring up this up next as well. Sorry for interrupting.
That's all right. That it's wild that now like the conversation changed so quickly from Confion 103 asking for.
96,000? Yeah. And I think it was, I think to that extent it's less than one year of funding. And then Notional immediately the next proposal goes for immediately three years of funding.
And I want to say there's a requirement of those tokens being staked on their validator until they're sold. There's something like that within there.
So it's such a weird different conversation and change of like, and it all kind of started with the Cosmic Validator proposal where they're like, oh, well, they got funding for creating videos.
Well then, well, I'm not going to reduce Confion's proposal for that, but I guess you could extend it to the 221 or whatever for the Interchain Information proposal.
But I'm going off the rails here a little bit, so I'll back off. Yeah, that's okay.
So, and then so they came out and they like, this one was for 40,000 ad-hocs per year to do hub maintenance and incident response. Notional will monitor the Cosmos hub for vulnerabilities on a 365 to 24-7 basis.
Okay. When we become aware of an ongoing vulnerability, we will coordinate with relevant teams, SDK, IBC, Comet, Tendermint to produce a patch.
We'll assist in rolling these patches out to validators resolve the incident as soon as possible. But nobody's asked for that role, right?
Like there's other teams that do that. There's other groups that have involvement within here. I don't know.
Like at least that, at least that, like that's a deliverable that we can make a decision on to say, do we want a support team for Cosmos?
Like do we want a Cosmos Adam support team for the cost of half a million dollars a year in liquidity?
And that's an actual, at least it's something we can look at. They're not saying how many people are involved in that.
They're just saying, this is what we're going to do for this. And then there's no SLA's of course, what the hell, other than we're going to watch for it.
But they're at least putting something out there to say, we want to be able to play this role and people can make a decision on it.
There's honestly a lot about Notional's proposal that I really like. I think that as a concept, it's laid out as least as I understand it really well, where they're like, hey, there's this role we want to fill.
We want three years of tokens. So three year guarantee of payment. However, we're not actually going to hold those tokens.
They're going to go into a third party. Third party will stick on us and then they'll have vesting. So as this happens, it rolls out.
I really like that actually. I like that idea of it too often. Like the Comfey proposal in it, they say that we're basically just going to sell it immediately as soon as we get it.
And I'm not strictly opposed to that. There are two different ways of going about it. But I do like the idea of Notional's notion of being like, all right, we're just going to roll it out really slowly.
Yeah. And they should be, if this is truly for a salary over a period of time and they think they have a burn rate, we know what that burn rate is. And this should be sold on a monthly basis, not everything upfront.
Then they should take it as a salary and stake it until it needs it or do whatever. They should manage it that way.
Yeah, maybe not. And there's a problem there with vesting, right? Because again, depending on your jurisdiction, vesting may be really suboptimal for a business.
All right. So they hold it.
Yeah. I mean, this is the thing. There's like vesting and then there's like an escrow contract that releases on the first of every month.
That's right. You're right. It should be a grant on a specific date.
There's a lot of people talking about vesting at the moment and it does my fucking head in because if somebody offered us vesting, I'd tell them to go fuck off.
Right. Well, I mean, you're paying the tax upfront on something that might depreciate value over time.
Technically, you're supposed to account for that every block, right? And obviously that's not going to happen, but it's just why not do the same thing, but just release it on a regular schedule.
It's just a few more lines of, in fact, it's probably easier to code. Like that's the thing. I've not written an escrow contract. I've obviously written some stuff around vesting.
Vesting is really fucking hard. Like an escrow is actually quite straightforward. The only thing that's obviously very easy to fuck up is the target blocks.
If you're doing it by blocks, otherwise you can do it by block time, but that...
Yeah.
Yeah. Don't try... Like it is fine to do times, but I don't trust them basically, is my review of times in almost any computer programming context, but doubly fucking so in blockchain.
You can't trust those times. But Asaf, what's your take here? Because you obviously, you folks at Secret, do you know, you obviously have a relationship with Confio, you have interactions with them.
Because my gut feeling, I'm kind of reassuring you on this, but I'm like, I trust Confio to deliver value and I trust them to deliver value up to the amount they're asking for. But the lack of deliverables, I may be a feral programmer now, but I did work in industry once.
And like the complete lack of deliverables does make you go like, if somebody came into tender in my old life and was just like, we want to do this and give us some money. I'll be like, all right, lads, I'm pretty relaxed, but you're going to have to at least put some bullet points for me, you know, with maybe some dates.
Yeah, well, I think like short, he said it's, it's an interesting issue because either way people will complain, like if you, if you give a bullet list of deliverables, they will start to, to pick, pick it apart.
And if you just give like a big number and then they will start to ask, what are the deliverables, the ice trunks and such. So either way you're going to get like people coming at you.
So, and plus they are small business, like they're probably 15 people. And like, if you, if you tell them to, to just work on Cozumazen, but they have other projects, so, so what they should fire people because they only get funding for Cozumazen.
Like it's a, it's a hard question. I guess there is, what's interesting, I guess is like the way you expressed it just there where, you know, do you fire the people that don't work on the thing that's been funded?
There is a model for that, isn't there? Which is a, a corporate partnership or a corporate secondment where like, if you're, I don't know, Pepsi, right?
I don't know. We were talking about Pepsi and Monster before the show. It's not important why listeners, but the Top Gun sponsored by Monster Energy. There you go. That's the reason. And yes, it is Shortsey's Tash.
Anyway, the point is, Pepsi have decided that they want to, I don't know, I'm struggling to think of a charity. Somebody, somebody think of a charity, like Mag, right? Landmines.
I don't know why that's the first one came to my head. Pepsi are like, we really need to get rid of landmines. I don't know why Pepsi of doing that. It's a thing, marketing, whatever.
Don't talk bad about Pepsi's care about landmines. What are you talking about?
They care a lot about landmines. That's why they're doing a partnership with Mag, right?
So they go to Mag, like a group that know how to clear landmines. And they go to them, we want to do a project where you clear landmines and we want to pay for it. And then they, Mag will then would, I guess, go and pick an operational area they work in where there's landmines.
And then they would go, okay, well, we will, here's the project and here's the people involved. Here's the time scale and here's what's going to cost you.
But it's typically my understanding is those sorts of engagements are time boxed and the money is ring fenced to the project team that is doing the fix. If they're like, we're going to take out mines in, there's still mines in former Yugoslavia? Maybe.
This is really taxing for this late on a Wednesday.
I'm totally zoning out.
They can say like, we didn't do it in this place with these people, money's ring fenced, Pepsi, the bill is $1 million, right?
And they wouldn't be able to say, oh, okay, we actually think there's this other role that we could spend some money on. That'd be really cool because that's going to allow us to get rid of loads of landmines, but just like not in that one area.
They'd be like, no, no, no, that's out of scope for this partnership, right? So maybe that's like, the problem is we're looking at this from the point of view of like, you should have the final say in your own business if you're a small business.
But if you were like a big business or a big charity or something like that where you do commercial partnerships, there is like a model for this where, yeah, you say I'm going to hire three people, they're going to work on this and that's fucking it, right?
Yeah, but whatever that budget is might be beyond those three people, that team might have three or four of these proposals up that can fund different pieces.
But I do agree, but I do think that we're buying, the community is buying output and deliverables, not teams, right? They're not buying contractors. There's an output to this, right? The team is saying, hey, we're going to support Cosm JS or something for a year. So we think it's this many people to be able to do that.
We would assume that that ask is more than their salaries, right? That ask is, this is a revenue number for, so we have a cost of that. We have a margin associated to that because we're not doing work for charity, right?
So we're going to assume it's a 40% margin. We have $500,000 a cost. We add another, you know, $400,000 on top of that. We're asking for $900,000 over one year to be able to support that Cosm JS, right?
If another team can do that cheaper, then maybe they deserve that business, but I doubt it, right? So, and then if that $900,000, if they need to, if that means that extra margin allows them to do something else and be able to grow another part of the business and be able to get something else sponsored and be able to build that out, that's how that should happen, right?
The idea of just saying, hey, we need $2 million over three years to support a bunch of stuff and we're good guys. I think that's, if there's enough trust there, then maybe the community gets there, but the idea is that we're, like the community is buying output, right? They're buying new users or they're buying code that's going to generate more value, not teams.
And they should be pricing that accordingly. They should show that and what that requires to do that.
So, a question to that. So, Asaf, I think that secret was, if not the first Cosm Wasm chain, the second Cosm Wasm chain after Terra. When you guys had started using Cosm Wasm, did you get any sort of, have any sort of ongoing relationship with Confio whenever you were developing Secret? And if that's the case, you did.
Yeah, they'll pop. So I guess the question is, is that ongoing relationship with upstream chains, like part of the proposal, you know, because that seems like a really big value add. I know security updates are, but providing support as a service, I suppose, seems like something that should be strictly outlined as well.
And maybe that's how they should get another source of funding, right? Is, hey, we're a secret network. We use Cosm Wasm. We will throw in additional funding for you to have some sort of like support lifeline. Does that make sense?
Yeah, I guess.
Not that I'm making the statement that secrets should, just I'm curious on what their, what Confio's relationship has been with the downstream chains.
Yeah, for us, like since I guess 2020, just like maybe security updates and stuff like that. We worked pretty closely with them since I think March of 2020, up until we launched on September 2020.
And then I guess like we drifted apart because we we stuck with with the V 0.10 Cosm Wasm for two years, and they kept on building. But early on we worked very closely together.
We worked on the upstream Cosm Wasm code and then cut the version for ourselves and took it from there.
Like our version is almost a complete rewrite of the internals and we just kept the API, which is sometimes a pain in the ass to get updates from upstream because we need to rewrite them too. But we had to do this to add the privacy features we wanted.
So I guess it maybe doesn't affect secret in the same way, but the question then kind of circles back around to public goods, right? Which is that if you use a thing like an open source library to ship a product, are you, I mean, in a perfectly ideal world, everybody makes enough money to get by and you send some money back upstream to the projects that you rely on, right?
But like in a realistic world where budgets are always having to be justified, how long do you continue kicking back to a public good project?
Because, you know, it doesn't feel like you should have to pay forever, right? That's free as in beer, not free as in freedom, right?
There is a point where you go, yeah, okay, like we've contributed back enough. I don't know, it's a difficult hypothetical, I think, you know, because if something wouldn't exist without the other thing.
Yeah, I guess it depends on the rate of change and how much is like, when does it go beyond just development into like long term support type of things, or if I'm just doing security, like I'd assume some of those decisions would come into that. Or in this case, like if it moves to Cosm.js and maybe that should be the one that receives book funding or something similar to that.
I can't believe we talked about this topic for 40 minutes. Like that's unbelievable to me that we wanted to avoid 103 and 104, and now we're 40 minutes in. Crazy.
I honestly find it such a fascinating topic though because the topic of funding and of like responsibility and how opaque the company is. It's just such an all encompassing topic, especially when you have two proposals that are looking for the same goals, but implemented just completely, completely differently.
Which to that end, Soy2Stodigo made a really great point earlier that the multi-sig for Notionals proposal is all internal Notional employees. So it's a little bit not as great as I thought.
That's not good.
But it's their ask, right? Why would it be somebody outside? Who cares?
Well, if they stop delivering, right? Like if they decide after year one that they're like, meh, I guess we're good, we've done enough. Well, they know they've got two more years of funding that they can walk away with.
Should a multi-sig with either community or project or somebody else be on every single funding proposal?
Yes.
I don't know about that. I think that certainly, I think it depends. If you're going for three years, then yeah. If you're going for a quick buyout or payout like Contio, no, I don't think that's necessary.
I mean, okay, fucking spicy opinion here, but I think if you've got like a three year thing.
No, but sure.
You not only should have a proper multi-sig on it, but you should be paying the people on the multi-sig because you are saying, oh, for the next three years, you have to pay attention to this, number one.
And like, you know, not leave the ecosystem, go do something else. What if regulation changes on that subject?
Like you're sticking your neck out in a way that I think is like not particularly obvious by doing something like that.
And there's no reason for three year proposals right now. I didn't think about that. Like this business is measured in fucking months. There's no reason for three. Like who knows what the hell's happened three years.
We got 120,000 atoms sitting around somewhere. Like ask again next year. Right? Like I don't, like that seems ridiculous. Like, is it, can we reject? So we can't reject two years, two and three if year one sucks. Right?
So there's no right to your point from a multi-sig perspective or even for anything else, you can't pull that back. So I agree. Like that should be, maybe that should be a thing is like you can't request more than one years of funding and then come back next year for the next piece.
Like that seems pretty reasonable.
Yeah. I mean, that's quite standard corporate contract is a year because you, you, you can provide a cost so that you can hire an employee for two years to do one year's work.
So, you know, you don't have to fire them at month nine. Right? Because that's the reality of a two. And this is a thing because I am an idiot. Right? So I have to get our finance guys to explain to me how this stuff works and why.
Like I've seen it play out. Like I've been made redundant in a startup and all this kind of shit. Like, and you know, I've been in, I've been in the thing where you, you look at the company's finances, especially in startup, you look at the burn rate and you're like, ah shit, they're going to fire us next month.
Right.
And then they do. And you're like, okay, cool. I can do elementary maths, but like the fact that I can intuit it doesn't mean I know the full reasoning behind all those things.
So this is one of the big things I think that, you know, those of us that aren't business geniuses like usurper have had to like work out over the last year, especially with the big bull pump and then bear crash.
And then all the tax implications of that and whatnot is actually like working out how you do cashflow for a business has been like one of the biggest learnings. I thought it would be simple. It is not simple, but like the rule of thumb, our accounts have just, and our fans, people have just, because we're obviously keen to bring on full time staff rather than contractors.
And they're just like, you need two years in the bank, two years in the bank. If you've got a contract that's bringing in two years of salary, once you do that and you've got your percentage on top, then you can hire one person.
Because then you don't have to fire them a month 10 when you're like, oh God, we haven't been renewed. You can instead be like, all right, we can, we need to find new work to cover this salary.
But look, we've got a year and two months to find work before we have to fire you. And we've still made our whatever it is, 10%, 20%. It's definitely a lot harder in the EU than it is here in the US. That's for sure. I mean, we have, everybody's at will, like fire anybody at any point for any reason.
Which is nuts to me. But anything. Today's your last day, you're done now. Right? Like, that's it. So from an at will perspective, there's a little bit easier controls to say, hey, this is going south. It's not great, right? You don't want to, look, we've worked very hard over 20 years to not put anybody out in the street, right? Because you want to be, but I don't need as much runway as you guys do, right? Because you need a lot of runway because you're, when you bring somebody on full time, you're making a pretty long term commitment to that employee. Now, if they decide to leave, that's different, right?
And then you're done. But from your perspective, as a business owner in the EU, it's really tough. Like we used to have an office in Amsterdam. I remember that very, very clearly is once you make that decision, you're in it.
Yeah. And this is why, like, you know, the, the thing that we, the, the, the, I did before crypto was I worked, I did contract work because if you need like a project lead or you need like people for technical due diligence or any number of things that require a software engineer, where you just like need them like next week.
Yeah. But you don't really know how long you're going to need them. There is like, obviously a booming market as a result of this. And that's something that like, you know, I've, I've done in my career as a, like, oh, this is actually quite interesting. If you like chopping and changing every six months, it's quite a good thing to do. Right.
Yeah.
But, you know, capacity planning is hard. And it's kind of, well, that's the thing you said at the start, which is that ordinary people, like I, I've been running this business for three years and it's only in the last 12 months that really have had like a full understanding of how all of that stuff fits together in terms of what we can and can't actually afford.
So it's no surprise that the average person looks at the funding proposal and goes, that's too much money. Or I don't understand it. Yeah. I barely understand it and I have to deal with this stuff.
Especially even like people don't even understand salaries. Like, like a typical salary for a good engineer might be 160 to $250,000 US. Like that is a pretty reasonable salary in blockchain. If, if you are at home holding tokens and you think people are making 20 bucks an hour doing this type of work, that's incorrect.
They are making somewhere between 150. Like, and even that range might be a little bit low, depending on the skill sets involved. Right. Sure. And even, and what they want from an ownership perspective, tokens inbound, a percentage of ownership in terms of the business, like those are expensive individuals and they are, it's a small supply and a high demand for those types of things.
So, yeah, like people who have 50 Adam and a wallet and they saved up 500 bucks to be able to get there and are hoping to have that moon to $45. Behind the scenes, there's some real big salaries to try to make projects that do that. I don't think people really understand that.
Like, I don't think they understand the cost of someone's things going on. Now, again, like, I also think that like we're not buying salaries, we're buying projects and we're buying outcome. That's for those teams to figure out what their cost is to deliver. That's not the community's, the community, like you say it's 10.
That is relevant for a core chain team, let's say. For a core chain team. But then you're looking. Like, they have. Yeah, they're showing. How do we pay whatever, $150,000, $160,000 plus a vest, plus, you know, whatever. Right. Right.
To attract talent that's going to be incentivized to work for more than six months on a project. Right. That's the other thing. Right. Yeah. But like, Cafio says, hey, we have 10 people. We need 25 people to do this. Who voting on this has any effing clue whether that's reasonable or not.
I even I'm in this like I'm in this business. I don't know if that's reasonable. I don't know. Can you can you have 25 developers working on a cause and wasm GitHub repository at the same time not overlapping each other. There's no single threaded items in there.
Like, is there really 25 like I've been on some big teams 25 widen developers working on one project. That's a pretty big code base, where you're not stepping on each other where you're not like you typically have teams are like five or six people that are working on something very specific 25 at once.
All working on the same project full time 40 hours 365 or, you know, 2000 hours a week or a year. That seems to us as a lot of developers 2000 years. That's like 25. What the hell like that that seems excessively big for a project like like that's a big project not like, and I can see how much how much codes in there but, but again like that might be include testers right and you have other people involved.
I think I think that's all in I think it's all employees I think still devs is probably 1011. But, but, but, is there anybody qualified how many people that are voting on this are qualified to determine if that's correct or not.
I've also remembered another complication is that obviously most European countries you have national insurance as well. So if you're all in salary is $160,000.
The employer has to then put in $100,000 or so maybe less I don't know but it is a significant portion of the salary. Yeah, international insurance and tax.
So you're actually you're all in cost for hiring somebody is probably like, I don't even actually know what it is that healthcare is a scary number, healthcare here and unemployment insurance here and everything like here it's about 18% over so if it's 100,000 salary it's usually about 118 with, with, with, with the
unemployment insurance and everything else and then healthcare is on top of it like if you're doing a stipend or something else is QC or if you're doing something else like that's different but because that's extremely expensive here.
Whether you're going to help the employer or not because you're at small companies you don't necessarily have to. But anyway so but anyway, why we still talk about this frickin these goddamn proposals.
50 minutes now. Can we, can we talk about something more fun. Okay, so apparently in the UK the average cost of 1.7 times basic salary.
Oh, man. Wow. Jesus. So what is that taxes like what is that is that all just that's just employer responsibilities for government payments that support the employee in case of healthcare this that basically is basically.
I think all nices.
What's that what's the ns.
And I see is is national insurance contributions. It's, it's basically state pension. And I kind of miscellaneous so national insurance was originally for. Yeah, essentially state pension or age provision, I mean some socialized healthcare, but the NHS is like a totally different thing
because it's like, you can never pay nices in your entire life. Yeah, and obviously you get free access to the NHS so that it is somewhat nebulous and there is currently a public debate going on in the UK where there should specifically be a ring ring fenced.
So this part of your salary is not nices this is your NHS tax.
So, what, the Brexit joke nevermind moving on. They hate they hate Europe, they thought the NHS would be good. They thought because it was because that was the thing they put on the bus wasn't it.
They said the bus thing yeah, leave Europe and we'll have more money for the NHS and right right, you know, it turns out that all the nurses were Spanish so oh shit.
Fire. Yeah, I mean, but again, like the, in the US like, if you actually look at everybody's all in piece of that with the healthcare costs people pick up individually, and if you take that as an average, it might be lower.
If you take that as an extremes in terms of people who have had significant significant healthcare costs or the types of things that's absolutely bankrupted millions of individuals right so I mean there's, when you put that thing in one, you put that in one bucket
and you say okay it's a it's 170% it sounds ridiculous, if we actually took and took a cross section of folks are in the US and you actually figured it out it probably, it probably pretty reasonable in the, in the grand scheme of things right, so I don't know,
it's, it's, but people like talk about that shit right there's like the idea of that, that everybody's in control of their own.
I've just realized that last number was because the, it was on a recruitment calculator site and they were assuming recruitment fees and extra stuff, it's actually lower, it's lower than I thought it was.
Yeah, it's like just over 25, it's kind of about 25%, something like that. Ben Davis says fuck that bus.
Yeah, Ben Davis says fuck the system. Finally something we can all agree about. So base salary of 100k, NICs are 14,131. Oh that's not bad, it's only 14%. Yeah, so that's definitely less than what we're paying if you take into account, like our personal costs, I mean I'm paying $1,000 a month just for health insurance, not even including deductibles or anything.
Yeah, and the employer has to contribute towards pension as well, so there's some additional costs that aren't just NICs, but yeah, it's like a 20, 25, 30%, maybe 30% all in or something like that, and then for some additional first year costs.
I shouldn't have said that, we do have that, we have a mandatory social security payment that comes out if you do salary, I shouldn't have said that, but beyond social security which is pretty light in terms of reward, in terms of coverage when you retire,
there's no mandatory like 401s or other types of things, 401ks or other types of IRA programs that are in place. Although there's a lot of options for small businesses to have, small businesses actually do much better in terms of retirement opportunities than enterprise companies that have a little bit more.
I tell you what, I was very excited about that when I learned that last year, I was like, really? I can do that? Really? Yeah. Well I'll be damned.
Especially, I think the US does a pretty decent job, I think the way to think about it is they, the reason that we're so fucked is they cater to large enterprise businesses and there's a lot of workarounds to kind of core rules and they try to be able to help large enterprise employers.
At the same time, the US does a pretty good job of trying to spur innovation and they do that to, there are a lot of benefits to small independent LLCs or single owner companies or other types of things and that's been getting better over time because they realize that gig economy and people being entrepreneurs and starting and breaking out.
I think that's been an area that the US government has always tried to be able to support in some way or the other, if they can.
We have a weird relationship here where at least from my perspective, it kind of seems like small and medium companies sort of pay the brunt.
They're the riskiest businesses, usually doing the most innovative stuff or the most essential stuff like a coffee shop down the road is not the most innovative thing, but the owner's taking on a big risk, they're doing a thing.
And that's like the bread and butter of the economy as well is those kind ofpreneurs, if you like, to reference the social network.
Obviously, those people are small enough that by and large, they're paying the tax, they're just trying to get by and not cause trouble and all that kind of stuff.
But the biggest players in the economy are not.
Yeah, Ben Davison said, I'm glad I arrived and paid the taxes.
Hey, look, we have a big AWS bill and like Spark are paying a goddamn cent in the UK.
I'd be astonished if they pay any tax here.
And it would a little bit surprise me if we pay more tax than them, but it also wouldn't potentially surprise me.
So, you know, swings and roundabouts.
I'm going to quickly run through some comments because I've noticed some.
So we've got going back a few minutes here, we've got a staff.
Don't know who this guy is. Looks handsome.
But he says, I'm here to shut up.
Cryptic.
We've got cause less harm asking what would happen to the chain if Notial didn't get funded.
Nothing.
Good question. Probably nothing.
Well, hold on. I want to go back to that one for just a second.
If Notial didn't get funded.
Probably nothing, but there would be a little bit more leverage.
And I think that'll affect the smaller chains the most.
The ones that don't yet have the staff or the knowledge base yet to actually implement their own security structure.
I think that's where Notial really shines.
If Notial gets funding, does that necessarily mean that anybody else who puts in for the same idea does not get funded?
What if Strange Love came out and said, you know what, we want that one.
We think that we want to be able to do that.
Would they go, oh, shit, I totally do that.
I want Jack and team to be able to be 24, 7, 365 support for all at Cosmos Hub issues.
Well, yeah, only if Jack personally though.
Otherwise, nah.
Well, it could be Jaby too.
That's true. You have Jaby. He's also involved there.
Yeah.
So would somebody say, okay, we're going to revoke this other one or those are already tied.
So therefore, this is it for the next three years.
Again, this is so goofy.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, I think the thing to be said is that I think some chains would have just died sooner if Notial weren't involved.
Of course.
And the question of whether that's a good thing or not is a fair question.
Some of these chains, maybe when Dragonberry rolled around, they should have just been like, well, that's that.
And then just shut down.
Everybody likes a comeback.
And it's worth saying as well, obviously, that a lot of the Dragonberry stuff was like,
not to minimize anybody's contribution in all of that,
but there were key players who were actually putting it together for everybody.
And a lot of those people are in common between the hub, other large players in the system, and obviously,
Honsmosis, and they were very careful about the order they did it.
And they secured the chains with the most value locked first and were very communicative and very professional.
And when it really hits the fan, you tend to find that people just get up and do the right thing.
And that's not to say that work shouldn't be valued.
It should be valued.
But back to what would practically happen.
That is what happened with Dragonberry.
And the devs who found it and patched it literally made patches for every other chain.
Like they went and did that for all of the key chains.
So, yeah.
I guess this is related to the funding stuff earlier.
Every chain using and relying on Cosmos and CosmosJS should contribute to the team behind it.
As to be honest, some chains made millions during previous bull market,
and they're avoiding to give a very small chunk to Confio.
But other chains have, right?
Wasn't Juno the first one to actually fund that? And I believe Stargaze did as well early on and some others.
That has happened, right?
It's not like this is the first time they've ever come back for this.
Yeah, I think it's more just the difficulty of funding in the bear market where some chains haven't collateralized into other things.
We've talked about a Game of Notes chain.
What would actually be valuable is a funding specific contract chain.
To be able to actually build some guardrails.
This is so distributed and so broken up.
Some sort of way to centralize funding requests, the structure of those, the review of those, the distribution of those, the rules around it, contract enabled.
In the Cosmos Hub, there's no Cosmos, right?
They couldn't even write a contract to deliver that over a period of time, right?
That would have to be all manual. There's no controls over that.
I think that makes sense for it to be Juno, right? With Dowdow.
Yeah, I think you just got Dowdow.
There's a real big case to be made around somehow centralizing some of this type of thing.
Sorry, Todd just said he can't hear me, but now if I screw with it now, now in post, I'm going to be fucking with levels for the next four hours.
Just brick wall compressors.
Brick wall compressors. Just put the Mick Gordon Doom compressor on it.
That's what I do. I do.
Oh, I like that.
You go over under so that it's fine when you're talking and then as soon as you stop talking, every little speck of dust is like.
Yeah, that's a good album.
Which one?
The Doom Eternal soundtrack.
Oh, yeah.
It's freaking fucking crazy.
It's really great.
Anyway, sorry. Thanks Todd.
So yeah, so Rama's solution is ask for three years, put it all into monitor control by the community, distribute every quarter when deliverable is met.
Otherwise sends back to community pool.
Yeah, solid model.
Somebody else said that they have the same problem in Polkadot.
It's not unique to the Cosmos.
Makes sense.
And but oh, it funky one does the Cosmos ecosystem use bounties for funding something where a certain amount deliverable is completely forget top up additional funding.
That's basically doubt out right.
So you can't do that with just an on chain prop.
You can do it with something as vesting escrow, something like that.
Well, so that's not entirely true, though.
I have one interjection there.
Secret actually does have funding proposals for for specific bounties.
And I think the way it works last time I checked was that basically it goes to a multi sick.
They say, hey, do we want to find these?
There's a vote on whether it's funded or not.
And someone can pick it up.
And once it's delivered, then they get paid.
And that's just how it works.
But as far as I'm more secrets, the only network that has that system built out and it's done.
People are actually implementing it.
Secret Saturn Alex from Secret Santa Saturn has done several of them.
I want to say, yeah, anyway, I just want to throw that out there.
We should have somebody on from the secret team to talk about.
I had no idea.
Like, yeah, you had no idea.
I had no idea.
That's great.
That's not like, really, do we know?
That's funny. I'm literally like not touching any funds, not dealing with dealing with money.
I'm doing my personal taxes right now from 2020.
For 2020. Yeah.
I'm going to pay some fines apparently.
Oh, yeah.
But yeah, it's a shit show.
Can we go back to the vesting implementation?
Yes. Like how it works on the SDK.
It's continuous.
So I don't think that you have to like report it every block that you get a vesting event.
Like I think that every time that you withdraw funds from the vesting account, then you need to to report it as a vesting event.
I am very careful to not get into financial advice territory here because I'm not a I'm not a tax lawyer, but I think it is quite different.
Basically, depending on whether they start looking at them like shares or not is my understanding.
Yeah.
And and that's when it just gets into Jesus Christ, lads, just pay me in crypto.
Just pay as a number, pay as a number.
And then we take 20 percent of that and we give that to the taxman or 20 whatever it is, whatever it's gone up now.
It's like it was it was I think 19, it's 20 this year.
I think it goes up to 21 next year.
And then eventually it's 25 corporation tax going up.
Wow.
That's glorious. I paid in the 40s last year in taxes.
Yeah, obviously we have other taxes like if we sell a thing, then we like so if we take a retainer in crypto, we have to pay VAT like sales tax.
So then it would be 40 percent almost dead on.
So yeah. But anyway, in conclusion, there was a whole bunch while we were talking about salaries.
General conclusion is most countries, it's about 30 percent on top and there is a lot of discussion about how all that breaks down.
And some some people saying happy anniversary.
This is this is I think technically show 53.
No, wait, no, no, this is what you know, 51.
I think it's 51.
No, no, no, because we missed one.
Yeah, we skipped it.
So this is 52, but we did two point five.
Oh, all right.
Yes, this is our 52nd show, but our 51st week, our 51st week.
Yeah, exactly.
So so this is not a way this is not the anniversary special.
Fuck it.
Who cares? It is. It's close.
You're right. You got pretty right.
Next next week, we might actually have to be off time.
So prepared because we I think she'll see now might be on planes.
That's right. Yep.
So we might have to do it on a different day.
We might try to do it as we might try to do it Friday.
The we were talking about Friday, the hell day is that third, third, third, third.
That sounds right.
Man, I can't believe it.
If Denver's next week for everyone to meet Denver next week, come say hi.
I've got stickers.
Yeah, me too.
I got all sorts of shit.
Those stickers are pretty, pretty ace.
I'm incredibly jealous.
They're ace.
We got some we got some game.
That's cool, but we got some of that.
That's really great.
That's pretty awesome.
Now, he was pulling his out.
He's like, wait, I want to show off my stickers.
It's show and tell time right now.
We don't have Game of Nodes M&Ms because I was overruled.
But, you know, maybe there will be an event in Europe where I will go and there will be if if you find us eat Denver, we have that, which is pretty legit.
That's a good game of notes sticker right there, which you guys see it.
But the real one, should we show it?
Yeah, because I'm hyped to see it again.
So this is fucking alpha right there that we're going to the white TJ sticker that thing.
We don't have a lot of these.
That's like it's like a real NFT.
It's cool.
You can put it on your laptop.
So Schultz and I and King notes, no names will be out there next week.
We'll have some of these.
We'll we'll probably give some other friends of the show who are out at East Denver like Jake will be out there.
So I have some of these to hand out.
So but yeah, we can if you're out there, if if not, you can email us at those stickers are dope at big ball.
Big Balls blockchain dot com and we might even send some in the mail.
But yeah, they're pretty cool.
Yeah, they're pretty sick.
So yeah, we get our guest jealous about about the number, but we should probably talk to us about secret because it's like an hour in as is tradition.
Tradition as a tradition.
I'm not going to do it again.
We ignored our guest, but we should we should stop doing that.
Wait, hang on. Just circle back out. My brain just caught up with what happened.
Did you just propose that we don't do Game of Nodes at the usual time next week?
I literally think we cannot because I think that the three of us, you could do it by yourself, but the rest of us might be actually on an airplane or pretty close to it.
Oh, hey, you know what? I actually could be there next week.
That time I arrived at noon in Denver.
I don't think we can get into the house until four, which parks.
We've seen Noel do it.
I need that meme from the from the death of Stalin where where Belushi is it believed nice Belushi.
Bishimi is reading out the charges against barrier and he's like you you've been convicted of anti Soviet behavior and will be shot.
That's what's going on here.
This is treason.
You will be shot.
Suggesting moving the time.
We've survived the great the great dis shitting of 2022 and stayed on time every every week.
Mostly sort of.
It's funny.
Well, we have a couple of times where we switched times and we've been very consistent with the last God 30 weeks now.
We just shitted a couple of times.
We moved it up like an hour back an hour or something like that, didn't we?
Well, originally it was much later, wasn't it? Like three hours, four hours later.
Yeah, I think we were allowing Noel to actually like wake up and be coherent.
Then we were like, I don't need to.
I don't need to be fine.
He could suffer.
He can suffer.
So, Asaf.
Hi.
You're in the playroom.
We keep we keep going back to it and then you just keep getting distracted again.
Something else.
So, do you want to tell us a little bit about the upcoming upgrade on Secret?
Yeah, I guess.
Oh, yeah, you do.
Yeah, not a major one, I guess.
And we're still like dealing with the fallout from the SGX vulnerability.
So we are going to rotate the encryption seeds and re-encrypt the entire state.
And we're also adding a light client inside the enclave because on Secret, there's an attack vector where you can send false transactions on your node offline to try to steal information from contracts.
So we're adding light clients inside the enclave to try to mitigate that.
So you'd have to have your transaction signed by the by the validators before you can execute it in the contract.
How is it that you can re-encrypt the state whenever I was under the impression that Secret had thrown away the encryption key? Is that not true?
Or like Secret Labs had thrown away?
We don't have the encryption key.
But it's encrypted in the, it's stored in the encrypted files you have on every node.
So when we compile a new version, like enclave, it can read the encrypted files and use the encryption keys.
So the new version will generate a new seed and then decrypt the entire state with the old seed and then re-encrypt it with the new seed.
Well, actually, it's going to be like a lazy approach. We won't do it like synchronously on the, like in the upgrade handler.
But once you access a state key, it will decrypt it with the old seed and then encrypt it with the new seed.
So it won't take like a week to do the upgrade.
Got it. Interesting.
So I guess if you can decrypt it, what was the point of tossing the seed originally then?
If that's a valid question. I don't know if I'm asking the quite the right question.
Yeah, I'm not sure what you mean by tossing the seed.
Yeah. So I was under the impression that in order to build the daemons, basically, you have a key that basically allows for the encryption.
I was under the impression that Secret had basically gotten rid of it so they wouldn't be able to unencrypt the state.
Yes. So there's a couple of things.
Like these are two different things.
So the first thing is when we upgraded the network on September 2020 with the Secret contracts, there was just like one validator which generated a random seed.
And then validators started to join the network and got the seed from the bootstrap validator and then once enough rejoined the network, we deleted the machine.
So it was kind of like a trusted setup.
You had to trust Secret labs to not extract the seed somehow.
But then the other thing is that we have a private key to compile new enclaves with.
So in theory, like we have a backdoor so we can compile like offline compile a version and extract the seed, which we never did.
But in theory, we did this. We can do this.
And the reason is because if you write encrypted files with SGX to the file system, then you can only decrypt them with the current enclave or with the private key of the developer, which is us.
So in order to do chain upgrades, like it was a trade-off.
If we didn't do this that way, we wouldn't be able to do chain upgrades.
Got it. Okay, that makes sense.
Kind of convoluted explanation.
No, I thought it made sense. There's basically two different keys there. One for basically compiling the daemon and one for what was the original validator effectively that initiated the initial encryption process.
Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, it had to be like a random value. So we couldn't do this in consensus.
Like right now we're looking at ways to do this in the future to rotate keys and somehow with MPC have all the validators calculate a new random number, which no one knows besides them.
Yeah, but that's not easy.
Yeah, to put it mildly. Yeah.
So I've been talking with Erdemann and he said that during this upgrade we can rotate our consensus keys. Is that what he's talking about or is what's happening there and what spurred the rotation of consensus keys? Because that seems really interesting considering that's such an in-vogue conversation piece right now on Twitter with all nodes.
So it seems interesting. Yeah, also two different things like consensus keys of the validators.
In tender means it's not what we're doing at all. We're rotating the encryption seed, which we call consensus seed, I guess. Encryption consensus seed, which is the value. It's like 32 bytes of value that from it you can derive all the encryption keys in the network.
What the White Hat researchers did in the SGX hack is to extract that seed using an SGX vulnerability.
So effectively they could decrypt transactions, inputs and outputs. State is a bit more complicated. They weren't able to do this.
But yeah, because of that we need to rotate the seed to a seed that they don't know. Like to ensure that no one knows the seed. Even though they swore that they deleted the seed, we don't really know if they did.
Okay, so I thought that the previous upgrade was what had handled that. So it's this one now then. Okay.
Yeah, it was a bit more complicated. We just patched the SGX vulnerability in the previous upgrade.
Yeah, not fun. Couple of months.
No, it was pretty stressful. But for a while there we were down to only a couple of nodes when normally for any network we have our standard node and a couple of backups which we use to communicate via Horcrux. But all that basically went down for a while.
While OVH cloud was updating their bio. So it was kind of horrifying for a while there.
That's all just been, what is that? That's SGX specific requirements that either are not being exposed or keep moving forward and the providers are using, or is it a BIOS issue or is it just like, is it architecture? What's the core of that?
Asaf, you probably know better than me. Please go ahead.
It's BIOS issues like Intel distribute the patch, the BIOS patch to the OEMs. And then they need to create like a BIOS for their machines which they don't do in time.
I mean, I'm sure at that scale they have what, like tens or 20s of thousands of machines. So to be able to push a BIOS patch is not a small issue, right? So it's got to be tested. It's got to go through a pretty long process to get out there.
So it's the same hardware that's, SGX is on the chip, right? It's not a separate hardware chip, right? It's actually in the Xeons or whatever else. And so it's just a BIOS enabling of that that you guys are using.
It's a little nuanced in that SGX is there's software controlled SGX and there's hardware controlled SGX. And Secret only works for hardware controlled SGX, which I suppose suggests that that is, it's like a separate enclave on the motherboard itself.
I thought it was in the, it's in the die, isn't it? Isn't it in the Xeon itself or is it in the chip or is it a separate, is it a separate like SGX chip that's sitting in the motherboard somewhere?
It's in the chip. I think the software one is just for simulating, not sure if it's really secure for any application.
So, and then, and then based on what you guys are doing, it requires different, this is a stupid word, but almost like an API or a call that you're using to the SGX module.
Those things obviously evolve over time. And so therefore it needs a BIOS specific type structure that you guys are using to be able to enable functionality. So I could see cloud based vendors.
They're probably lagging based on what you guys are doing.
Yeah, right.
Like, right. Like, okay, that makes sense. So it might be better to run your own. So you're looking for a way to stand up your own data center. Here you go. Perfect.
I definitely thought about that. You're in charge of your own BIOS, at least for secret. Sounds amazing. That sounds like exactly what I want.
Yes. The good news is that you control your own BIOS. The bad news is you control your own BIOS.
Yeah, I want none of that to be honest with you.
That's right.
One thing I'm curious about with the new upgrade is I read that there's going to be auto compounding of staking rewards without using AuthC or anything. How does that work? Is it just going to be automatic?
It's an opt-in feature. You'd have to send a transaction for a delegator and validator pair to enable auto compounding. And I guess I think every like 100 blocks, it just claims your rewards and then immediately stakes them again.
Just a little tweak in the SDK. Nothing much.
Really? Okay. So it's not going to require like a separate validator wallet or anything then? Because with running Restake, we have to make sure all of our funds are constantly topped up. It's just automatic.
No. But you can't force your delegators to auto Restake because then to claim the rewards, they need to essentially unbond for 21 days.
So we thought people won't love it. So it's an opt-in feature for now.
That seems like a great upstream patch to me.
Yeah, actually we weren't sure. It's still experimental. We weren't sure how much overhead it will add. Kind of like the osmosis epoch. But every 100 blocks. So maybe we'd have to stretch that a bit. So yeah, kind of experimental, but we wanted to play with it.
So when you say every 100 blocks, do you mean every 100 blocks based off of when they sent the auto compound command? Or do you mean every like block mod 100?
I think block mod 100. It's a param. It's an on-chain param, but I think the initial value is 100.
Got it. So if someone sent off the transaction at block 99, they would then compound the next block. That's pretty cool. Interesting. It effectively would be kind of like micro epochs, I guess then.
Yeah, interesting to see how it will affect chain performance once enough people opt-in.
Frey, what are you doing over there? Unmute. Fuck. You got him off guard. Still unmute. He's panicking. That's all I can see. Come on, boomer.
My mouse died and then the fucking StreamYard unmute is a massive pain. So I just had to kind of, there's a laptop over here. I just had to grab the laptop and do the thing where it's kind of, sorry.
Un-fuck the thing.
Well, that looked very distressing. It's just annoying when everything's kind of plugged in on a thing on the wall. You're just like, anyway, sorry, ignore me.
And how is it with having a new kid? You have like a three-month-old. Yeah. Three-month-old now, yeah?
Yeah, I have a three-month-old. She's a cute baby, but she wakes up a lot. And I also have like a two-year-old, two and a half year old, which also tends to wake up. I'm surprised she's asleep right now, but yeah. I don't get a lot of sleep nowadays.
Yeah. Young kids, man, it's all about sleep. That's the only thing that's important. That's everything else is, it's tough to sleep train, especially like three and a half months or like is to get the six or six, seven months, eight months. It's really tough to sleep train to get to the point where they can go through the night and everything else.
I think you can sleep train at three months, maybe six.
No, no, too early. Yeah, yeah. Six, seven, eight. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. That was like our one big thing was like trying to train our kids how to actually sleep, which sounds ridiculous, right? Like the idea of sleep training sounds silly. Like what are you talking about? They just go to sleep, right? And they sleep? No.
No.
Like actually getting into very repeatable structures where kids that age, even any age, but they like repeatability and structure. And if you can kind of build that over time.
You said it was like, we need to make this repeatable and automated. Exactly. Right. We need a Dow for sleep training. We need a Dow. We need to scale this operation beyond our primitive constraints. Sleep training Dow.
For every one hour of sleep loss you have, you need to add 30% extra as the employee contribution. The mint goes to shit. That's right. That's exactly right. Yeah.
It can be very, very frustrating to see to see your kids very, very tired, but she doesn't know that she needs to sleep. And then you have to fight to get her to sleep. So yeah. And also no one like you don't get it until you have kids.
How much the lack of sleep for yourself affects you.
Oh yeah. Yeah. And like, yeah. And like for us, it was always like, and like we, this is too much, but, but there's bottle feeding or breastfeeding. Right. So that also plays a role in like who's up and who's awake and who's doing all that work.
And then, so your role as a dad becomes just to maintain some sort of semblance of order and try to protect your wife and like, cause you're useless in the middle of night. I can't do shit. Right. So like I can't do anything at every two hours for the first six months, but I can be there to say this sucks. I agree.
I can be like, I want to be awake for that. I don't want to just sleep through it. Be like, Oh, how was last night? I got 12 hours of sleep. How did you do? Yeah. So yeah, I know it's tough.
I've heard of people that have done that. Like they just go and sleep in a different room.
So that's insane to me. No surprise that a lot of those, I think relationships don't last, you know, imagine my surprise. Every relationship and kids are always different. My, my advice to new dads has always been this, like the mother, there's a, there's a, there's a maternal nature to be able to take care of that child. Right.
So that mother is going to do everything possible. The wouldn't sleep for days. Right. Like, and, and you, and you as the member of the family with a thing swinging between your legs really can't do anything to make that better. What you can do is make her life better. Yeah.
That's it. So whether that is doing simple things like cleaning up or taking shit out of the way or doing things to make sure that her life is only focused on that child. That is the only, that is honestly the only benefit that you can provide because otherwise you're just in the fucking way.
Like instructions. Like, no, no, no, exactly. Yeah. Don't be like, don't be like, so does this need to be picked up or do I need to clean these dishes? No, just, just fucking do it. Like just get out of the way. Just stand up and do it. And like, and just focused on making her life better.
And her job is to make that baby's life better. Right. And that's, that's the only advice I've ever gotten that I received and which was really good advice because I want to, I want to get involved. Like I want to step inside and be able to help with these kids and whatever else. And I quickly realized I have no fucking role here. I can't, I can't, I can't nourish this kid. I can't fuck. Like I can maybe walk around and burp it. And maybe if we get to the point of like breast milk and bottles, I can feed it. But other than that, I'm useless. Right. Like Asaf, you're just a baby.
Right. Like Asaf, you're just in the way. Right. Like, so the goal is like, the goal is you just gotta like make, make your wife's life as easy as you can knowing that it's going to be miserable for six to eight months.
So you're telling me that when you have a two or three multi-sig with your newborn and you vote and execute the go to bed instruction, the child is not bound by the result on the block check.
I have no idea what the fuck you just said. Is that a Dow situation? Is this a Dow? Yeah. I guess, yeah. I don't know if, I don't know if childhood is a Dow. I don't think it is. There's no equality in that situation.
It's not a Dow. Well, there's no, there's no equality in a Dow. Is there? That's true. So maybe it is. Maybe it is. That's true. I don't know. I don't know. This is, this is, I mean, yeah.
Yeah. It's worth, it's worth, it's worth remembering that the, the person who first introduced me to the concept of Dows was also the one who I can quote as saying, well, look, mate, at the end of the day, everything is a Ponzi when you really think about it.
It's all a Ponzi. That's true. That part's accurate.
Make of that what you will about Dows.
You could say that the child is the only one with voting power.
That's true. Yeah. At 4am, that's a one of three multi-sing and you are not, you are not the, the, the signer.
At 4am, it doesn't, yeah, there, it's a hundred percent that way, man. I tell you. Yeah. So the only thing I would say is don't sleep through when your wife is up every two hours. You can't, you can sleep through some of those, but every time.
So you're saying don't tell her to like be quiet when she closes the door behind her?
It's, you know, I don't know, man. It's tough. I think it's, it's, yeah, our kids are 20 months apart.
So I think Asaf, you, you a little bit more than that, but like it's, it's when they're young there and the good news is it just gets harder.
It's different, but it gets harder. It's different.
Well, they sleep, they sleep through the night, but you get, you get older. It's a random. Yeah. It gets, yeah, it gets crazy.
How old are they right now?
Nine and 11. Nine and 11. Yeah. So it's been a while, but yeah. Yep.
Well, 20 months is not a lot.
20 months is not a lot. Yeah. But again, like I think, you know, it's if you guys are you guys done or one more?
I don't know. More.
I don't have voting power either.
Bear in mind, bear in mind. It's a different doubt. You, Serp, I have to remind you, this is a podcast.
I know we joke about this being the group chat.
Just like, yeah, yeah, Asaf. Also, can you, can you just remind us of your mother's maiden name?
You're dressed in the first house you lived in, your date of birth.
Like some more doxxing information would be like. Your favorite car.
Yeah. What's your favorite? What was your favorite pet's name?
Cosmos is not about the air drops. It's just about the friends you make along the way.
The real airdrop was the friends you make. Oh, the kid is up. See, look up from the seat.
There it goes.
Oh dear. For those of you listening at home, the Asaf has got up from the chair in a hurry.
I'm guessing the two and a half year old is awake. On the way out, but the camera is still recording.
Yep. Shit. This is probably the peak game of notes moment really right there, isn't it?
Yeah.