Awesome. Welcome y'all to Medigov seminar. Today is Wednesday, November 22, noon eastern time. Thank you all for coming out and joining us. We're very excited for today's presentation. So today's presentation is about grassroots architecture. I met Jacob on a different Medigov call, and we got to chatting about, yeah, essentially, decentralized governance and some of the applications of that as a philosophy, but also as, you know, a technical technical architecture, to underlay the Internet. And, you know, a lot of, Jacob's work and Udi's work will be presenting, overlaps with a lot of the concepts that we and Medigov, you know, tend to, research and study being that most of the mainstream Internet as we know it is pretty autocratic. And so we're shifting governance away from centralized sources to more people, more nodes, and trying to create a more democratic structure. So Jacob and I chatted about that, and, you know, he referenced Udi's work. And so we decided to propose this seminar where Udi can present his research. So I'll now pass it over to Jacob, to introduce professor Udi.

K. So shall I proceed then?

Please.

Okay. So hi, everybody. I'm glad to be here. I feel I may be preaching to the choir, but or the converted. But so if I if I say things which are obvious or I don't know things that are already have already been done, please tell me, or we'll have a lot of time for discussion, I hope. So you can mention that. But I would say that I've been working sort of for the last seven years on on questions of digital and democracy and why why the Internet has not has not contributed to democracy, maybe the the opposite. And this is especially this is against the background of me starting about thirty years ago, one of the first perhaps the first Internet social networking software company about ten years before Facebook, and we also had the metaverse kind of application about thirty thirty years before Meta. And since then, for most of the time, I've been doing biology research, actually. So I kind of woke up about seven years ago and said that well, I was awakened and and see that the Internet has has not gone in the way we anticipated thirty years ago with the declaration of independence of cyberspace, but maybe in the opposite direction, and try to see what went wrong and how can it be amended. And I'm sort of describing a rational reconstruction of of of this research of the last seven years. And let's see. So if you look at the Internet governance today, we see mostly red, which is autocratic platforms governed by one person, Zuckerberg, Musk, or a small group of people that decide everything, typically without any any due process or any clear constitutional kind of guidelines, but based on their autocratic decisions. And then there's a emerging flourishing cryptocurrency blockchain technology ecosystem, which promises to decentralize power and and and offer an alternative to autocracies. But if we look at the at at at these systems from a kind of political science perspective, I think the the the they are all should be characterized as plutocracies since powers is indeed is indeed distributed, but is is distributed according to the amount of wealth that the entities that participate have, whether it's a proof of work. So the more power the more wealth you have, the more competing power you have, and the the more influence you have, the more money you make, or proof of stake where where your powers in in in the protocol is proportional to the amount of money that you actually put on the table. And if we look to at fundamental architectures that that support democracies, then to the better to the best of my knowledge, we don't find any. So if, you are working on some or have experiences that I should know, please please share them with me. Now, of course, you can build applications on top of these foundations. I mean, you can build a democratic community within a Facebook group. So that's that's that goes without saying. But when I'm talking about democracies, I'm talking about digital democracy is built from first principles. And maybe the the first principle we should look at is is the principles of already stated several 100 years ago by by John Stuart Mill, which is the right of assembly freedom of assembly. So the first principle we should consider as a precondition even before we talk about how a community can conduct its its its business democratically is whether it's free to assemble. And without it, of course, you cannot act democratically. And if here is a cartoon from about a couple a couple of months ago when the threads was was announced. It sort of captures the current state of of affairs. Let me read. In a desperate search for a better tomorrow, millions of migrants from around the world are taking the daunting leap from Elon Musk's pocket to Mark Zuckerberg's. So we can assemble, but we can assemble in Mark Zuckerberg's pocket or Elon Musk's pocket or, in the the alternative that you're working on. But, I would say that fundamentally, we're still, that these assemblies are also subject to some third party control and do not uphold the other precondition for democratic governance, which is digital sovereignty. So once a community can can assemble, it should also be sovereign over over its operation and not be subject to third party control or taxation, rent rent seeking, or or any other such influence on on or or undermining the sovereignty of the digital community. So the question is, how can we achieve digital freedom of assembly and digital sovereignty in the digital realm? And my conclusion after a lot of investigation was that actually the fault that it's not happening is is is within computer science, that the foundations needed for that are not available. So that's what that's kind of a the middle point of the investigation after we spend a lot of time on on how to support democratic commit democratic digital communities. We we have a lot of nice work on on on democratic conduct of digital communities in voting and in community for in community formation, in constitution formation, you know, a lot of theoretical foundations for equality in the digital realm provided you have a community that can act democratically and it's sovereign. But how to provide a sovereign found foundation for that was was the the second phase of the research. And I'll try to outline here kind of the the results of the work. So this is sort of the the architectural outline. And during the next fifteen minutes or so, I will I will try to fill the boxes in a very kind of bird's eye view of these boxes. And given the the the interest of the people, maybe you're asking, okay. But why can't you use it on top of Ethereum, etcetera, etcetera? So I will not spend time on this right now, but I'll I'll be happy to discuss that during the the discussion. Why why current cryptocurrency blockchain technology does not provide for suitable foundation for democracy on in the digital realm. So the the first part was mathematical foundation, which I will not mention. The second part was this core concept of grassroots distributed systems, which is a notion that is is known from from social sciences. Everybody knows what grassroots movements are. There are movements that emerge from the bottom up, from the ground up, from people forming them without outside or top down intervention or outside intervention. In computer science, this is a noble concept, far as I know. And, again, I will not spend much time on it. It's there's a lot of mathematics that enabled formal definition of what a grassroots system is. I would say that all the systems that you know from the real world are not grassroots. Client service systems are not grassroots. Cloud systems are not grassroots. Cryptocurrencies are not grassroots. Bitcoin, Ethereum, etcetera. And they all violate the the basic principles, and and the let let me just

kind of read what the grassroots system is. The distributed system that can have multiple oblivious instances, so instances that can operate independently of each other. You cannot have two ethereums working, ignoring each other. And the other requirement is that if they happen to learn of each other, they can have new behaviors. So let's say you have these two ethereums that somehow you succeeded in in, let's say, face Facebook's two succeeded in dissecting them, so there's no interaction. They all operate independently. But you also want them that if they discover each other, they have new possible interactions. So in in so that's the formal definition. To a first approximation, I would say, intuitively, you should think about smartphones talking to each other without any global server, no global resource, no global address, no dip no dependence on any global anything, but forming forming in a in a in a in a bottom up fashion. So perhaps the first, again, to to give a intuition in this very fast paced presentation or or bird's eye view presentation, the the the most basic example of grassroots distributed system is a protocol for grassroots dissemination, which can be summarized in in in one line. Tell your friends things you know and you believe they need. Okay? So that's grassroots dissemination protocol. So it assumes two parameters. First, the notion of friendship. So you assume some kind of social graph that people are connected with. So you know who your friends are, and you you have control. If it's a grassroots, you have control of choosing who your friends are and who you want to be friends with and who you don't. And the second is that you have some notion of need that if you know something that your friend needs, then you tell them that information. It turns out this principle is sufficient to realize grassroots social networking. And, actually, there's a paper in ACM Oasis '23. Also, all the papers I I'm mentioning are on their archive under my name. They can be found there there. And it shows how using this one line protocol of Grassroots dissemination, you can realize Twitter like, LinkedIn like, WhatsApp like protocols without servers, without global global resources, just on a peer to peer basis by instantiating this general principle. So the kind of principles of grassroots social networking is that you make friends by mutual consent, and you tell your friends things you know and believe they need. And you can instantiate it to achieve Twitter like functionality, WhatsApp like functionality. And, actually, there's another grassroots system, which I'll mention next, which is grassroots cryptocurrencies. So we also have an implementation of a payment system for grassroots cryptocurrencies, which is also using grassroots dissemination to to disseminate this information. So the difference between these instances is what is the the the kind of social graph if it's directed in Twitter or a hypergraph in in WhatsApp. So every hyper edge is really the WhatsApp group or undirected in in cryptocurrencies. And what is the meaning of the edge? In in Twitter, the edge means I follow the person I'm pointing to. In WhatsApp, it means I'm a member of the group. In in grassroots cryptocurrencies, there's mutual disclosure of personal blockchains. So every every application is the edge has a different meaning, and you establish friendship in a different way and change the graph in slightly different way. And the notion of need is also different. So in case of Twitter, you need the feed of those you follow. In case of WhatsApp, you need the feeds of the group you're a member of. In case of grassroots, cryptocurrencies, you need information on payments you're making in your currency and etcetera, etcetera. And I'll mention later that they all realized using a a data structure called the block list. Again, I'm rushing through this because I I was asked to talk for twenty minutes. So I'll just give highlights, and then we'll have ample time for for questions. But, Val, if you prefer that people ask now when I speak more slowly, kind of interject the discussion with the with the talk, that's perfectly fine. It's up to you what what you prefer.

No. This is great. Let's keep going with presentation

and So I'll yeah. Great. Yeah. So I'll go have

her questions in the chat, and we can

Yeah.

Do questions.

Great. Okay. So I'll keep going. I know many, many questions are being raised, but I will plow through and and answer all of them in due course. So, yeah, I mentioned there is a payment system for grassroots cryptocurrencies. I will not get into that, but I'll just say it has no global resources, no global platform. It's peer to peer, etcetera, etcetera. And so in addition to the grassroots social networking, on the top of this protocol, we have a revocation exclusion, which is needed for a payment system, and we have a notion of grassroots cryptocurrencies on top of that. So, again, there is a paper on grassroots cryptocurrencies. I will not dwell on it, but we'll be happy to answer questions. I'll just say that, okay, there is a one hour talk on YouTube that that, that describes that. We've given it in recent Horovitz CryptoLab, so you can find it under my name or or a 16 z crypto and grassroots cryptocurrencies on YouTube. So you need the one hour talk to describe them. I will I will not say more. Just mention that the basic principle of grassroots cryptocurrencies is that they're digital means of turning mutual trust into liquidity. So any community that has mutual trust can start trading with grassroots cryptocurrencies without outside servers, outside support, gas, paying gas to third parties, nothing. It's just a community can start a digital ecosystem, digital economy internally and locally. Another community can start it separately. And if they interact, then they can trade, but they don't have to trade, or they don't need each other to to exist. I I'll mention on top of that, you can build community banks and UBI and the whole digital economy and the grassroots cryptocurrencies paper described addresses all these questions, including central bank digital currency, how it can be integrated within this framework. So I will not talk about that. I'll just mention that all this can happen without consensus, without smart contracts, without on chain governance. Everything all the governance in these types of applications can happen off chain. I'll just give you an example of the community bank. Again, it's in the paper and also in the talk on the YouTube talk. The community bank can can form by the community deciding they want to establish a bank and by vote of hands, physical hands, raising hands, like here or in physical meeting, appoint a board for the bank who will establish a multisignature account with signatures, will operate in the system like everybody else. So all the governance of the bank will happen off chain by the actual people who are elected, appointed to run the bank, and it will operate on chain with its own multisignature account like any other account. So you can have democratic governance of institutions that operate within this grassroots system even before you introduce smart contracts or anything like that by having the governance off chain. And I'll be happy to to elaborate on that. Now let's go back to the on chain. If you want things on chain, you need consensus. And, the the protocol stack is I'm building here. As you can see, these these blue layers are are actually, layers of the protocol stack. Typically, grassroots consensus oh, sorry. Typically, consensus protocols or, like, blockchain consensus are offered as a black box. You know, there's this is the protocol. But, internally, they have at least three layers. They have a dissemination layer, which disseminates information among the participants, minors, agents, validators, whatever. They have a method for a convocation exclusion, which is sometimes hardwired into the consent rules, but not necessarily. And then they have an ordering protocol for ordering the transactions. So in the architecture I'm presenting, these are different layers because each of them is supporting different applications. So you don't want them to pay the whole price of consensus if all you want is a social network. And you don't want to pay the whole price of consensus if all you want is grassroots cryptocurrencies because they don't need consensus. And if governance is off chain, you don't need consensus. So all this is happening without consensus, but consensus is important and good and other things need it. Let me just say, I mentioned the block place. So this whole protocol stack and all applications are built on top of a data structure called the block place, which is a generalization of the blockchain. So here's the block of a blockchain, and here is the blockchain. A block place is the same, except every block has multiple pointers, And the result is that the structure is not the single chain, but the DAG. And it has all the nice properties of of a blockchain, except that instead of being totally ordered, it's partially ordered. And it turns out a lot you can do a lot of fit a lot of things with it because and it's much easier to distribute in a true sense because different people, agents can add different to diff there's no single end that everybody is competing to extend the chain. Everybody can add things to the graph without destroying the graph. It's still a graph. Yeah. And blocks are signed by individuals, so everyone is essentially have a personal blockchain or every agent. And, again, there is a one hour YouTube talk only about the block place and how it supports all the components of consensus. Again, it was given in a 16 z a year earlier. So it's also available in the Andreessen Horowitz crypto website or YouTube channel. Okay. So that's the block place just to to mention what it is. And the block place is used to build all three blue layers of the of the consensus, dissemination, equivocation, exclusion, and ordering. Excuse me. And on top of that, we have something which is essentially functionally similar to smart contracts. The reason I use a different name is because smart contracts are executed by a third party, by the miners, not by the participants. And digital social contracts are essentially identical to smart contracts, except they're not executed by third party miners. They're executed by the parties to the contract. Okay? So, again, think about smartphones. People running smartphones talking to each other have a social have a have a smart contract among them. They are the ones who run the smart contract on their on their on their smartphones talking to each other. And, of course, there are much, much more efficient protocols than than Bitcoin or Ethereum protocol protocols that can support low low throughput, low cost consensus, and and smart contracts on top of that. So just to to top it off, maybe I should have warned it. I should have said it. All this work until now has been mathematical, theoretical. So I don't have a piece of software to show you. I have a pile of papers thick pile of papers, all have definitions, theorems, proofs, etcetera, that that kind of describe this foundation in a methodical way, an integrated way. But at this point, this is not a software system. This is a conceptual and mathematical construct. Everything I'm talking about. Just as a disclaimer, if it is not yeah. I should have probably said it up front, but but still not too late. Okay. So and these are all references to the papers. I'll will be available on the PDF if I share we we can share the the PDF itself of the of the slides. Okay. And the last yeah. One point I didn't mention is is the notion of civil resilience, which will be I'll I'll be happy to discuss. It has a lot to do with the question relation between democracy and plutocracy and proof of work and proof of stake because proof of work and proof of stake solve civil resilience one way, you know, by by that you prove that you exist because you have competing power or you have money. But democracy, you need to to resolve civil resilience another way. You have to prove you're a person in order to participate in the democratic process. So they're related but different. And a lot of our work has been invested in civil resilience to support democracy. And in fact, the grassroots cryptocurrencies were designed essentially to support civil resilience as a as a vehicle to support civil resilience. And assuming we have solved it, and, again, there's a lot a lot to discuss. I'll be happy to to answer the questions. Then we also have a pre preliminary, direction towards governance. All these with numbers have are are supported by publications. This is this is no number grassroots representative assembly. This is ongoing work with Ariel Procaccia and Daniel Halperin from Harvard, which is probably nearby some of some of you. And the basic idea there is to find okay. The the background against this is is follows, and this goes to the heart of governance. So maybe I'll spend a few a few more sentences on it than than on the other things. Much of the objection or the the critique or the the the the the risks that people associate with online democratic governance is is the risks associated with online vote large scale online voting, which is open to, you know, multiple forms of attack. And and there are people who swear, like like Ron Rivest, that it will never work, and and you should not even try that, etcetera, etcetera. We have done a lot of work. The first three, four years of the project, were invested in democratic governance of digital communities, but you can think about them as small digital communities, like 100 people. You know? So the question first of all, people can vote in many small communities. People vote, you know, by show of hands. It's not the anonymous voting. It's not the secret ballot, etcetera, unless people insist. But you negotiate, you discuss, you reach consensus. So and if not, then you vote. You have struggles, and and all these processes can can happen on a on a personal kind of basis. So so we have a lot of tools for excellent digital democracy on the small scale where the question of, you know, large scale frauds are not are not relevant because the the the votes and the behaviors can be all visible to people, to peers in the small scale. And the question is, how can we scale? And the answer we we are proposing, again, we plan to propose. It's not a published work. It's ongoing work, is using the notion of sortition for governance. So the the for in a large scale community will elect representatives, but not by voting, but by sortition, which is much more bulletproof than than, voting. And this this small group of people, which are known, which are elected by by by, sortition will meet, and they will be the the assembly that will, govern the the community. And the question is, how can they scale? And we have a method for, essentially grassroots representative assemblies where communities can federate and choose assemblies, and then federations can federate and choose higher level assemblies. So, basically, you get this not free, but graph like structures where you have where you have high level assemblies that are, drawn from lower level assemblies that are drawn from the leaf communities, so to speak, which are typically, small. So so this is, I would say, our our best best foot forward in terms of digital governance on a large scale is starting from small communities in a grassroots fashion, allow them to federate in a grassroots fashion, allow them to, elect assemblies by sortition in a grassroots fashion and grow, bottom up. So that's sort of the the dart I I I threw on the on the on the large scale online governance. That's that's our that's our bet. I think that's so now you see the full picture more or less of the architecture that's that's being worked on, and thank you for your attention. I'll be happy to discuss this this and all aspects of it. Thank you.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Ruby. It's fascinating to see all the layers literally of this work. So thank you so much. Yeah. So folks feel free to type your questions in the chat or just type stack, and then you can speak to your question by unmuting yourself. I think so a question that well, I guess, Steve, did you have a question that you wanted to ask about regarding the math or going any deeper? You were

I mean, there's a lot of stuff that I'm gonna be into this. I mean, there's a lot of overlap between our work.

Mhmm. But

more particularly, I wanted to say that I'm working with Dazzle dot town because we actually have an operating self sovereign peer platform that we can build stuff like this on. So Mhmm. You know, I'm basically doing, you know, application design at the, you know, the white paper level, essentially, just like you are waiting for Johannes to finish the underlying stuff and give me an API that I can use to build some of it. But Anyway, I just thought I'd mention that. Anyway, my question is more particularly, are

there Let me ask you before you go over the details.

Hold on. Uh-huh.

Can I ask you a question before you ask you a question? Sure. Sure. Is the design you're talking you're working on is, like, phone peer to peer or it has servers? Or when you say peer to peer It'll

work on it'll work on all devices. You can you can use your home computer. You can use your phone. You can have an instance on your home computer and on your phone. You can set up a virtual peer on a on a service somewhere. Any any way you wanna do it.

Okay. Great. I'll I'll I'll be interested to hear more about it offline.

Yeah. Okay. In any case, so my question is, essentially, though, with regards to that, are there any requirements for the actual security and sovereignty that you have in mind that you think would be nonobvious?

Okay. That that's that's an excellent and deep question, and I think let let me start by by I think it's best to answer it by scenarios. Okay. So let's let's the the foundation is the foundation of everything is this grassroots social networking because people talk to each other, find find each other, then they choose to have commerce with each other, then they choose to form commute groups with each other. So the foundation is this peer to peer grassroots social networking. So in peer to peer grassroots social networking, everybody has their own personal device, which is authenticated and associated with them. And, like, you know, today, basically, when in in Israel, WhatsApp is very popular. So you obviously, you know the phone numbers of your pea of your friends, of your peers, and you can validate that they are who they are because you know their their number, etcetera. So in the grassroots setting, it'll be more or less the same in the sense that you will establish connections with people, you know and trust, and they will be your peers in the Grassroots social network. It's even more, onerous than just a WhatsApp group because what you do with your peers, you actually, exchange information with them. This is, like, part of the actual carrier network. So so if you have a friend, then you actually transfer to your friend information from the rest of the network that you know and he doesn't, and he transfers to you information from the rest of the network that he knows and and you don't and you think each other needs. You know? Not everything, but if I follow some person that, my friend is more connected to him than me, then I will get the the feed of that person through my friend and vice versa. So a friendship here is is a fundamental you know, it's ex an expensive thing. It's not a Facebook like, you know, Facebook friends. It's an expensive having friends is an expensive thing. And and with grassroots cryptocurrencies, it's even more expensive or not not expensive, but onerous or important in the sense that we give each other credit. So we actually have a open credit line with each other. So we are we have financial exposure to the other person. So I'm I'm bringing this forward just to say that the network is is heavily loaded with emotional, social, and financial trust factors that that kind of underpin it. It's not just, you know, random arbitrary IP addresses that you talk to. You talk to your, you know, blood butters, your friends, etcetera, etcetera. It's a first approximation. But I see you have a question, so I'll I'll pause and let you ask.

Well, I I was just gonna say I'm actually just working on, precise Bayesian estimates of humanity in, you know, distributed systems. So, like, that's my the current white paper that I'm working on.

Okay. I'll be I'll be happy to to learn more about that. And let me just add another bit of information. Every person in this Envision system is associated with a public key, and every message is signed by the by the person. So when you get something, any piece of data, it is signed by the person. When you transfer it, you you you sign the transfer. So, basically, every piece of data floating here has provenance. It's provenance of people that know people that know people that have signed this. So you cannot kind of absorb absorb yourself from transferring a piece of data that you've that is child pornography because you've signed that you are the transfer transferee of this of this piece of data. Yeah. You know, or or things things like that. So

Alright. I'll call everything that you're saying. I know I'm not gonna distribute the single thing you ever say. I can tell. So let's guy let some other people ask some questions.

Okay.

I love it. Already collaborations emerging. Thank you, guys. That was a great back and forth. Yeah. I I had a question. I've so my research is more on the like, I I research use cases of decentralized technologies for all types of, you know, nonprofit or kind of social impact. So I'm often looking at communities and how they're using decentralized tools and finding examples. And so one that's come up in my research a lot are community inclusion currencies, which are, blockchain based, you know, local tokens. Basically, there's one in Kenya called the Sarafu system. Mhmm. I'd mentioned that, you know, this system would underlay something like that, a a local community, you know, use case. So, yeah, I'm curious if, one, if you know about that system and, you know, where your work kind of fits into the or relative to that. And also just in use cases for this architecture and, like, what are good ones and what are ones that are unexplored.

Okay. Great. So, actually, we started, our research in cryptocurrencies thinking and learning about community currencies and thinking that that's the right way to go. And we have even a couple of papers on proposals for variations of community currencies and how they should be with community currency, etcetera, etcetera. So we've followed at least up until, you know, two, three years ago. We followed all all this work on on community currencies. And in a sense, grassroots cryptocurrencies are kind of one layer below, and they provide the way one way to view them is that they provide the foundation on top of each robust community currencies can be established. If again, in the paper, also in the talk, I I talk about exactly that, how, say, my village, not half, 500 people. First, people establish liquidity through mutual credit lines among among them, and then they can decide democratically to establish a community bank with a community currency. And the collateral of the credit that the community bank gives to people is the personal currency that people give to the bank, which is backed by personal currencies of other people each person owns. It's a it's a bit it's too quick to to explain it in full detail, but I would just say that the community basically gives backs the the community forms a network of of of mutual credit lines, which is the the the collateral that the bank depends on when granting liquidity or or credit to individuals. So so definitely personal currencies or grassroots currencies on a personal level is the starting point, but it's not the endpoint. And here also, the idea is that community currencies will emerge. And also in the talk, I give example of two villages that have their own community currencies with banks, and then the banks get mutual open mutual credit lines. So I can go to the next village and and shop there with my community currency or or obtain for my bank their community currency and and shop there. And then maybe later, higher level regional currency can emerge. So all this, again, in a grassroots fashion, is supported by this by this framework. So I would say that to first approximation, any good idea that anyone had regarding community currencies could be realized as a secondary layer on top of grassroots cryptocurrencies. To a first approximation, that's that's probably my answer.

Cool. Thank you. Looks like Amar has a question that he's not able to speak to, so I'll read it. It's I wonder how this architecture will look like in terms of infrastructure. I think he means physical infrastructure, like, you know, consumer grade servers or mining gear for people to be able to reach this level of data and.

Okay. Okay. So, again, this is all a mathematical construction, so I can only speculate. But the idea is that it starts and ends here with the phones. That's the infrastructure. To a first approximation, there's nothing else. Now, of course, if I want to back up my phone and I want to pay Apple to back up my phone, it's fine. Oh, I can back it up locally, etcetera, but it's not Apple does not control the structure, the architecture, or anything. Their their their service that is elective in the sense. So, basically, the only infrastructure in this architecture is interconnected phones. That's all. Now if you think it's it's too little, I you can tell from my gray to very to white hair that that I've been around. And, actually, I've been around in the very early days of the Internet and very, very early ages. And we started with some microsystem, you know, Unix workstations that were the working horses, of the Internet at the time. And this four years old phone is a thousand times faster, has more memory, and, more more thousand times more net faster networking speed compared to the Sun Microsystems that were the working course of the Internet thirty years ago. So the reason we need, quote, unquote, infrastructure bigger than the smartphones or different from the smartphone is is is entirely commercial and political reasons. I mean, it's it's in almost everybody's interest that our smartphones will remain dumb and be used as as a door and terminals to third party services. But but the the reality is that they're extremely, extremely, extremely powerful computers, lots of memory, lots of computing's power, lots of networking speed. They can do everything. Everything we we need we don't need anybody. They can, you know, all disappear, and we'll be fine. That's that's kind of I hope I've answered this infrastructure question. If I didn't, then please elaborate.

Cool. Amar, feel free to write in the chat if you have a follow-up question on that answer. Okay. Cool. It looks like there were some follow-up comments that came up after you went into the community currencies stuff, cross collateralization, how do you set up exchange rates with external currencies? What do you like to

Okay. So, again, this is there's a whole I suggest actually, actually, that talk was was edited professionally, so all my mumbling have been eliminated. It's a very smooth kind of a well edited talk. You're you're you're welcome to listen to it. And there's actually a demo there. It turns out that I tried many I tried to explain grassroots cryptocurrencies using graphics, animations, drawings, hand waving. Nothing worked. The only thing that worked was demo of real people actually using them by exchanging and buying things from each other, etcetera, etcetera. So there's a live demo in in the in the video you are welcome to see. So all these questions are answered regarding collateralization. Regarding exchange rate, I will just say that the grassroots cryptocurrencies protocol has one line. And, basically, the one line says that if you have my coin, you can use it to buy any coin that I have. So if Jacob has an Oodie coin and I have a Steve coin, Jacob can buy a Steve coin from me at the one to one exchange rate. So that's the that's the the only thing the protocol says. So the the protocol instills a one to one exchange rate on redeeming your IOU. Basically, a personal coin is an IOU. So if Jacob has my coin and has an Oodie coin, it basically has an IOU that I've issued, and he can redeem the IOU by buying for me bananas, apples, oranges, or other people's coins. But other people's coins, I'm obliged to sell at a one to one exchange rate. It does not mean that my coin will always have a one to one exchange rate because if I go to the beach for a year and and earn nothing, I have nothing to redeem. I have no I have no other people's coins Jacob can redeem, so he might as well try to think about the part of Oodie coins he has as bad debt and sell it at discount on the free market. So bad debt is sold at a discount. But as long as there's liquidity, coins are exchanged at the one to one exchange rate. And if someone's goes it becomes insolvent and is their coins the value the the market value of their coins go down. If people don't trust it, they will come back from the beach and start working again. You know?

Yeah. So because because of this redemption rule, which I said that's the only that's the only rule in protocol. It's a one line protocol. Because of this redemption rule, if I sell red apples for 2 d coins and Jacob sells them for for 3 Jacob coins and there's mutual liquidity between us, then you could barter. You can buy coins from me for 2 coins and then sell them to Jacob for 2 and a half coins, and you will make half a coin profit, and Jacob will make half a coin profit if he sells them for 3. But the this is barter, and it's gonna go on forever unless, you know, there's some barriers to commerce. But in general, because of this coin redemption rule, as long as there's liquidity between people Okay. If there's if there's a price gap, either we price our coupons differently or we sell the same merchandise, the same commodity, a different unit, different prices, then barter will continue until either price is equalized or there's no liquidity. Okay? If there's no liquidity, there's nothing you can do. I mean, you cannot you cannot redeem between me and Jacob. But as long as there's liquidity and the price is different, someone will barter and make a make a profit until either the price is equalized or until there's no more liquidity. So that's the answer to to pricing and and and so the market forces will equalize the prices as long as there's equity.

Awesome. Does anyone have any other questions in the last couple minutes? I had one question about sort of outside of currency use cases. Like Mhmm. I've done some research on a tool called Mapeo developed by Digital Democracy that is a peer to peer network that helps communities in remote territories without access to Wi Fi do basically collect collective data collection, like mapping their territories. So an indigenous community that can collaborate on a map of their territory that then can be used to help them defend their land rights, for example. I'm curious, like, yeah, those kinds of use cases beyond currencies. What Yeah. What do you envision? Does that sound like something that could be accomplished?

Well, as I said, this this is a kind of theoretical framework which could have multiple applications. I would say that to be purely grassroots, you could not you cannot depend only on global network providers because today I won't get into the technical limitations, but, basically, phones are again, again, because of political and economic reasons, phones are second class citizens on the Internet. They don't have their own global IP address. You have to have permission to get an IP address or to be connected to etcetera. And therefore, peer to peer networks, direct peer to peer networks, for example, based on the Bluetooth l LE or things like that, are the kind of pure pure grassroots solution. And the kind of applications you are describing is presumably has implemented some kind of infrastructure that is grassroots. And then on top of that, edit some layer of applications, which is you know, it's completely in in sync with the kind of things that that I envision for for grassroots distributed systems.

Awesome. Alright. Well, that just about wraps it up unless anyone has a quick last minute question. I'll give it couple

have to add it if

So so Thanks for noticing. I'll I don't care so much about the about the, you know, the the owner of spelling my name, but it'll make people it make make it people have hard time finding it. So I'll ask ask them

Okay. Yeah. Let me just add as a as a parting sentence that, of course, this is a theoretical framework, but it was in was it is and was designed with the intention of being realized and and put to actual use. And part of the my problem is that, on the one hand, I want I want this to be a kind of common good public domain foundation. And on the other hand, it has to be highly professional, high quality software. And I think the problem of designing and building not for profit product level quality software is not a solved problem. So I'm not sure I have I have an answer how to build it in a in a kind of nonprofit setup. And building it for profit is not something I'm interested in right now, and and building it low quality is also not a a good idea. So, anyway, that's that's part of the where where things stand regarding this project.

Yep. Well, that is a common problem that many of us are very deeply embedded in trying to solve as well. So you are in the right community. I wanted to ask if if you have a a way that people can contact you. I'm not sure if you've made it into the Medigap Slack, but, yeah, whatever please.

Best way is email. You know? Udie.Shapiro@Gmail. I think my email was if it's not there, I'll I'll just type it in. I'll be happy to be in touch with everybody on any any questions and follow-up. Let me just type my my email address. So I'm old fashioned and also overwhelmed with all sorts of other social obligations. So I'm trying so email email is best and WhatsApp, of course, but let's let's start with email. And all the everything everything I I've published is on on on our. Let me give you the link the kind of the search link that that just pulls all the all the all the publications at once in case you wanna follow-up. So I'll just also put it into the chat.

Awesome. And we're at time. So I know, folks, if you have to head off, obviously, feel free. But before we go, for perfect. Thank you for that link. We will end this call like we do every others with a round of applause. So if everyone you don't mind unmuting and giving Udi and Jacob, thank you for facilitating this. Please give them both a round of applause.

Thank you. And I'll be happy to follow-up with everybody. Steve also, let's let's correspond and see how we work together on this.

Yeah. I'll I'll pop you an email right now.

Okay. Alright.