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Have you ever played Civilization? Glen Weyl is is co-creator of quadratic voting, a collective decision-making procedure designed to allow fine-grained expression of how strongly voters feel about an issue,[2] and quadratic funding, a method of democratically disbursing resources.Kate Sills is a software engineer at Agoric, building composable smart contract components in a secure subset of JavaScript. Previously, Kate has researched and written on the potential uses of smart contracts to enforce agreements and create institutions orthogonal to legal jurisdictions.Paul Gebheim has spent the better part of 20 years creating software that gets stuff done, makes things go, shows you what's up, or keeps you connected. Recently he also helped to build a company based in the foundation of real life connection and the principal: It has to feel good to be good. This episode goes through chapter 5 of the book: IMPROVE COOPERATION | Info, Money, New Rights to Do Things Session summary: (425) G. Weyl, K. Sills, P. Gebheim: New Info, Money, Rights, Contracts, Privacy | Gaming the Future Ch. 5 - YouTube The Foresight Institute is a research organization and non-profit that supports the beneficial development of high-impact technologies. Since our founding in 1987 on a vision of guiding powerful technologies, we have continued to evolve into a many-armed organization that focuses on several fields of science and technology that are too ambitious for legacy institutions to support.Allison Duettmann is the president and CEO of Foresight Institute. She directs the Intelligent Cooperation, Molecular Machines, Biotech & Health Extension, Neurotech, and Space Programs, Fellowships, Prizes, and Tech Trees, and shares this work with the public. She founded Existentialhope.com, co-edited Superintelligence: Coordination & Strategy, co-authored Gaming the Future, and co-initiated The Longevity Prize. Apply to Foresight's virtual salons and in person workshops here!We are entirely funded by your donations. If you enjoy what we do please consider donating through our donation page.Visit our website for more content, or join us here:TwitterFacebookLinkedInEvery word ever spoken on this podcast is now AI-searchable using Fathom.fm, a search engine for podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
How will Dweb, DeSci, NFTs, zkps & lex cryptographia impact your life?Zaki Manian, CosmosKate Sills, AgoricJazear Brooks, SifChainChristine Webber, Spritely, Josh Tan, MetaGovMusic: I Knew a Guy by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100199Artist: http://incompetech.com/Remarks: The length of this recording has been altered.Session summary: Cryptocommerce & Web 3 Tech Tree | Vision Weekend US 2021 - Foresight InstituteThe Foresight Institute is a research organization and non-profit that supports the beneficial development of high-impact technologies. Since our founding in 1987 on a vision of guiding powerful technologies, we have continued to evolve into a many-armed organization that focuses on several fields of science and technology that are too ambitious for legacy institutions to support.Allison Duettmann is the president and CEO of Foresight Institute. She directs the Intelligent Cooperation, Molecular Machines, Biotech & Health Extension, Neurotech, and Space Programs, Fellowships, Prizes, and Tech Trees, and shares this work with the public. She founded Existentialhope.com, co-edited Superintelligence: Coordination & Strategy, co-authored Gaming the Future, and co-initiated The Longevity Prize. Apply to Foresight's virtual salons and in person workshops here!We are entirely funded by your donations. If you enjoy what we do please consider donating through our donation page.Visit our website for more content, or join us here:TwitterFacebookLinkedInEvery word ever spoken on this podcast is now AI-searchable using Fathom.fm, a search engine for podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Today on The DIVI Crypto Podcast we interview Kate Sills of Agoric. Agoric is an open-source development company unveiling an interoperable Proof-of-Stake chain and economy. Agoric's JavaScript-native smart contract platform provides developers a safe, reusable library of DeFi components to rapidly build and deploy on-chain. Agoric lets you “Build Fast, Earn Fast,” by providing a Proof-of-Stake chain utilizing secure JavaScript smart contracts to rapidly build and deploy DeFi. This allows for composable DeFi, where developers choose your DeFi legos, compose your dapp, and deploy on the Agoric chain. In a few lines of code in JavaScript, one is able to reuse a smart contract component that your users know and trust. Each and every step of an application's journey has been considered in order to save you time and resources. From idea to deployment like never before: Choose components from our library to fit the project's requirements. Add your unique elements to the components to build your dapp. Use the deployment mechanisms to deploy on chain and create new contract instances. Agoric is built on a JavaScript library of reusable, composable components coded by experienced community members. Developers can connect to Ethereum, Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC), and Chainlink. You can attract Ethereum users by providing them a dead simple on-ramp through the Gravity Bridge. Ethereum's assets can collateralize your contracts in seconds. The Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol ensures that Agoric can connect natively to any Cosmos chain and any chains which adopt it in the future. Agoric is integrated with Chainlink's market-leading oracle network, letting your application launch in a data rich environment. There are a few ways for you to start earning with Agoric. In the Token Strategy, Blockchain projects often establish a native governance token, which may include protocol fee capture. Agoric's framework makes designing and launching your token simple. Import our tested examples and make them your own. Under the upcoming Fiat On-Ramps, you can address users unfamiliar with blockchain. Agoric's upcoming fiat on-ramp partnerships will make it easy to onboard users with a credit card or fiat-backed local currencies. Many projects want to monetize off of interest on balances in user accounts. Agoric provides block-level rate calculations, timing notifiers, and governance to manage it. Get paid directly by your users. Agoric's local currency, RUN, is backed by the chain itself and supported through economic activity. Let your users buy in RUN and get paid immediately. RUN is a stable local currency pegged to the USD to facilitate economic growth and on-chain transactions. To learn more about Agoric, visit: https://agoric.com/ -- DIVI is creating the world's first closed-loop, vertically-integrated cryptocurrency ecosystem. Much like Apple's ecosystem is anchored by iCloud, the DIVI Project blockchain serves as the core of the DIVI network of technologies. Thanks to a keen understanding of the divide that separates the mainstream from the crypto world, the DIVI team is able to create solutions to the industry's biggest problem: adoption by non-technical users. DIVI's user-friendly, one-click solutions aim to bring blockchain-based payments into modernity with great UX. In this podcast, we will cover all aspects of cryptocurrency, hot topics, and technology as worldwide adoption grows.
“Why is property law so different from contract law? Normally, when two parties buy or sell something, it doesn't have a huge negative effect on everyone else.“Kate Sills is a software engineer with an interest in economics and law. She has been a columnist for the Cato Institute and was previously a board member of the Tezos Commons Foundation. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in Computer Science.How can we create a blockchain-based system for property rights? This is what Kate Sills, a software engineer with an interest in economics and law, talks about in this episode of the podcast. Music: I Knew a Guy by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100199Artist: http://incompetech.com/Remarks: The length of this recording has been altered. Session Summary: NFTs and Engineering Property Rights | Kate Sills, Agoric - Foresight InstituteThe Foresight Institute is a research organization and non-profit that supports the beneficial development of high-impact technologies. Since our founding in 1987 on a vision of guiding powerful technologies, we have continued to evolve into a many-armed organization that focuses on several fields of science and technology that are too ambitious for legacy institutions to support.Allison Duettmann is the president and CEO of Foresight Institute. She directs the Intelligent Cooperation, Molecular Machines, Biotech & Health Extension, Neurotech, and Space Programs, Fellowships, Prizes, and Tech Trees, and shares this work with the public. She founded Existentialhope.com, co-edited Superintelligence: Coordination & Strategy, co-authored Gaming the Future, and co-initiated The Longevity Prize. Apply to Foresight's virtual salons and in person workshops here!We are entirely funded by your donations. If you enjoy what we do please consider donating through our donation page.Visit our website for more content, or join us here:TwitterFacebookLinkedInEvery word ever spoken on this podcast is now AI-searchable using Fathom.fm, a search engine for podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode we talk to Dean Tribble, the CEO at Agoric, a secure smart contract platform built with the help of Tendermint & Cosmos-SDK. Dean's Twitter (https://twitter.com/DeanTribble) Agoric are a smart contracts platform (transfers of rights enforced in code). Agoric uses an object-capability (ocap) security architecture, in which access to a programming object itself is the authority to use the object. This approach has been used successfully to create secure operating systems, and to control untrusted scripts in Google’s Caja project and Salesforce’s Locker Service. Agoric is developing a secure distributed ocap platform for smart contracts and market-oriented programming. It supports the development of smart contracts and market institutions across many scales, from large public blockchains to small two-party contracts. We spoke to Dean about smart contracts, and: What is Agoric How Agoric is different from CosmWasm The team behind Agoric and their experience The use of Tendermint and Cosmos in Agoric The Cosmos community and its role in the development process What is SCS for JavaScript and what is Jessie Open Source VS proprietary software The key ceremony of Z-cash Oracles and decentralized OS Can decentralization help to reduce vulnerability of human mistakes Top information sources according to Dean The projects and people that have been mentioned in this episode: | Tendermint (https://tendermint.com/) | Cosmos (https://cosmos.network/) | Agoric (https://agoric.com/) | Midori Micorosoft (https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Midori_(operating_system)) | AMiX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Information_Exchange) | SunLabs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Microsystems_Laboratories) | Epay (https://www.epay.com/) | Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/) | PayPal (https://www.paypal.com/) | Venmo (https://venmo.com/) | Ethereum (https://ethereum.org/en/) | Bitcoin (https://bitcoin.org/) | IBC (https://ibcprotocol.org/) | WebAssembly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebAssembly) | JavaScipt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript) | CosmWasm (https://www.cosmwasm.com/) | Z-cash (https://z.cash/) | Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/) | Chainlink (https://chain.link/) | EVM (https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/evm/) | SeL4 (https://sel4.systems/) | Swing set Agoric (https://github.com/Agoric/SwingSet) | ZK rollups (https://medium.com/matter-labs/optimistic-vs-zk-rollup-deep-dive-ea141e71e075) | Corda (https://www.corda.net/) | Halo (https://electriccoin.co/blog/explaining-halo-2/) | Innovation University of Australia (https://www.iru.edu.au/about/our-universities/) | Mark Miller (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_S._Miller) | Jae Kwon (https://github.com/jaekwon) | Zaki Manian (https://twitter.com/zmanian) | Ethan Buchman (https://www.citizencosmos.space/ethan-buchman-cosmos) | Adriana Mihai (https://www.citizencosmos.space/adriana-passion) | Zooko Wilcox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko_Wilcox-O%27Hearn) | Christofer Lemmer Webber (https://www.patreon.com/cwebber) | Kate Sills (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-sills-79170a14) | If you like what we do at Citizen Cosmos: Stake with Citizen Cosmos validator (https://www.citizencosmos.space/staking) Help support the project via Gitcoin Grants (https://gitcoin.co/grants/1113/citizen-cosmos-podcast) Listen to the YouTube version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeRbY6tiAio) Read our blog (https://citizen-cosmos.github.io/blog/) Check out our GitHub (https://github.com/citizen-cosmos/Citizen-Cosmos) Join our Telegram (https://t.me/citizen_cosmos) Follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/cosmos_voice) Sign up to the RSS feed (https://www.citizencosmos.space/rss)
Chris and Morgan, driving in the Covid-19 pandemic, reflect on lessons of hygiene and a separation of concerns from the past (seen through the retroactively surprising struggle for handwashing acceptance) while analyzing how to bring safety to today's computing security pandemic via object capability discipline.As said in the episode, there's a lot of research and evidence for the object capability security approach! Please do scour the links below (with significant commentary attached).Links:Ignaz Semmelweis and two excellent podcast episodes with more:Ignaz Semmelweis and the War on Handwashing on Stuff You Missed in History ClassThe fascinating, inspiring, and infurating story of Ignaz Semmelweis on SawbonesThe mailing list post by Chris that prompted this episode (largely the same stuff, a bit more particular to the targeted audience): Hygiene for a computing pandemic: separation of VCs and ocaps/zcapsPOLA Would Have Prevented the Event-Stream Incident, by Kate Sills. Examines how malicious code inserted into a library designed to steal programmers' private information/keys/money could have been prevented with capability-based security.An interview with Kate Sills about object capabilities; contains some of the same information presented in this episode, but with more focus on the basic concepts.A Security Kernel based on the Lambda Calculus explains how these concepts apply to programming language design (using a limited subset of the Scheme programming language).Ka-Ping Yee's PhD dissertation, Building Reliable Voting Machine Software, demonstrates the difficulty of finding intentionally obscured security vulnerabilities through code review (see "How was PVote's security evaluated?"). This demonstrates that FOSS is necessary but insufficient on its own for security.A backdoor which was inserted into the official Linux kernel source code (and actually distributed on the official CVS server, briefly!) all the way back in 2003. Note that the vulnerability was initially discovered not through code review, but through discovering a server intrusion. The code is well obfuscated in a way that might be difficult to observe through visual inspection of a significant body of code.The zcap-ld spec has a subsection on how to safely and hygienically bridge the worlds of identity/claims/credentials with authority/ocaps. (Note some bias here: Chris co-authored this spec with Mark Miller.) It also has some other useful subsections: Capabilities are Safer contrasts with ACLs, and ZCAP-LD by Example shows how capabilities can be constructed on top of certificate chains (an approach not even mentioned in the episode... but yes, you can do it!)So why are ACLs / an identity-oriented approach so bad anyway? ACLs Don't explains the problems caused by an identity-oriented authority model:Ambient authority, ie "programs running with too much authority"... think about the "solitaire running 'as you'" part of the podcast (and contrast with the POLA/ocap solution also explained in-episode)Confused deputies, which are notoriously kind of hard to describe... Norm Hardy provides a capsule summary which is fairly good. But also:The Browser is a very Confused Deputy is an excellent and fun video introduction.Norm Hardy's original Confused Deputy paper is still worth reading, and there is more to read hereAn example of a confused deputy attack against the Guile programming environment (which Chris helped uncover): Guile security vulnerability w/ listening on localhost + port (with fix). Note the way that both the browser and the guile programming environment appear to be "correctly behaving according to specification" when looked at individually!Another way to put it is that identity-oriented security approaches are also generally perimeter-based security approaches and (I'm paraphrasing Marc Stiegler here): "Perimeter security is eggshell security... it seems pretty tough when you tap on it, but poke one hole through and you can suck out the whole yolk."Capabilities: Effects for Free shows nicely how capabilities can also be combined with a type system to prove constraints on what a particular subset of code can do.What we haven't talked about as much yet is all the cool things that ocaps enable. A great paper on this is Capability-based Financial Instruments (aka "Ode to the Granovetter Diagram", or "The Ode"), which shows how, using the E distributed programming language, distributed financial tooling can be built out of a shockingly small amount of code. (All of this stuff written about a decade before blockchains hit the mainstream!)You might need to know a bit more E syntax to read The Ode; Marc Stiegler's E in a Walnut is an incredible resource, and has many insights of its own... but it's a bit more coconut-sized than walnut-sized, in my view.An enormous amount of interesting information and papers about object capability security on the E Wiki's Documentation page page (snapshot). Honestly you could just spend a few months reading all that.In particular, if you're mathematically minded and say "yeah but I want the proofs, gimme the proofs; I mean like real math'y proofs!" there's a whole subsection on Formal Methods (snapshot)But maybe you're worrying, is it possible to build secure UIs on top of this? Not One Click for Security does a lovely job showing how ocap principles can actually result in a more intuitive flow if done correctly... one smooth enough that users might wonder, "where's the security?" Surprise! It was just smoothly baked into the natural flow of the application, which is why you didn't notice it!And if you really want to spend a lot of time getting into the weeds of how to design ocap systems, maybe look at Mark S. Miller's PhD dissertation, Robust Composition: Towards a Unified Approach to Access Control and Concurrency Control. Chris is pretty sure they're the only one with an autographed copy sitting on their desk.Finally, have we mentioned that Chris's work on Spritely is pretty much entirely based on extending the federated social web based on ocap security principles?
In our fifth episode, we speak with Kate Sills from the Agoric team on computer science, libertarianism, building novel institutions and tiny houses. Kate Sills earned her degree in computer science from UC Berkeley. She has researched and written on the potential uses of smart contracts to enforce agreements and create institutions orthogonal to legal jurisdictions. Kate is a software engineer at Agoric, building composable smart contract components in a secure subset of JavaScript. In her own words, she is "a bizarre mish-mash of hippie anarchism and economic liberalism beefed up with lots of technological determinism".
Chris and Morgan discuss an ethical framework Chris has been workshopping for the last few years, "An Ethics of Agency", with the foundation of maximizing agency "for you, for me, for everyone" and minimizing subjection. CW: Note that Chris talks about an incident involving them experiencing suicidal depression at one point.Links:Other philosophical systems mentioned:UtilitarianismKantianismEthics of CarePeter Singer's book Animal Liberation, and the argument for Equal consideration of interests. (Note that Peter Singer gets criticism from some disability circles; this is a good summary. In general it's our position to focus on "raising up" rights, including those of animals; pitting animal rights vs disabled rights need not be done in a society with as many resources as ours presently is.)Amartya Sen, whose book Development as Freedom had a bigger background influence than Chris probably realized in its treatment of the agency of people as the primary index by which we measure a country's developmentThe GNU Manifesto. Search for "Kantian ethics" on the page. (Curiously its preceding sentence is described in an example that appears consequentialist! By the way, pretty much every decent ethical system claims that its foundation is the "golden rule", this isn't unique to Kantianism.)The Free Software Definition. Also note the pun on another speech called The Four Freedoms.Free as in Freedom episode with the AGPL panel discussionA FOSDEM talk in 2014, The Road Ahead for Network Freedom, where "freedom for developers, but not for users" is mentioned as a phraseLibre Lounge's subtitle: "a casual podcast about user freedom", including mentioned episode with Karen SandlerSome talks in 2018 by Molly DeBlanc (and Karen Sandler) using the term "user freedom":That's a free software issue!User freedom: A love storyMolly DeBlanc has a wonderful article giving a personal definition of "user freedom"Declaration of Digital AutonomyOCap conference 2018, source of the mentioned dinner between Chris, Mark Miller, Kate SillsChris's ActivityPub Conference 2019 keynote, ActivityPub: past, present, future
The Libre Lounge crew invite Kate Sills from Agoric to help explain and explore Object Capabilities, an alternative to traditional ACL (Access Control List) or authentication based mechanisms.Links:Agoric (agoric.com)POLA Would Have Prevented the Event-Stream Incident (medium.com)What are Object Capabilities? (habitatchronicles.com)An OCAP Approach to Safe Javascript (docs.google.com)The XKCD Sandbox Cycle (xkcd.com)Professor David Wagner Gives a Google Tech Talk on Object Capabilities for Security (youtube)
The Libre Lounge crew invite Kate Sills from Agoric to help explain and explore Object Capabilities, an alternative to traditional ACL (Access Control List) or authentication based mechanisms.Links:Agoric (agoric.com)POLA Would Have Prevented the Event-Stream Incident (medium.com)What are Object Capabilities? (habitatchronicles.com)An OCAP Approach to Safe Javascript (docs.google.com)The XKCD Sandbox Cycle (xkcd.com)Professor David Wagner Gives a Google Tech Talk on Object Capabilities for Security (youtube)
The Libre Lounge crew invite Kate Sills from Agoric to help explain and explore Object Capabilities, an alternative to traditional ACL (Access Control List) or authentication based mechanisms.Links:Agoric (agoric.com)POLA Would Have Prevented the Event-Stream Incident (medium.com)What are Object Capabilities? (habitatchronicles.com)An OCAP Approach to Safe Javascript (docs.google.com)The XKCD Sandbox Cycle (xkcd.com)Professor David Wagner Gives a Google Tech Talk on Object Capabilities for Security (youtube)
This episode is all about attack vectors in crypto. We look at a 51% attack on Vertcoin, and how ASIC resistance is turning out to be a massive security bug, not a feature. We also look at Ethereum Classic and a social engineering attack on the ETCDEV team. Finally, we discuss the event-stream attack which robbed crypto wallets that used that npm library, and what that means for open source governance. Topics: ASIC resistance is a massive security bug, not a feature What ASIC resistance is Vertcoin is currently being 51% attacked What NiceHash is ETCDEV shutdown What ETC is Who ETCDEV is Event-stream situation Links: Vertcoin - MIT Digital Currency Initiative - https://dci.mit.edu/video-gallery/?tag=vertcoin About NiceHash - https://www.nicehash.com/about About Crypto51 - https://www.crypto51.app/about.html Vertcoin is currently being 51% attacked - https://medium.com/coinmonks/vertcoin-vtc-is-currently-being-51-attacked-53ab633c08a4 On Dec 3, Igor put out the following statement - https://twitter.com/etcdev/status/1069625401515872256/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1069625401515872256&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsbtc.com%2F2018%2F12%2F04%2Fcrypto-bear-market-strikes-ethereum-classic-etc-development-group-folds%2F Event-stream situation Synopsis: - https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream/issues/116#issuecomment-441759047 - https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream/issues/116#issuecomment-441749105 Dominic Tarr’s response: - https://gist.github.com/dominictarr/9fd9c1024c94592bc7268d36b8d83b3a Kate Sills - https://twitter.com/kate_sills/status/1067202990690291712
This week Kate Sills joins us to respond to several recent articles criticizing smart contracts. One of the issues we cover is the “Oracle problem,” which is how a self-enforcing digital contract can know whether terms have been met in the physical world. Also, we discusses how smart contracts cannot be mere transactional documents but also need to facilitate relationships, something that has led traditional contract law to purposefully include ambiguous or unenforceable clauses. Finally, we talk about Alex Tabbarok’s call for a dedicated arbitration system for smart contract disputes. Disclaimer: While squirrel mortality is referenced briefly during the episode, no members of the Sciuridae family were harmed in the making of this show.Kate Sill’s case for smart contracts.Jimmy Song on the Oracle problem.Alex Tabbarok calls for a smart contract arbitration system.(Deep Cut) Karen Levy reminds us that contracts are relational documents.Listen to Kate Sills discuss smart contracts and the blockchain on Free Thoughts. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Kate Sills joins us for a conversation on smart contracts and the future of blockchain technology. We also discuss how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency platforms are using smart contracts to ensure a more secure network, the DAO implosion and the future of cryptography.More about Kate Sills http://katelynsills.com/Free Thoughts Episode: Your World on the BlockchainEncyclopedia of Libertarianism: Voluntary Contract EnforcementEncyclopedia of Libertarianism: Contractarianism/Social Contract See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Kate Sills joined us to talk about free speech, great TV and the dangers of "anti-college" outrage. Terrible Opinions Kate: British comedy TV is better than American comedy TV. See "Peepshow." Jordan: A lot of people are yelling about football, but they're all ignoring a big issue. Not to rain on everyone's parade, but the research about the damage to football players' brains is pretty damning. Matthias: If you got a 4.0, it means your teachers failed you because students should be challenged. Higher education vs. conservatives? We discuss conservative writer and speaker Ben Shapiro's recent appearance at UC Berkeley, and Kate contrasts her own experience as a student with the extreme headlines about the school's supposed oppression. Matthias talks about the building antipathy that conservatives seem to have for higher education in general. EMMYS We catch up on last week's Emmy awards, touching on "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt." Matthias details his theory that a "hipster ratio" can explain what wins. Mostly, we all wish we had more time to watch great TV.