Episode link:
https://www.citizencosmos.space/chrisgoes

Episode name:
Governance in the Era of Technology: A Discussion on Syntax and Privacy with Chris Goes.

In this episode, we interviews Chris Goes from Anoma. The interview is both technical and philosophical and it covers a wide range of topics, including but not limited to; monetary theory, shortfalls of government, advances in hardware, mass adoption and the needs and wants of the people, to name a few. Chris also shares his initial journey that led him to Anoma and his passion for privacy.

Citizen Cosmos
Good space time, y'all. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast. We had the pleasure of speaking with Chris Goes from Anoma a project dedicated to providing privacy and governance on the blockchain. During our conversation with delved into some thought provoking topics such as the importance of privacy and governance, a polycentric conception of law, and the cultural context in which money operates, we explored how semantics can lead to dystopia and the dangers of gradient descent.

Citizen Cosmos
We tackled the nature of money and what people truly want or don't want out of it. Furthermore, we discussed the solutions to the shortcoming of blockchain governance, democracy, social equilibrium, using technology and the consensus building process.

Chris
Maybe it's like a perfectly coordinated dystopia. There's a lot of what I would call like gradient descent, and Defi could sometimes slip into this. And if we wants to build, you know, products that people, you know, in 100 years are still going to remember as opposed to being consigned to the annals of some Wikipedia page editing debate, We need a theory of what people want financial systems to do when lightspeed delays become real, like a multi-planetary species, and how that changes the dynamics of cultural evolution.

Chris
I Pay American taxes and I am forced to pay that under penalty of guns.

Citizen Cosmos
Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast. Today I have with me Christopher Goes, I will introduce him as the founder of the Anoma Project. But Chris hi and welcome to the show first of all.

Chris
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Citizen Cosmos
My pleasure. And second, I will ask you to introduce yourself in however way you would like that people to know you. I mean, I said founder of Anoma but I know you're a lot more than that and there's a lot more. But it's up to you, of course. So please introduce yourself. Tell us everything you do these days.

Citizen Cosmos
What are you interests, what do you work on? And whatever else you want us to know.

Chris
I don't know if I'm all that interesting, but I try. I got involved in the cosmos Project, which just got my first introduction to this space from a serious perspective back four four and a half years ago now, before the launch, about a year before the launch of the Cosmos Hub, I initially joined because the idea of IBC sounded very appealing to me.

Chris
I hadn't done sophisticated research at that point in time into what all of the technical constraints or economic constraints of blockchain protocols were. I just like the idea of kind of allowing for free interoporation. At that time, I was interested in sort of what you might call polycentric conceptions of [...]so how we are. Different communities have some rules on which they agree internally and internally.

Chris
They accord to those rules and they agree on some, but not all rules with other communities. And so they kind of you need a very flexible system to capture what you agree on, what you don't agree on, allow for interaction, where you agree a sort of separation or sovereignty or freedom of different choices wherever you don't. And so IBC certainly doesn't solve that problem completely.

Chris
But it seemed to me at the time like a step in that direction, protocol design perspective, which is also a technical area that I was at least somewhat familiar with. So I joined at that point in time, it was All In Bits incorporated or Tendermint the company and moved to Berlin, Germany to work for Tendermint I worked for Tendermint for two years.

Chris
I first worked on the launch The Cosmos Hub, then on IBC, and when the engineering team spun out of Tendermint to form interchain [...], I was part of that effort. I stayed with interchain [...] until the launch of IBC and then left to a follow on Adrian, who is also a co-founders of Anoma Together. We had also been running Cosmos Validator [...] Labs prior to that.

Chris
That's sort of the Cosmos centric introduction. Yeah, I would say that, you know, I've started in the definitely started from a very technical perspective. I was the first software engineer then kind of a protocol designer and to try to broaden my understanding in, you know, areas which I'm really personally very unfamiliar with, at least from an academic perspective, like anthropology and economics and sort of cultural systems, since those seem to play such a large role in how these kind of equilibria of technology and human interaction end up working out.

Citizen Cosmos
There's two facts I love about your introduction. One is how you are completely like denying your own importance. I love that because I know the work you did for IBC and I know It's kind of things you've written. I love, this is great. And second, it's fascinating to me that everything you say, you mention communication because in my opinion blockchain is a communication tool, right?

Citizen Cosmos
We are social creatures. We cannot survive without communication. So I'm excited that a developer on your level, somebody who's contributed so much to IBC, is talking about polycentric conceptions and consensuses, and that's what got them interested essentially in that technology. Why in the first thing is first, you mentioned that IBC doesn't solve those issues and yeah, I have my own opinion.

Citizen Cosmos
Why doesn't. But I would like to hear yours. Why doesn't IBC solve the issues you were mentioning about polycentric concepts and communication and consensus.

Chris
Right? No, I mean, I think maybe IBC is a necessary but not sufficient component of a solution, as in it's part of the technical substrate you need for a consensus systems to interoperate. But that's not the technical substrate is very insufficient to determine a social equilibrium. Right. So if you think of like what social equilibrium, I'm some proper theorists are going to kill me for this.

Chris
Right. But if you think of what the social equilibrium of a system is, it's some combination of the technology. So like what the system does, it's something could think of it as a syntactical level. So like language has syntax and semantics. The syntax determines what's grammatical, it determines what are like words. It determines how you tell one word from another.

Chris
But syntax alone doesn't have anything to do with the relationship between the language of the word. So in our language, banana means, you know, yellow thing that you put in. At least I do an apple means, you know, a red round thing that you chomp down At least I do. And we could have another language where apple means long yellow thing and banana means round red thing.

Chris
Right. And that would be a difference in semantics. Right. But association between the word the correspondence between the words and reality has changed, but kind of the same syntax. So similarly protocols are basically syntax like TCPIP Most blockchain protocols describe how like what are valid states of the system and how you can transition between those states. And they, you know, they can have informational syntax like private keys or, you know, you can authorize users by whether or not they know particular information was a very powerful protocol side primitive, but it still doesn't it isn't sufficient to determine semantics like how a system is used.

Chris
So in another analogy, you could have a monetary system and what happens as a result of the monetary system is in part a function of like the technical side, like what is money, How does it flow between people? Is it privately owed, collectively owed? What are the mechanisms of issuance, stuff like this? But the other part depends on what people do with the money, like when you have money, most of the time you're doing something with it, you're spending it, you're giving it to somebody else.

Chris
You could have a monetary system that had like some currency with some currency issue. It's policy and everyone used it to buy sandwiches. You could have the same currency issuance policy. Everybody uses it to buy weapons. Those are two very different. Social equilibrium rights system alone is not sufficient to determine social equilibrium. So IBC is the technical part or the syntactical part, right?

Chris
But it's not number one, it doesn't go all the way in the protocol design perspective. It doesn't include stuff like, say, tokens of the specific units of the system, which she wants potentially to correspond to features of the real world. And number two, it doesn't include the kind of cultural or sort of use praxis part of equilibrium.

Citizen Cosmos
I mean, you mentioned semantics. Another topic that I'm absolutely well, not even fascinated, but I'm obsessed with semantics, to be honest with you. How do you unify semantics in your opinion? I mean, you spoke about a great example of bananas and apples. And I mean, one of the most common examples, you know, is the Bulgarians. Yes or no.

Citizen Cosmos
Right? I don't know whether you're familiar. Right. Is complete. Exactly. So just for the listeners who are not seen as the Bulgarian, yes and no are different moments of the head to what we're used to. So exactly what Chris was saying. So how do we unify semantics? How do we get to the point of that? Everything that we say means everything for everybody.

Citizen Cosmos
The same thing for everybody.

Chris
Right? To be honest, I’m not sure that it's possible. I was not even sure that it's desirable. I mean, in some sense, if you think of a completely unified semantics for everyone wants the same thing. It's you know, to me it's a little bit dystopian. Maybe it's like a perfectly coordinated dystopia. So for the inhabitants, maybe it's a utopia insofar as it's perfectly coordinated with what they bought.

Chris
But it sounds like really boring, I guess. My objection is not not so theoretical. It sounds boring. What would there be to do in such a world? Everything would already be done. So I think one of the ideas behind, for example, polycentric law is that you have to accept that semantics is not going to be unified, or at least that what people will want to do.

Chris
Maybe preferences, you know, semantics like the correspondence, but preferences are not going to be unified and work under that assumption. But still, then you face the kind of opposite question of how do you coordinate at all? And then you're kind of answering that at the slightly derivative question of how do we figure out if we agree on semantics and are what we want?

Chris
And if we have figured that out, how do we like, actually coordinate what's there? And if you have a faithful mechanism and if agreed on these things, then it seems like you should be able to get to a mutually preferred.

Citizen Cosmos
I totally agree. I think, you know, it seems that whenever we talk about, you know, semantics or syntax, we're talking about consensus underneath it all. So going back to consensus and considering you did so much work on IBC and you already mentioned, what are, in your opinion, you know, some of the issues with IBC, but how do we improve upon that?

Citizen Cosmos
And I mean, you know, not necessarily technically, maybe again, feel free to answer the question and however you hear in it, but how do we improve upon it?

Chris
Right. I mean, I think there are two interesting versions of this question. One of them is technical. Another one is, as may be more product oriented or sort of cultural, technological to just as a brief shout out to the technical. Answer to the question after working on IBC for a few years, I've come to the conclusion that IBC and Tendermint should be unified because it cleans up a bunch of the abstractions and it allows IBC does a whole host of things like handshakes, which are extremely complicated, hard to get right, and props to the brilliant engineers at at interchain and informal for getting it right despite it being complicated.

Chris
But I think some of it's unnecessary if you unify IBC and Tendermint into more content address naming, which basically gets sort of handshakes. So I think that there are technical improvements that could be made which would achieve the same functionality for applications which use IBC while simplifying the protocol stack walk [...] from informal has a really good proposal that I keep trying to promote.

Chris
So we'll do it on this. You can ask him to the second question, you know, and that said, even doing that kind of cleans up some of the technical stack, but it doesn't and it adds some new features, but it doesn't change so much what IBC offers to applications. IBC already is quite generals and asynchronous cross-chain message passing protocol, so I think we can answer a question one or two independently to the second question.

Chris
I'm not sure that it's precisely IBC that needs to change, but what I would like to see, you know, from the Cosmos ecosystem and other blockchain ecosystems is a much more thought out theory of product. And what I mean by a theory of product is, you know, to think about there's a lot of what I would call like gradient descent and Defi could sometimes slip into this.

Chris
But where and what I mean by gradient descent is where product designers are. People who are actually building blockchains seem to be asking themselves the question of something like, What do people want now? Where can I like take this existing thing and make it like better in this specific way? And maybe people will want that. And I don't mean to that kind of innovation is fantastic.

Chris
My concern is that that is 99% of what's happening and the danger of gradient descent is that it's gradient descent, that it tends to fall into local minima and that you tend to end up with something that like maybe a small segment of people in the world who have tokens and want to trade their existing tokens once or not.

Chris
Even that just to like some specific maybe some specific gaming thing or something like this. But you don't, you know, when you're just looking at these very now, very present time indicators, you don't necessarily get a sense of what like a much broader swath of people would want or what people would want in the long term, absent some very specific conditions that are likely to change.

Chris
So I think, you know, in terms of what I mean by a theory of product, there are I want to give shout outs to some groups who really are doing this. I would say the Circles project in Berlin, the grassroots economics project, some of these folks have thought about, you know, what is money, how is money embedded in cultural contexts?

Chris
What do people want or not want out of money? And how do maybe blockchain systems as a design tool change some of these equilibrium or enable things that weren't before possible? AT I think more experimentation in that direction, but also trying to come up with a more serious mathematical language for describing what it is that we want financial systems to do is it would be really helpful.

Chris
So by contrast, sometimes it seems to be like there's this really strong two cultures divide where there are brilliant engineers, mathematicians, distributed systems, scientists, cryptographer that come up with very well specified definitions of the syntax of the protocols, how they work, how they're received from a distributed systems perspective, how their privacy, preserving cryptographic perspective, etc.. But then there's this line, and on top of these protocols, they're like smart contracts, they're apps, and they don't have like often they have no theory whatsoever.

Chris
Right? They have like there's a token and it does something that first will make a token because that's how we fundraise. And then we'll try and come up with a theory to make the token valuable. And I mean, one of in part this is like, I don't mean to critique people too much because in part this is just because our current economic system is so broken that a lot of people have kind of given up and don't even try to come up with theories anymore.

Chris
And I could totally empathize. But on the other hand, it's still like going to work. And if we want to build, you know, products that people, you know, in 100 years are still going to remember as opposed to being consigned to the annals, some Wikipedia page editing debate when you the theory of what people want financial systems to do and whether or not we are accomplishing that

Citizen Cosmos
I'm going to, you know, play devil's advocate now. But if you just said, you know, unified Semantics, man, of course, that doesn't mean unified agreement and unified consensus is boring. Right? But isn't unified consensus on what all those economical theories would achieve would also be boring? Because if everybody was believe in like all we need is just, you know, I don't know whatever to build the next Eiffel Tower.

Citizen Cosmos
It would be the reward. That's we get it. And so wouldn't it be kind of boring as well.

Chris
Right? That is a good question. To be clear, I'm not advocating for one economic theory to rule them all. I just advocating for more theory because that seems like that's the direction in which things need to go. But still, I think there is somewhat of a distinction here in that. So when we talk about, for example, a system of money, we could agree on the mechanisms, we could agree on the mechanisms of of a system of money, and we could agree on a theory of correspondence like how we want to use that money to represent things in the real world without agreeing on what we want in the real world.

Chris
And when I'm talking about maybe I'm talking here about unanimity of preferences, I don't think it would be boring for what wanted the same thing. But there are some things on which consensus is kind of like free and doesn't seem to cost anyone very much. Like, for example, TCP IP is a good example of this. More or less everyone benefits by adopting the same standardized set of internet protocols.

Chris
TCP IP is maybe not like perfectly efficient, but it's 90% efficient for what it does. And it does, you know, the only thing you could replace it with is something like 10% better for the specific thing, which it does in organizing messages between computers. Right. So I think there's similar, you know, not necessarily all the way to kind of the end product or interface, but there may be some similar points in between IBC and like user spending money that we can come to consensus on.

Citizen Cosmos
So it's interesting. I mean, I know I'm kind of like dragging you another way a little bit, but I'm just, you know, I want to get into your head a little bit more. Sorry about that. And to me, it seems that, you know, I mean, you're mentioned in like clear set examples like TCP IP which are easy to understand for people like myself, you and a lot of the listeners probably of this podcast and probably a lot of other people as well.

Citizen Cosmos
But, you know, this is something that I was trying to ask people a few months ago in Lisbon. I was going around and talking with steak, fish and with it was taking a, you know, swan. And a lot of the guys from that and the set of questions I had for them was always like, Do you guys honestly believe that what we are doing here is the problems people are trying to solve?

Citizen Cosmos
And what I mean is, you know, you mentioned semantics, you mentioned things like unification. But there is one thing like tradition, for example, which really is a pain in the ass because, you know, for a lot of people that belief in whatever is religious tradition or any other taboo topic, you know, which which could concern economical things as well, like Shariah law, for example.

Citizen Cosmos
Right. Or the 10th and Judaism or whatever, is really creating a problem for us to have consensus and to move on forward as humanity? I think So again, we kind of coming back to consensus, right? It seems that it's always a fucking issue consensus.

Chris
Yeah. I mean, I think this will quickly veer beyond the domain of blockchain, but there's an interesting question here as to, you know, where do my freedoms infringe on yours? Right. You know, if I'm observing different religious practices in the privacy of a home or in some private way, it seems like that doesn't if I'm attacking you with the rifle, it seems like it does.

Chris
Right? So there are differences here. I won't try to draw and attacked line, Right. But there's some spectrum. To me. The question, though, I don't think that's a problem that blockchains can solve, as in at least not directly because the most blockchains can do is change the economics ... help change the economic system so that there will be less reason for, you know, maybe less possibility for military industrial complex to capture government money printing facilities and manufacture absurd amounts, unnecessary arbitrary arguments.

Chris
But if there are like, yeah, blockchains don't stop guys with guns and they don't change that fundamental question of when some freedoms infringe on others in the use of force, I think yeah, we should limit that or try to see clearly. That said to me that's not the important question because it's not number one, it's not particularly tractable, it's just like fundamental and number two, or rather that has to do with different questions in physics, like the cost of attack versus defense.

Chris
I think then there's an interesting question. When you when light speed delays become real, like the multi-planetary species and how that changes the dynamics of cultural evolution. But maybe you just won't go that far tangentially for now.

Citizen Cosmos
No, no, no, no. It's good. It's good because I just want to say thank you for what you're saying. I'm sorry to interrupt you because I think it's very important to say that blockchain doesn't solve this because a lot of people have this belief that it does. You know, and you're right, you know, guns don't kill people. People kill people.

Citizen Cosmos
You know, it's how very old the old song from, I guess mine in your childhood, roughly. But, you know, so go on as far as you can is you want because I think you're right for by saying this I absolutely agree with you on that. Yeah.

Chris
I mean, to me, the question is, you know, I for example, I am an American citizen. I pay American taxes and I am forced to pay that under penalty of guns or indirect guns. And I am pretty unhappy with some of the things the American government spends money. And some of the things are nice, like social programs. Some of the things are maybe marginal.

Chris
Does the education system work? I don't know. Kind of like prison for kids, but at least it's there's some some positive benefits. Some of the things are terrible, like drones hitting civilians in the Middle East and, you know, guns to lock up whistle blowers in jail or threaten them and prevent them from entering the country and am like in any other situation, I would never pay money to an entity which did this right.

Chris
Like what's coming in there is the force and that I want to be able to see my family in the United States again right. But that's pretty you know, to me, it feels like a pretty terrible decision to have to make to be honest. So, you know, independent of I'm not I'm not making a case against taxes specifically, but more and more generally, I think it's important to ask the question of is the financial system doing what we wanted to do, like as humans, as people, you know, both at a sort of very micro-scale like for local communities and at a broad scale for global communities, is the financial system is not.

Chris
Sometimes I think especially here I'm going to be maybe slightly spicy, but especially in disciplines such as economics, people take aspects of the financial system as law or like physical law. They're not physical law. The financial system was created by people. It was usually, you know, what we currently have is an amalgamation of many different choices made at many different times, at many kind of systemic evolutions that were not, you know, even chosen by any one person or group, which they just with the accumulation of multiple actions, a lot of it's contingent.

Chris
And, you know, it's difficult, of course, difficult to apprehend. It's very complicated. You can't, like, understand every interaction. But on the other hand, you know, to me, the operative question, especially for people interested in signing blockchain protocols, is what do we want the financial system to do? Does our current financial system do it? And if so, or if not, how could we crafted alternative system which did it better and how much better?

Chris
You know, how does that system work.

Citizen Cosmos
And seriously like this is, I think the first times im agreeing with the guest in three and a half years and a ten out of ten scale like I mean, just one thing to say, I don't know if you knew, but the irony is that one of the guys who contributed I mean, you said financial laws are not laws.

Citizen Cosmos
Absolutely. You know, but it's the irony is that John Law, the guy with a surname law, was one of the biggest contributors to the more than what people call I mean, you said taxes. I call it theft. You know, like the very similar it's irony, You know, the government how does the government work? It asks you for money and gives you protection.

Citizen Cosmos
I know one other entity that works exactly in the same way. It's called the Mafia. So if you don't pay, it doesn't protect you. You know, it kills you. So man. Okay, but let's go back to money for a second. Let's go back to money. So, you know, because it seems that everything we're talking about that can be done, it can be influenced, you know, because consensus is it seems that a bit more difficult to influence.

Citizen Cosmos
But at least we can influence with Blockchain's money. Okay, so let's talk about that. So how do you first of all and this is going to be more of a project question, but we'll go into detail about that. And I want to know, I don't know if you want to talk about Anoma or a little bit like towards in a couple of minutes, But still, I would like to know maybe how you guys approach economics.

Citizen Cosmos
I hate the word tokenomics I'm not going to use it. Sorry, but how do you approach economics in Anoma? But with it I'm going to ask maybe like what are, in your opinion, some of the obvious things at issues that blockchain economics have from what you've seen already, and maybe mention how you guys approach and solve them.

Citizen Cosmos
in Anoma

Chris
Right? So I think there are two categories of blockchain economics questions. The first category is kind of internal system designs. This is most commonly what goes under Tokenomics, but even stuff like proof of stake system designs, I would put in this category. So things which have to do and what I mean by internal system designs is that proof of stake is supposed to serve a like pretty clear function in the context of a proof of stake.

Chris
And [...] it's blockchain, namely it's supposed to assign staked validators so that they can be given voting weight and BFT-systems it's supposed to somehow discourage validators from behaving differently than the protocol says they should behave. And in particular, it's supposed to, you know, minimize or try and disincentivize the particular BFT threshold risks like one third and two thirds.

Chris
Right. Those holds true kind of independently of like what the blockchain itself does, like what the product is. They're just more internal systems, just like questions. You have a question of, you know, if you have transactions which are more valuable to reorder than the proof of stake system itself is that maybe you have some security problems. You can kind of separate these things by an abstract barrier.

Chris
The second question, which yeah, maybe is a bit relevant to my earlier point, but is a question of how do you want the state of this, what I call maybe a theory of correspondence. So what state are you interested in, the real world or in some other system in representing on the blockchain? This doesn't have to be the real, quote unquote, real world across the game, right?

Chris
A theory of like what? There are items in the game and there are things people can do with them and we want to represent them in this and this way. Right? But even there you have interesting questions like, boy, I think it was some Second Life clone ended up implementing land taxes or something like that, like Georgian land taxes because they found out it ended up it led to more people staying in the game because the wealth didn’t concentrate so much so they're interesting questions even for stuff like games.

Chris
Yeah. So how do we approach them? We approach them by first bucketing them into kind of those two categories so we can deal with them separately. Narmada I would say does not greatly innovate on the second front, as in the product is very simple. The product is just transforms. Nomada innovates a little bit on the first front in design system called Cubic Proof of Stake, which is a sort of spiritual descendant of the cosmos spotted prof of stake system that features similar style of bonds.

Chris
But it has something called cubic slashing where slash rates change according to what stake of validators committed in a faction within a particular interval and the formula ends up being cubic, hence the name. And that's designed to discourage validators centralization so that if you delegate to several smaller validators, have uncorrelated setups, even if they get slash, the slash amount will be much less than if one large validator gets punished

Chris
And the idea is that captures some of the risk to the protocol of having many or a small number of or high power validators There's some maybe some interesting work there that we're hoping might be. The system is quite general. It could be adopted by by the cosmos SDK or by other cosmos chains. And we're hoping to see, you know, some unfortunately prof of stake system design kind of died two years ago was a big thing.

Chris
You know, around time of the launch of the Cosmos hub, everyone was trying new proof of stake systems and then everyone just concluded that they were good enough and stop designing new protocols. I'm not convinced the timeline we care about is longer and also maybe this is a public service advisory, but if you are running a Cosmos blockchain and using the Cosmos proof of stake system, you should read the code.

Chris
Not, I think the SDK maintainers do a great job, but the system design was designed for the Cosmos hub launched by like three junior engineers. It's not the proof of a perfect proof of stake system. You could probably do better. So some innovation there would be great to see in the second front. Or to the second question, Anoma is I would say has been tried to articulate a better theory of correspondence or theory of products.

Chris
This is the part that we didn't know how to do. We knew kind of the technical stuff. You know, if you read the Anoma original Anoma vision paper, which we don't delete because you know, censorship resistant, no deleting history, but you will find that it contains a lot of wildly speculative language, which I would now disavow.

Chris
But it was, you know, it conveyed the direction of investigation that we were interested. And we have since made a fair amount of progress. You can look at some of the new specs still not done yet. I mean, I think we've had to you know, personally, I've ended up reading a lot of app topology. We've had to dive into a lot of different disciplines to try and better understand, you know, what we should think of as a theory of product.

Chris
We've learned a lot from some of the folks circles, from informal cooperative finance team, from, you know, lots of other people in the ecosystem who have different specific perspectives. So we're kind of we're interested maybe in the more theoretical side because we're trying to build technology that will work for all of these maybe different community currency schemes, stuff like this.

Chris
So we're trying to work on that Part of the problem.

Citizen Cosmos
I just remembered when you talk about anthropology that I once [...] written an article, part of which was how to fix anthropology with digital consensuses. But yeah, I just remember that. But regardless of that can we, I think I skipped one part of Anoma. Can we kind of go back a little bit and once second let me see if I wrote it down here because I like doing this.

Citizen Cosmos
I know that it might not be like, you know, the best thing to do, but I like doing this. I'm going to say a sentence from a website that I think every person who would open the Anoma website will see this sentence. I think it's on your Twitter as well. I mean, the Anoma Twitter and I want you to help me like really pretend I'm really not understanding any word at all.

Citizen Cosmos
And so Anoma an intense centric privacy preserving protocol for a centralized counterparty discovery solving and multi-chain atomic settlement. Now let's pretend nothing zero like I want you to choose if you can. Of course, different words to tell me what this sentence says. So and I don't want grandma to understand that I'm really like not this kind of person.

Citizen Cosmos
Let's do adoption for grandmas. No, let's not do adoption for grandmas, because that's going to happen when we going to be grandmas. So let's just try and explain this in a bit of them if you can like really ELI5 that sentence.

Chris
Right? Let me try try one. I should say that we're definitely going to change that tagline. We know that it's terrible, it takes time, but we'll find something. It's still accurate, but we've had maybe a dozen. It's good taglines. The hardest thing, you know, it's like the bike sharing, a bike sharing a protocol sign. But I guess what I would say is this.

Chris
So to us, blockchains are interesting. Like we like talking about them. We like reasoning about the protocol design. We have long you know, I like having long debates about how to do something or another interest in the internals, how the systems work. Perhaps slightly sad, but also probably good discovery of mind that to most people, blockchains are boring.

Chris
They care about what the system looks from the outside. They want to do something right, like, you know, and I see this too, and I've ended up learning more about how the financial system works. And boy, like, I really kind of don't want to like, I don't care how the Fed works. So what are these theories like some very elegant.

Chris
You know, it's not esthetically appealing. Right. But I've learned that because I kind of want to understand what's going on. But part of Anoma’s thesis is that we want to build a system with very clear abstraction boundaries so that users can use the system based on what they want to do with it. And it's the system's responsibility to figure out how to do that

Chris
Or to fail, right? So that's what we mean by intent centric. The users describe what they want, which could be something as simple as sending a transfer, right? That's a very straightforward instruction. But it could also be something like finding someone to trade with. Which brings me to the next part of Counterparty Discovery. And so. So most blockchains right now deal with settlement.

Chris
Settlement is what happens when you have a transaction, when you know what you want to do and you just need to settle it you know, who you're interacting with, you know what you're trading, you know what's going to happen. Basically, you need it to be ordered by a blockchain so you can confirm it in history. Update your sort of consensus state, right?

Chris
Settlement is generally the second part of a process. And the first part of the process is counterparty discovery. So for anything more complex than a transfer where you already know who the counterparty is by some other process like going to the coffee store, you want to usually find a counterparty. So when you want to barter, when you want to do some sort of exchange between different currencies, when you want to do some kind of economic interaction involving your heterogeneous units in multiple parties, you need to discover counterparties.

Chris
I mean, at the moment in the blockchain ecosystem, this happens in a kind of ad hoc way. There are, you know, for example, Opensea, you know, some other zero X protocols like this. Run a server to store orders which are signed messages, so they do counterparty discovery through a server. I mean, to start centralizing this is not necessarily as bad as centralizing settlements.

Chris
The server can't steal your assets, but it still has usually full view into all of your data. So it's not very privacy preserving and the server can front run you because it has some control over ordering it censorship abilities in there. Other sort of Uniswap does counterparty discovery on chain? In a weird way, there are I think, some Cosmos blockchains which maybe DYDX, which seem like they're going to do it by sending things around in the mempool Anoma just to build a general layer for doing this.

Chris
So it's like a kind of gossip network, like the mem pool. But the difference in a mempool like the tendermint mempool you gossip around transactions which all validators need to eventually receive, and all of them need to be like included in history, right? So it's like a, it's a very simple gossip network because everyone is the nodes are homogeneous and you want all of them to receive all of the messages.

Chris
Whereas in internet gossip, you're many, most of the time your gossiping intense, which might not necessarily be matched because maybe you don't have a counterparty. And it's important that's trying to discover whether or not you have a counterparty is very cheap. So for that reason, the [...] gossip network is sparse. As in you send around your like I want A, I have B, you basically turn that into a signed message, sends it around.

Chris
So if anyone has B wants A we could do ring trades more complex things. But the basic pattern and then once some kind of if in fact there is a A for B, B for C in the C for A, we can someone solve our it, combine those three together, turn it into a transaction and send it to the regular blockchain.

Chris
So the first phase that the gossip finding matches the solver does, that's counterparty discovery. Then second phase is solid.

Citizen Cosmos
That's quite a few things that you said there. Definitely need a new tagline just saying. It's just saying. But I like that because of those taglines and the reason I like to ask about them was definitely not to tell you. You need a new tagline. I'm really bad with those things, but it really helps to understand like what the people behind the project try to put into that too.

Citizen Cosmos
And when you explain it like that and I'm going to go from here to Anoma and economics and you already started to talk about it. So I'm going to go back to it slowly. And but I think before that, even before that, I have a note here from when you're speaking user centric and this is something I wanted to ask you about as well.

Citizen Cosmos
It seems to me that a lot of the things you talk about and a lot of the things Anoma have puts out there, I mean, I must say I'm not that familiar with Anoma, but from what I know, from what I've read, from what I've seen, it's a lot about decentralization, a lot about some of the values that blockchains originated.

Citizen Cosmos
Let's just play this use. That's right. If we were to talk about user centrism, can I say that like that's and about what is going on with governance and blockchains and I want to know your opinion. I mean, we can take it to Cosmos. Let's I mean, I don't know if you want to like shoot at anybody feel free, go.

Citizen Cosmos
So in my opinion, I think that the way the governance, blockchain governance is designed today, especially in proof of stake systems, well not especially but in especially but in proof of stake systems and particularly in cosmos, is definitely not user centric. So I want you to comment on that and tell me what you think and tell me how can we solve this in your opinion or if it needs to be solved.

Chris
Right. Yeah. I mean, I would certainly I would didn't go further than that and say that the way governance is currently described in most Proof of stake blockchain systems is random and not based on any coherent theory of much whatsoever. Well, there are a few of like factors here, and some of them are not bad. So one factor is, I think, a sort of misinterpreted good intention of more democracy.

Chris
Everyone likes democracy, right? Democracy is the one word which still universally good. Every country in the world is like People's Democratic Republic of the United States, of a lot of prisons, whatever. But that's the one word surprising so many. It is surprising to me because almost everything has been politically polarized now and then linguistic sphere. But democracy is still universally good.

Chris
Everyone wants democracy. No one knows what the fuck democracy is. So in particular, a lot of blockchain systems signers have taken it upon themselves to implement democracy. You know, maybe there's some initial thing of like need to coordinate hard forks, which is true. But and, and they've like made voting systems and them historic thing you could do is to make voting systems where everyone could vote.

Chris
So maybe you have one layer of delegation to go to validators or something like this. The problem is that this solves solves the easy part of the problem, which solves the part that doesn't matter very much what makes democratic society. I think there's a good like historical record on this. If you read like to talk about democracy in America or something like this, what makes democratic societies work is not the voting mechanisms.

Chris
What makes democratic societies work is the systems of consensus building. I would say like where people discuss whether many different layers of groups which come to sort of independent consensus these and then negotiate with each other and in particular, democracies also work as a check on the elites when they provide a credible threat. That's if you know, you do such and such will be voted out.

Chris
And when they change the incentives for elections in ways that at least kind of, you know, democracies are not particularly good at selecting for extremely good leaders. But there are like sometimes okay, it's selecting against really awful leaders that, you know, maybe it's the most we can expect. It was system of government. Luckily, blockchains aren't solving a problem that is that hard.

Chris
They're solving a much more extreme problem because they're not governments. They don't control armies yet. Please don't make them control armies. So we don't need to go that far. But you know, to me, the key question in. Right, another exacerbating factor just to yeah, go through the analysis here is I think it's interesting is that often someone launches a blockchain projects and then they do some things and then they don't know what to do after that.

Chris
And so they like say, oh, governance can figure out what to do. This doesn't work. It's never going to work. The you know, it's like creating a board solve a problem which already doesn't work except that you're like creating a giant board composed of random people can all exit any time to solve the problem, which is even less likely to work.

And it's not necessarily I mean, from the perspective of an individual blockchain one, [...] makes sense, but from the perspective of like an ecosystem of blockchains, I think that we can have a much higher risk tolerance. Like I think that we could tolerate structures which have frankly, smaller numbers of parties making decisions as long as it's easy to exit the system because, you know, if you can move your money, maybe move your assets out of a system freely, then different systems can experiment with different things.

Chris
There more some sense, you know, many blockchains as it stands are more like companies which are de facto dictatorships than they are like states. And, you know, insofar as blockchains have that structure that I think we should be optimizing governance more for a lot of like quick experiments than for conservatism and large numbers of stakeholders voting to approve things is going to lead to conservative, not American conservative, but like classically conservative in the sense that risky changes are not generally dont go through more conservative governance.

Chris
Yeah, but I think then there's a separate question of like, what do you actually need to design a governance system and how do you think about the various actors involved and what's the information flow? Who's kind of, you know, what is the purpose of the system In the first, you can't design governance like absent of a purpose. States are maybe a slight exception to this, but they are an exception grounded in different historically contingent reasons and they don't apply to blockchains.

Chris
So I think it's unlikely to if you don't have a clear product definition for your blockchain unless you have a community with some other bonds, like if you have a localized community, I think that's different. If you have a community in some economic you who has some like other reason than the blockchain for coordinating with each other and maybe a governance system makes sense, then the governance system could be used by that community to like agree on what they want the blockchain to do for the community.

Chris
But if the blockchain is the community and the governance systems versus decide what the blockchain, i.e. the community is for, then there's no purpose to the system anymore and it will eventually probably fall apart.

Citizen Cosmos
Will we ever come to a day where blockchain governance is going to become efficient, in your opinion, on chain governance?

Chris
Right? To me the central question is always is governance supposed to be doing so? You could have a very narrow definition of governance, which is like.

Citizen Cosmos
Be efficient, right?

Chris
Efficient at what? Right. Efficient is always towards some kind of purpose.

Citizen Cosmos
Anything. Anything.

Chris
All right. All right.

Citizen Cosmos
I'm being devil's advocate, of course. You know, I have to be a little bit so I have to like.

Chris
Fair, fair, to use some examples. So and I'm not the most plugged into the cosmos governance ecosystem. But as I understamd in Cosmos, people have used governance proposals to agree on some hardforks, to discuss potential protocol changes, roadmaps, and to sometimes distribute funds, usually at some kind of form of public goods funding or funding open source work funding, Commission's work, stuff like, I actually think these are very different problems, so they probably should be treated by different systems.

Chris
So the problem of funding public goods or funding works that's relevant to community or a project is very interesting and important. I think it is considerably easier than whole different space mechanisms than most current cosmos governance systems because you don't need total consensus. So you need total consensus for something like a hard fork, because if two different, you know, 50% decrease in hard fork, the 50% decrease in the other hard fork, the, you know, the system will fork

Chris
So governance, if you want governance to kind of act before hard forks, then you need total consensus. But just for spending funds, you know, you can mint more funds, right? Or as long as they fall under some caps on count. Maybe the decisions themselves are not necessarily conflicting with each other. So I think you can build governance systems which are much more oriented around like, you know, sufficient quorums to do things but which don't go through, go through everybody and for, you know, public goods funding in particular, there are interesting science frictions and quadratic public goods funding.

Chris
You could do some kind of liquid democracy. There are kind of many different options that don't, you know, don't look like proposal voting. I think retroactive public goods funding is a really interesting candidate I hope some people try that. There. I think like a lot of mechanism experimentation would be a good way to go for specifically coordinating on hard forks in general where the hard forks like extremely technical, like they're fixing a bug or they're like fixing or optimizing some existing existing feature.

Chris
I think the proposal process works fine. You know, it could be optimized somewhat, but those don't seem to be controversial validators. You know, the tooling could be better. But like the kind of structure is okay when the hard forks are sort of changing major things or there's like some strategic question, then it's not that relevant. Like what's relevant is the process in the community beforehand to come to consensus and you know what the actual voting mechanism is, is kind of subsidiary to that.

Chris
I think that sometimes for example, with the cosmos hub and atom 2 there was there were a lot of different camps with kind of longstanding, different ideas about what what the cosmos should do. And I honestly, you know, the important question is, can we come with some like more economically reasonable way of forking so that those camps and experiments independently instead of being so tied together?

Chris
I think being tied together is what's inefficient. It would much better if we could just like you're supposed The Cosmos Hub has some like value, right? Like in part what what enables people to collaborate on it is that, you know, they can exchange items for other currencies or like there's some people who want to use system. I think it would be nice if we could come up with a sort of different way of forking that was not just like creating two tokens or maybe different ways to coordinate integrations.

Chris
So the fork can be palatable so that you know, different camps who want different incompatible protocol changes could just split. I think there's not necessarily been a lot of mechanism work in this so far. I mean, that's tricky because a lot of value is like name recognition or something like this. Like it's how exactly do you can you automate this from a protocol perspective?

Chris
I'm not sure, but there could do some like exchange rate agreements or something like this. There are options. So I think that would be interesting. I think the final part of governance system design that I'll cover that I think is relevant is privacy. Privacy is very important because it allows people to make decisions in a way that is resistant against cherrypicking.

Chris
So let me explain what I mean by this. I would say privacy is like a tool in the Governance Resilience Design toolkit. So privacy doesn't really change like what your governance system should do, and it doesn't change the voting mechanism, but it can provide resilience. And what a lot of blockchain governance systems lack is resilience, as in it's very effective for outsiders to attack the system not by sort of proposing constructive alternatives, but by kind of sometimes [...] like saying that it should be $19 and instead of $20 and sometimes, you know, attacking specific parties based on how they vote or stuff like this.

Chris
I think about like the theory of voting systems. Usually what you want to do is elicit true information from participants as an elicit their honest preference about which alternative would be better. And if votes are not private, then if participants know that their vote votes will be seen and they vote due to some other reason than you're actually not eliciting that information anymore.

Chris
You're eliciting like the others system information or in other in more direct terms. If you know everyone can be bribed to vote, Then when you conduct a vote tally, you're not learning what people think about this proposal. You're just learning who had the most money, which is fine. Maybe you're fine with learning that, but you've ended up with a different system, right?

Chris
So I think privacy is a very useful tool for designing more resilient governance systems, especially because of the how configurable [...] groups are. You can really like whatever balance you want to strike of, okay, like maybe the votes are private but the output is public or something. Aggregate totals are public wherever you kind of want to draw the line between individual actions or private, some collective outputs for public or something statistics are public, you could do that at least eventually with these these kinds of very configurable privacy technologies such as ZKp’s and some whole encryption.

Chris
I think there's a lot of room.

Citizen Cosmos
homomorphic encryption is the Holy Grail, right? So we don't go into that because I know it's a topic you're interested in, but definitely for another time because it's a huge, huge topic. I just want to ask one more thing about governance and do you think it's fair that especially without some tools like privacy, that centralized, biased and self-interested entities are allowed to publicly vote on important things?

Citizen Cosmos
I'm talking about validators, of course, and I'm a validator, by the way, and we validates Cosmos Hub. Of course, we are a self-interested, centralized, biased entity that I don't think should be able to publicly vote.

Chris
Interesting. I mean, I guess I think it's a matter of degree. I mean, everyone's a centralized, biased entity. That's what makes them people or organizations, and that's what gives them preferences. And if there weren't such things, then there would be no point designing any blockchain systems in the first place. So to some extent it's always a matter of degree.

Citizen Cosmos
I like.

Chris
It. I think there's an interesting question as to whether to what degree it makes sense to align validator voting power with governance power. And at the moment the answer the Cosmos ecosystem answer is like very high alignment. Delegators can override but validators have the default votes and there's not a separate delegate in general, I think maybe that's too high.

Chris
You can make it somewhat less like give people be operation ability to delegate different votes. Folks. But on the other hand, validators do have some incentive to align with the network as a whole. Often they hold the token, have some stake bonds. And I think you could end up with a system that's kind of if you end up with a system where those two groups are not coordinated at all or not correlated, at all than you might have different problems, like then maybe governance votes to do something, but validators don't want to do it and the validators are the ones who run the codes.

Chris
They always kind of have the final say. So I think you want a complex question. Actually, I think there is more room. I'd be curious to see. Like in a system where the choices were free, where you can delegate your vote to validator or you can also delegate your vote to Someone else who's not a validator but just a delegate.

Chris
I would be curious to see what equilibrium would look like.

Citizen Cosmos
I think I've seen some experiments on ether projects, but I'm not sure, So I'm not going to go into that. By the way, just for the record, not everybody likes the word democracy. In my opinion. That word associates like really Red Bells. And just like I think it's a really, really bad thing. I mean, Tendermint to me sounds like a much better consensus than the word democracy.

Citizen Cosmos
So and it's not perfect for sure, like we've just been speaking about. So but em Chris I know I'm really fascinated because I really want to get more into your head, but I know that I want to keep it still up to the hour. And so I'm going to go to the Blitz. I'm sorry. Okay. Three questions. Feel free to answer a bit more.

Citizen Cosmos
Not not as fast as you can. Feel free to answer how you want. And one of them you already kind of been answering because you've already been mentioning a lot of projects that you're really interested in. But this is the first question. Give me a couple, three projects that you're really interested in terms of R&D and research and development.

Citizen Cosmos
What are they working on? What are they doing maybe in consensus, maybe ZK proofs or something like that. So a few projects if you can, please.

Chris
Sure. I would say, let's see. I think the Circle's project is doing some really interesting work in economics product design. They're trying to work on a private web of trust now based on Berlin. I'd say I've always inspired by Henry [...] and Penumbra has kind of tight engineering designs that are very purpose driven and very elegant to accomplish their specific product of a private, interchain Dex.

Chris
So looking forward to see what happens there. I've read some really good consensus papers, mostly focused on Dex. Unfortunately, they all seem to be being implemented by Facebook ex Facebook teams who have brilliant consensus researchers and God awful products. Sorry.

Citizen Cosmos
I like this. I like this.

Chris
Yeah, I think they brilliant consensus researchers should work on a product which deserves them instead of like defi clones. It doesn't deserve their consensus research.

Citizen Cosmos
What about something like one project in terms of privacy? What have you seen? Anything this makes you aroused in terms of research and privacy or research of, you know, maybe eliminating or lowering the cost for ZK proofs or something like that? I don't know. Whatever something interests you.

Chris
Right?

Citizen Cosmos
In privacy.

Chris
I mean, there are some people working on hardware acceleration for ZKp’s which is great, I think. Yeah, I kind of just expect ZKp proof cost come down. I think there's enough ecosystem momentum that we can rely on that for several years. Hardware acceleration will give you another few orders of magnitude. There's still, you know, this kind of a convergence [...] for improvements.

Chris
I mean, I think private architectures actually seem to be converging to me, like elio Anoma at least very sexy, although I don't know exactly what it's supposed to systems is doing, at least the sort of private components of that architecture have ended up looking very similar. I think it's pretty constrained by using ZKp’s So maybe there's actually some more opportunity for shared code there.

Chris
The kind of application stacks of these protocols look different. They have different features, but some of the core like privacy technologies, similar, any specific I mean, they're that's good. I would say people work in FHE but I do not personally. I'm still a neophyte to that area of cryptography. So I don't know enough to like, understand how feasible the research actually is.

Chris
But I think there's sunscreen, there's some others, you know, even if it's early, if there's money towards going towards making that cryptography faster and more practical, then I'm excited to see what happens.

Citizen Cosmos
Cool. Second question am and this is going to be an unusual one, gives me two things which motivate you in your daily life to build on. Well, I guess if I was to summarize what you say. Well, to build a better financial system, right. But give me two like motivational things that you do in your daily life that if you want to share them, of course, that keep on helping you doing this.

Chris
Yeah, I would say I guess I try to read like especially perspectives of people who are reflecting on this question but are not in the blockchain sphere. You know, there's always you want the right amount of cultic ness, right? Like you want to be a little bit culty so you could develop interesting ideas without just ending up at mainstream consensus.

Chris
But you want to be not too culty that you go completely off the deep end. So I'm not sure if I maintain that balance or not but atleast I’m trying. I've been reading a book called The End of Finance. I can highly recommend it. Very good book, Perfect best so far for my understanding of like what an Earth is the current financial system and why, or at least how, even if there's no why start in terms of inspiration.

Chris
Yeah, I'll start talking to people, you know, people who are, you know, both in and outside the ecosystem and trying to understand, you know, what they want, how their perspective on things especially. It's always encouraging when you sort of I would say you learn that you've been thinking about the same problem, but you didn't know it. That moment is always very, very inspired.

Citizen Cosmos
It's always a boom when you've been like, Oh damn, I've been thinking about this for ten years. You kind of already just said that answer to your last question, but I'm still going to ask it because you might say something completely different to what I'm hearing. Give me dead or alive one inspirational person to follow. I know it's very to follow dead people, but it could be a book, it could be an author it could be a GitHub account, it could be a medium account.

Citizen Cosmos
Anything you want.

Chris
Yeah, I would say probably moxie marlinspike from signal, because I think signal has struck the very hard practical balance of building a protocol which is sort of cryptographically secure and correct and building a product that exposes the features of the protocol in a way which on balance makes most users safer. You know, it's not perfect, but it's like close.

Chris
And it's very hard to strike that balance. Blockchains have failed so far. They have not yet allowed so far anything like the reach or kind of effectiveness this at cost. So I would say, you know, slightly scoped in this area. I find Moxley's work very inspiring

Citizen Cosmos
Thanks, Chris. It's been fascinating. And the least I can say, unfortunately, I don't know. This always happens. Like I want you to have like somebody you want to talk to it just like that said men, though. Thank you very, very much for finding the time to join us today. And thank you for sharing all your views. Man. It was fascinating to listen to them chatting.

Chris
Thanks for thanks for the great questions and good luck with Citizen Cosmos.

Citizen Cosmos
Thanks. Thanks, everybody. bye

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