Arthur Breitman is the creator of the Techos blockchain. He talked about his project but also more generally about Bitcoin and intelligent contracts.
By Nils Baudoin.
You are running Tezos, a decentralized blockchain project in the Bitcoin and Ethereum vein. What is your interest in these networks?
The invention of the blockchain allowed the deployment of Decentralized Great Books, that is to say a mechanism of shared compatibility, accessible to all, and not under the explicit control of anyone.
Behind this rather sober description is actually a rather revolutionary advance. Where the Internet has provided almost universal access to information, these networks provide access to consensus coordination. This coordination can take the form of money as in the Bitcoin, which derives its value from a consensus around its usefulness. It can also take the form of settlements & delivery2 compensation mechanisms, registers of domain names and cryptographic identities. Individuals living around the world can use these tools to pass verified, validated and executed contracts at a minimum price and without having to resort to a third party.
Existing networks suffer from a blind spot: governance A myth persists around Bitcoin, the idea that the network tightly pure "mathematical", ideal, platonic, immutable. In reality, although many aspects of the protocol are purely mathematical, its proper functioning depends on conjectures on the behavior of the actors who validate and use its blockchain. For example, the security of Bitcoin is based on the assumption that collusion between certain actors is not plausible.
Beyond the ambiguities, to the network, its evolution remains contentious. Recently, a debate opposed by the supporters of the "small" blocs, worries the main ones by the importance of maintaining the decentralization of the network and the supporters of the "big" blocks, who want to increase the pace of transactions. Absences to great debate, the holders and users of Bitcoins. These problems are even more pronounced for Ethereum, a project run by a foundation that has a great influence on the technological evolution of the network, but also on its governance.
The concept of Tezos is to use the consensus capacity of the blockchains themselves to implement their own governance models. In practice, in Tezos, this means that we let the token holders accept or reject protocol updates, i.e. the rules followed by the network. We start with a simple voting system where a supermajority 3 can choose and adopt proposals for updating.
These proposals may contain conditions that pay their creators, creating an incentive to maintain and improve Tezos. Crucially, the governance model itself is subject to updates and can move gradually from this stripped-down voting model to a more sophisticated model involving safeguards or introducing counter-powers.
