 Hey, how's it going everybody? It's me Rarar Diego that one kid that you know You're probably not seeing me as much these days as you would if we were in the physical thing And I'm running around the village and stuff But that also means you get to experience all these other things that people do how's Def Con been for you guys, huh? Digital is there something you'd like to repeat is this something you'd like to do another time? I don't know Hopefully if we do decide to do it. It's not gonna be under the virus situation, but whatever Daniel Kim's got some good stuff. I've been Chilling in the discord We have some people hanging out in the voice over there if you have questions about Monero or you want to talk about Pretty much anything dropped by our discord the Monero village area We've got a voice chat where at least somebody's usually hanging out from the community to answer questions okay, I Am said to speak now I'm set to speak today I got a little bit of a half hour slot to fill But this time I don't have to fill it with a bunch of filler because it's an actual talk that I'm gonna be giving We're gonna talk about Decentralization in a centralized world apologies to all the people tuning in from Europe I'm spelling it with the Z which is the American spelling of decentralization and centralized Instead of an S and when I see it with an S it makes me cringe inside so without further ado Let's go ahead and get started on this Decentralization when people hear about blockchain right or when a blockchain is kind of when a blockchain project is talking about their project They're like yeah, you know, we have these goals of decentralization You know, we we really feel that decentralization is gonna is gonna make all the difference and like where that's one of our the things we're working towards on a technological level and it Nobody ever stops to ask and think Why what what what what is the purpose of decentralization at this point? It's really just kind of this buzzword right that they say decentralization you go. That's good, right? Okay, so if they make that a goal and it's good then that means that everything's good, but it's not quite that simple It's not quite that way If we don't know what decentralization is for if we don't know why Decentralization is a thing why it's important and if we don't know like the ways to achieve it Then really we're just throwing words on things and nothing gets better In fact, many things would benefit from not being decentralized and we're not going to be able to think about this critically and See what things should be decentralized and what things shouldn't be decentralized Unless we know really what it's for so this is kind of a rundown of what I'm going to be talking about right now We're going to give some definitions about decentralization And we're going to talk about the different forms that it can take place in Because there is more than just one form really when people say the word decentralization They mean many many many different things Because it applies to many areas of a cryptocurrency project Then we're going to explore some trade-offs. So when you when you choose decentralization, it's not all positives There are negatives that go along with it and then we're going to look at a practical application And see how that can kind of help us as we look at Cryptocurrency projects in general and evaluate them and try to think about them critically to see if they're doing something good or if they're just kind of wasting resources And yeah, that's where we're going to go and then from here depending on time. I may give some light touching on Kind of the world as we know it and how how we're moving into a more decentralized place because we pretty much our world is very centralized as is the Name of the talk So who am I? I'm Diego Salazar. I contribute to Monero and that's pretty much everything you need to know about me There's my Twitter. You can go to my Twitter. I don't do anything on my Twitter I don't tweet hardly ever So you yeah, I have long curly hair and some people like that. So if that's your thing then Then give me a thumbs up in in chat okay Decentralized decentralization as stated before this is basically just a new buzzword, right? We have all of these things that have become buzzwords in the world blockchain Is the name of the game, but it is also a buzzword because as Daniel Kim was alluding to in his talk when people are like, oh, yeah We're adding blockchain to the automobile industry and you know, their socks just shoot way up at this point Blockchain is a buzzword privacy is also a buzzword, right? You have Bitcoin and all these transparency point coins. They're like, oh, yeah, you know, we're not a privacy coin We're not privacy first, but we're adding privacy Decentralization is another big buzzword and it's probably one of the top ones if you look at almost any cryptocurrency project I can guarantee you that the word decentralization is going to be somewhere in there These people this is they just know that this is desirable, but they don't know why So let's go ahead and do the definitions and like all boring people when I do definitions We start with a dictionary So decentralization is defined by Merriam-Webster dictionary as the dispersion or distribution of functions and powers Right, so then also we're gonna define decentralize to move the control of an organization or government from a single place To several smaller ones and this is defined by the Cambridge dictionary and I would also expand that definition somewhat so it's not just a single place to several smaller ones. It can really be You know from three to five from 10 to 20 from any smaller number of Places to Larger number of smaller ones and so the word centralize is Just the opposite of that right we're moving from many places of power or functions and putting them From many different places to less places in the most extreme case into one place, right? One person can do it So we're gonna give an example. We're gonna talk about We're gonna move into why would we want to decentralize? What is the point of decentralizing? So In this example, we all start a club, right? We start a really cool club. We all love Twilight series. We all love the Twilight series I can't think of a single person on this entire planet that has not read the books watched the movies wrote fanfiction All these things right everybody's crazy about the Twilight series. So we start our Twilight series club and You know everyone is either on team Jacob or team Edward and we need to vote We need to vote who is going to be the leaders, you know We need to vote on who's going to be the leader of our club who's going to be leading this thing But everybody is in these two very political parties of team Edward or team Jacob And I am a team Edward fan maybe and you're a team Jacob fan maybe so I don't want the team Jacob people to be in charge because they're gonna cover our Twilight clubhouse in Team Jacob stuff and that would be awful. I want Edward posters on the wall So I want to make sure that whoever I'm voting for is part of team Edward So everybody's gonna vote right? We let's say we have 20 ish people. Everybody writes their thing on the ballot and we all put it in the box But here there a problem begins to arise The jumps a little bit ahead we have to count these votes We have to count these votes and who are we gonna put in charge of these votes in? In theory this voting is anonymous. We don't know who voted what but does it really matter what anybody voted like And let me let me tell you why if we put one person in charge of Counting all of the votes and this person is a team Jacob person as signified by the J here Then they could just like either not really count the votes or count them But not really care and say oh Jacob Juan this guy from Team Jacob Juan and We would all have to trust this person because we didn't count the votes Right and this is just not something that we want to do So this is on one end of the extreme where we get one person to do it on the other end of the extreme We get everybody to stay Everybody is staying here to count the votes, but you know the kids are getting tired and you know It's been a long day for me. I want to get home I don't want to stay here and count all these votes the only way to be absolutely sure with zero trust of who won this is if everybody absolutely everybody stays and Everybody takes out each vote looks at it passes it around and makes and everybody's watching everybody else to make sure We're not doing some sneaky substitutions or anything like that, right? So everybody has to stay everybody has to look at each vote and keep their own tally Then we compare our tallies to each other and if we all come up with the same thing Then there is 100% assurance with zero trust that we have a correct vote That's the other end of the extreme But that requires everybody to take their Saturday to stay here and we don't want to stay here But as we just discussed in this first example if we have just this one person here Well, they can go ahead and report whatever they want and we would never be the wiser So what else can we do? Well, we can decentralize so from this one person. We've now moved to two people, right? And in this case, we're hoping We're hoping that one is team Edward one is team Jacob So that way we know for sure that you know, they're not going to collaborate because it what if they're both team Jacob then They're like, okay, so we both want team Jacob to win so we're going to agree together that That we're not going to really care about the actual vote count. This is just what we're going to be reporting So we have to kind of make sure that we get somebody who's on team Edward and somebody else who's on team Jacob So that way when they count the votes if one person tries to lie The other person is incentivized to say no, that's not true. No, that's not true But there are some attacks that can happen here as well. This is not a bulletproof foolproof kind of thing because what if One of two things happen. I've got a couple examples What if the guy that is known as team Edward is actually a secret closet team Jacob guy? Right, he doesn't tell anybody. He's actually changed teams recently Or he's been convinced by a family member or he's just lying for whatever reason and he is Converted to team Jacob now we have two team Jacob people and it's the same thing that I discussed They're just going to agree. Okay, it doesn't matter what the vote is. We're just going to say that the team Jacob guy wins alternatively another scenario is The first team Jacob person is quite wealthy or powerful or has a lot of resources and they're able to say hey I will give you money resources, whatever you want if you If you agree with me that it doesn't matter what the vote is we just agree team Jacob wins And maybe this person cares more about the resources Then about their allegiance to any particular team. So they are They are persuaded Well, let's try to decentralize even further because we don't want any of those attacks to happen We want to make sure that this is a fair election. So we decentralize even further and We say okay, we got four people now Hopefully two of them team Edward two of them team Jacob, but now we get to some really interesting kind of Game theory things that start happening here because what if we're able to get one person to our side Either through either of the ways that we were talking about before where we were able to convince them through resources Or they were a secret agent all along whatever the case may be now We're kind of this three against one scenario and these three people can threaten this person Hey, if you don't keep quiet about this or if you don't do what we say Then we're gonna tear we're gonna burn all your posters, you know in real life scenarios It can be things like they can threaten violence They can threaten family resources, whatever and now this person is gonna have to go along with them because they have the numbers advantage so We've decentralized into a place where in theory It's like okay four people is good but not everybody has to stay and waste their time counting all of the votes but We have enough people that we can trust that nobody's gonna do anything weird But in this scenario, it's not enough so we can do this again and again and again and again until we're All the way back to everybody having to stay To count the votes So I if you're seeing a pattern here I hope you're seeing a pattern here and this pattern is that the more we trust people The more convenient it is for everybody because if we only have one person counting those votes That's a lot of trust placed in that individual, but it's much. It's the only person inconvenienced is that one person It's much more convenient for everybody else. They get to go home and watch television, right and the less trust we have The more inconvenient it is for everybody and this is basically Decentralization in a nutshell This is going to apply Everywhere across the board when we look at blockchain. We are decentralizing a database, right? It's just a database that has a ledger Information that says this person has this much money and this person has this much money But we're decentralizing it so it's now not on just one server where we have to trust the system Administrator is not going to do anything bad with that or maybe they're not malicious But they're incompetent and so Hackers get in and they mess with the database. No, we give the blockchain We give this database to whoever wants it and now because Everybody has it. We don't have to trust anybody So if I'm like, oh, do I have an accurate? Copy of the blockchain I can compare it to many of my peers and see okay Yes, it agrees with all of them. So we're all good. We're all fine, but The it's much more inefficient It's much more inconvenient because if you want the most trustless option you have to download the whole blockchain onto your computer Now you have to take up your hard drive space your bandwidth your everything to be absolutely trustless And when we start thinking about the fact that this is always going to be the trade-off the more we decentralize The more inefficient it is the more inconvenient it is We need to start asking the question what things need to be trustless. This is the core question What things need to be trustless because those are the things that definitely we can start to decentralize Knowing that there is going to be a cost But not everything does need to be trustless when we start thinking okay To give a very stupid example and sorry to call people out here There was a coin back in the 2017 boom called campus coin and the idea was that campus coin was a cryptocurrency That students would be able to use to pay tuition or their meal plans or all these things right? So we're trying to make paying our tuition and paying for our meal plans for our students a trustless endeavor and I don't I just didn't see or hear the outcry of students that were like these these Universities are cheating me. I paid the money and they said they never received it. I don't trust them We need to we need to make sure that they're in check We need to make sure that this is the whole trustless kind of thing I didn't see this right this is something that does not need to be trustless same with denticoin Paying dentists right how many people have been defrauded by their dentist I mean, maybe there's some of you and you might raise your hand and say I see a need for denticoin But I think for the majority of us we're able to pay them and they're like, thank you for your money Here's your teeth clean and we're good So kind of in this whole blockchain area it makes sense in some Spaces for example distributed ledger technology There is strong motivation for people to Try to mess with money information Why because I can become a millionaire or a billionaire overnight if I have the capability to mess with the money situation Or I can be malicious against somebody else and they have a hundred dollars and now they have zero dollars There's strong incentive money is such a strong incentive. So kind of this ledger based information There is a lot of reason why we would want to trust people less So we may be able and willing to decentralize become more inefficient So that way we can trust people less But I mean if we just can't do that for it for everything But here's here's the big thing about decentralization in terms of blockchain It's as I alluded to earlier It's not just one thing when somebody says we are a Decentralized project which you hear pretty much everywhere. What does this mean? We're gonna we're gonna start kind of poking into a couple many of the ways that A project can be decentralized one way who writes the code, okay? There's so all of these wallets all of this protocol all this stuff needs to be written by some entity Usually like pretty much always by people right who is actually writing this code Is it one person is it ten people? Maybe they have 20 CEOs and one engineer that's actually writing the code is this decentralized They have 20 CEOs so 20 people looking over making sure the project is okay or 20 people in high CT position CEO CTO these kinds of things right, but they don't know the code well enough to be able to check on this guy or whatever So functionally there's one person who is writing this code and He has no oversight, which means that this person can put back doors inside They can you know, they can do whatever they want And nobody's gonna be around to stop them. Who's writing the code finances? Who has the money? Who's distributing the money if there's like one guy or just a very small team of people who is handling the money of a project Then they can choose like this it gets a little subtle here and it gets a little not quite so on the nose But they can hire engineers That maybe they're less than scrupulous or maybe they're hiring engineers that are incompetent Or maybe they're hiring engineers that adhere to a certain design Philosophy and not to another one so that they don't have to have as much in fighting to get the To get the project to go in the direction that they want it to go rather than another direction This kind of stuff is important because when we're talking about decentralization trusting less are we just like You know the development one is the one that's most well known who's writing the code How many eyes are on the code but the same thing with money? How many eyes are on the money? How many eyes are on the money who's paying to either hire somebody or fire somebody or to get this research done What if you know there's two? Papers to research papers that are done for two different totally different directions that we can take a coin in terms of Evolving the protocol well the person with the finances decides to fund an audit for one of those papers But not the other once that audit is complete They can say look this way has been audited and they said it was good this other one is Unaudited so I really don't think we should do that well just like that you have influenced a community Because of money decisions so it's also decentralization also needs to take place kind of on a financial level If there's only one group or a small group of people that has all of the money. That's something you also need to watch out for research Who's doing the research? Because you know just as I alluded to in the audit thing Perhaps a researcher comes across two or three different ways that things can go You know evolved from a cryptographic perspective and they decide to really pour They're all into one of them that they think is the best and not put as much effort into the other ones They're gonna have a lot more Do we want do we trust this researcher and many times? Many times. Yes, maybe many times. We think they're not malicious, right? But we can never be absolutely positively sure when we're talking about decentralization where when we're talking about making things Trustless, it's not just on the code. It's not just on the money. It's also on the science. Who's doing the science? and Practical stuff practical stuff. Who's running the day today? Who you know, who's running the the community management stuff all of these are ways all of these are ways That decentralization needs to be looked at so when a project says we are a decentralized project Maybe they mean in one way like we have several different engineers or we're open source Usually what they mean is we're open source, which means there are several eyeballs on the project But when you start digging deeper, you're like, oh, but we do have a small group of scientists. That's pretty impenetrable Like as in it's hard for you to do your own research and they're the ones that do majority the research Oh, who hands the money? Oh, well, I see we've got this little group. That's that's responsible for that What kind of oversight do they have? Oh, we just we make sure they do good stuff So they start hand waving a lot of the centralized areas They start hand waving away a lot of the centralized the ways that they are centralized And they're like and we want you to only focus on the fact that our development is Decentralized Here's what I'm not going to take a lot of time to get into you about mining Centralization decentralization. This is something that you know Monero tried to do with random X ASICs tend to lead to centralization of mining over a period of time to particular people That are able to create new ASICs and stuff and we don't have time to go over in that Daniel Kim has kind of discussed this in his talk So I would give that a look but basically the goal is to Explain to you guys that there are many ways that something is decentralized and particularly when a project is centralized in many areas I would even say in most areas they do their best to divert attention to The areas very few that do exist where they are Decentralized and that's usually the protocol level because blockchain by design is pretty much decentralized as long as there's miners and stuff Like it's just the way that it is and they'll point all eyeballs to that and say see we're decentralized when really everything else is Centralized so we've gone through the what? What is it? We gave some definitions. We've gone through the where right can be mining It could be development. We've gone through the why why would we want to decentralize because we want to Reduce trust now we need to talk about the how and so to discuss the how I'm going to say that I start a new project this new project save the marmots.com. It's not a real website I mean, maybe it is you can go there and check but it's not something I've created But we're gonna say I started a new project save the marmots.com and you come in and you say okay I want to judge whether this project is worth my time I want to judge whether this project is worth, you know My my attention my money whatever the case whatever whatever this cause is for I want to make sure that I'm not going to be wasting any Of my resources on this so save the marmots And I say it's very decentralized. It's very decentralized and so you're like ooh decentralized that sounds good Okay, so that's a couple points in its favor. I may maybe put some money in there But we got to ask the big questions got to ask the big question First of all, does this need to be decentralized? This is always always always always the first big question that you should ask yourself when they say we are Revolutionizing the real estate industry the automobile industry the trash picking up industry the dentist industry We're decentralizing all of these industries. We need to start thinking critical thinking Does this need to be decentralized? Is this something that would benefit from a reduction of trust? Is this a something where all the parties don't trust each other? Is this something where we would be willing to tolerate the inefficiencies? What are the inefficiencies? They may not be as neat on the surface so like for blockchain The inefficiency is it requires proof of work which requires electrical consumption It requires power to secure the blockchain It requires the database to be on everybody's computer. That's a lot of space, right? What so for blockchain? We might know what those are But if we start looking at decentralizing other industries, we may not know it may not be readily apparent to us What are the inefficiencies that are going to come from decentralizing something? We need to start asking the big question. Does this need to be decentralized? But there are a few other smaller questions that we can ask because that's a big question And it's probably the most important and maybe they they're able to give you a good reason Why they think that this should be decentralized. They'll typically say there is a good use case for this Usually it's a bunch of bullshit, but that's what they'll say. There's there's there's a good use case for this But there's a bunch of smaller questions that we can use to tease out whether a this thing needs to be Decentralized and be whether the project itself is a decentralized for example. Who do I talk to to get information? Who do I need to approach? Who do I need to talk to to get any? Information about this about this product if it is largely contained within one Website one person one department, right? If it's only a small group of people that is able to give you accurate information about this Then that means that for the most part the information is going to be coming from a select group That's going to tell you what you want to hear Are there dissenting viewpoints are those dissenting viewpoints given a platform? Assuming they're not trying to spread misinformation, which I really Feel sorry for everyone in this day and age of social media where there's so much misinformation everywhere There's so much noise. It's really hard to distinguish between what a signal and what is noise But that is another talk in and of itself But are these dissenters who have different ideas that are in theory in a perfect world presented in a Respectful manner and they have good points and they address people's points and stuff Are these people given a platform or are they silenced? If they are silenced and that says that this is a pretty centralized thing because you need certain amount of power to silence these people You know and if we look at kind of Bitcoin and BTC from the subreddit perspective There was a group of people that didn't like the Bitcoin subreddit, so they made their own They made BTC and regardless of what you think about these two subreddits I don't really care what you think about these things But these voices were not silenced and they couldn't be silenced like in one area They were but they were very easily able to build a following build the community of people who disagreed with the first one Whereas many people those things get attacked those places get shut down It's really bad if you start getting like some cease and desist letters that shows okay These people really do own pretty much everything and it's not decentralized at all question to what is Centralized and why so this is a bit of a this is a bit of a funky thing that I'm gonna throw in here It's probably best No, let me let me take a step back. Maybe not probably best some projects may choose to centralize some things and If we need to understand why they do that because maybe that's the way to go for example payments Maybe it's just easier to get people paid on time in terms of researchers who decide they can devote their time and energy To this or engineers or people who are gonna code full-time You know what we have decided to centralize the way we do our finances so we can pay people on time So they don't leave us if they can give you a reason for their centralization now at that point You can kind of decide for yourself. Well, is this kind of worth the trust? Maybe maybe not but if they if they're like, oh, no, no, no, that's all decentralized and you're like, no No, it's clearly not right. They need to be able to point to parts of their project that are centralized And honest people which are hard to come by will tell you. Yeah, we're a decentralized protocol But this part is centralized this part is centralized and this part is semi centralized and here are the reasons why Okay, now at that point we are armed with information you can run it through your personal philosophies and worldviews to see if that's something that you're okay with but It's definitely something that is rarely talked about. It's kind of hand waved away. Well, no It's not really centralized it is and they need to be able to explain why so talk to your projects that anything that you're interested in and What can I learn from history? There is a huge amount of examples of not just blockchain projects But open-source projects business projects everything all over the world where they have failed Because of centralization and some have failed because of Decentralization there was too many people that you needed to get a Unapproval from to make a decision and so you missed out on an opportunity Right, you couldn't get all 10 CEOs to kind of give a check mark or all 10 powerful board members to give a check mark Either because you couldn't reach them or they couldn't reach a decision So you missed out on a big opportunity and they go under right so Decentralization is not always blanket good. Sometimes it can keep you from doing things in a quick fashion But it reduces trust so there's a ton of examples Please please please go look through failed businesses failed open-source projects failed blockchain projects tried to find out Why did they fail? Oftentimes one of the underlying issues is that it was either centralized in some way or decentralized in some way that it shouldn't Have been I'm running short on time so Conclusion summary in closing decentralization is this big buzzword. It doesn't We really have to understand what it is what its goal is what it's trying to do Because otherwise when somebody says oh, this is decentralized. We're just like, oh, yeah, that's great when really it may not necessarily be that way so Yeah That's my last slide. That's my last second. It's for 30 my time I'm an hour ahead of Las Vegas, so it's time for me to Back on out of here if you have any questions, I will be chilling around in the discord I'm more than happy to talk with you guys about decentralization What I think about various projects and what they claim about decentralization blah blah blah blah blah So that's it for me. Thanks for coming to my little talk my deaf contact I hope you guys enjoy the rest of the conference go check out everything that we have to offer Monero village org has the rest of the schedule for the rest of today and tomorrow. Thank you