Welcome to Better On Blockchain Episode Two with Jay McCarthy and Chris Swenor from Reach. I'm Jay McCarthy, the CTO of Reach.
And I am Chris Swenor. I'm the CEO of Reach.
And what we do on Better On Blockchain is we we kind of pick a different industry every time and we ask the question, you know, could this industry be improved? Or would it get any value from being on blockchain? And last time, we talked about Uber or ridesharing. And tonight, Chris, we're gonna be talking about?
Social media or specifically, Twitter. How could you do Twitter on blockchain? You're hearing a lot about some actually, Jack Dorsey himself talks about how he wants to utilize blockchain to make Twitter better. But I think it would like be good for us to actually really talk about an analyzed and say if blockchain is right or ready for Twitter.
Yeah. And the way that we try to do things is we try to like, first explain what the problem is what like, you know, trying to define our terms a little bit. And then from there, we'll talk about kind of a sketch about how this program could work on blockchain. And then we'll talk about the pros and cons and decide whether or not we think it's worth pressing the button to really do this thing. Before we go.
I do want to actually we didn't do this in the first episode. But I want to make sure that the people watching this knows that this is a an interactive thing. Want to make sure that because we're coming up in our own heads, because we haven't released any of the episodes yet. What what we'd like to talk about so while you're watching this, you go you know what, I'd really like them to talk about his real estate on the blockchain, or whatever supply chain the blockchain has put it in the comments, and we'll read it. And that's how we decide what we'll do next. And of course, also, as because this is a YouTube thing. Gotta smash that like and subscribe so that you know that.
Yeah, and I think that in the future would also be fun to do it actually live rather than just, you know, comments after the fact. But you know, what, we'll, we'll slowly build our way up to that. Alright, so now, what is social media, specifically Twitter? Now, of course, you said social media. So I mean, like, you know, we could we could talk about Twitter, and Facebook. And I mean, Discord. You know, I mean, like, all of these are social media in some form. So like, we want to be specific to Twitter and like, what is Twitter?
Let's think of it in the mindset of how we would build Twitter. And then let's talk about how other social media platforms could exist as well. Sure, the reason why we're actually even talking about this is because the whole censor resistance, you know, Twitter decides who can actually say things and who can't. And really, the debating that is a completely thing that we're not going to touch if that's okay, or not, okay, but let's just say that, you know, how could we make it censor-resistant, and this is take on that topic.
So I mean, like, the defining thing about Twitter, like stripped to its bare essence, is, is that like, I have a feed, you have a feed, everybody's got a feed, they have like, sole control over their feed, they like, you know, can send information. And you know, Twitter is famous for having a small amount of information. And, and then so I can like publish a very small amount, subscribe to other people find out what they're doing. And then there's some, you know, very light interaction stuff. So there's like, you know, direct messages, and there are, you know, retweets, and there's like replying to people. So there's a little bit of stuff around the edges, but you know, stripped to its bare minimum, it's me and my feed.
Yeah. Because that's a great point. That's a blockchain, social media blockchain, Twitter, you yourself are censor-resistant, but the interface can censor you. So like that is the one thing to kind of really talk about as well. But, but let's let's talk about like, how we would structure this what like in what, like, where would you start with actually building a blockchain? And and the first thing I always say is that you have to actually start with the public good. What is the public good that people like? What is the thing that you own? And that you own yourself? You own your feed? And what's that look like? In blockchain world?
Yeah. I think in blockchain world, your feed is probably going to be a smart contract. And the publications that you make, probably it's not going to be worthwhile to store them in like the persistent state on the chain. Probably it makes more sense to store them as like the the history of interactions on the chain. So you know, let me I will, I won't try to go into too much technical detail but basically on blockchain there's a distinction between when the chain stores that what what the chain store is as the current state, versus what this chain stores as the history and some blockchains they Only store the history and the current state is entirely in the background. But other chains, they actually do store something that you might call the current state. So that's a little example. You know, if we're talking about something like an NFT, typically the current owner will be the current state, and the history of all the previous owners and what they sold it for. That's the, that's the history that we're talking about. So I think that for a feed, it will probably make sense for the actual messages that you sent to be in the history rather than store, are we going to actually store the messages on chain or a hash of the message on chain? Yeah, I think that this doesn't really matter from the blockchain perspective. See, because like on Twitter, you can only send a small amount of information, which, you know, basically, the reason why is probably a technical reason to control how much data they're storing. And that has evolved into, like something that actually affects what people say. But I think on blockchain that actually, first of all, you're gonna have a very strict limit on how big big these things are. Because, again, one of the other things you got to remember blockchain is that everything you do cost money. And so And typically, it costs money in proportion to how much you're doing, or how much data you're sending. So on many networks sending 256 bytes will cost more than sending 128 bytes. And there's kind of a magic number of bytes that are going to be really useful, which is like 96 bytes. Now, why is 96 bytes magical? Well, there's this a fairly common blockchain slash storage provider, that's called IPFS. And when you upload something to IPFS, it is it is identified by 96 bytes. So you could, for instance, have arbitrary data on your feed, if you first uploaded it IPFS, and then you refer to it on on your feed by with just those 96 bytes. I think that, for my personal taste, I think that it would be nice to have, you know, something on the order of 256 bytes. And then there's just a convention that oftentimes people put things on, on IPFS, rather than mandating that you always have to do that. But I mean, this is kind of this is a, this is a tiny technical detail that I don't think will affect the overall structure. But the thing is that anytime your feed points to something else, then that other thing is now the thing that you censor. So for instance, if I post if I control my feed, but my feed is just URLs, to you know, my Geocities page, well, then now the way you censor me is, yeah, you just attack geo cities. So in, in the worst case, you want your actual message, the actual contents of your feed on the blockchain.
But that's I mean, that's another point, though, as well as that. So there's sensor resistance, which, you know, makes sure that no, you couldn't be stopped. But there's also immutable, immutable aspect of it ends, if you are putting the actual message itself or the actual story in the state of your feed on the chain. That means it's mutable. But if you're actually storing a pointer to, to what you're saying, from that point somewhere else, there's really no guarantee that you change that or somebody changes that or it gets changed. So that is one of the downsides as well.
Yeah. No, like, you know, in the example of something like IPFS, like IPFS, when the if you change the data, then the identifier will change as well. So you can't change that. So that's also blockchain-like, but this feature of immutability, it's kind of, I think, some people will want it and some people won't want it. So for instance, like, you know, if I tweet, a correct prediction about the Super Bowl, and the, you know, the blockchain, Twitter has this property, that you can't change it. And that means that like, you can trust that I really did have that great prediction about the Super Bowl. On the other hand, if, you know, one of my staffers says something really dumb, and I really want to delete that tweet. Unfortunately, there's not a way to do that. So basically, there's kind of pros and cons about making things immutable. And one of the, you know, problems is, is that you really can't have it both ways. On blockchain, it's either got to be immutable or not. And you might think that that's like a pure bad, but the thing to remember is, is that in the centralized world, the only option is that it's immutable, that you just don't even have the choice. And it's mutable. And in a way that is, you know, hidden from you, right? Because Twitter can do things that we don't know anything about.
Yeah. And like this one things that like, I'd like to get into, probably not in this talk today. But maybe if we actually dig into NFT's, a hybrid mutable and immutable properties into a single single state. I think it'd be really cool to talk about, but we won't talk about that. Now. That'll be for another talk.
Yeah. So we've now kind of just basically talked The real pure basics, which is that we're imagining that what a feat is, is it's a contract, it's there are only certain people that can send messages to it, probably the owner. And you know, that's the simplest case. And they send messages. And those messages are simply recorded as being Yep, this message was a valid one. And I can go look at the history of all the calls to that contract and figure out all the messages that got sent to it. That is a bare minimum version of Twitter. That is actually really, really easy to make.
But there's actually another very important thing about Twitter that Twitter deals with all all the time is verified users. Now, is there anything that the blockchain, I'm asking this question, because I know the answer, but I know you do. Do Is there anything that the blockchain could do to to help with that?
Well, I mean, the thing is, is that you could very easily know that this contract is owned by this particular public key, because like, you may, you may have this idea that you have like an account or wallet on blockchain. But really what you have is a public key, which uniquely identifies you, and you know, anyone else, but there's nothing about. So like me, for instance, I have a vanity algorand. Address, because I basically, Dan, and I wrote this program that like just generates new public keys until we found one that like, looks cool to us. So he's got, he's got Dan, he's got the Dan Fund. And I've got Jay Fund. That's it. Those are the first letters. So anyways, so that, but the thing is, is that there's nothing about Jay Fund that like says, Oh, this is J. McCarthy, the CTO of Reach, but but if I keep using it over and over and over again, then it can it can gain an identity, just like the fact that like, My face looks like this, you know, I mean, like your presence in the world creates an either thing. Yeah, exactly. Like it, there's not a, there's not a sense in which like Jay Fund is J but Jay fund is the same account that did this other thing over here, and the same one that did this other thing over here. And, you know, if I can, like prove, like, you know, I'm holding up the newspaper that says, you know, I'm verified, this is me, and it's signed with my public key, then, you know, now you might, you might have more confidence. Now, of course, there are a million people that are trying to solve the, quote, identity problem on blockchain. And ultimately, this is what they're just trying to do. They're just trying to have some sort of real world verification of who you are, that ties that to a public key. And then now that's really you.
Or a reputation weighting system that allows you for for individuals to like, the more you use that identity, the more weight that identity has, which I think is really cool.
Yeah, because one of the things that is possible on blockchain is like, you know, I can just generate a new account every single time I use things. And that is that doesn't literally provide anonymity. But it provides something like anonymity because I can create lots of burner accounts. Now, the main problem with that, and we're kind of off the track of Twitter. But I, I just want to say something about this. The problem with that is, is that if I make some, if I make some burner thing, like, how is it useful, it has to have money to be useful. So if it turns out that Jay Fund, you know, every day gives, you know, five tokens to a new account every day, well, maybe those accounts are really mean, just like pretending to be somebody else. So it's kind of hard to really create a network, I guess, you know, you gotta take advice from the money launderers out there, but how to do this effectively.
So let's go ahead and earmark. Let's talk about identity in one of these in the future, because I, like I love like talking about the potential of individuals having multiple identities, as well, like, because that is something that's really possible in the blockchain, the digital world, but let's get back on Twitter. Alright. So we have, we have the public good, because the individuals own that, right. I own the issues like we're saying, We own the Twitter feed, but really, we're, we're Oh, I own the Chris feed. And you own the J feed, but we're floating out in the blockchain space right now. Right. So how do people that one read I mean, everybody wants to read but how do people find me that want to read what I've said?
Yeah. And I think that, in addition to talking about how they find me, there's also this other question of like, what are things like replies, and DMS, and retweets even mean? Retweets are kind of obvious because retreats that's just a message on my feed that says go look at this message on Chris's feed. So that makes sense. But like, with a reply, or a DM something about those is that that's like me doing something that to you, Chris, but like, Well, obviously you follow me, but if I do this to like, I don't know like Carly Rae Jepsen, like she's not following Jay. She's not following the Jay feed. So she's not going to find out about my clever, you know, dm to her or reply or whatever. Yeah. So, I mean, what does it mean to follow something? Right? Like, in the centralised world, like, Twitter literally has a database that says like, you know, primary key user secondary key, like who they're following. And there's this this big thing that says, oh, Jay is following this person Jay's following that person. And what is the point of keeping that information? Like, where could that be? It could be in a centralized server, like it is on Twitter. Could it be on quote, the blockchain could like, I send you a message, like your feed that says, alright, I'm following you now. And like, why would I do that? I could also just like, keep track, I could just have on my computer. Okay. Well, I, I'm, I want to pay attention to Chris's feed.
This, this contract this identity. Right? Exactly. But But you're, I think you're spot on. Like, why would you send that to me? Right? And yes, there would be some type of encryption to my messages that I will only actually provide the ability to view that if you paid me or something that sort.
Yeah, but even doing something like that is pretty hard to do. Because you couldn't I could you could like say, oh, if I pay you, then I'll send you something. But how do we check that the thing that you send to me is actually a useful thing later on? I mean, there are fancy encryption schemes that could make something like this plausible. But that's really not something that's done on the blockchain right now. So it's kind of too hard to do that. I think that what could potentially make sense would be something like, I pay attention to replies of people who paid me. And so you know, if you reply to somebody, then if they happen to follow you, then that's fine. But maybe you could like send them a message. Sorry, when I say send them a message I'm not talking about in the Twitter program. I mean, like you would send their contract a message that says, hey, Jay, just replied to you. And so you should pay attention to that. And the thing is, is that, you know, your client could, of course, ignore that. But probably what we're going to do is, you know, there's this like a mores that will develop that says, like, Oh, well, when someone does this, and you can basically charge people for me to listen to you. I can imagine something like that developing.
The way that I actually envision how, like, decentralized Twitter would work is very similar to how decentralized Uber would work. We talked about that in the last episode. Yeah, the Twitter company would still exist. That's the and what they would do is rather than actually hosting the the feeds themselves, what they do is they index feeds, and they index feeds, and they provide an interface to display the actual information on the feed in the way that they want. The cool thing here is that it, it means that they don't own you. But it does mean that they still actually can tailor an experience. But it also means that evil Twitter or Twitter clone could also exist and with an actually consumed the same feeds and be able to display something else. And this is where the sense of resistance, this sense of resistance comes in is that Yeah, Twitter could still censor you know, they they don't want Chris to talk about ice cream. I don't know why, but maybe that and they
They're vegan.
They're vegan, they No, no ice cream posts at all. So they don't ever post it. But yeah, evil, you know, evil Twitter, as happy with ice cream. Tweet.
Yeah.
So they display it all,
let me just sort of be take what you're saying and make it a little bit concrete. So you know, there's all these tweets, there's all these, uh, there's all these feeds that are floating around out there. And it's hard for me to keep track of which ones I care about, it's hard for me to find new ones that I care about, maybe there's this, you know, retraining thing, I also really liked seeing ads about what I'm interested in, whenever I, you know, open my web browser. So I want to see all those things. So what the Twitter company does, is it goes off in it has the index of these things, and it says, Oh, you know, Jay, you're following these five people, and you probably would like to follow this other person as well. And here are some things you may be interested in. And I feel like they actually are, like, I'm kind of embarrassed to say this, but they're, I feel like they're pretty good at noticing what I want to look at. You know, they can tell they can tell them?
I don't want them to know, but they know.
Yeah. And they're, they're pretty good at it, you know what I mean? So anyways, so that's a valuable service. And with that valuable service, like they could, for instance, you know, charge people to like, I'm kind of thinking ahead about how they're going to make money, right. Like, obviously, they're gonna make money by suggesting, you know, the advertising to me. They could also, you know, have, you know, your really cool stamp on a feed or something like that. Okay, but now, that's like the positive side, but the dark side is, is that what you're saying is that if this is my main interface, then they can actually do the filtering in the client, which means that Chris Chris's feed really does say vanilla ice cream is a flavor. It's not not it's not the like vanilla is a flavor. This is something you know that ice cream aficionados will fight about whether or not Bill's favorite. So that's what he says, and Twitter's like no, no, we can't have this message there. And they could filter that on the user interface. And what you're saying is that they could absolutely do that, in most people, their Twitter experience could be censored in this way. But there's nothing special about the data, unlike today, which is that if I wanted to make a different user interface for Twitter that actually showed all the ice cream posts, I could not do that. Because that data is literally gone. It's been deleted from their database, and no one else has access to it. But we could, there could be different competing interfaces to Twitter. And perhaps what they could do is they could have different degrees of advertising, they could have different suggestion algorithms, they could have different censoring policies, and people could make their own decisions about which one of those they wanted to use. And there would be this public good that many people were trying to provide the best interface for that good.
And myself as a feed provider, I'm not handcuffed to their decisions. So like, that.
You may not even know like, I could start using evil Twitter. And you wouldn't even know that I was using evil Twitter.
So here's a great question, though. Because so we're in blockchain, we're, you know, game theory, it's a system, it's not a thing. How would you How would we actually incentivize the people that create, create the feeds, actually create the content?
Yeah, this is actually kind of a subtle detail that we have mentioned before, right? Remember, everything that you do on blockchain cost money, therefore, you making a post actually cost you something because you have to pay to have it stored. Now, before we talk about how to incentivize things, I do want to make clear that we kind of assume generally that when we talk about something being on blockchain, we kind of have this background assumption that it's going to be on one of the existing consensus networks, it would be extremely plausible to me for a social network to have its own blockchain entirely devoted to just that one app, as opposed to a blockchain that like had defy and Twitter and I mean, like, that's possible to have defy and Twitter, but it's plausible to me to have it be separate. And you're gonna say, Oh, no, I don't like this.
I'm gonna stop you right there. I hate that idea. Because the main thing because then it gets back to the whole being handcuffed, like when you when you because like, who is going to actually pay for this? the server's who's gonna do that? The Twitter, blockchain, the Twitter's protocol? And then how is evil Twitter going to actually consume? Like it? How is like, here's the other thing, too, is like, so we're talking about, you know, Twitter and evil Twitter. But what about Twitter and Facebook? Because the way that I look at it is that Facebook has different content, but really, it's the same content, it's just in a different way. So in my mind, the public good of my feed, is I have like, it's like semantic data, where like, I'm building this online profile of me on a blockchain profile that has, you know, a ton of ton of data. And Twitter's only taken this vertical and Facebook's taking this vertical, but I own it all. Um, so so you saying, you know, oh, this could be a application specific thing. I want to raise my hands and shake and say No, don't do that.
Yeah, so what so like, as like, the tech side of things, you know, when I send a message, maybe my message says something like, this is really short, it should go on the Twitter things, or this is really long, maybe it should go on my blog. And this one is just a picture. So it should go on my Instagram, you know, I mean, like, your feed can actually be all of them unified, which is something that I think that casual, even tech people, they could very easily say like, oh, no Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. They're all different things but actually unblocked, and they could be the same. Kay but, now your point about who would pay for all these things and whatnot. Yeah, this is well taken, because one of the major things that you want to ask yourself when you come to a new blockchain is like, Is it really decentralized? And like, how decentralized is it? Because the fundamental way that all of these systems work is that there have to be a whole bunch of different computers, all running the protocol at the same time. And those programs are assumed to be in an adversarial relationship, which means that they are not collaborating together to do things because it's very common for there to be what's called a 51% attack, where if one organization controls a majority of the nodes in the network, then they actually can censor anything that they want and lie. And so it's very valuable for a blockchain to have a wide variety of different people participating in it. And the assumption is, is that the more specific a blockchain is, the less participation there would be. And so that's why Chris has this red flag that goes off when we say application specific block Or one for just one social network. But now
A big red flag.
Yeah, but now this means that we go back to this thing that it's gonna cost me real money to post something on my feed. And now obviously, there are chains that are more expensive than others. So probably it's not worth spending 17 $100 to post my latest cat pic. So we want to have a.
But wait Jay. Wait Jay. Okay, so what you're thinking, though, is like the way you're thinking was like, oh, Chris, I have to pay an Algo to actually pick my post or I have to pay an Eth to make my post what right?
We have to pay some network we could talk about Algorand, Etherium, Cardano any network.
But there are sub-economics or, you know, economics where like the, we could actually create an entire economic structure that yes, I might pay for gas to do this. But by doing this, I can actually be incentivized through a new type of currency for this network. So there is there is ways to actually incentivize, maybe not necessarily through the actual base currency, but with a new currency for this type of, you know, system.
So I think that, you know, there's this concept that like Brave is doing called the Basic Attention Token, where it's like, if you pay attention to advertising, then you can get something out of it later. And we can imagine something like that, is that what you're saying? Like, where if I pay attention to advertising, maybe then that gives me, you know, coin, so I can put stuff on my feed?
Yeah. Or like, where it can be is that maybe there's a, I mean, I guess you could do this without actually a new currency, but like a tipping system, or a way of being able to, for people to, you know, a way to track in some kind of way like that. Either way, every time we do these, this is like a fresh conversation or thought about it, but a way to actually build like an economic system where it allows for individuals to like if it is actually consumed, maybe you have some type of new system where you can say, okay, maybe there's a rating system, where if, if you get enough up votes, you then become more?
Well, let me give.
I'm throwing things at the wall right now, something.
But let me give you a straw man. So, like buttons, and dislike buttons, and little reactions are really common all throughout social media? And the question is, is like, what are those in the decentralized world? If they are like replies, then that means when I click, you know, like, on vanilla is a flavor, that is really me actually posting a message to my feed, which is going to cost me something. And maybe what we do, just because that's going to cost me something no matter what, maybe what we do is we say something like, I don't know, I configure my browser, you know, my client, so that every day, if I do, if I typically do 20 likes in a day, then maybe one of them will actually send money to the person that I send it to. And it's random on my client. And so basically, I know that every day I'm going to be spending, you know, 10 cents on clicking likes. And nine cents of that is going to be like, or I don't know, maybe like one cent of that is going to be posting posting on my feed. And then nine cents of it is actually going to pay a random person that I click the like, on.
So like.
I'm not saying that it is the perfect idea. But that idea is extremely easy to implement on on the blockchain. And it's a reasonable you know, people are gonna have a very small amount that they're willing to dedicate to doing this. And that actually is going to be way more money than people are getting right now for likes.
So one thing that's like me rambling about, you know, trying to think about like what what's the financial incentive is that incentives on the blockchain is actually are hard because of how the blockchain works. Sybil attacks are extremely easy to do on a blockchain so you need to make sure that your Sybil-resistant you need to make sure that any like oh well make it so that's every single time that's somebody likes my posts, I get a a Twitter coin well then why can't Why can you spin up 10 million accounts to like your thing?
Hold on my so and just yelled from downstairs? What's a Sybil attack?
Oh, go for it. You're You're the one that actually has the the PhD and the you know, the computer science research in these things go Go for it.
So I mean, I think that your last example is the is the is the quintessential Sybil attack where, you know, if there's, if there's someone else that's going to reward me for doing something, then then if I can pretend to do that thing, and have it be cheaper to pretend to do it, then have it do it for real, then I can get the get the benefit. So, you know, for example, like, I don't know, imagine if we're in like a team sport, like, imagine where like racing, okay, so I'm wearing a Formula One hat. Okay, so Formula One teams have two drivers on every team. And imagine that we made it so that there was some bonus that you got for like passing another car. And this was independent of the way that you finish the race, well, then I guarantee that there's going to be a time when two cars on the same team are going to go right next to each other and one's going to pass one than the other is going to pass one, then one's going to pass around, then the others are going to pass one. And now they're just going to do is they're just going to get tons and tons of passes, even though they're not real passes. They're not. They're not what we were trying to incentivize. And so I think that when people say Sybil attack, they're not talking about some like specific attack, they're just talking about the idea of people finding loopholes, and whatever incentive structure you try to produce. And so for example, one way to talk about giving people benefit for getting likes, is I watch the network. And when Chris gets lots of likes, I give him money. Now, what that means is that now Chris can figure out a whole bunch of tricky ways to get likes, and then trick me into giving him money. The other way of doing it, is making it so that the actual people who like him give Chris something where if you add all those up, it makes it so he gets it. And that's why I in my little strawman proposal made it so that like, well, I'm going to be clicking cost you money, I'm gonna be clicking on links all day long. But I don't want every single one of them to donate to everybody. I just want some number of them to donate to people. And maybe that's going to be random so that over time, the people who get the most money from me are the people who I click the most often. And I can control what my expenditures are. But I can click likes all day long. So that's an example of a Sybil-resistant system. Right?
You actually hit us the right word, there's that. So when people talk about Sybil attacks, they they say Sybil-resistant, because it's pretty much impossible to make it Sybil like, like, completely prevent all types of Sybil because people are crafty.
Yeah. And for example, like one of the things that you could do is like, you know, I could just have my marketing budget spent on sending likes to me, you know, I mean, and that is, and there's, there's presumably no easy way to tell whether or not those are real likes or fake, quote, fake likes. The thing is, is that the concept of a fake like, doesn't really make sense. I mean, what it really is, is that, like, people that really wanted to do this, but I mean, they definitely were like.
So anyway, this is this is a problem, not just for Twitter. This is actually a big problem in just blockchain in general. I mean, lettuce is actually a big problem, like most incentive models, because, you know, there's, this is a, this is a hard, gnarly problem.
However, I don't think that it's a problem for blockchain. I just think it's a problem when you're doing anything online, anonymously, like Twitter and Facebook have this problem, because there are, in fact, companies that I can pay to give me a whole bunch of likes, by, you know, sleeper agents, who have been pretending to be valid Twitter users for months now.
And this fits tightly in the theme of even if blockchain doesn't fix everything, it's still mostly good. And it doesn't have to fix everything.
Yeah. Alright. So we've talked about the basic idea where there's this fee that you control, we've talked about how there can be many different user interfaces. We've talked about how something like likes, which feels like it can only really exist in the centralised world actually has this special extra role in the decentralized world? Are there any other features of Twitter that we want?
You know, let's, let's cut it here to get we could we could actually talk more about features all day long, unless you could think of one that you want to kind of hit?
Not I don't think there's anything that really stands out. I think that if we keep going, then we're going to be talking about where we would really be broadening out to the whole idea of social networks. And we would start talking about things like Well, there's like followers, and there's influencers. And there's like, you know, aggregators and stuff like that. There's a lot of ideas that we could go into detail on. But I think that this is the key idea of Twitter.
And one thing I do actually want to touch base for people watching this and want to actually do research more. So Tim berners Lee, who you know, the inventor of the internet, he after he invented the internet, he really dove deep into like Semantic Web. And he's been actually working on that quite a bit and a lot of stuff we've been talking about by owning your own data. This actually, you know, doesn't even involve the blockchain. But now that blockchain exists, I can't. He has to now be like to think about integrating the two things.
Yeah. And there's this. There's this other Twitter like thing I believe it's called Mastodon, and it's like a attempt to make something decentralized and peer-to-peer but it doesn't use blockchain technology. It sort of uses sort of a peer-to-peer stuff prior to blockchain. That I'm I'm kind of nervous that I don't really totally understand what Mastadon so I apologize to Mastadon aficionados if I have not done an accurate job describing how it works, but that's what I vaguely hear.
one one more thing. So saya, Sayacoin who's also Boston native, I do know that they've actually been building or that somebody is actually building some type of decentralized social network similar to what we described on the Saya network and which is a, which would be competitor to IPFS. But I really like the team.
Cool. Alright, so
Enough, enough shout outs.
Yeah. Okay, so this whole time we've been talking about pros and cons. But I mean, like, Are there big pros and cons that we've left out?
Because like, it's the same con, with most decentralized things is that because you can't, a centralized company can actually kind of guide and force people to do things, it becomes an easier system to build. Because of, of like decentralized Twitter, or decentralized social media, ie, it's much more complicated to build a system that has proper balance. And that would be the biggest con is like, let's in blockchain, it's much more difficult to build a system that doesn't collapse on itself.
I mean, I don't really completely follow what you're saying. And I sort of feel like, maybe my counter to that is, is that decentralized blockchain to sorry, decentralized Twitter, the first version of that is going to be only evil Twitter or only normal Twitter, there's just going to be one interface. And that interface is going to say, We are the future of Twitter. But we are sensor resistant. And we do that by empowering you. And they're going to build something and they're going to be the only interface. And then somebody else is going to be like, oh, but I have a different vision about how to do this. And they're going to be able to reuse the other, the other team's like back end and protocol and stuff like that. And they're going to be kind of followers on, I think it's unlikely that this is going to develop by like, Oh, I just j just will launches the Jay feed. And Chris launches the Chris feed. And like, you know, 10 years later, you know, a few months later, we figure out what the standard for these feeds are going to be, I think that someone will build a product, and that product will have the censorship resistant features. But ultimately, the people that make it want to be the only ones that are the one interface, but they cannot be trusted to be the only interface. And so people will build an alternative. And I think that's the way that this develops.
Yeah. Okay, I agree with you. There. I'm just always skeptical when it comes to things on the blockchain, as far as actually building a system that actually works with each other, rather than, you know, forcing people to do it just because it's adversarial. Like, even if there is an interface, anybody has the ability to actually look at the public good and start pulling levers to actually take advantage of things. Yeah, that's what I mean, is that, yeah, I agree that there'll be one interface to kind of like, that's going to build us all, but because the entire like data portion is exposed. Like that, that would be worse. You know, I, I would still do it. But I would say that that is something that actually would care extra about.
Now, is it a con that it's harder to have reliable advertising on this? So because there can be like, what does it mean to advertise on this platform? Because you know, that you're only advertising on certain discover uncertain discovery front ends? Or maybe you know, that you're advertising like on Chris's feed?
And no, I mean, I don't I don't think there's gonna be a con at all, because the the interface, the centralized interface knows what they're displaying. And I don't see how it would be any different than what it currently is. Because you're all you're doing is you're pulling from a public data rather than your own personal database.
I guess what I mean, is that, like, if I'm an advertiser, then I know that the Twitter audiences is captured by Twitter. But I don't know.
And it still is. So like.
What do you mean? Well, let me let me just finish. So we're good at reading each other's minds. So maybe maybe everyone else didn't read my mind. So what I was saying is that, yeah, so Twitter, like they, they can say our audience has captured, that means that when you advertise with us, you're really advertising to people, because we're going to fight all day long, we're going to figure out ways to get around their ad blockers. And I mean, that's really we're going to we're going to get them to use our Twitter app. We're going to make it so the features are only in the app. And why did they do that so that you're captured. So all of their job is to capture you and make sure that you will always see the ads. And the the argument about the decentralized one is that well, by empowering users, that means that users can make their own user interfaces that don't have the ads. So therefore, if you advertise with the decentralized Twitter, you're not going to get as many eyeballs even if the network is the same size.
Well, you wouldn't pay for them. Like that's, that's the thing is like, advertisers pay for the number of eyeballs. So if Twitter doesn't do a good job and building a good interface that draws the eyeballs, they shouldn't get paid. So I would say that's a pro.
So basically, what you're saying is, is that right now Twitter can do a quote, "bad job" at selecting ads that are good for me and do a bad job providing an interface, and they are actually hurting me, their customer, and they're hurting the advertiser their customer, because they are basically getting an extra number of eyeballs over what they're really worth, because the users don't have another option.
You know, we do this every time where we start off with cons, and then the other person explains why that's actually not a con. But, but yeah, so like the obviously, there's tons of pros, though, I mean, owning your own data, being sensor resistance, knowing that the what you write is actually what you really write, being able to actually build on top of and build other services easily on the data or other companies to actually kind of maybe build extra extra, like middleware or, or doing all of this stuff, it completely makes it makes it possible. I mean, the thing I was you know, people talk about money, Legos, when it talks about defy this would just be social Legos.
Like social media Legos. So something that I think is a really good pro, actually, is this whole thing that you actually have to pay to post stuff? Because I think that that is an amazing spam filter. And like, if you, especially if you have to, like, you know, pay for me to hear your reply, or, you know, basically that increases. I think that right now, it is too cheap to do things on Twitter. And that's one of the reasons that we have so much trash. And I think that by making it more costly to do that, it makes it so that there will be higher quality content.
And the the the con is, once again, a con always is that people in power want to stay in power, so that the companies that that already are in power most likely won't implement this in the right way. So it's going to require somebody new to come in and build it and kind of disrupt how things work, which leads.
Well, then so yeah, so what you're saying is that, like, Twitter has no reason to do this. They're the market leader. So somebody else, they that's why there can be a, you know, a different Twitter that says, We're where the small guy, but you want to use us because we're censorship resistant. That's like the only story that's going to work right now you want to go into Are we going to fund them?
Yeah, that's my segue. I'm getting good segue to the next thing is so well, all right. Jay. Someone approaches you said "I want to actually build a a decentralized Twitter".
Yep.
Do you? Do you find them?
Yeah. So you know, I feel like this is I feel like.
You always say "no".
I like I always say "no", because the thing is, is that, you know, they're asking me for my money. And so I'm gonna be like, "how are you going to get my money"? Okay, like, "how are you, how are you going to get a return on this"? And I think that, I don't know, actually, I think that this is a case where the discoverability interface that that provides the advertising that provides the feedback, I think that those are very straightforward, like they can leverage a lot of existing tech and a lot of existing expertise. So that's not really like a big technical wildcard on the other hand, the the core blockchain stuff that's also pretty straightforward. And I think that there is a huge market need for this like there are many people out there in the world that feel like they're being let down by Twitter. And they want this so I think that this is actually a really good thing that yeah, I think I think I'm going for it I'm going for I'm funding I'm going for I'm going to fund them.
I would as well. Because the way that I think of things I I like to think of things you know, same way as you as far as like, "would the company itself make money" but I also like to think about the actual network Could I believe that there is an incentive model that the that there's actually a way to actually to be able to be part early in the overall Twitter protocol token so I would invest actually in both this time so I would be okay with that. So but Okay, so we both said "yes", and you just said that you know, it's you I mean if Jays gonna invest that's a great idea. Why doesn't this exist?
Yeah. I think the main reason that doesn't exist is that price on the popular networks is too high. You know, paying to post is just too expensive for a lot of things. I think that's probably the killer. And I think that even for other networks I mean, maybe they're just not quite they haven't they haven't got the the market share enough. Maybe they don't have the, you know, the stability of the the interface like, you know, Twitter's got a lot of users. Could these networks handle that many people querying for Latest feeds, I don't know, I think that I think that this is something that's waiting to be built. I think maybe one other thing to say, too, is is that I think a lot of people they, like advertising is a huge numbers game. So the only way that that company makes money is if they have a huge number of users. There, of course, not going to have a huge number of users right away. So they have an, they basically have this risk where they have to make money right now. And I think that when you look at a lot of people who are like leaving Twitter and leaving Facebook and leaving newspapers, they're going to like subscription services, where you subscribe directly to this person. And that's like, I'm paying for access to your feed. And I think paying for access to your feed, it's actually harder to do on blockchain. I mean, you could do something kind of right, where you can just say, well, like, I post the things, but they're encrypted with my public key, like, sorry, they're encrypted, and you need to like pay for access to the key. But the problem with that is, is that like, well, I can just go share the key with somebody else, I could maybe make one that's personalized for you. But now the blockchain isn't really doing something super valuable. Because I now need to, like, make one message for every single one of my users. I think that it's a much more complicated technical problem to imagine how to have a private feed that you get paid for. And I feel like a lot of people that are going in this world, like that's what their first target is. But I my guess is, is that, you know, if there were still in person, you know, blockchain conferences. I bet you if we just walked around and talk to people, we would find that they're actually 15 companies doing this.
Alright, so we talked about, you know, would we fund it? Yes. Why didn't exist? It should. Alright, time to put your architect hat on.
Yeah.
All right. You and I, I'm CEO of cool social media name, and you're the CTO. Alright. Alright, CTO, Jay. Give me an estimate. What's it going to take to build decentralized censorship resistant? Twitter, the blockchain portion, you can use it to use Reach.
Yeah. So the blockchain person, I'm going to say that give me two people that have never programmed in blockchain before ever. And I'll give them three weeks to implement it, provided they are college students also doing finals at the same time.
It's funny that you actually say that. Because, like people listen, you're like, oh, he's he's full of BS. But like, the reason why it was very specific about this, because there is a team that built decentralized Twitter, using reach while doing finals. And they finished it in three weeks, and they don't even knew what blockchain was. And they do remember what the name was. They forget the name.
I think they called it Thoughts Eternal or Infinite Thoughts or something like that?
Well, we'll put it, we'll put a link to it. So you won't actually see.
Yeah. But now that is the blockchain part of the contract. And like we said, at the very beginning, that like feed that just off, authenticates the fact that I said these things that is really easy to do. All of the difficulty of this is going to be building that aggregator building the recommendation algorithm. The thing is, is that that right, there is not a blockchain problem. That's just a normal building websites problem using machine learning problem. And there are a lot of experts that can do that. And I think that, you know, building that is going to take a lot of time, it's going to be a very interesting creative endeavor. But you don't need blockchain technology, you don't need blockchain specific information to go do that. You're just going to be able to just go do that based on your existing skills. So I'm not saying that the company is built in three weeks. What I'm saying is,
We're building an MVP here. It's not gonna have all the bells and whistles from day one.
Yeah. So I think that, you know, the contract piece, you're done in, you know, a month, easily, less than that. And then you get the MVP version of like the interface. I mean, I'm going to give you another month, plus another month to make it really beautiful. I mean, less than that at the same time. Yeah. Yeah, just have two different teams do it. I mean, this is going this is a this is one of those things where programmers and because I'm a programmer, engineer at heart, right. programmers, you know, you could slap up some programmer art on that thing, get out, just do some really basic CSS. I mean, it's, it's basically done. I just think that engineers like me. We vastly overestimate the difficulty of really starting and launching businesses and running real production websites, as opposed to doing the engineering tech part, you know, the deployment side, the business side, those are going to talk about that before. Yeah. But anyways, this is Not a hard thing to build. Cool. All right, it's actually and again, it's actually easier than building the real Twitter one, because you don't need to build some giant, reliable database. Because guess what? The giant reliable database it already exists, that's what the blockchain is.
Okay, so we just talked for a long time. Why don't you go ahead and just actually do a quick summary of everything that we kind of talked about, and then I'll wrap it up. And send them on their way.
on their way, yeah. All right. So today, we talked about on better on blockchain, how to imagine building Twitter on blockchain. And what would be better or worse about that, we talked about how the key idea of blockchain is to empower users to control their own data and the own their own interactions with the network. In a situation like Twitter, the thing that you want to control is all of your data, your feed, you don't want anyone to be able to censor you, you don't want to be able to delete what you've said. And the key way to make this work is with a really simple, smart contract. That really simple smart contract is going to be combined with a discovery system that's going to implement all of the other nice things that Twitter provides, like recommendations and things like that. And that there are lots of ideas that are out there in the world for doing things like identity verification, and incentivizing, producing good content. And the thing that's special about blockchain is that when you build something, you don't have to build the entire ecosystem. From day one, you build little composable blocks. In this case, we're not building finance blocks, or carsharing blocks, we're building social media blocks. There are a few pros, there are a few disadvantages to doing this. But a lot of those disadvantages, when you look at them the right way, they're really just providing a different feature set that we can very easily imagine that people can do. Chris and I are both going to fund this company. And you're gonna have your MVP in one month. And then you're gonna be you know, launching and taking over the world. Just a few months after that. It's been really fun chatting about this.
Thank you. Thank you, Jay, for joining me and doing this again. We're gonna continue to do these. Once again, like I said, in the very beginning, we're going to run out ideas soon. So please, in the comments, give us hints on what you'd like to see. And of course, as always, go ahead like and subscribe if you're watching this on YouTube. Because we want more people to watch us because that's just the type of people we are.
Yeah, and if you want to know more about our company reach, you can join our discord and you can go to our website reach out sh and read our documentation at docs dot reach that sh where a programming language for making programs like this daps really easily and safe and secure. And remember it's always better on blockchain.