{ "episodeId": "SLP80", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "richard_myers": { "name": "Richard Myers", "role": "guest", "tag": "RICHARD" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:09", "start": 8.95, "text": "Hi and welcome to the Stephan Livera podcast focused on Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Learn the economics and technology of Bitcoin. So today, for episode eighty, my guest is Richard Myers. He's decentralization engineer at Gertena and also working on a new proposal called Lot forty-nine with Global Mesh Labs. I think this is exciting because it's using Bitcoin to help enable mesh networking and provide an incentive for people to provide alternative means of communication and sending encrypted messages. But before that, a quick word for my sponsors. So firstly, have you checked out Kraken? Over my years in Bitcoin, I've been impressed with the way Kraken operate. They have a very, very strong focus on security. 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While a loan is outstanding, your bitcoin is stored in a dedicated multisig address under collaborative custody with Unchained, holding one of Of three keys, you would hold the second key and Unchained's independent third party key agent would hold the third key. So to learn more and sign up, go to unchained-dashcapital dot com. With that said, onto the interview. Richard, first of all, I just wanted to say, thanks for joining me on the show, and congrats on, the getting the highly contested Lightning residency with Chaincode Labs, and also some of the work you're doing now with Lot Forty Nine." }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "02:58", "start": 177.92, "text": "Thanks, Stefan. It's, been looking forward to chatting with you and, Looking, yeah, pretty excited about the residency too. It's, really sort of drinking from a fire hose of information." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:09", "start": 189.47, "text": "Fantastic. So look, tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and what you're doing now in terms of GoTenna and global, mesh networking." }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "03:19", "start": 199.09, "text": "Yeah, sure. So, GoTenna has basically spun off a subsidiary, Global Mesh, Labs, just to pursue the, the LoT49 protocol and, and related technologies, to make it, to make it something that's not just, you know, a GoTenna product, but something that basically we wanna open source and share with the world. So that's why we thought it made more sense to, to break it out into a, into a new kind of organization." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:46", "start": 226.15, "text": "Fantastic. So, look, tell us a little bit about, maybe we can just start with, what is the Basic problem that mesh networking is trying to solve." }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "03:55", "start": 234.83, "text": "Yeah, sure. I mean, there's a few, few kind of ways to look at it. One is just what we would call resiliency, and that's, you can think of things like natural disasters, I mean, in the, in, Puerto Rico, they had Hurricane Maria, that took out ninety-seven percent of the infrastructure for communications and took, you know, months to recover. you've even got, you know, places like highly connected places like New York or the eastern, you know, eastern part of the US, which was taken out by Hurricane Sandy, and that took out like a third of their communication infrastructure. so basically centralized systems are just inherently fragile and slow to recover. so that's, that's, that's a pretty, you know, that's probably, maybe the Technology is, is that kind of resiliency? but there's also man-made disasters. I mean, you can look at what's going on in Ven-Venezuela, and that's not a natural disaster, but there's certainly a man-made disaster which is really im-impeding people's ability to communicate in, you know, and it has pretty serious consequences. but then, but then censorship, you know, that's actually pretty topical now to talk about because you see what's going on in, Hong Kong right now, for example. you Kinda quell some of those protests. and, you know, there's for a long time been something, you know, the Great Firewall of China, which everybody knows about, but, you know, if you think about it, they're really sort of normalizing a, an Orwellian censorship, with, with that Great Firewall, but, it's pretty scary when you, when you think about it. and, and this whole idea of, you know, politically shutting down networks is, is really pretty widespread and I think, you know, potentially growing. You've Ethiopia, you know, these are recent stories about censorship. I think you've probably, followed Alex Gladstein from the Human Rights Foundation. He does a, a great, you know, talk on this and, and the work they're doing is really, you know, c-covers a lot of these things going on around the world. but then there's also surveillance, you know, besides just shutting down the network, you've also got this idea of sort of prevalent, per-pervasive surveillance. And again, we see this in Hong Kong, and this is again" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "06:06", "start": 365.56, "text": "Aren't using cash to buy their, to buy their train tickets to the protests because, you know, this stuff is all recorded. And, you know, Edward Snowden, it goes back to Edward Snowden, what he revealed, you know, basically is that the cypherpunks' worst nightmares from the nineties of how credit cards and other, you know, financial information could be monitored, has basically come to pass. I mean, it's, it's interesting to go back and read some of those cypherpunks 'cause they were, they were worried about credit cards" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "06:36", "start": 395.54, "text": "This metadata is basically being sucked up and used, not just by governments, but by, you know, by commercial interests of all, of all sorts. and then of course, go back to China, you know, there is, there is a pervasive, surveillance state, you know, which just shows a sort of way that the world can go with technology, and they're exporting that technology. New York Times had an article about that, so this isn't really just limited to China, this is a technology that's being exported and collaborated on with Western democ- Democracies as well. So there's, there's quite a lot of, to, to worry about in, in that surveillance, realm. and then I think the last thing that's worth mentioning is this idea of just last mile communities. There are a lot of places in the world, maybe not in, you know, Sydney or New York, but a lot of places that just aren't economical to really connect to the, to the internet or, or to the, to the kind of wider world. and, you know, it would be nice to have a technology so these communities could connect themselves and sort of keep some of that, keep some of that incentive for, Or, what should I say, basically create their own infrastructure rather than rely on some centralized party to provide that infrastructure. So, yeah, those are, those are probably the major motivations for mesh." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:54", "start": 473.56, "text": "Great. And I like the idea that you're mentioning around an incentive for it, right? So even with, when it comes to things like natural disaster and last mile, some parallels that I'm thinking here as well is Even during a natural disaster, there might be higher prices to go and buy water, for example, and that higher prices is also what attracts new suppliers of water, right? Because that's part of a market mechanism to kind of pull in resources there, because it's saying, \"Hey, we need water here,\" so now people who are entrepreneurial will think, \"Hey, I, I can go buy some water somewhere else where it's cheap and bring it to the disaster zone.\" So in the same way, that's probably one of the powers of- This approach that I'm seeing with mesh, mesh networking and incentivizing it, so that might be something we can get into." }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "08:44", "start": 523.96, "text": "Yeah, I mean, the, you're, I know you've, you've got an economics background, so I mean, that, that's, I think what you're observing there is the power of incentives to- Fill market demand and create-- and so what I guess you could look at incentives as a way of creating a market where there isn't a market right now, which is a market for communication. So I absolutely agree." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:02", "start": 541.87, "text": "Yeah, fantastic. So look, let's go into a little bit around how mesh networks work and how are they different from our current centralized options." }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "09:11", "start": 550.66, "text": "Yeah, so- Mesh network, and with a mesh network, your device, say your mobile phone, it's gonna communicate with other mobile phones within radio range, within the range of its radio. whereas in a centralized network, your mobile phone always talks to some central nearby base station, which is run by some, you know, one or many, different mobile carriers. but here, you talk to your, you talk to just other people within radio range, and if the message you wanna send has to go further, it can hop from device to device to device until it reaches reaches its destination. And that network system might include gateways over the internet or might include gateways, you know, other sorts of gateway, satellite links, things like that, but generally it's, it's from sort of a peer node to a peer node. It's not something that goes through some hierarchy of communication that's centrally planned. and the thing is everybody has this technology in their pocket right now. Your phone does send and receive, it just doesn't send and receive to people nearby, it only sends and receives to this sort of locked down system that, that you really don't have any control over. Yeah, so and, and, you know, the centralized carriers, they don't really have an incentive to unlock that potential. For them, it's, it's, it wouldn't be a revenue source if people could communicate without the centralized carrier. So, so that's, yeah, that's a very big difference." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:32", "start": 632.45, "text": "And with that, are there certain other benefits, I suppose, that can come with economies of scale using a centralized service or radio tower, let's say? And is that part of the challenge then with doing mesh networking, is that you can't, you're sort of losing- Some of that economy of scale in the processing and networking of it?" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "10:52", "start": 652.14, "text": "Yeah, I mean, it's true. I mean, you've, you've, you've seen this in the Bitcoin world too, you know, you can't really compare a Visa network which is centralized on a database, that's always gonna be a more efficient way to, to operate a system, isn't it centralized way? efficient in the sense that, you know, you can plan where you put your cell towers to get good coverage, you can, you know, you can basically capitalize it, you can pay for all that planning. and then you can also, you know, you can finance the start of a cell phone network, whereas with the mesh network, you've got, you've always got this, it's like Bitcoin in the sense that you've got a zero star problem, we call it. So if you're the only one running on the mesh network, it's not very useful. This is like the telephone had this problem. If you're the only one with a telephone, how do you communicate with somebody else? So overcoming that is something, you know, unique to a mesh network or any peer-to-peer network for that matter. you've also got the fact that if you are relaying for other people, that means the battery of your mobile device, is being used not only for your own use, but to relay for other people. So how do you overcome this sort of power anxiety that, that might come from somebody, you know, worrying about their device being drained by, you know, by this? Relaying function. and then there's just sharing of spectrum, you know, assuming all these other things are solved, you wanna make sure people fairly use the spectrum, you don't just get, you know, one person who's just blasting out all the time. so there's a tragedy of the commons that has to be overcome, and that's a place where if it costs you a little something, that, that's like, you know, keeps people from essentially spamming this shared resource, which is your spectrum. And, and maybe finally, just one other thing, is the If you want, you know, there are some, even though it's a flat peer-to-peer network, some nodes, some functionalities, do potentially take more planning and resources, and you want to incentivize people to supply that, that resource to the other users." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:48", "start": 767.7, "text": "Interesting commentary. And so now, as probably most listeners would understand, that people have been working on mesh networks for a while, is there a reason why it hasn't caught on until now or until, until already?" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "13:03", "start": 782.57, "text": "Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I went back I went back and did a little research just to see what the history was when I, when I wrote this lot forty nine, white paper, and it seems like there were quite a few attempts, you know, going back to the nineties, and a lot of those were initially, you know, some of them were, were just very simple based, you know, just trying to like solve some of these problems, like, for instance, spectrum usage. but the ones that started to get into monetization, they only had sort of centralized payment systems to work from, the, you know," }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "13:34", "start": 814.23, "text": "Centralizes the mesh because now you're centralized over a single payment provider. And, I mean, I don't know if that's the reason they didn't take off, but it's true that we're sort of at a, at a point now where you can, you can actually make your payment system as decentralized as your communication system. And, and I don't think that's, you know, there's really been no way to do that before, you know, Satoshi's white paper. So that, you know, that's one, one thing that I think probably helps us right now." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:59", "start": 838.52, "text": "Fascinating. It's, it's partly a technol- technological answer that now we have decentralized money and potentially also now we have more surveillance. So there's more reason for people to try to use mesh networking. So look, let's talk a bit about Lot forty-nine. What is it?" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "14:18", "start": 857.83, "text": "Okay. So, Lot forty-nine is a protocol, you know, just like Bitcoin is a protocol. and it's, it's a, it's a- Work in progress. So we're basically adapting the Lightning Network, which is a, you know, which is a way to make micro-payments between people. You know, that's, that's, that's the sort of fundamental function of a, of a, of the second layer protocol. but a- and a lot of people have made this observation, and, and, and I think we're just sort of trying to realize this idea in a real concrete way, to make it happen, and that is that the Lightning Network, it works. it works off-chain, but it also essentially, there are aspects that essentially could also work off-grid, 'cause working off-chain is in essence working, you know, off-grid. You don't, you don't have to communicate to the internet to get to the blockchain when you're doing an off-chain transaction. so the, this protocol, the lot forty-nine protocol, is, is ways, is basically an adaptation of the Lightning protocol, to incentivize nodes to relay for other nodes. So just like in the Lightning network, you're, you're incentivizing nodes to chan- to relay payments, here we're relaying, not, you know, we're not focusing on the payment part, but we're relay- we're focusing on the fact that these nodes are also relaying data. And each time they, they- Pass a message from physical node to physical node, they can collect part of the Lightning payment in the same way that Lightning nodes collect a small fee for, for relaying data, payments." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:43", "start": 943.39, "text": "Fascinating. And yes, I like the idea then that, you know, this is now- A better attempt because now we've, we've got a really more credible incentive for people to try and be a participant in this network and to provide some of their resources for this network because now they can get paid for it. And so, are we-- Hopefully, we're gonna be opening up the internet to more people in more ways with this, is that, is that one of your hopes?" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "16:09", "start": 969.03, "text": "Yeah. I mean, it's, it's the, the, the idea is that you can-- This network can reach in many more places. And, you know, part of the reason to make it an open You know, we don't want there to be a gatekeeper for people who wanna basically use the network and who wanna to continue to develop the network, and I think that's gonna help it reach places that a more centrally planned or centrally, even centrally sponsored sort of protocol Couldn't reach. So, you know, we wanna basically unlock people's ingenuity to create this permissionless marketplace like what we talked about before for, for communication essentially. and then, you know, where it gets used, you know, we can't really even imagine where the first most useful place would be. but it at least creates a protocol that people can use to, to incentivize each other to sort of do this, this bottom-up, this bottom-up, bootstrap basically a bottom-up, communication economy. so that's, yeah, that's probably the, the most important aspect of, of, of that, and, and I think, you know, one, one of the other, getting back a little bit to your question about, why now, sort of like, why can this happen after, you know, not being able to happen in the past? Part of it, too, is we actually, not just that we have more surveillance, but we actually have a community, the Bitcoin community, which is really focused on this question, has a very high value use for it." }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "17:32", "start": 1051.62, "text": "Because they, you know, you've got-- it doesn't have to be a large community to bootstrap something, you just need some people with a real interest, and it could be that Bitcoin community is that community that can, that kind of bootstrap this, this idea." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:44", "start": 1063.8, "text": "Fantastic. Let's talk about the basic approach. Now, I've had a chance to read the paper, but, just for the listeners, if you-- maybe you could just spell out some of the different ideas around the sender node, the relay nodes, and so on. Sure." }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "17:57", "start": 1077.17, "text": "So, you can sort of imagine the You know, let's see, we're like four or five different types of nodes, or nodes that are playing different roles. So you might have a sender, the sender is gonna be the one who wants to send some data somewhere. So if you think of, you know, we-- I usually, because Yeah, so w- I usually think of it like an SMS message. I mean, there could be other data, you can, you know, you can have API data, for example, but, but just for now, it's simpler to think of it as like an SMS message. and then, then there's gonna be relays. So the relays are all the nodes around the sender who- Who through a chain of, of relaying get it to some destination node, and then there's, so that's the destination node. and there may also be involved, depending on, you know, what stage of this communication you're in, there are also maybe gateway nodes involved, which are just nodes that are on both networks, that are perhaps on the local mesh, and they may also be on inter-, the internet in some way, either through a internet connection, like a, you know, normal fiber connection, or, or, or it could be a mobile node that has mobile internet but that would be a gateway to the global internet. and then we have something that, is called a, that I call a witness node, but it's essentially a node that it would be online, so this wouldn't be a mesh node. The witness node would be, you could think of it like a full node, if you will, which is able to, handle the confirmation of, Bitcoin transaction, 'cause essentially, you do just, even in the Lightning Network, you do eventually have to settle and, and monitor Bitcoin transactions. And we're not envisioning that happening on the mesh network itself. I mean, maybe someday that's possible, but right now we're trying to keep this sort of use of the communication of the- Over the mesh network is, is small, is limited as possible. So, so you can think of the, your, these nodes as sort of from the lightning standpoint, pretty light, light clients, So when the sender wants to send a message, they, they're gonna pre-pay in the sense of Lightning, which is the same way Lightning works, they're gonna pre-pay some amount. and that prepayment is gonna be encoded as sort of a, you can think of it as a header on the data message, which is gonna go to the destination. And what that header does is it, it- If there's already a channel with the relay that, that is along the route to the destination, it's going to commit to pay that next hop some amount of value, and then that process repeats from each relay to each relay, where, where the relays, again, like on the relay, like in the Lightning Network, each relay is gonna take a small cut, they're gonna take a small fee, before transferring the data and the commitment to their next node until it gets to a destination. and then the destination is again gonna get a pre- A small prepayment, we, we imagine, you know, that's just something that the, the destination could either-- it could either be a large payment to the destination if you were prepaying, say, for a reply message or just a small one, but the key is that, just like in the Lightning Network, you want the Destination to offer, or to reveal some secret. So when the sender put together this message for the destination, they encrypted their message, and in that message they encrypted, they're gonna include, what is the, what is the, secret essentially. In, in, in the light, in the lightning sense, they call it a pre-pre image of, which is a secret that needs to be revealed by that destination. And, and when that's revealed, it flows backwards basically through a kind of delivery receipt mechanism. And this idea of including the secret in the message, that's not new to Lightning either. There's already been a lot of talk about that. I think, the Light-LND guys call it a \"Sphinx send,\" that's, that's the, the sort of nomenclature they use, but it's the same idea that you don't have to kind of negotiate an invoice, you just send that pre-image to your destination, and they, they unwrap it when they get the message. So that's sort of the, that's the path when all these channels are set up. there's also a step where if, if a node doesn't have a channel set up, and this is probably maybe the weakest part of the system, is what do you do if there's no channel? and what it, what you do need to do is you do, you need to- open a channel like you would in the Lightning Network, and what that means is that the destination that you're opening with, whoever's funding that channel, sends, you know, in the Lightning sends a setup transaction. and that does have to somehow eventually get confirmed on the internet, on the blockchain. And, and this is something we wrestled with for a long time, but essentially there's just no clever way out of it. You, if you wanna have a payment that's secured by the Bitcoin network, at some point you gotta touch the Bitcoin network. but the longer lived these channels are, then the less, of a problem that is essentially. So, so we can get into that a little bit later, like what those trade-offs are. But so now, so now you can imagine this message flows through the relay, it gets confirmed by the destination, which reveals the secret, the secret flows back as a return receipt, and these lightning channels then update. So that's the, that's sort of your basic, your basic control flow there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:07", "start": 1387.48, "text": "How do the nodes negotiate a payment? As in, how much did they pay? And I guess the other question is, if, if I'm a node, if I'm a sender node out somewhere and I don't have good connection, how do I then know, oh, yeah, my payment, my message got, got through, or maybe I need to bump it up a bit more and put more fee to kind of get it through? Yeah," }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "23:28", "start": 1407.8, "text": "I mean, like I said, this is sort of a work in progress, and some of those things we haven't quite, you know, figured out the best practice for. My, I have a few ideas, which is what I, what But my, my basic idea is that, these nodes will publish some information about themselves, and some of that information might be how much they charge to relay data, and, and/or they could-- there could be a standard value, 'cause part of-- you could include that value in the message, you can also include it in the routing, so that's another proposal that, that's been, that's been suggested by our, our, you know, routing protocol people is, you can actually include that in the routing protocol. So when-- so the sender, before they send, they might have a, a, a computation from the routing protocol that tells them what the total cost is gonna be. and that's also a kind of a guarantee too, because you wanna avoid problems with nodes introducing fake links, you know, so that people trying to double dip by introducing fake Fake additional nodes. So probably the best, best approach is just to have a, a fixed fee, but we, we recognize that there might be nodes that are in special positions, and, you know, you wanna encourage people to be in the right place at the right time. So, so there's also an advantage if people can publish what their fees are, and make that, make that part of the computation for the sender. So, that's a good question, and I think that's a place that we'd like to do more research for sure." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:01", "start": 1500.79, "text": "And the other question then is how, how does the sender node-- I guess what I'm trying to get at here is how does it find a route? Is there some sort of network graph here or what's the-- how does that work?" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "25:15", "start": 1515.04, "text": "Yeah, so if you look in the Lightning Network, they have a very specific routing protocol that, that they follow, and that's one place where we, we would differ from the, the Lightning Network sort of as it's currently implemented, because routing over a mesh network is a, is a very diff- different kind of thing. And I would say that Gotenna as a company, for example, has probably, we've put most of our protocol effort to sort of to date into that question because it's It's a challenge to do that in an efficient way so that you don't, you don't use up sort of all of your battery and bandwidth just routing, routing messages. you know, you wanna actually route the data. So, Raghav, our chief scientist, he's Recently published basically a paper describing what they call a, a zero overhead routing protocol, which is a way to, to route these messages Or to get a route without introducing additional protocol on top of the communication. so, so from the standpoint of a node, it's just, you get it from the routing protocol. But, doing that in efficient ways, is, I guess, you know, something that each device-- is it's gonna be a little different for each device?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:28", "start": 1588.21, "text": "Excellent. And so the other thing is, obviously, we might be working with low-powered devices here. Are there any specific challenges presented by this?" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "26:38", "start": 1597.88, "text": "Yeah, yeah. I mean, like I mentioned a little bit earlier, the idea that, you know, people have this sort of, you know, power anxiety, they don't want their, their system to run down. But you also-- Yeah, you, you, you also work, and so it will take power to relay messages, and, you know, without an incentive, people maybe aren't gonna wanna, to route for other people, especially if they're in a, in a high value position, they could end up routing a lot of messages, you know, rel-relatively to somebody who's more on the periphery. so yeah, I would just say that generally speaking That's what people are paying for, if you will. I mean, when they, when they buy a relay, they're paying that person essentially for their power and maybe a slice of the, of the time of the spectrum usage. so it's, it's a good idea to focus on power, and in our case, we just wanna minimize that as much as possible. And the way we mostly minimize that is by decreasing the bandwidth of our messages. So we don't want-- we wanna make sure that as little bandwidth is used for the actual incentive protocol, and that's sort of practical both from Just because there is limited bandwidth, you don't want, you want as little fraction of that sort of total bandwidth to be used for incentive relative to data, otherwise you just have a payment network, which, you know, for Bitcoiner might be all they want, but we're looking at this a little more broadly for communication as well. So as much that can go to sort of arbitrary communication, really the better off. We would, you know, that's our, our litmus test for, for improving the, the protocol." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:08", "start": 1688.32, "text": "Excellent. And what about connectivity? So some devices may- Maybe off, o-offline at periods of time. How does it work in that sense? Like, would it store a message and send it later or, would you have to find another route if, say, one of the hops along your intended route is down?" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "28:28", "start": 1707.62, "text": "Yeah, that's another area that, you know, you bring it up, and I, I wish now I'd written a little more about that in the, in the paper, 'cause there's this idea of store and forward, and it's sort of the difference between a mesh or between a, like an SMS network or an instant message net-network and an email network. So an email net-network is really set up for this idea of store and forward. So it's all on a continuum. I mean, at the, at the one end, you've got instant messages where you really expect communication to be" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "28:57", "start": 1737.22, "text": "side of the spectrum, you really have email, which, you know, back in the day might have taken a day to get through the network, or maybe don't, you don't get it until you log in and, and sort of pull down your email, back, you know, how that used to work. So I really think probably both will be useful. you know, I can imagine a case where storing forward is actually pretty useful for somebody who doesn't need immediate replies. So, and maybe as you're moving around, since we're imagining a, you know, a mobile mesh network, it could be that Your message goes out to a, to a relay that you've got a channel with, but then they don't forward it perhaps for some period of time because they're also moving around and maybe they come within range. So, that's something unexamined, but I would like to examine, at some point to see how that could change the dynamics of, of this system and, you know, make it a little more flexible, 'cause that would, that would definitely, by using time in the equation, you know, that, that would open up more chances for a message to get delivered They're also, again, doing some stuff about the, you know, they're looking into this question too a little bit for the Lightning Network. I can't remember the name, maybe you remember it, but I think they call them like Huddle Pay or something like that, where it's like a store-- Oh, Huddle" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:08", "start": 1807.96, "text": "invoice." }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "30:09", "start": 1808.7, "text": "Yeah, Huddle invoice, that's the one I was thinking of, right? So you can think of like a Huddle invoice where they have much longer times for delivery of that invoice, while again, that could just be the same for a message, for a data" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:26", "start": 1826.27, "text": "one other question is when you send this message along the lot forty-nine protocol or along that network, is it that there might be multiple competing messages and people are sort of competing because they want to be the one who relayed it and then therefore they get some of the incentive, or is it more like only once, you know, only one, version of it is trying to fly around the network? Does that make sense?" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "30:50", "start": 1850.31, "text": "Yeah. I mean, what we wrote in lot forty-nine really imagined there to be a fixed route. But we sort of have under the future directions, things to investigate, this idea of more of a, just a broadcast and then more of a, a bidding, if you will, you know, sort of a bidding to deliver. So you could, you could really imagine somebody who's a relay or even the sender themselves to basically- Send out the same message to multiple people, I guess, again, to sort of find a, a lightning analogy, it'd be like, what is it, Map, or, m, yeah, multipath payments." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:25", "start": 1885.11, "text": "Amp, atomic multipath payments. That's the one I was thinking" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "31:27", "start": 1887.07, "text": "of, right? So AMP, you could think of AMP, you know, you could imagine overlaying a system like that, but instead of where AMP, where you want them all to be delivered, it would be sort of a first come first serve for delivery. I think there's something there. It's a little, it was a little too complex to really go into in, in this particular, in this version of our white paper, but certainly something we've thought about and, and it, it, from a market standpoint, it does have some interesting qualities there. On the other hand, you also wanna make it, you don't want people to expend energy and not actually get, you know, paid for it. So it kinda goes, it sort of, these are fighting a little bit, you know, these, these concepts." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:03", "start": 1922.91, "text": "Yeah, no, I think the Was an idea. okay, and also I like, I like that you're using Bitcoin rather than creating your own shitcoin for it, because, you know, I think that's more, you know, socially scalable and it's more resilient to the downtime as well." }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "32:20", "start": 1939.92, "text": "Yeah, I mean, bootstrapping a new token is something we considered, you know, I gotta say, we started this project in two thousand and seventeen, so you gotta, you gotta look at all options. and m- mostly what we were looking at basically is trying to use, some sort of less crypt" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "32:38", "start": 1957.7, "text": "People talk about BLS signatures, that's a technology that isn't likely to appear on Bitcoin, but would give, you know, really radically reduced bandwidth for payments. So I, we spent a long time kind of going down that path but, but ultimately, sort of what was the, what pushed us back to, to Bitcoin was that more than the technology, you know, when you're looking to bootstrap a network, more than the technology is really the community. So finding a, a large, growing community that is technically aligned with, with what we wanna do, really is more important than You know, like, you know, in the Bitcoin world, this is-- or in the crypto world, this is true too, there might be some other projects out there with, you know, more cutting edge technology, but at the end of the day, it's really the shelling point is around the, the largest technology-- or the largest and most sort of advanced technological community out there. So That really was the deciding factor, I would say. I mean, and now that we're really in that camp, you know, like sort of really embracing it, you know, a lot of what's coming down the pike for Bitcoin really is Very, you know, well aligned with what we wanna do technologically. It may not be as radical as something like BLS signatures, but what's coming down, you know, what's, what people are proposing, in the development community, things like, just blanked on it right now, but, Taproot, that's the one I was thinking of. You know, things like Taproot, which are really meant to save block space, also have the nice side effect that they save just basic space for, you know, you know, like the communicating transactions are also smaller, so you're not just saving bandwidth for commun- you know, you're not just saving block space, but you're saving bandwidth, which really works into, what we're looking at. I mean, anything, and this is like philosophically, I think how we are most aligned with Bitcoin, the project we're doing. you know, other projects have other sort of concerns, but the, the real overriding concern, as, as we've learned in two thousand sixteen, is, is keeping the footprint, the-- keeping the, resource usage of the network as minimal as possible to keep it maximally decentralized. And that's really critical for doing a decentralized communication network is having the, the most, you know, conservative view towards resource use. So this could be on a Raspberry Pi, this could be on a low-end cell phone, it could be over- You know, maybe different transmission technologies, maybe, you know, instead of, you know, what we're looking at is this sort of LoRa technology, but, or not LoRa, sorry, it's ISM band technology. but you could imagine like what Elaine Aouad did with the high frequency radio, where it's even lower bandwidth than what we're, we're sort of looking at. so anything you can do to keep the You know, both the bandwidth and the sort of computing technology, low resource usage, it just opens it up and decentralizes, you know, where this protocol can actually run. And of course, if it runs on the low end devices, it can run on a high bandwidth, you know, desktop computer, but, you know, you wanna set that bar as, as, be as conservative essentially and set that bar as, as low as you can. So, so anyway, this is just a long aroundabout way of saying why, you know, we really- You know, had to entertain other ideas, but, but the over-- you know, the overwhelming, sort of solution was to go with Bitcoin, you know? And I think, as far as I know, there are no other networks who have made that choice, and there are other projects out there that are like community, they call them wireless community networks. one that I think is really good is this Althea project, and they created sort of a lightning based payment system, but they, they basically don't use Bitcoin. So, you know, that, as far as I know, we're the only ones that sort of taken that approach, and, you know, I really believe that's, that's gonna be a deciding factor for us." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:28", "start": 2187.9, "text": "Yeah, you might win some supporters who want to, stack some stats while they, participate in the lot forty nine network, right?" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "36:36", "start": 2195.75, "text": "Yeah, yeah. Sure. And I, Or satz a day, or, you know, not even that. That motivation is, is way over, it's way more than that sort of financial motivation you might get, you know, it's, it's really, you know, even if you kind of think of them as game tokens, there's, there is a real motivation there to, to earn something. in fact, one of the most requested features for just Gotenna generally is to see how many messages you relay for other people. So, you know, if you're getting paid, you're also finding out how important" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "37:13", "start": 2233.25, "text": "Incentivised Mesh Networking. So yeah, it all, it all works together, you know, these incentives, you know, they, they really have a powerful impact and it's not just the monetary, it's just, you know, just knowing what you're doing." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:50", "start": 2269.76, "text": "Fantastic. one other question around the topology of the proposed lot forty nine network. In the paper, you mentioned about how this concept of edge nodes, right? Would be net payers, right? And so there's po-potentially some parallels there with the Lightning Network, and if you listen to guys like Alex Blosworth, he'll talk about, \"Well, consider stock and flows, and we'll need to think about, you know, things like channel rebalancing, and, you know, o-over at Lightning Labs, they're talking about ideas like loop in and loop out. Would there be equivalent in the Lot forty-nine, protocol or proposal?" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "38:27", "start": 2307.09, "text": "Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I, I did a little economic modeling of this, you know, back of the napkin mostly, but there is this pretty You know, easy to imagine system where if you're in the middle of a dense mesh, you're likely to be relaying messages as much as you might be sending, or messages are going through you in two directions basically, but if you're at the edge of the network, you would be like a private node in, in Lightning where you're, you're only sending payments, so you're, you're likely to be a net, you know, you're, you're a net payer of fees, and the net-- So you've sort of got that guy at the edge What they need to send payments, so they're gonna kind of net out, you know, they relay enough to pay for their own messages. And then you're gonna have people who have sort of taken on special roles like gateways or people who connect disconnected networks. Those are gonna be, people who are more in demand and probably, like you said earlier, maybe have a queue of messages they could send and are likely to take the highest payment or the most payments. so those nodes are gonna be the ones that are more net earners of, of credits. and, and I didn't mention this before, but the network probably won't get rid of the ability for people to broadcast without any incentives. So if you're one hop away from somebody, it wouldn't make sense to send an incentive, for example. That would be a free, free connection. So in really dense places, you'll find that also being a factor. So, yeah, these e-economic questions, that's something that we're gonna model, but I think also you won't really know until you get kind of unleash people's creativity to see how they can stack sats on the, on the mesh." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:09", "start": 2408.54, "text": "I love it. So look, let's talk a little bit about attacks or risks with this kind of proposal. So firstly, what about this potential of spam or like ddos-ing it to try and, you know, grief the network or take up capacity?" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "40:24", "start": 2424.11, "text": "Yeah, I mean, this is something that I think you're, you know, you're right to observe, most P2P networks have this, this potential. and a, a wireless mesh network has, has even like a different sort of attack vector I mean, you, you could just ddos by creating your own custom client and just not following the protocol. but probably easier than that, if you just wanted to spam your network, is to just put a radio jammer and just try to jam people around you, 'cause that's essentially what you'd be doing by not following the protocol. And, and the only way around that is essentially just to route around it. So, so while somebody who's a griefer could grief some local area, their local nodes are gonna stop talking to them and route around them, or, you know, that, and that's sort of the, the way you have to think about that. And it, it probably would also, you know, you, yeah, you just, you just can't avoid that, but what you can do is localize it. So I, I think that's probably the way this thing would develop. the spam question is a little bit different. So the spam would be, I mean, I think about it as, let's say somebody sets up an IoT device that measures, I don't know, the wind or something, and they, and they just wanna send out packets and they never wanna relay and they never wanna, they never wanna yeah, they don't wanna relay for anyone else, they just wanna send out, you know, the weather. if you didn't have a token or some unit of, of, of, you know, e-economical sort of unit you used to pay for those messages, well, there really wouldn't be no disincentive for somebody to do that all day long, everywhere. by having a token, by having basically Bitcoin payments and that be real value too, you're gonna cut, you're gonna create a cost for spam. so somebody can't really do that unless they're also participating by relaying other people's messages. So, so I think those two risks really are somewhat amelio- I mean, the spam is really ameliorated by the, by the payments. DDoS isn't so much But it would at least be localized, you know, people would have an incentive to route around it. I mean, who knows, maybe if this becomes really popular, there's an incentive to triangulate that guy and, you know, shut off his power." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:31", "start": 2550.51, "text": "Right. Or like, as I understand with the Bitcoin, there are certain bad nodes, and I think Greg Maxwell has a list, and basically if you're a bad node, you get on the ban list, right? Something like that. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "42:41", "start": 2561.14, "text": "Yeah. I mean, you can't really-- That's why I was saying ultimately it kind" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "42:49", "start": 2569.1, "text": "Could do that, but, you know, they can't-- on the internet, it's a little harder to do that, but, but I guess it's the same. I mean, even with, with botnets and stuff, there's only so much you can do, but there's only so much they can do too, you know, they can-- they have to focus one place or another, so it's at least you can't spam the whole network or you can't ddos the whole network. I think that might be the, the, the best," }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "43:20", "start": 2599.84, "text": "I mean, that, that is, that is what the governments do when they shut off the internet, is they denial of service their users. so you still don't have that done, that sort of ultimate master off switch, and you can't rat around it as easily. And, and I guess one other thing on that topic, one last thing is, if people are using centralized networks and there is also, you know, even a rudimentary mesh network, it really has a sort of, creates a sort of, sort of a herd immunity to the government who might think about shutting off the centralized networks. I mean, if they know it's gonna be ineffective at accomplishing what they wanna accomplish Then the whole idea of, of shutting off the internet sort of loses its, its appeal." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:04", "start": 2644.26, "text": "It's sort of like having a better alternative or, bat no, having a credible alternative kind of means they can't, shut down the centralized one." }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "44:12", "start": 2652.3, "text": "Exactly." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:13", "start": 2653.06, "text": "Great. And what about, like message tampering? Is that something that our typical encryption and digital signatures will be used as a mitigation for that?" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "44:21", "start": 2661.05, "text": "Yeah, I, I would say so. I mean, there are a few places where this might, you know, where it might be a little special. I mean, Information, so that's also a future topic we wanna look into. Are there ways to sign and, and/or, you know, maybe not encrypt, but sign routing information to kind of help make sure that people don't, fake the network routing layer? but that's, that's, that's something that there is a fairly good literature on. so we-- I didn't put anything about that in the Lock forty-nine protocol, but, but I think that is a place where if you're thinking about message tampering, I would look more at the routing protocol and ways to really It's, you maybe hear people talk about, BGP, networking and how that can be spoofed, and that's essentially a networking spoof, and but there is a whole literature on how to get around that, it just hasn't been implemented. so BGP secure, for example. but that, I think that's probably, that's probably where there's a little more research to look into it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:21", "start": 2721.14, "text": "Right. And I suppose one of the big risks, and I, I think we've sort of touched on this as well, is this risk of insufficient take up or routing partners, therefore impacting the coverage and the reliability. But I suppose as we were mentioning, it's really about having, well, the stacking sets incentive, there's a bit of gamification, and having a community around it is probably, probably some of the" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "45:44", "start": 2744.06, "text": "Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's hard to predict where this would have the greatest take up, but, but definitely, you know, communities that need it the most are, are gonna be the ones that, that overcome that zero star problem So that's true." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:57", "start": 2756.64, "text": "Great, another one I noticed is in the paper, there's talk about swapping xpubs between nodes to save on the space, because obviously we're dealing with lower power devices, we're trying to compress the transaction, so it's trying to save on sending the payment address. But presumably, if you're swapping xpubs, does this come at any loss of privacy?" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "46:17", "start": 2777.11, "text": "Yeah, I mean, privacy, if you read through the white paper, you'll see we don't really- Talk a lot about privacy, and, and part of that is just because we needed to limit the scope of the paper, but the, the other part of it is that you've got a sort of physical security built into a mesh network. you know, you, the, the, the normal, like normally when you're dealing with these questions on, on the internet, you always have to assume that there's some mapping between your, your node and, and your real name, you know, your, your true name, and that's, that's something that comes from Key, they might know your true name or your, your phone has a MAC address which ties it to whatever messages you send, but, but here in a mesh network, you decide what your ID is and there's nobody else who can basically- you know, so if you change your ID, you basically change your identity. so I think, you know, that's sort of where the, the, the fundamental privacy comes from is just the physical privacy of being on a mesh network. Somebody, the cost of tracking you down and recording your metadata is a lot higher than it would be in a A centralized network where somebody just taps one server and they get it all for free. In a mesh network, somebody would have to be on every street corner listening to packets in order to, to sort of have that level of, of surveillance. but, but it is something to, to research. I, I mean, I think there's probably solutions to that, and, you know, this is sort of the easiest solution to propose is the xPub, but there are a lot smarter cryptographers out there, and part of putting the paper out there is to get their ideas about how we might do this in a smarter way. So it's a good observation though, absolutely." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:57", "start": 2876.75, "text": "Excellent. So look, let's now talk about what's needed in our traditional Bitcoin and Lightning network to help enable some of these ideas that you've come out with in Lot 49. So some of them are, you know, Schnorr, L2, SigHash, no input. Did you wanna offer some comments on that?" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "48:13", "start": 2892.76, "text": "Yeah, I'll just go through it, you know, really quickly, but I do encourage anybody who's sort of technically minded to, to, you know, look at our white paper and especially the appendices, which go a little more into the detail. so Schnorr signatures, everybody's talked a lot about that, and what we get in our protocol from that is MuSig, which, you know, was, was proposed as a way to aggregate signatures with Schnorr. and by s- you know, by aggregating signatures, what that means if you've got two- 64 byte signatures and you can aggregate them into one 64 byte signature, you've essentially reduced your bandwidth by half. So for us who are looking at really minimizing our bandwidth, that's a big win. L2 is a little more unexpected. when we really looked at the protocol, it allowed us-- we believe it allows us to make what's called simplex payments, so the payer signs a message to the receiver, but the receiver doesn't have to res-- doesn't have to respond To update the state of that payment channel. So it's really only the person receiving the payment that has to, has to sign, who has to send their signature. So, that's, that's different than the, that's different than the current system, and we believe that also gives us a roughly fifty percent reduction in the just bandwidth between two nodes. And especially, you know, when you're making updates between nodes, that's where most of your bandwidth is gonna be. You really only set up and close transactions infrequently, but you're constantly making updates. So that we think also On, on the bandwidth. you, you also mentioned, sig hash no input and, like any previous output. those are also proposals. Actually, any previous output is a replacement for sig hash no input. It's the taproot, fication of that concept. and that's just, that's pretty exciting to see people really looking at, not just- Doing Taproot, but actually this would be a way to include what's necessary for L2 in Taproot. So you get all the benefits of Taproot and you get to do L2. and these things are, you know, we don't expect this to happen in the next year or maybe even the next two years, but, we see it coming and, and we think that it's gonna be the thing that allows us to continue to improve this protocol. we'll probably, you know, initially we have to do our tests either on a testnet that has this when it or just using the normal Lightning protocol, with the caveat that, you know, it may not be as efficient as it, as it would be, and I, yeah. So that, you know, that's, that's, that's where those things work into the system." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:46", "start": 3046.0, "text": "Fascinating stuff. I mean, it's, it's just really cool to see how all these different building blocks are kind of coming together to enable this. So I think as we kind of get to the end of the time, let's talk a little bit about next steps with lot forty-nine. Like, what's the timings? Would you need testing? do you need further feedback and review? What's, what's kind of happening next?" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "51:08", "start": 3067.93, "text": "Yeah, so, I mean, just briefly, Right, we just published it, so we just published, you know, our thoughts on, on what this protocol could be, and we're just gathering feedback at the moment. But the next step will be to do a proof of concept implementation so that we can actually get people to use a, a simplified version of this protocol, and, and allow us to get feedback from people how they would use it, and, you know, we may even gamify it in some way. it wouldn't be something for money, it would just be a way to get feedback on the, on the system And yeah, so and, and I think because a lot of technologies are still in flux, you know, we're hoping to get feedback from the Bitcoin techno community and see if they can suggest things we haven't thought of to, to make this really more efficient as we get into the more nitty gritty of, implementing it. and so, yeah, hopefully when we get, at least start to get the sort of a first version of a proof of concept, we would like to get people involved to help us test it, and give us, give us feedback. So I, I Proof of concepts that people can start playing with, that would be our, our goal at this point." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:13", "start": 3133.45, "text": "And what sort of role will Global Mesh Labs be playing? Is it sort of like helping decide what the protocol is going to be and then? Kind of working with users who wanna maybe make hardware or run software to, to be a part of the protocol." }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "52:29", "start": 3149.04, "text": "Yeah, the, the word that we like to use is it's, it's like incubating this concept. so we're, you know, we are a subsidiary of, of Gotenna, and we hope to implement this on our own hardware, but by doing it through Global Mesh Labs. We wanna incubate this on other pro-- you know, on other pieces of hardware, other open source hardware, you know, other, other communication, layers. So, yeah, I, I mean, I think there's, there's sort of a precedent for that in the Lightning world too, people who are really just shepherding the protocol. maybe we have a, a different financial incentive in that we actually, if the protocol is successful, we would be one of, we hope, many harbor manufacturers who could really take advantage of it by selling compatible hardware" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:10", "start": 3189.76, "text": "And, actually another question just calling back to one more thing around the lot forty-nine protocol. There's some discussion in the paper about reconstructing the implied transaction. Could you just outline a little bit about what's, what's meant there?" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "53:27", "start": 3206.7, "text": "Yeah, this happens already a little bit in the Lightning protocol, so you- You've got a transaction that you send to the, that eventually could end up going on the Bitcoin blockchain, but what gets communicated between nodes isn't really that entire piece of information that could be on the blockchain. You're really just, you can have like a template, and then you're just sending the parts that might change. And we would go like one step further than the Lightning Network goes. So, whereas in the Lightning Network, they may be, like, they may include a public key, say, well, that's the place where- Or we might use an xPub so that whole public key data doesn't have to be communicated, it can be, it can be inferred by just knowing the public key that goes with perhaps some short ID. So this is all really just to save bandwidth. I mean, it's, it's a way to make that protocol as, as little, you know, as least, as not as verbose as possible. And, you know, the long pole in the tent is really the signatures. That's the thing you can't compress, as far as we know, and, and you have to communicate. So the protocol, from a bandwidth standpoint, really boils down to just how to just the signatures. I mean, ideally, it's a, it's a template with just the signatures and maybe, you know, some small representation of who it is communicating. so that's, that's this idea of implied transactions. You wanna imply as much, you know, if a transaction template, and then you're just sending the critical information that, that fills out that whole template. Hope that helps." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:53", "start": 3292.65, "text": "Fascinating. And now, what can listeners do if they wanna get more involved? Are you just looking for feedback at this point?" }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "54:59", "start": 3299.25, "text": "Yeah. I mean, if, if people We have a, let's see, we have a, Telegram channel if people wanna just chat about it and tell us what they think. You can find this information from our website, globalmeshlabs dot org. there's also a Twitter, a Twitter channel if you wanna follow us there. It's, it's at Global Mesh Labs. and if anybody who wants to follow me and just sort of learn more about what I'm doing it's r e Myers underscore on Twitter, and I, I will tend to post what's going on. So, yeah, I encourage people to look at the white paper, read through it, give us your feedback. you can even do pull requests. This is really we imagine this to be an open source protocol as well, so if people just wanna get in there and make suggestions. We do encourage that. So yeah, please get in touch." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:50", "start": 3349.56, "text": "That sounds excellent. So look, thanks again for coming on, Richard. I think, it's been really educational and hopefully the listeners got something out of that." }, { "speaker": "richard_myers", "time": "55:56", "start": 3356.08, "text": "Yeah, thank you, Stefan. Really enjoyed it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:58", "start": 3358.16, "text": "Isn't it just incredible the way the network effects around Bitcoin just continue to become stronger and stronger? It really is just better money, and that's the way people are thinking about it, and that's also why people are building on top of it, and they are increasingly viewing it like this is civilizational infrastructure. That's why we've got Blockstream beaming down the blocks from a satellite. That's why people like Richard are trying to build a mesh networking protocol and incentivized routing with Bitcoin. So go and check out the proposal, go and have a look at Global Mesh Labs, jump in the Telegram chat group and chat with Richard as well. So remember, the links for that are all in the show notes, which you can find at stephanlivera.com. Make sure you're subscribed to the podcast, and also just wanted to say thanks for everyone who helps share Yeah, the podcast. I see that on Twitter and I see people giving it shoutouts and all that, so really appreciate all your help there, guys. Thanks. That's it from me, and I'll speak to you soon." } ] }