The Blockchain Singularity of the Future with Dom

What is up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of the Dibi Crypto Podcast. And today I am joined by Dominic Williams from Diffinity Foundation. How's it going Dominic? Hi Steve. I'm getting well, thanks for having me on on a yeah. Yeah, I'm excited to learn everything that is Internet computer and what you guys are building. But before we get into that, let's learn about your origin

story. How did you get into this space? Well, you know, what you might call an engineering entrepreneur. So I've been building things in tech for quite a long time now. You know, my I was working on a big project, you know, during the docom era to build what would have been one of the first cloud computing services in the process of that. I, you know, started

working with cryptography. And I had some early brushes with sort of cipher punk thinking, you know, I came across this paper by way die called B money. And I honestly didn't understand any of it. But it, you know, I took notice. And then I was bicep of 2013. I was running this computer game that I'd built. It was an MMO, a massively multiplayer online game with

some millions of users. And, you know, I built all these different systems to support it. Many of them were actually semi decentralized. And, you know, Bitcoin caught my attention properly. And I started getting into it really properly in a April of 2013. And by the end of 2013, I decided to pretty much have bands and everything I was doing and make a permanent switch to crypto.

And, you know, December 2013, I was already working on how to make faster blockchains that might be used within the games industry, probably just because I just come out of the games industry. And, you know, I've been here in crypto ever since. Nice. Nice. So, I think, you know, such a fun distinction of we all have been calling it crypto for so long. And then the

word Web 3 or the phrase Web 3 comes in. We've all started to adopt that hand over fist. And it's so fascinating to me how things change. And you've been in this space for a long time. So you've seen a lot of the kind of semantics change over the years. And you got started in 2016, right? When you first kicked this off. Yeah. So the history

was ended 2013. I started looking into how we could make faster blockchains. But the aim was really to make a cryptocurrency that could be used in my case with games that would allow people to buy and sell virtual goods. I also meant that we'd have to create a blockchain that could support a great number of transactions a second. And in 2014, I started working on a

project called Pebble. And the aim was to create a cryptocurrency that could process hundreds of thousands of transactions a second. And the thinking was that people could use a cryptocurrency like Pebble to pay to remove ads from their Facebook account, say. And, you know, we imagined a world where, you know, you've got billions of users on social media and a substantial chunk of them would be

making payments daily payments in this cryptocurrency to get. You know, on a recurring basis automatically to get rid of the advertising. So there are a couple of firsts actually involved in that project. The first was I was the first person to try to adapt traditional consensus mathematics to the blockchain space. And the second was that I was trying to devise a scalable blockchain that could process

fast numbers of transactions. And that was a second. So I did a lot of work on Pebble. But during 2014, you know, I became part of the Ethereum, the earlier Ethereum community. Of course, Ethereum hadn't launched at this point. And while I was involved with that community, somebody came up with this concept for a world computer. And this idea came about because people were just realizing

that a blockchain can't be host software and the blockchain can run that software and process and store data itself. Okay. And that was a big jump because, you know, before Ethereum, there was only really Bitcoin and variations of it. And Bitcoin was just about the cryptocurrency. It was just about the tokens. And, you know, with the Bitcoin blockchain cryptocurrency lives a different addresses. They're called UTXOs.

They're almost like, individual coins. And these coins move from address to address. You can almost trace them. And you can, you can configure little access control scripts on those coins. Right. So I could configure some access, an access control script on some Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain that says, only somebody, you know, two of these three signatures have two of these, you know, there has to

be two out of three signatures for this to be. So, you know, it's like, you know, you can't just move somewhere else. Right. But it was still pretty basic in terms of the computation that was done on the chain. There's just this, this little access control scripts. Ethereum really presented a kind of different vision of what a blockchain could could be. Now all of a sudden,

you had these script smart contracts that stayed at fixed addresses. On the blockchain. So with Bitcoin, you just, you know, you have these coins moving from address to address. And you can configure an access control script. But when that, when those coins move, the script disappears. Right. It's impermanent. But Ethereum allowed you to create these smart contracts that would reside at fixed addresses. And then cryptocurrency

move between those scripts. Cryptocurrency sort of moves between these smart contracts or fixed Ethereum accounts. So that was a very different way of thinking about how blockchain should be designed and what kind of functionality it can provide. So people realized for the first time that a blockchain could be a compute platform. Because, I mean, I mean, smart contracts is an unfortunate name, right? We should really

just call it blockchain code. Smart contracts that just software that runs on a blockchain. So it would be less confusing to call it blockchain code. But anyway, the smart contracts name stuck. But essentially, you know, Ethereum is like a sort of blockchain computer. It hosts all these smart contracts. And those smart contracts also store data on the blockchain and process that data. And, you know, the

same kind of guarantees that were provided for tokens on Bitcoin were now being provided for computation on Ethereum. So someone, you know, I forget the name of the guy, but someone realized, well, hey, you know, you, you can run. Software and store data and do computations on a blockchain. Well, it's a kind of blockchain computer. So why don't we build a world computer? Couldn't we have

a world computer? And, you know, pretty much every and at least my interpretation of this idea was that everything, you know, nearly all our systems and services would run on a blockchain, a world computer blockchain. And as soon as I heard those words world computer, you know, my outlook about what I should be working on changed. So, you know, I'd completed this white paper describing all

kinds of, you know, a pleikratography and consensus math and so on for this cryptocurrency called pebble. And, you know, I made the decision as well to move on from that and start looking at how we could build a world computer. So early 2015, I started proposing a technical ideas that might be used to produce a world computer. And then, you know, really the purpose of this

work in my mind was to create a Ethereum 2.0 or Ethereum 3.0. And I was still very much involved in the early community, Ethereum community. So around that time, you know, I also met a number of sort of famous cryptographers who gave me information that that allowed me to see that certain things were possible. And I proposed something called threshold relay. And without getting too complicated,

this was effectively a way of creating random numbers in a decentralized network. And the reason I wanted to create random numbers is I realized you could use them to drive a blockchain. And you could do it in a way that could scale. So interestingly enough, actually, although at the time, the Ethereum community, you know, there was a, for Talik, obviously, and there's a guy called Vlad

Zamfir, who are the primary sort of engines of research for Ethereum. And they had, they were very interested in these sort of crypto economic approaches to consensus. Whereas I was primarily interested in these sort of approaches that relied upon new applications cryptography. Anyway, the initial proposals that I made, or essentially a Ethereum 2.0. So if you look at a Ethereum 2.0, you've got a beacon chain,

which uses BLS to generate a stream of random numbers that drives consensus and other functions. So in the end, you know, the ideas that I proposed early in 2015 have been realized. But I, you know, didn't continue thinking about these. Problems and doing my research. And I realized that, that in order to create a world computer, you'd also need a new kind of blockchain architecture. And

so I began to rethink that, how blockchain's blockchain network structure. And, you know, and I think back in the day, it was very difficult. And people were interested in my ideas, but they sounded very complicated. And it's true. They often did involve a lot of, but play cryptography and other complexities. But, you know, it wasn't really going anywhere. And it was difficult to galvanize people around,

trying to build something on this really, using this really kind of complex idea. So 2016, I think it was like, gosh, April, May 2016. I was a co founder on an incubator, a crypto incubator based in Palo Alto, California. And, you know, it had been pursuing some projects that weren't really going anywhere. There were some roadblocks. Either they were going to be built on a theory.

And then a theory wasn't fast enough. Didn't have enough capacity. All the regulatory hurdles to overcome. And I said, look, guys, why don't we just do affinity as it was called that? Why don't we do the definitive project? So then during the summer of 2016, this incubator is called string lab. And my co-found was a Chinese guy called Tom Ding. Began incubating the definitive project. And

then I think it was October, November, one of those 2016. We've credit the definitive foundation in Zoug. Basically just aping Ethereum because, you know, Ethereum had credit the Ethereum foundation in Zoug too. And 2017, we ran one of the first, ICOs, or the, you know, or rather one of the first of the new wave of ICOs. And we didn't raise that much money because we are

so early. I think we ended up selling, you know, 25% of all the ICP for like $3.9 million, which was paid in Bitcoin and Ether, which obviously in hindsight, you know, people, you know, members of the public who got in on that ICO made absolutely stupendous amounts of money, right? Because they were buying ICP at $3. But we were kind of lucky because, you know, we

received Bitcoin and Ether. And although we are trying to sell it as fast as we could, the price went up enormously. So we ended up with a much bigger watch est than we would have had otherwise. And that, you know, enabled me to extend the ambition of this, this definitive project. Originally, I just wanted to create a blockchain. There was a derivative. The Ethereum that switched

out the consensus protocol and put in some network governance mechanisms. So you wouldn't have to do all these hard forks to update the network. And, you know, essentially, we sort of started laying the ground works for creating a real world computer. And it turned out to be unsurprisingly a very major endeavor. And in order to deliver this thing, you know, we had to scale out a

very large international team. So one thing that's not so well known is that the definitive foundation probably employs more famous cryptographers than any other organization in tech, let alone in blockchain. One of the curiosities of the current blockchain environment is that a lot of blockchain projects don't actually employ any cryptographers at all, right? They just, you know, rehash the same old techniques and they don't really

innovate in that sphere. But in order to create the, to create the internet computer, which is the only world computer, if you like, in existence, we had to innovate in a lot of different spheres. We had to do a lot of very, very complex engineering and indeed, you know, sort of blue sky cryptography research to get all the pieces that we needed together. And then, you

know, we, the network finally underwent Genesis May 2021. So in fact, really, if you look at it, it's like a sort of six years ingestation, which is a very, very long time. A crypto project to spend an R&D. Yeah, yeah, but that's an awesome stat that you guys are really hiring and nurturing the cryptographers out there to really do research and figure this stuff out. You

know, I've, I've followed Cardano very closely and how they focus on research and a lot of these foundations that focus on research. And when you were talking about the original days where everything was just forks of Bitcoin and Litecoin, I remembered colored coins. That was like the sort of big, big, big thing back then. Everybody was talking about it. And it seemed like it was going

to be this huge deal. And lo and behold later, it sort of took shape. I guess you could call it in the form of tokens. But I, when you were mentioning that, I really liked just reminiscing on that time frame, because it was a special time frame that you're talking about before at the EREM. There were so many cool ideas floating around like on Bitcoin talk

and all these like fun, fun things. And it was a really genuine time. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was a really exciting time. You know, you, I mean, people like me weren't really motivated by the money. We are motivated by the potential of this technology. And I mean, you mentioned colored coins. I mean, I guess you're alluding to counterparty and master coin and projects like

that. I think really the thinking behind projects like master coin and counterparty got rolled into Ethereum. So the talik, of course, was very, very aware of those. And I don't want to, I wouldn't want to speak for him. But I think, as I recall, he'd been a consultant on master coin. So, you know, Ethereum didn't come out of nowhere. In the same way, you know, the,

the definitive foundation and the internet computer didn't come out of nowhere. I mean, we were entirely inspired by learnings from Ethereum and this site, this, this concept of a world computer. But yeah, it was, it was kind of, I didn't go so far as saying it was a magical time. Yeah. And especially within the, the earlier Ethereum community, there was a kind of traveling circus that

went around the world, you know, and we'd be meeting up in these kind of mini conferences all over the place, you know, and discussing just about everything you can imagine from, you know, blockchain architecture through consensus math through the potential of dolls, you name it. Everything was up for discussion. And everyone was just much more innocent than them. Really pure, pure, pure of heart, pure of

heart than they are today. I mean, we were doing it for the money we were doing it for the love of the technology and just excitement about the potential. We knew, we knew that this technology was going to change the world. And we wanted to be part of it. Right. And that, that made the whole thing very, very magical. You know, now of course, crypto has

kind of gone mainstream. I mean, it's really about hyper noise. I don't, I don't think many people coming into the space really are aware of the kind of interesting history of crypto and where things came from. And I think it's just very difficult to get information out there. And you know, the whole ecosystem of, you know, crypto publications and social media and so on is very

much oriented around generating returns on tokens. And it kind of like means that people knew to the space, find it very difficult to see. Through the noise, you know, it's difficult to get a signal on. It's difficult to get information. And we certainly found it very challenging. I mean, we were sort of getting our act together now. But when we launched the Internet computer in May

21, I sort of remembered the blockchain environment of old, you know, and I hadn't really been part of it because it's almost like we'd just gone off to the metaphorical garage, you know, in fact, we built these big research centers and just hired tons of propeller heads and just been working away for years. And I remembered a different kind of world where in crypto, where if

you solved fundamental problems, you know, you'd be sort of championed for it and thanked for it, you know, and everyone would be super excited about technical innovations. That's not actually the case today. It's really, you know, about maintaining the state of mind. The state is quiet and pushing return investors towards purchasing a small set of, relatively small set of tokens. And we had great difficulties because

you know, most blockchain projects today are like 90% business development and marketing and people who work on the inverted commerce community, which really means organizing armors of shills and trolls on social media, right. But you know, we launched and we had this incredible technology. It was incredible team, but it was all just R&D. And we kind of got eviscerated when we launched, you know, we were

sort of subjected to all kinds, all manner of dirty tricks that just now are beginning to be exposed. But somehow, you know, we survived. And despite the crypto press refusing to report on the Internet computer, really. One way or another, just because the underlying technology was so strong, you know, we built up a developer community of many thousands through a huge numbers of projects on it,

we still didn't get any press. We're still a potential disruptor. Everyone's very worried about, I suppose. But the project somehow survived and grew and and has been has been doing very well. And, you know, still today, there is only one blockchain out there that can lay claim to being a world computer. And a world computer is a blockchain, in our view, that runs, which can run

online services and applications entirely from the blockchain without any use for traditional IT in the cloud. And so, well, computer needs to be able to serve web to users, right? Someone needs to be able to build something like Facebook on the blockchain. And those smart contracts need to be able to process HTTP requests and serve the user experience directly to the end user. And those smart

contracts need to be able to store and process data cheaply enough that you can have, you know, one day exabytes of data on chain being processed on chain. And, you need to do all of that while maintaining all of the, you know, the guarantees that a blockchain provides like security, live news, decentralization, censorship, resistance, and so on. And, you know, a world computer needs to be

able to run as efficiently in our view as traditional IT, like our objective, and this is where things get turned completely on the head. Our objective is to provide a world computer blockchain that can host an enterprise system or a web 3 social media service. With ultimately better efficiency, then you could get, if you built it on Amazon Web Services using traditional technology, like a database

think the average number of transactions be processed a second is about 5,000. So it's currently chomping its way through almost half a billion transactions a day. And, you know, if you read the crypto press or you hear people, you know, look at, listen to the hype of the crypto sphere, you know, supposedly salon as the blockchain that's built to handle high numbers of transactions. And it's

only doing 30 million transactions a day, which is a tiny fraction of the number of transactions being processed by the internet computer. Also, when you look more deeply into it, you find, well, you know, and this is something I guess is a subject very dear to my heart is, you know, the public have been greatly misled, you know, about Web 3. Like sure, like, you know,

the, the, when people hear the Web 3, a lot of the time, they just think about NFTs. And these are very simple things, right? They don't realize is that firstly, even with respect to NFTs, it's living on Amazon Web Services typically. And that's a bit of a cheat, you know, just putting a link to content on the blockchain. And our view is enough. It should all

live on the blockchain. But more than that, you know, Web 3 for us is about reinventing the internet ecosystem. That means creating, you know, social fire, you know, social networks that blend social media functionality with Define. This stuff needs to run entirely on the blockchain under the control of a community. And now, because Web 3 is all about ownership, the simplest one of ownership is just

tokenizing assets, like tokenizing ownership of some digital art, say. But what's much more profound and interesting is the tokenization of, you know, the entire internet ecosystem and running services on the blockchain from the blockchain without any intermediary, without any use for traditional IT and cloud services and things like that and placing them under the control of community dows. That's the real revolution we're interested in. What

a lot of people don't realize is when they interact with services on other blockchains that claim to be Web 3 services, what they're really interacting with is something running on the cloud. So if you interact today with an Ethereum Web 3 service, a salon, a Web 3 service, an avalanche Web 3 service, whatever. What you're really interacting with is something that's running on a cloud, you

know, cloud computing service like Amazon Web Services generally. That's constructed with, you know, a database, a web server and all the other kind of components people use in traditional IT. That just occasionally makes, you know, forwards a few transactions if you like to the blockchain to change ownership of an NFT or something like that. And I don't think the public really is aware that's the situation

today. I think, you know, in our experience when you ask the public, hey, someone said this is a Web 3 service running on Salona. What do you think? How do you think this works? You know, in our experience, like 95% plus of the public will say, oh, Salona's acting as a decentralized compute platform. Right. And this Web 3 services running on Salona as per the grammar

would lead you to think. Right. But in reality, that's not the case at all. In reality, this thing's running on Amazon Web Services and Salona's just been used to maintain a few tokens. And the internet, you know, the internet computer, which is a world computer, solves that and to give you a kind of measure of the difference, you know, if you wanted to store a phone

photo on Salona, right? You know, a photo you take with a, you know, a high end smartphone typically is about 3.3 megabytes. You know, if you want to store that photo on Salona, firstly, it's very technically difficult to do to upload that much data. Salona, but the biggest obstacle is the cost. It's going to cost you north of $1,500 to store one phone photo. So how

are you going to build Web 3 social media sites on blockchains like that when you can't even store a photo on the blockchain, like in Harrison on the internet computer, you can store a photo for like 1.6 cents. So today, you know, we've got one example, because it's kind of I'm near to the team. I keep using, but there are lots of examples. And I apologize

to the other examples. But there's a, there's a certain service called OpenChat, and it's a messaging service, OpenChat. An OpenChat runs entirely from the internet computer blockchain and small contracts are processing the messages people send to each other. So they, and they're even processing like media messages. So you know, say you and I were on OpenChat, you know, I could send you a photo in your

chat stream, I could send you a video. Now, it's not quite as unrestricted as WhatsApp. Yeah, I think the, after a certain, I think it's 100 megabytes or something, you know, it starts deleting old pictures and it, and video to keep the load on it down. But you can see where this is going, like for the first time, it we could, in the first time in

history, we can now see that a public decentralized network can be used to build mass market, social media, and of course, it's not just normal social media, it's what I'd call social phi, that your chat account is also a crypto wallet, and you can send crypto, chat messages and stuff like that. And that service very shortly is fully decentralized by assigning control of the smart contracts

involved in providing that service to a DAO, a community DAO. And their plan is to give away the vast majority of the governance tokens that control the DAO to the public and the EU. So that for us is what web 3 is about, and that's what a world computer is, a world computer is a blockchain that is, you know, can process HTTP, I can serve web

experiences, so you don't need to build all of that on the cloud. That's fast enough and efficient enough that it can actually store and process all of the data, the huge volume of data that's associated with, with services like that. Very cool, very cool. And you answer quite a few questions. I know a lot of my questions in advance there, especially what a world computer is,

and how you guys have constructed everything. And I really like what you mentioned about the AWS part. The vast majority of people that I talk to do not know that, they don't, they're not aware that this is all hosted by web 2 companies. And I think that is, that's a bit of a meme in the builder community that has, you know, come up with the idea

of how to build a new computer. So taking a different step here as the finale question to wind down a little bit outside of Internet computer, you've been in this space for a long time. You've been building really cool, innovative concepts. You've met all these awesome builders all across the world. What is it that you're excited about when you get up, you check your phone, what

is it that just makes you super hyped? Well, I'm generally very hyped about blockchain. Sometimes it's, it's fear and sometimes it's optimism. I'd say probably both an equal measure. You know, I, I greatly fear like the sort of mystery. I, I greatly fear the way the ecosystem has become will lead to regulate is kind of closing down everybody. And I think there's a lot of dirty

stuff that went on. And we certainly are on the, the ends of it. I mean, there's others are, there's an investigative investigative journalism site called crypto leaks. It's crypto leaks.info. And if anyone's curious to see quite a dirty blockchain can be, they should go and, go and check out crypto leaks.info. But I worry that all of this will open the door to regulators around the world.

You just sort of stifle innovation and the whole space gets slowed down. On the other hand, I also think that at some point, you know, with the macro economic environment turning down, and you know, if you like the Thai gang and crypto and exposing a lot of these kind of bad actors and stuff, and the nefarious goings on, that there may be a chance for the

space to become more rational and start looking more objectively at the different projects out there. What value they're really creating, what they're bringing to the table and who the teams are. And so I'm excited about that. And I'm also excited. I'm just excited about the number of really sort of driven, innovative, creative, smart, determined, you know, resilient people that have been brought into the blockchain space.

Look, I mean, you know, you know, I don't know if you've got it, if you've got kids, but I remember this sort of transition that took place. And, you know, when I was a kid, you know, we looked at it. TV, when we got back from school, what even that many TV channels, you know, for a kid today in the early teens or something, they don't

even really know what a TV is. Like, if you ask them what a TV is, they'll show you like Instagram or TikTok or YouTube, or you know, it's, it's almost like their internet natures, right? Like they don't know what cable TV is. They, they just understand the sort of social media ecosystem. And you know, there are, there are kids now that, in their early 20s, and

they got into blockchain, you know, high school, they were buying and selling tokens. And a lot of those kids now are building really cool shit. And so I think the, although crypto and blockchain will be as chaotic and crazy as it always was, it just seems to be the nature of it. I suspect that's going to continue for many, many years. I think there's a lot

of very, kind of, cool, interesting people that have been brought into the space. And there's a lot of new ideas. And there's a lot of just the sort of ground swell of energy that I think will, in the coming years, will, will probably mean crypto succeeds on a, in a very big way. Well said, well said, I too am excited about, about that. Those are all

the questions I have for you. Where can people go and learn more? I'm going to question. So internet computer.org is a fairly good place. And there's content on that website that's links into wiki.internetcomputer.org. If you're a coder, the good news is we've been getting much better with our online content. I think I'm right in saying there are now 138 sample dApps that you can use to

get started quickly. There's a grants program. There are hundreds and hundreds of, well, thousands now of interesting projects running on the internet computer. You can look at to get inspiration. There's a lot of good technical content online. Yeah, I just tell over to internet computer.org. And get started. If you're interested in more, if you're interested in affinity, go to affinity.org. And you can check out the,

the affinity team and see what kind of people work on something like the internet computer. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well, wherever you guys are listening on iTunes or Spotify, all the links that Dominic mentioned will be in the show notes. But thanks so much for coming on and sharing the entire story. That's how you got started and how affinity got started.