Politeia: https://blog.decred.org/2017/10/25/Politeia/

CoinDesk article on Politeia: https://www.coindesk.com/one-of-investors-favorite-governance-blockchains-is-handing-over-20-million

DiceMix “paper”: https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/ndss201701-4ruffingSlides.pdf

Brave New Coin post: https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/decred-price-analysis-a-sustained-increase-in-mining-activity-2

Coinbase may list Decred: https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-continues-to-explore-support-for-new-digital-assets-4d2ecbcbd38c

Transcript:

Laura Shin:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I’m your host, Laura Shin. In case you haven’t heard, I have another crypto podcast called Unconfirmed. It’s shorter, newsier, and comes out Fridays. If you haven’t yet, go subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts. Also, find out what I think are the top stories in crypto by signing up for my weekly newsletter at Unchainedpodcast.com.

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My guest today is Jonathan Zeppettini, International Ops Lead and Chief Evangelist for Decred and also known as Decred Jesus. Welcome JZ.

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Hi, Laura. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Laura Shin:

So listeners, there is an announcement about Decred today. This is maybe the second time I’ve done this on the show, which is kind of fun. It’s not easy to do the podcast, but before we get to that, we need to start with the basics. So you even know a Decred is. So, JZ, you tell us what is Decred?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Sure, Laura. So before the big reveal, suspense, Decred’s a community directed a digital currency with built in governance to make it a superior long-term store of value. So what that means basically, and as my buddy Chris Burniski likes to say, Decred’s killer feature is good governance. And with governance you can have any feature you want.

Laura Shin:

So what does that mean? So it’s that you will be a currency but that people will be able to help decide what features the currency will have?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Sure. Exactly. So if we think about Bitcoin as revolutionizing banking, you know, be your own bank. Decred takes that one step further and says, hey, you know, you can be a central banker and help make kind of monetary policy, not necessarily a monetary policy, but decide on features.

Laura Shin:

And you also said that it would also be a store of value. So it would both be used as well as have features similar to digital gold.

Jonathan Zeppettini:

So what we think the way we think about this is that the first issue you need to tackle is being a store of value. I mean so much of this space is about speculation, and I think, you know, that applies to Decred equally. But before you can go and have that meeting with exchange property, you need to be proven as a solid, secure store of value. And if people want to hold your currency and they feel that it has a long-term future they’ll be willing to use it as a medium of exchange eventually.

Laura Shin:

All right. So we’ll talk a little bit more about the full vision in a while. But as you mentioned, governance is a huge part of cred and I think that is really key to the origin story of Decred. So how did Decred get started?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

That’s really a great question and it’s super interesting because there were basically two groups that came together to found Decred. One of them was Jake, our project lead and his team at Company Zero, who were previously working on Bitcoin. So they built something called BTC Suite, which is a full node implementation and go. So their idea was, you know, Bitcoin’s this cool technology, it’s going to be a money protocol to make it more secure. It’s good to have multiple implementations, right? So if there’s a bug, let’s say in Bitcoin core and you know, half the network goes down, well if there’s other implementations, you know, it’ll just keep churning along. And what they learned was that you know, while Bitcoin was a lot fairer than, you know, the banking system in terms of the transparency of the rules. There were still issues with, you know, how you organize people and how you get, you know, new features proposed and pushed forward and that kind of plugs into the second group that founded Decred. So there was someone who goes by the name Taco Time, who founded Minero, and Taco Time’s big idea essentially was a white paper called Memcoin2, where they propose a governance system so that you could have all the awesome properties of Bitcoin, proof of work, but on top of that have it so coin holders can make decisions about how the protocol’s upgraded.

Laura Shin:

So Jake wasn’t available for today, but I have interviewed him in the past and he told me about that period when he, and I guess some other developers, were trying to get into Bitcoin. And he described what he called challenging interactions with the Bitcoin core developers saying that they were incredibly hostile, adversarial, and rude. And he also said that I guess one of the developers he was working with, you know, as you mentioned, they had written this other implementation of the Bitcoin client. And he said, quote, “Rather than see this as a positive development, that the ecosystem is diversifying that now there’s a second option. They saw it as a threat to their power and they responded by trying to disenfranchise us and sideline our project.”

And I think these feelings led him to write a blog post in November, 2015 which was, you know, I feel like actually he must have, you know, this was shortly before he announced Decred and you can kind of see how his criticisms of Bitcoin kind of led to Decred.

So I will link to this in the show notes, but just to summarize, he called the way that Bitcoin was governed then an oligarchy and he called out, some issues that he saw such as that he says consensus and Bitcoin is defined as 100% agreement and that requires unanimous consent. He said another issue is that development was completely donation driven. He saw there was a conflict of interest in the fact that a majority of the Bitcoin core developers were involved in the founding of Blockstream and that there was a conflict between Blockstream’s business model of side chains versus the block size debate. And he also said that Bitcoin businesses, minors, developers of non0Bitcoin core infrastructure and users have no vote when it comes to future decisions regarding Bitcoin. And he ended up summarizing the problems this way, “The current governance model of Bitcoin does not admit multiple stake holders and is geared towards stagnation because of the way consensus among Bitcoin core developers works beyond the structure being built to stagnate, even a conversion from a unanimous Bitcoin core developer consensus model to a weaker one. For example, one with 66% majority required for changes would be subject to a veto from Blockstream by merit of their employment of so many Bitcoin core developers. Additionally, all of us who participate in the Bitcoin ecosystem who are not Bitcoin core developers have effectively zero say in the matter.”

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Wos, there’s a lot there.

Laura Shin:

Yes. So this very long blog post. Oh, actually it wasn’t that long. It basically ends with what he identified as the top two problems with Bitcoin. One, the lack of funding for development and then, two, the fact that proof of work miners have too much power. And as far as I can tell, these really were like some of the key design decisions for Decred. So can you expand on these design features of Decred and how it attempts to resolve those issues?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Indeed. So you know, we really look for three things with Decred, make it as secure as possible, make it as adaptable as possible, and make it as sustainable as possible. So that would address those three price points. To start with the third sustainability. I think, you know, that that one’s the easiest to attack just because you know, it makes sense that if you want to have a currency and you want to have this piece of software that needs to be able to adapt and integrate new features and fix bugs, you’re going to need people working on it, right? You need to be able to pay people. You know, some of us are lucky. We’ve been in the space a long time, caught Bitcoin early on and can do whatever we want now. But that’s not a big help to new talent that comes into the space, right?

Most people can’t afford to, you know, work full time on a project just out of passion. So one thing we realized is we need to be able to pay people and that pay needs to be independent. It can’t come from VCs. It can’t come from, you know, people who invested in an ICO or anything like that. It can’t be having strings attached to it. Um, so the idea for Decred was we’ll have the treasury, it’ll be decentralized, and 10% of the block reward is going to flow into that so that we have this self-renewing a pile of money that we can use to pay people who only care about Decred. That’s pretty much how we do that.

Laura Shin:

So I thought about when you said that there was no ICO because you didn’t want strings attached. I think a lot of theory for a lot of the people who had ICOs was that then they’re sort of creating these like user-owned networks. So what was the thinking there around, because I think for them they thought, oh, then the incentives are aligned, but you guys saw it differently.

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Yeah, we saw it the exact opposite way actually. So for us it was like if we say we’re going to build something and then, you know, you give me a pile of money, where’s my incentive to actually deliver? Right. And in the case of a, a software product like Decred you know, it’s a bunch of people get this preferential access and like an ICO or pre ICO you know, there’s a lot of other issues, you know, is it a security afterwards? Right? So we didn’t want to raise any external money. We figured if the product idea is good or if it has value in the market, if the market gives it value the treasury will have value and then it will become self-sustaining. If the market thinks it’s terrible, it’ll be worthless and you know, won’t be able to sustain itself.

So, you know, no external capital, no strings attached. And the other problem with ICO is you know, a lot of these coins sell so much in pre ICO to a small group of, you know, preferred people and then those people who actually participate in the ICO are underwater from like day one pretty much. And you just have this sustained selling pressure to people who’ve got this kind of sweetheart deal. So our view is like treat everybody fairly, everyone gets the same opportunity. And one of the things we did when we started Decred is we gave away part of a pre mine so that we could bootstrap the network with individuals who owned coins for free and that they would actually be the people making decisions in the beginning of the early days. So everyone pretty much just had to say, hey, you know, I don’t want of these. I just had to sign up and give, you know, like my Twitter and say I’m a real person. Look at this and you know, everyone who did that got, you know, 282 coins, which is worth about seven thousand dollars today. And if they stake those coins and participate in our governance as we intended them to do, that’d be worth probably about like 42 thousand US today. So, yeah, we’re not a bad return for just being able to prove you can fog a mirror.

Laura Shin:

So you talked about the origins of Decred and where did you come into the picture and what were you doing before?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Sure. So I was a futures and equities trader for about 10 years, and I kind of discovered Bitcoin in 2010. Fell in love with the idea of being able to have this kind of sovereignty over your own money. And then my investor mindset was, you know, follow the smartest people in the space from that point on. And that’s kind of how I found, you know, the guys from Company Zero, Jake and his team working on Bitcoin. I thought to be able to reimplement Bitcoin in a different language you have to know it like the back of your hand. You have to be able to literally take apart the old system, analyze every piece, and recreate it from scratch in the new language. So you know, these were kind of like the foremost Bitcoin experts in the space.

I would argue that, you know, outside of the Sitoshi team, there’s probably no team out there that knows, you know, Bitcoin as well. So that was kind of my reason for following them so closely, and I kind of watched how things devolved. And you know, found out about Taco Time’s Memcoin2 paper and thought, you know, this is amazing. I wish Bitcoin could have something like this.

So you know, when the two teams merged and decided to create a currency based on some of these ideas, I thought for me, I got the same feeling I got when I first discovered Bitcoin. Like, wow, this is revolutionary and this is a no brainer Bitcoin hedge. I think everyone who owns Bitcoin is going to want to have this as a hedge in your portfolio just because it’s got so many of the fundamental things that make Bitcoin amazing baked into it. And then it’s got this novel system on top of it that Bitcoin can never have because it’s ossified, which is great in many ways but means that it can’t, you know, progress in other ways. Everything has to be, you know, soft forked in and done off chain.

Laura Shin:

And you think that the Decred developers know Bitcoin even better than the Bitcoin core developers?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Honestly, I’d say that would be really tight. I think so. The work that they did, I mean, writing it from scratch the way they did was quite the feat. To be able to reproduce a bug for bug how the consensus rules work requires an understanding that’s really unparalleled.

Laura Shin:

Yeah, and just to clarify for listeners, I think the main Bitcoin core client is written in C or C++, and they had written in Go language, which is obviously different. And it is true to recreate a functioning client in a completely different language you definitely need to understand the protocol well, but I have a feeling there would be a lot of people who would disagree with you.

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Oh, they’re welcome to. I want to be a little controversial.

Laura Shin:

Okay. Okay. Well I think you’ve definitely staked your claim there. So why don’t we go into how the governance system in Decred works. And actually before we get into the details, can you just sort of start with the overall philosophy around governance of crypto networks?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Sure. For us, the philosophy is skin in the game. So if I asked you like, who’s in charge of Bitcoin? Well, I guess you kind of know who Jake thinks is in charge and like you might have a different opinion and that’s valid in my view. And I might have a different opinion, too. So the big three that people usually point to are, you know, miners, the other one would be node operators and some people say developers, right? But just the fact that, you know, like we can have this debate means that it’s not clear, right? So they’ve made a clear choice of making no choice. So their governance is pretty anarchic, which is fine because, you know, Bitcoin has certain properties to it that make that, okay. First mover advantage is one of them. But for us, the main issue we wanted to solve right off the bat is who’s in charge. So if you ask me who’s in charge of Decred, I can give you a clean answer and I can explain exactly how that works. And the answer is stakeholders, people who own the coins, the people with the most skin in the game. So if you own Decred you’re in charge.

Laura Shin:

Okay. So why don’t you then describe how the system works?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Great. So basically people take their Decred and once they own some they can actually lock it up into what we call the ticket. And there’s a pool of tickets. Now the target for this pool is about 40,960. And if you own one of these you’re called in a lottery so much in the way you know, Bitcoin is a lottery on hash power, proof of work, right? We’re choosing random miners who are playing this lottery to validate blocks. Proof of stake is kind of a lottery on these tickets where you get pulled out. So you know, we work a lot like Bitcoin in terms of the proof of work sites. We have two validation systems in our blockchain, proof of work and proof of stake. The proof stake miners create the new blocks and they get added to the blockchain. And then stake system, the ticket holders, participate by verifying that they accept the block to the system. So it kind of acts as like a second authentication factor on the chain. So every time a block has proposed, you know, five randomly selected tickets or included to vote on the validity of the prior block. And if three of those five approve it, it gets added and we can actually use that to upgrade the network as well, which we can get into a little bit later.

Laura Shin:

And why do you have this hybrid proof of work, proof of stake system? Because a lot of other networks choose one or the other.

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Sure. Exactly. So we found that each has its own weaknesses and each has its own strengths. So one of the main problems with proof of stake is, you know, how do you start up? Right? So for a project that’s just taking people’s money, like an ICO, it’s easy. I take your money, I give you some coins. Right? But you know, there’s no mechanism after for, you know, distributing the coins other than that, right? So we think proof of work is an awesome way of not only creating security, but also coin distribution. So it’s not a few people in Decred who are able to acquire all the coins in the beginning who hold power forever because new coins are always being produced and proof of work is producing twice as much as proof of stake. Thus, diluting all the people who happen to be lucky and get in earlier. So they work together in a symbiotic relationship where proof of work is basically producing blocks as a service to the network. You know, we’re not asking them to tell us, you know, where they want to go in terms of features or this or that. It’s block production as a service. They package those transactions, they make sure they’re secure, they make sure they conform to the consensus rules. They broadcast that and they get paid for doing it. And that’s all we want from them. We really don’t expect anything else.

Laura Shin:

And then you briefly touched on tickets as part of the Decred governance system. And this actually took me a little while to wrap my head around, but why don’t you just describe more in full what tickets are for, what people do with them, how they function in the system.

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Cool. Tickets are basically for voting. So they actually let you do three main things and it’s really interesting because two of those things have to do with voting. One of them is every time a block is produced, you have those tickets being called to say whether or not they want to add it to the chain, right? So most of the time that’s pretty straightforward. Everything gets added to the chain. If there was a misbehaving miner, like a miner who was mining empty blocks, we could create a rule saying, you know what, if a miner mines empty blocks, even though it’s valid and forms of the consensus rules, we’re going to reject that. So we can create a rule like that. But the other two things that we really vote on is that when these blocks are created, if we want to have a consensus upgrade, we actually pre-program all that code into the system, and we actually vote on that. And if that vote passes, it can essentially be activated automatically.

So it’s not a signaling mechanism. It’s actually a selection for a hard fork that will take place if there’s a super majority. And then that third thing is off chain voting system. So the ticketing system does the on chain voting for blocks and for consensus changes as well as an off chain system, which we call Politeia, which is for signaling how we want to allocate budgets. That 10% treasury that we have and for signaling which features we want to build so people can make proposals or if we want to hire a PR firm or if we want to hire a new development team, all that kind of stuff can be signaled on Politeia. So the idea is, you know, Decred’s really adaptable and we’re not ideologues about stuff. You know, everything doesn’t have to be on chain or off chain. We’re super pragmatic about these things. Some stuff belongs on chain and some stuff belongs off chain. We find that for things where there’s a lot of little decisions being made, it’s not super sustainable to have it all being dumped on the chain.

Laura Shin:

And just so I understand, can you use the tickets then simultaneously for the off chain and the on-chain governance or do you have to use them just for one or the other at any given moment in time?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

But we use them for both. So if you have a live ticket when a non-chain issue is being decided, it’ll be valid. And if an off-chain issue is being decided at the same time, that’ll also be valid. If I can give you an analogy, which I really like this one actually, it’s really interesting about like kind of like a factory. So imagine that you know, there’s a two way car factory with miners acting as machines that make toy cars, right? And every time a toy car is produced, five quality inspectors, they get randomly selected, look at that toy car and decide whether or not it’s, you know, valid, good, right? And if three of them approve, it’s good and it gets added to the chain.

Now in terms of how that works for consensus changes, if we decided that we wanted to turn the car factory to a boat factory, that would be like a hard fork, right? Well then 75% of the inspectors over a one-month period would need to not only approve those cars, but they also say, hey, you know what? I want to switch to boats. And if that happens and we get to that 75%, you know, it automatically changes to a boat factory. And then because everyone’s agreed, super majority that we’ve switched it’s going to be pretty impossible to find enough people, three to five inspectors to approve the old toy cars once we’re all on boats.

Laura Shin:

And in order to participate in that, I need to stake my Decred. So during that moment in time, I can’t be using it to purchase things or pay somebody or whatever.

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Correct. It needs to be locked up. That’s part of the…it’s a really important part of the skin in the game aspect. And I’m glad you brought it up because compared to other coins, you know, we’re asking something pretty big of stakeholders in that, you know, they’re locking your coins up for an average of a 28 days, let’s say. But a ticket could be called to vote in as little as a one day about or as long as like 142 days. So you’re talking about like up to four months there. So when you lock your Decred up, you’re going to have to deal with the consequences of your votes and be tied in to this system for potentially up to four months. So you need to really be cognizant of what’s going on and be really measured in the kind of things that you vote for because you’re stuck with your decisions. We think that’s really important. That’s skin in the game is really important because it doesn’t allow people to do hit and runs like, oh yeah, I’m going to vote for this because I think it’s going to make the price go up and then boom, it went up, I’m gone. You know, we really want people to have a long-term vision and be in it for long term. And then to me, four months isn’t that long on my plan is to be here for, you know, decades from now and Decred is actually designed, you know, to last for centuries, everything we’ve built is with an eye towards being adaptable enough to make any change necessary to deal with the unknown unknowns of the future.

Laura Shin:

And at the moment, about 50% of Decred is staked, which…that seems fairly high to me. What do you make of that percentage?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Yeah, it’s been steadily increasing. I think it’s fantastic actually. It just shows that, you know, I mean there’s a couple of incentives to stay, right? We can’t ignore. The big one is, you know, you’re getting paid to stay to some extent. So you receive part of the block reward for staking. So I mean it is profitable, but I think even aside from that, you know, there, there is an incentive for people to actually participate and help make Decred better. Right? So like if I could give you an example, we had a vote last week and you know, there was a developer that, you know, did some work, like he built some tools in Python basically, a Decred toolkit in Python and finished the work and then put it up on our proposal system Politeia and said, hey guys, you know, I built this, these cool tools for Decred, are you guys willing to pay me for them?

You know, it’s all open source code. It’s all out there. So if we say, no, you know, he’s not getting paid and we’ve got to work, right? It’s under permissive license already. And what stakeholders did is they voted on whether or not we should pay this person, you know, eight thousand dollars for these hours and hours of work that they did, and it passed, you know, with 94% and they got paid. So we’re able to organize labor and compensate people. So it doesn’t always work that way where people do the work first. But often you’ll find that, you know, people do a little bit of work and get paid in arrears, and it’s really an interesting way of being able to sustain the project.

Laura Shin:

All right. And so we’re going to keep talking about Decred. I was going to say Bitcoin’s governance. Decred’s governance and it’s new feature in a little bit, but first a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible.

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Laura Shin:

Back to my conversation with JZ. So one thing that we haven’t really dived into is that Decred has a pretty high inflation rate, 28%. And when you combine that with the staking rewards, doesn’t that incentivize more people to just stake Decred rather than actually use it?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

I mean staking certainly helps offset some of that inflationary effect. As we discussed earlier, you know, a lot of that’s by design. So the curve is very similar to Bitcoins. So, you know, like imagine where Bitcoin was in like year three. That’s pretty much where we are. So yeah, it does help a little bit, but again, you’re still being diluted by design because we want new people who show up to be able to have a voice. So compared to like a pure proof of stake coin where like, you know, you can get a foothold on the governance if you were there first, you know, if you had 51% of coins from the start, you’re always going to have 51%. Right. Well, compared to that, you know, new coins are always being produced so that new people can have their voices heard. So we think that’s a real positive. But over the long-term it’ll stabilize and level off.

One thing that we find is, you know, which is really interesting is that, you know, stakers tend to take the coins that they get from Proof of Stake them and even proof of work miners, a lot of them actually, you know, they mine Decred because they want to stake it and then participate in the ecosystem. They’re not necessarily mining it and then just blowing out because it’s another asset for them. So we think that’s a really positive development that, you know, there’s a lot of people who view this you know, this contention between miners and developers in other cryptocurrencies, and we just haven’t experienced that at all. We find that, you know, because we have this clearly defined set of rules it makes conflict real solution easy. And because everyone knows what the rules are, there isn’t a lot of fighting.

Laura Shin:

And you talked earlier about the, you know, different kinds of voting that you can do when you have tickets. So what percentage of people are participating generally?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

That’s actually a great question. I’m actually surprised how high it is. So for that super important stuff, those consensus rules where it’s like, hey, do we want to raise the block size? You know, so for the on-chain stuff, we find that like 50% of people will usually cast a vote on those. So about half of the people, the other half are abstaining, which doesn’t really matter because they still receive proof of stake rewards, they’re just not expressing a choice, you know. So if, let’s say I don’t have a lot of time to follow, you know, what’s going on in terms of consensus rules and I feel I’m not educated enough to make a specific decision about this rule at this time, I can abstain. But if I decide I want to vote and I educate myself and hear from different developers what they think are the advantages of a specific rule I get to vote. So 50% participate in those super, super important ones.

And then on the Politeia side for managing the treasury, hiring people and what not it’s a little bit lower because those words are happening really often. So like there’s like at least I think two going on right now and last week there was a bunch of that’s like, it’s kind of consistent. There’s rolling votes. We usually see about a third of voters can participate in that. It can go higher depending on how exciting something is. You know, but sometimes people just don’t bother, which is fine.

But I think the important distinction to make is, you know you know, there’s no delegation in Decred. So when you’re, when you’re voting you know, you’re actually voting, it’s you expressing a choice. You can’t just be like, oh yeah, I’m going to delegate my vote to JZ and let him let him vote and then pump up the numbers by virtue of everyone just delegating so that they can get paid. The people that are voting are actually making a conscious decision to participate, and they’re not saying, you know, oh, I’ll let someone else handle it, which I think is important.

Laura Shin:

Wow, that’s amazing. I actually wasn’t aware that it was impossible to delegate. So you know, because as you probably know, there are so many of these other systems do enable that. But then that also I guess requires that if for whatever reason, because here’s the thing, like, so if you’re going to stake, you need to be online the whole time, right?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Yeah. We actually have a really interesting way of dealing with that. So for people who are, you know, technically savvy, they’ll have a machine, the server that you know will answer when those votes get called, right. For people who are less technically savvy or just, you know, don’t want to deal with the burden of that. What we have is something called stake pools. And what a stake pool does is it lets you create this multi-signature transaction whereby the pool can cast the vote on your behalf but not spend your coins. So you could say to the pool, I want to vote yes to this proposal to fund this code being written. And then when your ticket gets called as part of that normal process over the next, you know, four months that pool will say, oh, yep, this was Laura’s ticket. What did she want? Oh, she said she wants to go yes for this. And then she’ll go ahead and she’ll go ahead and have that vote cast and receive your reward for that. But not necessarily have to have your machine online so the coins will flow back to an address that you provided. The pool never touches your money, but you get to participate in the governance.

Laura Shin:

And one other thing I wanted to ask about what you said earlier is you mentioned that there…so we talked about how there’s 50% roughly of Decred staked at any given time. And then you were saying that the participating I guess ticket holders for the big consensus changes are at about 50%. So overall that ends up being about 25% of the network.

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Correct.

Laura Shin:

So if it’s a third for the softer proposal done through Politeia that’s like 17% or something. I guess potentially the remaining half of the network that has staked their Decred, they’re potentially using it or trading it or whatever they’re doing. Is that?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

They could have it on exchanges. They could have it on a paper wallet. It’s much like Bitcoin. People will store it in all sorts of different ways. Having your Decred participate in staking puts it on the machine essentially that needs to be online, purchase tickets. For some people their security model is such that they don’t want their coins exposed that way. Everything’s going to go on a hardware wallet or everything’s going to go on a paper wallet. So there are different things we think we can do longer term to kind of accommodate that in terms of security because we’re all security nuts. We want to make things as secure as possible but for now we’re pretty pleased with the levels of participation that we’re seeing.

Laura Shin:

I know that you guys also talk about how Decred is supposed to be resistant to contentious hard forks. So can you talk a little bit about that, how the design discourages contentious hard forks?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Sure. Basically what we’re doing is we’re allowing people to vote on these hard fork rules. So imagine we want to increase the block size to two megabytes or what have you. What basically happens is there’d be a multi-prong process. First a developer would say I’m willing to undertake this. I’m willing to write a document out that explains how this is going to work. That’d be a DCP, which is very similar to Bitcoin’s bits. So the Decred change proposal would be written describing exactly how this is going to happen and then they’d go put that up on Politeia, the off-chain voting system.

Now, that would be a great signaling mechanism for the community to come in and say, hey, do we want this? Do we not want this? Now, if it can get 60% of the vote on Politeia it’s a pass, right. So they could say I need some money to do this. This is what we want to do. If that passes that would then give them the signal to go write this code. Now, when they write that code what we would do is we would automatically put it into the client. It wouldn’t be active though. So next time when you update your Decred software, you’re going to have this new agenda in there. This code that upgrades to two megabyte blocks. What that does is when we start this voting period, everyone’s going to get to see that.

If you’re a stakeholder and you have tickets you’re eventually going to be voting on this. Now, when you’re voting on this you’re not signaling as you were on Politeia that you want this done. You’re voting on code that is written, it’s in the client, and it’s ready to turn on once the vote passes if it does. We give it a grace period of 30 days after that so people have time to upgrade if there are laggards, but that’s pretty much how that works. So if 75%…so the bar is higher for consensus changes. It’s 75%. So you have a significant super majority there.

If 75% agree that new code activates and everyone who’s gone in the clients is now using those new rules. Now, in order to protest you would need to start using older software. Now, what you’re going to find if you’re using older software is there’s no miners mining those blocks and there’s no validators, proof of stake people, validating those blocks because they’ve all moved on.

As we saw with the toy car factory, if we move to a different factory and are producing different things and you’re calling for inspectors no one’s going to show up because they’re all gone. So the probability of a minority fork being able to succeed becomes really slim. So we call it minority fork resistant as opposed to fork-proof because forking is controlled but we do it in a way that allows things to happen really smoothly.

Laura Shin:

Yeah. I found that super interesting when I read about it. I mean obviously I think it doesn’t prevent somebody from just copying the code base and being like I think Decred should designed differently and don’t want to go through this whole thing to try to change the network but in this case if there is some kind of divisive matter then the losing side would be much harder for them to take the minority chain and keep that alive.

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head there in terms of that. We don’t mind if people want to take open source code and go do their own things but what this is really to do is to keep the community together. We always say you can fork a code but you can’t fork a community. People are going to choose one side or the other and you can’t copy people. What has a lot of value in Decred is the people, the community making al these intelligent decisions and writing all this great code and having a mechanism to say together cohesively.

What you find out is when you have a method of expressing yourself and a fair system to do it people aren’t so angry when things don’t go their way because there’s a process they’ve already bought into. So if I could give an example, when we wanted to activate the primitives for lightning network we had these huge discussions in the community. Is lighting good, is lightning bad? Is on-chain better than off-chain? People were kind of fighting but what we found out is when people voted on the actual change it passed with over 98% support, which basically told us the loudest people kind of can dominate conversations but they’re not necessarily representative of what the average person wants.

Laura Shin:

I would love it if we could translate that to our overall online communities and political system because I feel like I see that happen all the time where the loudest people don’t represent what everybody else wants. Anyway, one other thing that I want to reference about some of your earlier remarks was that actually I did have a question where I was going to ask you because I didn’t actually fully understand that Politeia and the hard fork changes were used in conjunction with each other. I was thinking oh, my gosh, you have to write the whole code first and then it gets decided on? Because what if you do all this work and you don’t get paid. I was a freelancer for years and years and I was just like what? So that answers a big question because otherwise I was like who in the hell is going to do that?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

One of our cornerstones is we don’t expect people to work for free. I mean I’m a volunteer. I’ve been volunteering full-time for three years now. Our project lead is a volunteer but we have 75 people are paid. We pay them. Half of them are full-time, half of them are part-time and we’re all about paying people to do great work.

Laura Shin:

So we have been referring to Politeia throughout but I’m going to ask you a question and I think through this also if you have anything left about Politeia you want to add you can do it but one thing I also wanted to talk about was how the Decred block reward includes basically it’s split 60% miners, 30% to stakers, and 10% to the Decred development pool. So if you could just fill listeners in on what that is and maybe even how it works at Politeia etcetera.

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Sure. So this treasury is basically a huge pile of money that’s been collecting over the last three years. Last I checked it was 15 million dollars or more that’s piled up of Decred there and it’s constantly being refilled because 10% of that block reward is going there. We’re pretty conservative with the spending so the new stuff that’s being produced pretty much covers the monthly burn rate so this pile of money is there and growing. It’s obviously dependent on the price of the cryptocurrency. So in the depths of alt winter as we are now that’s not that high but if the price goes up we have more money to work with. So contractors are able to come work for the project and get paid in Decred. That process is organized on this off-chain proposal system called Politeia, which is where people can make proposals and get paid and we have multiple ways of doing this.

There’s regular independent contractors that can come. You could be like I’m a dev. I want to start hacking on Decred. It’s a pretty informal process to get someone hired that way. If a couple people who are your peers say Laura’s great at writing code. We’ve looked at her work, let’s start paying her. That would just be two people who are already contractors but endorse you and you’d start working. But if you wanted to do something big and you’re like I’ve got my own devs I want to build a big feature on Decred you could become a corporate contractor and say I’m going to build X, Y, and Z if you guys want. I need a million dollars to do it over the next six months and propose that on Politeia and have a draw schedule and we’ll be able to look this over, get I peer-reviewed. If there were consensus changes necessary, we would obviously have to have appropriate documents and fight it out and discuss whether this is a good price, whether or not we want this feature built and then we get to vote on that.

That’s really the unique thing about Politeia that says let’s vote on all these little things that aren’t super important long-term. I mean they’re not going to make or break the network like consensus rules will but it’s still important to have finality to be able to make decisions.

Laura Shin:

There is a new decision that’s been made, which is what we’re announcing today. It’s basically about a new privacy feature that you guys are launching. So why don’t you tell us about that.

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Oh, wow. Yeah. This has been about two years in the making. So I mean as you know, Decred is super conservative and has a very iterative approach. We don’t like to do something just because it’s trendy. We’re not trying to win blockchain buzzword bingo. But when we think a feature actually is important we work really hard to bring the best possible option forward. That’s kind of what we’ve done with privacy. Two years have been spent analyzing everything that’s been written on it in terms of academic work and analyzing all the other implementations that are out there. We’ve come up with something that’s very unique in its approach.

Laura Shin:

Which is?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Well, the privacy feature is actually based on something called a dice mix. So dice mix is kind of the follow on to some work that was done by academics. They originally modeled it on working on the Bitcoin system but it applies very well to Decred for a number of reasons that we can get into but it’s actually really interesting because it’s super simple. The math, everything behind it is really straightforward and well-understood. It’s only a few hundred lines of code that we’ve written to implement this. It’s going to be easy to audit, low chances of fatal errors. It’s kind of a little bit reminiscent of the way Bitcoin is built. It’s all these existing pieces in terms of cryptography and game theory that are just put together in a unique way as opposed to something that’s totally off the wall. So it’s a creative use of existing technology.

Then it’s also nice and adaptable because there are places we can pivot and go in different places with this to make it better. So the way dice mix works is basically it’s a mixing process with a server that basically allows people to take coins, send them to these special addresses where they’re mixed and then have clean coins come out. Then we can get a little bit into how that works.

Laura Shin:

Can you?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

I’ll describe it maybe technically first and then describe it more basically. I’m kind of a high-level guy so I’m not really into the super nitty-gritty stuff. I’ll do that a little bit. Basically what it’s doing is it’s just allowing peers to do these mixes together. The server is centralized in terms of you need to talk to that specific server to be able to go into this transaction but it at no point holds custody of the coins or anything like that so there’s no risk there. So peers are going to subscribe to these sessions that are going to take place, these mixing sessions and then there’s a specific time window whereby you subscribe.

So let’s say every 300 seconds I believe it is, so like five minutes people will be able to say I want to mix some coins and what you do when you do that you’re going to be exchanging some public keys and creating these secret keys and then peers are going to take these addresses and obfuscate them and send that to the server and then the server takes all of that data together and solves a bunch of fancy math equations to get these anonymous payout addresses. Then essentially a mixing transaction takes place where there’s a huge transaction aggregated where all the peers verify it and sign that transaction and then everything gets spit out.

That’s a really longwinded way of saying we take a hack, we break down our coins into small denominations, let’s say you have 100 and have 10 coins. We’ll break them down into ones. We’ll dump then in the hat, we’ll shuffle them up, we’ll make sure that we each get back an appropriate amount of coins, verify that in those little lots, agree to that transaction and then the person controlling that hat will spit them out, broadcast that transaction to the network and we’ll have shuffled coins.

The way this works really well with Decred, which is super interesting, originally the idea was based on Bitcoin but as we talked about people don’t really hold Bitcoins live. They put them in paper wallets. They store them offline a lot. What we have with Decred is we have this transaction flow from the proof of stake tickets. Money’s always moving. Tens of thousands of Decred every day are flowing back from tickets that have voted and going back into tickets that are being purchased. So we can enable people that are purchasing tickets to do so through this system whereby they’re providing anonymity for people who want to then go and mix coins. So when you’re mixing your coins, let’s say you want to mix, you’re going to be mixing them with everyone who’s buying tickets and has this enabled. That has a bunch of really interesting advantages that we can talk about.

Laura Shin:

Before we get there I just wanted to understand, you said that the mixing happens via a server. So it sounds centralized so who’s in control of that and can that be hacked? Can people kind of find out who was using it?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

All valid questions. For our first cut what we’ve done is we’ve essentially used a centralized server because our view is if you over optimize this you’re never going to release anything and you’re just going to create complexity. So these features were developed in secret because we didn’t want someone else scooping us and taking our code off GitHub and doing ICOs saying we invented a new privacy coin. So they were done in secret for the first cut to get this stuff out there. But because the server is just used for coordination, basically it lets you and I talk to each other but we’re basically doing our own thing. It’s not a huge risk. You’re right that someone could try and censor you. Let’s say your ISP blocked access to that server, they didn’t let you connect to that IP. You might need to use Tor to get around that. I mean in theory the server could be Dossed so it’s not a perfect solution yet.

The iterative approach is that longer term that server is going to be built into the Decred demon so that every single person running a DCRD, running their own node is actually going to be able to participate in that transaction and it’ll be fully peer to peer, but for the first cut we’ve kept it really simple and made it a centralized server.

Laura Shin:

One other thing I wanted to ask about how you guys were working on this secretly, did the community not have any input or did they decide this?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

That’s a great question. I mean everything is community driven, if this required money and it did the community would have to approve it. So it wasn’t appropriate to use community money to build something in secret. So two interesting things are Jake and his team, Jake bankrolled this out of his pocket. This is something that we feel is necessary. We’re all privacy advocates. We believe to be a currency you need fugibility. It doesn’t make sense if you go buy a cup of coffee and then I’m able to figure out your net worth based on that went from that wallet to that wallet and there’s millions of dollars of Decred or Bitcoin in that wallet.

For us, it’s fundamental to be able to have privacy and this is something that we thought we’re really going to need. So those guys essentially built this for free. Because it doesn’t require consensus changes, when people download this they can download this and start using it right away. At first, it’s just going to be CLI so it’ll be for the nerds like me who like running their own CLI tools.

Laura Shin:

What is CLI?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Command line. So there won’t be a pretty interface to it so that people can use it from their mobile wallets and their graphical wallets. We figured in a few months from now we’ll integrate it into there. Again, it’s an iterative approach. We start testing it with all of the people who are really hardcore, making sure everything is perfect, and then integrate it into the graphical user interfaces so that people can use it really simply and protect their anonymity.

Laura Shin:

All right. So now let’s go back. There was a point where you were going to dive into the details on how this works. Why don’t we do that now?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Sure. So a basic way to explain how this transaction is happening is a secure sum example. The way this works is let’s say you have three people, Alice, Bob, and Carol, and they wanted to know together how many coins they have. Now, without revealing to any single party what their total net worth was what they could each do is split those coins up into three unequal parts, give each of the other two counterparties one of those parts and each person would do the exact same thing. What that would do is essentially everyone would be holding a share of their coins and a share of the other two people’s coins. What they could do with that information is add all those numbers up themselves, broadcast that number and then take those numbers that have been broadcast and add all those numbers up and know what the actual sum of all their stuff is together without revealing anything to each other about their net worth. That’s basically what’s happening and the server is just acting as coordination for creating these transactions, signing them without revealing anything to each other or the server and then solving this big math puzzle and broadcasting it.

One of the things we think is super important and this is an advantage, there may be drawbacks to having a centralized server but there’s also super advantages that none of these encrypted bits are hitting the blockchain. So if you look at Minero or Z Cash you have this chain being bloated by all these encrypted transactions and you have this danger that if one day someone’s able to break this encryption they’ll have the keys to the kingdom. They’ll be able to see everything that was sent to everyone, whereby here since you’re only getting the final transaction of everything being distributed after it’s mixed, breaking the security really has no value unless somehow you controlled the server and you were capturing what was happening on there as well. So for us we see it as very scalable, which is amazing.

Laura Shin:

One thing is for now all it does is hide who is sending coins to whom so transaction amounts are exposed. Obviously, just as would happen in any transaction where you’re paying in cash there will be change from those transactions. How do you handle the change so that people can’t work backwards to figure out how much people were spending and who was sending money to whom?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Right. That’s a great question and it’s a super problem. So our view is that eventually we’d like to get the transactions being hidden as well. It’s on the roadmap in theory. It’s going to require confidential transactions and consensus changes but for a first cut we’re pretty much doing it kind of like the way Minero did it. Minero didn’t have this transaction hiding until much later. So we think the most important part is the sender and receiver. So when you get that change it’s important that the wallet takes it and puts it into another pile to be remixed in the future. So it’s not going to come back to you in a way whereby I can spend this by mistake and then link all of those transactions together.

The change will go back into the mixing wallet and get downmixed in future transactions. So we need to be super careful of the way the change is carried because this is a big risk.

Laura Shin:

One other feature that ZCash and Minero have is a viewing key for auditing purposes or really any purpose you can always reveal what happened in that transaction selectively to whoever you’d like. Is there going to be such a thing for your privacy feature?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

What’s actually cool is we’ve obviated the need for that viewing key because you’re actually having a transparent on-chain transaction at the end. So I can show, if I need to, look at this transaction. You give me an address and I can show you all these inputs got sent to this address. So we don’t really need to have the ability to de-obfuscate a transaction on chain. It’s all clear there on chain. Again, what’s nice about that is it leads to a much cleaner chain that can be pruned. So it’s not these blobs of encrypted data that we don’t know what they are or we have to make everyone download all of them. They can choose what they want to download. So it’s an opt-in system and we think that confers a lot of the strengths in the system. It’s also much less complex.

So when you have systems like Z Cash or Minero there’s a chance for things like stealth inflation but because everything is transparent on the chain, if someone breaks this encryption they’re not able to mint Decred secretly. So that’s kind of one of those big concerns a lot of people have with Z Cash in particular. If they screwed up the trusted setup it’s one of those things like we’re in cryptocurrency because we don’t trust anybody but now you’ve got this big event happening where you have to trust these people that they did things right and if it got screwed up someone can secretly create unlimited money. For us, it’s a store of value like protecting those store of value properties are the most important thing. So we want to make sure 21 million coins. It’s never going to be more than that and we can prove that on chain. It’s all auditable. That ties back into our proposal system.

If we’re paying you through the proposal system we need to be able to audit that. Anyone needs to be able to audit that. They don’t have to have a special view key. They can see this group did this work, the treasury paid them this money, and it was all transparent and on chain.

Laura Shin:

Throughout we’ve been talking about features that Decred wants to add to its system even just with the privacy feature just announced. Obviously, you’re going to keep flushing that out and iterating, as you’ve mentioned adding privacy and transaction amounts. It sounds like also at a certain point in the future will it be less centralized?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Yeah. I mean that’s the goal. The idea is once we have this stuff working, get rid of that centralized server, have it integrated into the demon and go from there. Have the confidential transactions as well so that you don’t know about the actual number, the transaction size and then be able to take it to the next step.

Laura Shin:

This is sort of a theme I noticed in the research, which is in general it sounds like kind of an overarching goal that you have is for even the governance mechanisms to also become more decentralized and autonomous. In some of your materials you also refer to something called decentralized autonomous entities. So at the moment you even talked about just to rule out this feature there was a centralized aspect where you guys worked in secret. How do you imagine transitioning to that sort of more decentralized autonomous version of governance and what does that look like?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

That’s actually a great question. That’s something we’re struggling with constantly because our view is decentralize all the things but there’s a big difference between saying it and actually doing it because there’s technology that doesn’t exist yet, right. So we had to invent Politeia to do all of these different things off chain because before that it was literally a small core group of people deciding this is going to get funded, that’s going to get funded. We needed a way to be able to poll all the stakeholders and have these binding votes.

Even today there’s still an area that can be improved in that when Politeia payments are going out that’s still a centralized process. Someone is taking…a bunch of people are having these multi-sig addresses and signing that transaction and sending them out. So that’s not great. As a stakeholder, I should be part of that process of making those payments and that’s actually the next step that you referred to, have real, decentralized autonomous organization whereby we actually control the money on chain to release these payments after we voted for this or that. That’s actually a really complex problem. We had someone who got a proposal passed to start working on that. It’s being worked on and we’re hoping by the end of this year we’ll have made significant headway there.

It’s a good problem to have that our decentralized treasury isn’t totally decentralized because most projects don’t have a treasury at all. But it’s still a problem that still needs to be addressed because we don’t like any single point of failure. So if someone gets hit by a bus, if someone decides they want to rob us or whatnot, that’s not good. We literally want to have to trust no one.

Laura Shin:

As we’ve mentioned some of these stats, around 50% of the coins being staked in these high participation rates on some of the votes, it does seem that you guys have a pretty engaged community and yet at the same time the number of monthly active addresses has been going down. Simultaneously, the NVT ratio, which is basically the network value divided by the daily transaction volume has gone up, which if that goes up it can indicate something is overvalued, although your network is nowhere near where some of the other coins are at. Anyway, why do you think the monthly active addresses have gone down and how do you plan to get Decred more widely adopted?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Right. That’s interesting. I mean one of the things that Decred does by default is literally uses a new address for everything. I think these things kind of ebb and flow naturally. I wouldn’t read too much into the active addresses because every time you’re buying a ticket a new address is being generated. Every time you’re going to receive coins a new address is being generated. We’re really against address reuse for the privacy reasons behind that. I think that’s natural fluctuations. The number that I really focus on more is percentage of coins and stakes, as you alluded to.

So when that’s going up it means people are engaged. To your point about overvaluation, it’s not something I’d worry too much about. I mean I’m an investor myself and in the short-term I see these markets as a casino and the long-term they’re a test of patience discipline and focus. We’re just at the beginning of really intelligent investors starting to get involved in this space heavily. I’m very encouraged by what we’re seeing around the Decred ecosystem. I mean Decred is essentially ruled by the people that own the coins. We’ve got some of the smartest people in the space taking interest, so I’m very bullish on the future there.

Laura Shin:

For adoption and getting more usage of Decred, how do you or how is the community thinking about how to make that happen?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

I mean that’s the beautiful think about the community. There’s so many opinions and we can actually take different approaches to it. So my view is I still see Decred as an amazing store of value. The properties that it has, the improvements that it makes to Bitcoin to make it different. Not necessarily better because Bitcoin’s got these unique advantages from being the first mover and dominating the most pervasive hashing algorithm out there but the things that make it a little bit different give us unique security guarantees. So hybrid proof of stake, proof of work that we have makes it so that at 5% of Bitcoin’s hash rate we get the same level of security because not only do you have to be able to control mining to take over Decred but you have to actually control all of these tickets.

So these unique security properties kind of make Decred a natural store of value and a lot of people see it as a hedge to Bitcoin. So if you’re going to own a bunch of Bitcoin you want to address tail risks like what if something goes wrong with Bitcoin. It’s probably not going to happen but as any good investor will do is you’re going to try and predict everything that could possibly happen. We see this store value market at the only area in cryptocurrency that’s really well-proven as a use case. So there’s a lot of cool stuff out there like various smart contract platforms and whatnot but the only use case that’s shown real, real use and picked up momentum over the years it seems has been this store of value narrative. That’s the most basic type of smart contract, transferring value from one person to another.

So that’s one of my views on it and the other is we want people to use it as a currency as well, so we’ll do everything possible there. Politeia is one of those great things where wallet developers can come and say we’d like to integrate Decred into our payment processing product and we need some money to do it and because we have that money we can actually bring on new developers to do that work. So it becomes kind of a virtuous self-sustaining cycle of new people can get paid, can come into this space and have a place where they work and learn and earn and what that does is just grow the demand and use cases for Decred.

Laura Shin:

All right. Well, it’s been super fascinating learning about Decred and hearing about your new privacy feature. Where can people learn more about you and Decred?

Jonathan Zeppettini:

They can go to Decred.org. I’m sure they can find me on there and they’ll find all sorts of information about the project for sure.

Laura Shin:

Great. Thanks so much for coming on Unchained.

Jonathan Zeppettini:

Thanks so much, Laura.

Laura Shin:

Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about JZ and Decred, check out the show notes inside your podcast player. If you’re not yet subscribed to my other podcast, Unconfirmed, which is shorter and a bit newsier, be sure to check that out. Also, find out what I think are the top stories each week by signing up for my email newsletter@unchainedpodcast.com. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Factal Recording, Anthony Yoon, Daniel Nuss, and Rich Stroffolino. Thanks for listening.