# How to Ethically Build Public Good Infrastructure by Corey Petty | Devcon Bogotá

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2023-10-07
- Duration: 29:57
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-yi7nS0g0Yno
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi7nS0g0Yno

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/6/how-to-ethically-build-public-good-infrastructure/

We at Status have been working to enable an interface to Web3 since our inception. We bought into the principles of this ecosystem, and have spent extraordinary effort to not compromise on those ethics while we continue to create applications that are easily accessible while also maintaining our user's rights. 

This talk is an overview of this journey, lessons learned, the fruits of this labor, why we're doubling down on this process, and why you should to.

Speaker(s): Corey Petty
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: Layer 1 Protocol
Keywords: infrastructure,community,ethical

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Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon 6 was held in Bogotá, Colombia on Oct 11 - 14, 2022.
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## Transcript

foreign [Music] Petty I'm going to talk about how to ethically build public good infrastructure specifically focusing on the ethics it's not going to be as many details if you'd like more details on kind of our history and the current work we do at status and sister organizations you can I'd recommend watching Oscar Thorne's talk he did earlier today so if you missed that check it on the stream but for those of you who are leaving you see what a tldr [ __ ] exist web3's main primitive is to minimize their influence on everyone else that's the whole goal I think that what we're trying to do in Building decentralized Technology is mitigating those with power and their influence on those without it and the ethics of building this stuff this infrastructure has a massive impact on our success in doing this so the process of um how we think about building these things and how we make decisions in the process of building these things tremendously impacts our ability to mitigate [ __ ] so a little bit about me my name is Corey Petty I said at the beginning um I started out doing podcasting in early 2015 and researched a couple years before that joint status four to five years ago it's a blur at this point doing security research and security stuff across the organization and since this year I've moved into doing uh kind of coordinating all of the infrastructure projects which we've recently expanded into you'll see kind of a start to that work uh in the later half of my of my talk you can reach me in all these different things corepetty.eath on status just search for petty and uh core Petty on Twitter so status is an organization that's founded on a series of principles we wholly bought into what we believe to be like the ideal ethereum principles for building public good infrastructure uh I'm not going to list them all you can see them and in some cases these things are a little in conflict with each other but as an organization that's founded on these things they serve really really really well as uh how we argue about trade-offs when implementing things or developing things or trying to understand how we'd like to do it and I'm going to do the normal thing where I give you the Wikipedia definition of something and that's public good infrastructure and that's a good in which all enjoy in common in the sense that each individual's consumption of such a good leads to no subtractions for many other individuals consumption of that good and this is Paul sentence so we're trying to optimize uh infrastructure where it's not a zero-sum game uh and someone can't take advantage of others or in the process of someone being successful that is a detriment the use or experience of someone else that has nothing to do with that work but as I said earlier [ __ ] exist there are always people who seek to profit for themselves on behalf of others because they don't care or they don't know and our goal like I said in the beginning is to mitigate that influence as much as possible and I've come up with somewhat of a law I'm sure this is something more General informal somewhere else but every Community has [ __ ] there's always someone in a community that uh cares more about themselves than the others is willing to do things on the for themselves to the detriment of others and as things grow the likelihood of these things also grow and more often than not these people are usually very loud now what a community is is as generic as you could think it'd be it's either a blockchain ecosystem a government your local Meetup your friends Group whatever we all know kind of uh who this person is and I imagine there's probably a lot of [ __ ] in this building as well so like we all kind of get the idea here's some uh uh this is an example of what the influence of power dynamics can have on a system in which tries to mitigate it but doesn't quite successfully do so and I want to make it a point that we're not seeking to remove power dynamics that's kind of a natural thing across Society where humans uh the world is unfair we each start off with a different set of uh circumstances and we change differently but uh we're really trying to flatten its effects we're seeking to remove the ability some of someone with asymmetric power to impact those without it and this could be summarized by uh this kind of change of phrasing we've all heard in the beginning of Google uh their their phrase of don't be evil and we loved it that's one of the reasons why I enjoyed Google in the beginning was they had this kind of ethos and model of like seeking to not uh try and take advantage of others in the process of building out infrastructure and serving people uh and I have to give credit to Dr manibelli for introducing this exact phrasion to me back in I don't know one of the early consensuses in New York is and what we're trying to do is change don't be evil to can't be evil because we've seen what happens when the motto is don't be evil you have the option to do so it's it and you continue to have that option you get to selectively choose when it's economically feasible for you to not be evil or maybe there's a change of guard and uh everything that's set up that had that ethos changes when uh that new change of guard doesn't really quite care the way the original one did so we're seeking to do this don't changing don't be evil if it can't be evil don't give people those options and this is an example of when that fails uh uh this is a mbvwatch dot info I believe yeah I think so and this is what's currently happening as the as a result of the sanctions being put down on tornado cash now uh I'm not going to opine on the original picture of someone being held captive for in prison for a long period of time uh but what we can see is that tornado cash was sanctioned the code was removed uh and put back on subsequently but uh we're seeing OPEC sanctions having a an impact on what we thought was uh Central like censorship resistant technology where this is the list of all of the blocks currently done since the merge and those of the if you look at the the gray here the gray is all the ones that are not using a service on the validators called Mev boost and those that are are the ones that are uh the portion of those blocks that are of fat compliant they're censoring transactions on the public on the public ethereum blockchain in compliance with these 20 request sanctions and the ones that aren't and I think if you look at that it ends up being quite a bit so 32 of all transactions put across the the blockchain network or are ofac compliant and if you look at just the ones going through interview Mev boost the massive majority of those are so we're seeing censorship at the base layer and this can only be done because we can see what those transactions are and you're able to make a distinction and do transaction ordering because you're able to see those details now that means you're given the ability to look back here here maybe you have the ability to make a decision that you're choosing don't be evil and that can't be evil so it makes it it's showing that we need more privacy and censorship resistance well I'll get to that in a moment don't know why that moved yeah so we're seeing that we need more privacy and censorship resistance at lower and lower layers um if we can't just do everything on the blockchain layer and then ignore it on the ones below and if you looked at the talk before this you see that like that's a really hard problem to solve there's a lot of like trade-offs and difficulties you have to do to try and figure out what is good behavior and how do we make the appropriate trade-offs to then maximize that right so I'm going to take a slight turn here to talk about kind of how you can maybe think about structuring this argument and um where it actually comes into place when you're making decisions on uh like how to build infrastructure and where you need to focus your your uh your principles so this this I keep coming back to this phrase the medium is the message and it's a general idea that uh the technology you use the medium has a drastic impact on your ability to convey a given message when we try to put something out some idea in the world uh we think about it in our heads we form it in some way and we send it out into the world via some technology or formalism or whatever and it's up to the perceiver to uh decode that appropriately and it's also in while in transit potentially being manipulated and and that's where a lot of that's coming in I'll make a kind of a case for that in a moment but this wonderful picture by Monica and the crowd here uh is is kind of like this example of what it looks like when you you don't take this into account and you funnel everything all human relationships into a single medium in which kind of takes out all your optionality and how you can build things so this is kind of like all of the complexity of Human Relationships and different things coming through what I would see a meat grinder where everything comes out uniform in the same currently this is what I would consider centralized infrastructure in which we try and take everything that we humans do to communicate and make digital relationships and lives and what it turns out to be when we try and like mimic that stuff in a digital environment so to dive into that a little bit deeper there are three parts three layers of any message I want to try and explain what these are and then point out kind of where the subtlety in the evil comes in first we have the frame message which is the concept of uh giving information that there is a message it says hey I'm a message to code me if you can it's the ability to identify that a message even exists for you to think about uh and it's this is this it's it implicitly conveys in the structure of this message this is a book so you know what a book contains a message that's a good decent example and to understand the frame message is to recognize the need for some type of decoding mechanism I've identified that there is a message and now I need to find a way to decode it to understand what that message actually is next one is the outer message which is the medium used to convey that message this is how the message was sent out in the world to understand this the outer message is to build or know how to build the correct decoding mechanism for the inner message so this is I've identified that there's a message that I'd like to see and now I need to understand that uh how can I take this message and understand what the intent of this thing is and then finally the inter message which everyone kind of understands which is the initial intent being conveyed in the first place so understand this is to have extracted that meaning that was intended by the center in the first place now this is a overly simplistic model of what a new message is but what gives you a framework to kind of give you an idea of like where things can be introduced and how to start trying to understand how you can mitigate these things so uh if we think about blockchain networks as coordination mechanisms this is we're using them as social layers to then as I said earlier mitigate [ __ ] as best we can and trust a system as opposed to humans to convey those interactions and the interesting thing about them that's different from the Internet is that they have real world value which attracts a lot of people to do things that are very greedy so we have these beautiful cross-border cross jurors dictional uh attempts to be attempting to be Central uh censorship resistant coordination mechanisms that allow us all these things we couldn't do beforehand in a digital environment with digital relationships with approval value um and if we think about that earlier framework of thinking about a message it's really hard because it's layered in a bunch of different ways if we look at the kind of Stack the very very overly simplistic stack of what a blockchain network is we have networking at the bottom this is how messages get passed around so then everyone who's contributing to these things can it comes to agreement and has all the right data to figure out what's going on they then go through the process of validating all these messages that say if they're well formed or someone's doing a double spend or that gets dropped or whatever and then construct them into blocks and then we go through a consensus mechanism where we as a distributed system come to agreement like this is all the right one to then move on onto from now on right and after that we have to find some way of like extracting that data from this massive blockchain that we keep building that's a lot of messages and a lot of different mechanisms which have what would be considered an outer message that needs to be interpreted appropriately and based on anyone in this process's ability to understand that outer message and the powers they have in various places across the stack give them the ability to change that message or censor it and most of the time when we're thinking about adding security or privacy we're looking at the top two validation and consensus we're basically just making sure it's correct but what we're seeing now like we spent all our time on privacy in the retrieval and kind of well there's a middle layer with smart contractors so on and so forth we're seeing all of our time spinning up here when when things happen and those that the powers that be want to change stuff that go to a layer above because we didn't necessarily think about it back then right so that's kind of an overview of like kind of how to think about uh public good infrastructure it's complexity and um and a small example of I don't want to say not thinking properly or building improperly but like as this thing is grown and ossified the interactions of not incorporating what I would consider the strongest point the strongest principles that we set out to do mitigating [ __ ] properly at the lower the lower layers we look to scale things too quickly and instead of uh providing what I think is a more fundamental requirement in order for self-sovereignty and that is privacy uh and censorship resistance we're failing to do so now in the system that's actually being adopted by many people so quick history of whisper and how we've moved from the Arlen relay and kind of statuses and now back in waku's uh attempts at trying to take infrastructure and grow it in the direction that it needs to grow while keeping all these principles aligned uh once again there's a lot more details to all of this I'd recommend reading the ridiculous amount of stuff we have online and watching oster's talk previously here's one tomorrow where he gives them an awesome demo of what I'll get to eventually please show up for that but this is a what the original theorem uh announced to the world this is what the decentralized stack looked like where you had smart contracts on ethereum we all kind of know what that is and then swarm and Whisper which were the other two pillars of what a decentralized application was supposed to be swarmed for file storage and Whisper for dynamic Communications or femoral Communications and with a special emphasis in obfuscating the route of uh how who sent a message and uh who's receiving it we holy bought into this status and we wanted to build an application we wanted to be this thing that consumed these things so that people had access to it in resource constrained or like areas in which only had access to small little number of resources like the mobile phone right we wanted to increase the inclusion as much as possible while maintaining this high level of decentralization and we had this concept of socioeconomic networks really really really early you're seeing a lot of social token stuff happen and kind of the idea of that ethereum is a coordination layer we're moving past this financial applications only situation and so we incorporated whisper we used what was put out by ethereum ecosystem um and we did it naively I'd say we used proof of work because that's part of it in terms of the the anti-spam mechanism for messages being passed on the network and we killed batteries and had super hot funds use glossop gossip and Bloom filters for sending it for Center midi and we destroyed data plans for people right we tried to use this technology as best we could and read it it was a new technology and we tried to apply it in a very extreme place and then the first discovery finding peers and we had a based on the high churn of people's mobile devices popping in and out of places or turning them off and so on and so forth it's really hard to get good message reliability and so what did we do we took ownership of it because was for wasn't whisper wasn't being developed in applying resources they reasonably speaking had a tremendous amount of work to be applied to just fixing and making a blockchain scale itself and solving those problems with what resources were available at that time so Oscar wrote A Blog here along then we we decided as an organization to take ownership of this and introduce waku which was the fork of whisper and we tried to make it a little more scalable a little more usable so that status applications uh the users of the status application could have somewhat of a reasonable uh user experience so we tend to the patch whisper for our environment took responsibility and applied attention to our required infrastructure and we did this in an open way we created vac which is a separate organization to focus and research and study on trying to grow these things and the manner that's appropriate with the principles I talked about in the beginning and for all of these things you can see out in the open we try to make open specifications that anyone can use whisper or waku is for everyone we're taking opinionated versions of it and applying it in contexts we think is appropriate but it's for everyone a public good is not to be owned by a given organization and used at our discretion so we publish all these things at rfc.vac.dev join opine contribute um but we had issues we had spam for those of you who've used status in the past couple years and you go to maybe this status Channel you're going to see a lot of this why because we had no incentives we took away our ability to um mitigate some of that with proof of work because there are a lot of other issues with using proof of work for spam mitigation but we had a problem but what what could we do what what could we have done to fix this we could have offered up a lot of centralized solutions by looking at IPS and banning them or running things through our servers and censoring or things appropriately but we tried to stick to our principles of what a real decentralized stack should look like and it was painful but we're in a scaling problem too we had multiple problems simultaneously so what did we do we chose to a plan for waku waku 2 because the way whisper was built was fragile and couldn't scale and we realized that when we tried to fix it so we wrote it completely from scratch off of the P2P and called it waku V2 that's why we call it the spiritual successor of whisper so what do we do we did a complete retooling of a private decentralized generally messaging stack on top of the P2P uh it's modular so that users trying to use this stuff for a specific context can make the decisions it's appropriate for what they're doing uh whenever you try and make a completely generalized solid framework that isn't flexible you're going to optimize for No One so if you will provide a suite of protocols that work well together and a way for them to interact together then you can hopefully build multiple solutions that optimize for multiple applications and it's open once again it's built for generalized messaging it's not just for status that's one of the applications we use it for being used for things based on what choices you make in the suite of protocols still spam right still got problems to spend we just dealt with scaling and getting people to use it and understanding that like there's a lot of different ways you can do generalized chat and we're not going to tell you how to do it so in order for keeping with our principals we decided to build the What's called the rln relay and that is a privacy preserving spam protection that leverages zero knowledge proofs and severe secret sharing and some economic disincentives uh this is built on walkover V2 relay and this is an uh I'm not going to go through the overview I don't have much time um but uh it's a really interesting way of using novel cryptography and uh very well known cryptography in a unique combination of uh allowing people to contribute to a network and be removed if they do bad behavior without having to really reveal a lot of pii information about themselves and so on and so forth so we stuck to our principles it was painful along the way but we got to a unique solution that I don't think ever would have gotten to or maybe much later had we just you know compromise those things and moved on to some other way all the specifications once again are at rfc.vac.dev you can see the papers of these things I'm sure there's links on on vac.dev but you can find them here if yeah it's easier if you just go to the website and click on it as opposed to trying writing it down now go play with it tell us about it we have a lot of different other research along the way once again go see Oscar you can see a live demo of this type of thing live a video of a demo of this type of thing tomorrow uh it's once again wrapping it up so a principles are priority right in order to do what I would consider public good infrastructure you need to publish openly you can't do things in the dark uh especially when it's a digital permissionless system you can't have trust in things if you don't know how it works and these things should be Community Based so publish openly Implement iterate the concept of using old two tools will lead to Old Solutions if we would have compromised on our principles and done things to make status scale and kind of soar quickly we would have just ended up with the same stuff the same [ __ ] we have today and that's not why we hear in the first place [ __ ] are everywhere and think about that think about how they can manipulate the intended messages that you're trying to send out in the world where can they understand the outer message of what you're trying to do manipulate it and change that message such that the receiver either can't get it or get something wrong and uh in general I think it's important to finish on we should be conforming technology to relationships we're trying to have with the people who are trying to have them and not the other way around um and we're building a lot of this we've since expanded the organization substantially to start growing infrastructure uh and we want to do that with as much of the principles and Ethos that we started talking about in the beginning and that's collectively built to student access specifically Network level privacy you can't have censorship resistance if people can see what you're doing so as much privacy as possible with Selective disclosure in the right places heterogeneous multi-chain Network you need the right to exit it should be behold into a single place in which you shove things and then rely on them to work appropriately native private public smart contracts once you get in privacy at all levels of the stack and as much as we possibly can optimizing for resource restricted devices because you can't be inclusive if people can't get access to the devices that are required to use your software or Hardware or whatever this is what we're doing there's a lot of work to be done and we're hiring this is a QR code to go to a lot of the jobs that we've posted currently keep track of it there's going to be a lot more thank you thank you since we're the last ones we have a lot of questions plenty of time for questions I'm happy to take them yeah take as much time as you want Corey yeah we're looking uh are there any I'm looking there's a question over there hey uh great talk um allow me to stand uh so I was curious you know you talk about your principles um and it seems like first and foremost privacy is at the top of that stack uh I think there was like an implication about the morality of the ofac uh sanctions like in the validators um which seems to imply that privacy is Paramount above the other principles that you try to present as like uh what is ethical for status uh that's not a judgment that's just I'm just trying to say that uh the question is how do you prioritize the principles against each other I mean you talk about inclusivity uh like with the resource uh limited devices and then how do you you know ask your community to input their opinions about like the priorities of those principles so in designing you know the future of status like what sort of processes do you use to get feedback uh on those principles good question actually um it's really really really hard uh first off I think it's that an Oscar stock you mentioned something that I've I like repeating and I like saying a lot because it really tells uh kind of powder like a general idea of how to how to frame these things and like because in the day there's a lot of principles to uphold right a lot of ideas we want to try and do simultaneously in some situations in a lot of situations come in conflict with each other uh but you can't build a decentralized framework on top of a centralized Foundation but you can do the opposite really easily coinbase is a wonderful example of that um and so when you're thinking about having one of these arguments and trying to come to a priority which is going to be context specific you need to try and um see what's most important and what removes your ability to uh have that decentralized Foundation that can be compromised with at a later at a higher at a higher at a later place because we don't want to make decisions for other people so how can we make the most generalized way that people can make decisions for themselves and and build appropriately for their context so that means privacy is very strong because you're not revealing information until you need to but if you're not private you're automatically giving all that information away which allows people to make decisions like which doesn't allow people you can't add so much harder to add privacy later to the same thing can't build private Solutions on top of public Solutions there are there's always going to be a way to remove that privacy to layer below and go after it right and I think like uh one of the examples I've heard uh recently is from our founder is like say you wanted to build a limited liability doubt heck can we do that today I don't think so because you can make a vote on a specific proposal and someone doesn't like it they can still see who voted on it and the whales can go after those so like there's no removal of risk in the process of contributing to something like that like that because they just go after you and you can see the lower you go the more often that happens so like it's like kind of long-winded answers your question you have to try and have arguments that move towards a direction of uh what constraints are we applying now that are going to have implications in the layers above and is that in line with the people's ability to make decisions for themselves um you mentioned you can build uh private Solutions on public infrastructure I'm wondering what's your opinion on Road upston GK applied they are beholden to whatever constraints that ethereum gives them they don't have a lot of power in themselves and I really don't enjoy although zero knowledge is wonderful it's currently being used for compression reasons and there's no privacy there and once again same thing you just even higher above the stack uh since you're publishing all that data to the blockchain in a non-privacy preserving way it's not doing anything it's just a scaling solution uh so it's it's adding additional constraints that will eventually be subject to the same censorship or just like non-censorship resistance that we're seeing today but that being said it's awesome like there's a bunch of really cool technology being deployed and very very novel uh advancements in cryptographic Primitives that will be useful for scaling and adding privacy preserving Solutions in in different ways in the future so like I'm happy we're able to start to serve the amount of people that starts to compare to where we set it out in the first place of like blockchain serving the world but if we keep moving in this direction it may become so ossified that we can't make solutions that keep it from being censorship resistant which is what I said in the first because the whole point of all of this if we build blockchains that are not censorship resistant that we didn't do anything we set out to do other than making I don't know digital fun money I'd like to give the biggest Applause we have of the day because it's the last speaker Corey thank you so much let's see