Gavin Wood: You can recreate an "Ethereum" in Polkadot, but you cannot make a Polkadot in Ethereum

at the end of last month,Polkadot founder Dr. Gavin WoodI had an in-depth conversation with Sebastian Moonjava, deputy editor-in-chief of the blockchain investment media Real Vision, for more than an hour, and talked about various topics about Polkadot in an in-depth and concise manner.

Since the content of the talk is relatively long and the information density is quite high, PolkaWorld is divided into several articles for release. Today’s release is the fourth part, which mainly discusses:

• Why is Polkadot said to be a fork-free blockchain, and what are the benefits of no fork?

• How does Polkadot maintain the infinite progress of the network through governance?

• What is the value of Polkadot's "heterogeneous sharding and multi-chain" architecture?

The contents of the previous sections are here:

• first part"What Polkadot has to do is to make rapid blockchain innovation possible》

• the second part"Possibly under governance, award 10 million DOTs to Kusama》

• the third part"first level title》

SEBASTIAN MOONJAVA：I've read some reports that sayPolkadot and Kusama try to be fork-free blockchains,Is it right? Can you explain what this means? What good is that?

GAVIN WOOD：Yes, I did it myself, and I treat it like my own child. I started doing this three years ago, and it was also the first thing I did Polkadot.

Wait, these aren't actually part of the underlying protocol, but the fundamental stuff that runs on the web. These things are actually a protocol that sits on top of

This means that what people feel is related to Polkadot, that isParachains, governance, balance, DOT tokensWait, these aren't actually part of the underlying protocol, but the fundamental stuff that runs on the web. These things are actually a protocol that sits on top ofand, it is fully programmable. This means that at any time in the future Polkadot, it can be replaced with some other business logic, and can be replaced with some other options.

andactual agreement, is defined as Polkadot, and there are actually very, very few things that are difficult to change. that's allThe underlying consensus, known as BABE and GRANDPA, are two aspects of a mixed consensus. Somewhat similar to Ethereum 2.0's consensus, it is a fairly substantial improvement over all existing consensus mechanisms. The layer above it just shows how to execute the business logic. We explicitly chose the most common and widely adopted language or format in the industry -WebAssembly, which is backed by Google, Firefox, Microsoft, and a lot of big companies.

WebAssembly is well understood and supported by many large technology companies. It's simple yet well-designed. It's very performant, efficient, and has a lot of great implementations. It has a great community around it. Basically, we're just saying, we don't need to invent our own stuff. We will not reinvent Ethereum's virtual machine EVM like before, WebAssembly will become the industry standard.

We can say that we just integrate WebAssembly into blockchain consensus, databases, etc. that's what we saySubstratefirst level title

SEBASTIAN MOONJAVA：can you tell the audienceWhat is a hard fork? Why do we want to avoid it?Maybe you can talk about Ethereum Classic, or give us another example, to make our audience understand what a hard fork is and why we don't want to do a hard fork?

GAVIN WOOD：The existence of blockchain allows different economic participants to participate in one thing under the same economic rules.The existence of blockchain allows different economic participants to participate in one thing under the same economic rules.So,

So,What happens if you need to agree to something that is not within the established consensus?Bitcoin allows you to form a consensus that is the pastWho was paid Bitcoin, and to whom, but it won't get you to a consensus on "how bitcoin should be upgraded". This problem is not within the Bitcoin system, which only considers account balances, and whether a particular transaction has been made on the account.

The same goes for Ethereum. Ethereum is very good atspecific small computer programsForm a consensus, but it cannot form a consensus on "how Ethereum itself will adapt to future changes". This is beyond the system, beyond the scope of the Ethereum consensus. This is basically the case for every blockchain other than Polkadot. For Polkadot, Polkadot's system and Polkadot's own business logic are all included in the Polkadot consensus.

Now, if you don't have this function, then you have toFind another way outside the systemto reach a consensus. You have to find a way for all participants in the system, all stakeholders to form a consensus. Currently, this is possible through abenevolent dictatorvotevoteto achieve, and everyone must implement the result of that vote. But as we've seen in recent history, it's not easy to even agree on a vote, let alone get everyone to enforce it in the first place.

What we ended up seeing was the same problems that Bitcoin and Ethereum have had in the past, we saw Bitcoin being forked into Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision, Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Diamond, and all the other various "Bitcoin currency", because the consensus of Bitcoin cannot form a long-term consensus on "how the protocol should be changed, adjusted and developed". The same is true for Ethereum. As early as 2016, Ethereum had a political decision: when there was a large DAO hacking incident, should the funds of the hacked DAO be taken back and returned to the original owner?

This decision basically split the community. Some say, no, code is law and these funds must continue to be hacked. Others in the community said, no, actually, we should try to solve the problem, Ethereum is still early, and this kind of thing can be forgiven. These two different political views have led to the two different blockchains we have today, Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.

Now, the biggest problem is these hard forks, because there will always be disputes. People always associate them with politics.Because hard forks are not governed by any automated consensus mechanism, this means we are subject to soft forms of consensus - human interactionfirst level title

SEBASTIAN MOONJAVA：Polkadot and Kusama, which are more like living, are a living protocol with its own meta-governance. Is there any risk in this way? I've been working in this space since 2013, and I've heard a saying before that a hard fork is actually good because it's two communities doing what they want, or going the way they like work.Are there any potential problems with using a forkless protocol?

GAVIN WOOD：This debate is not without merit. It's certainly good to try different things. However, as we have seen in the past,Division within a group is harmful.They end up causing negativity on all fronts, which is often the opposite of the happy innovation we see in a well-functioning community. I accept and believe in experimentation, trying multiple approaches simultaneously with different potentials, then letting them compete and picking the best one, and then running it that way, but it needs to be run in some order.Just trying to do different things in a radical way is bad because there's no way (once the community splits) to get back together and it's going to be a big problem.

However, Polkadot is actually one of the first blockchains to take this into consideration. becausePolkadot is a heterogeneous sharding multi-chain. Because it has these different shards, that is, different parachains, each of which can be a different thing, and each can do its own thing. It's a bit like what I read about America in The Economist a few years ago. Kind of like, the federal system can experiment with different policies in different states, and those that work can be promoted to federal status, and those that don't can be discarded.

So is Polkadot. In fact, we can achieve the good part brought by the hard fork, namelyexperimentation with policy or agreementfirst level title

SEBASTIAN MOONJAVA：Just to make sure I understand what you mean, you're saying that Polkadot is kind of like a federal government, and each parachain is like a state. They have their own meta governance, they have their own rules. Again, you said they were heterogeneous—

GAVIN WOOD：Fragmentation multi-chain.

SEBASTIAN MOONJAVA：Arguably, this means the opposite of Ethereum. For ethereum, the projects are all built on top of ethereum, they need to use the same blockchain logic as each other because they are one thing. However, the parallel chain is not so unified. They just get security from this standard stuff (Polkata). They all have their own blockchain logic, their own set of rules, just like each state has its own rules to determine whether this is legal or that is legal.

This is one of the biggest differences between Polkadot and its heterogeneous sharding (and Ethereum). Parachains have their own blockchain logic. Whereas for projects on Ethereum, everything happens on Ethereum — projects are built on Ethereum, tokens are built on Ethereum, and they are still subject to the same type of logic.Can you tell me what is the benefit of using a different logic, or having the ability to use a different logic？I'm just not sure how valuable the world will be with these heterogeneous chains.

GAVIN WOOD：sure. You can imagine a network of smart contracts like Ethereum, and others, that start withroughly the same structureTo structure, a bit like the civil law system in the modern world. You can get a lawyer and they can draw up a contract for you that does a lot of different things. I mean, if you talk to a lawyer, you can basically write anything you want in the contract,There will be some statutory requirements, which are imposed on you by the legal system, and different legal systems are different. For example, in UK company law, it is very difficult to give different shareholder rights or limit shareholder rights within a company. In some states in the US, the shareholder rights are much more flexible, and you can basically remove all rights, or give all rights to one shareholder, or whatever. But that's not the case in many other countries.

Now, you can think of the generality of Ethereum as what type of civil law applies to you in a particular jurisdiction.(The project on Ethereum) will exist in this jurisdiction, it will not be able to invoke civil law in other jurisdictions.Whatever the civil law of that jurisdiction is, it can only accept the pros and cons of that civil law in its entirety.

And what Polkadot gives you is that you can own other jurisdictions.You don't need to exist only under the legal system, jurisprudence, court system, lawyer framework of a specific country,You can choose and create your own rules.You can say that my blockchain only has financial laws, and it has very strict supervision. There could be another blockchain that says we don't have any regulation.

and

andIn Polkadot, you can define the countries you want. You can define your laws any way you want.You can define your economy however you want. You don't need to buy into any of these things that already exist. And this will enable many more experiments.

For example, if you don't want your users to have to hold your tokens to interact, but instead just provide a verified Facebook identity to interact, say once or twice a day, you can do that and be perfectly fine . You only need to write the blockchain logic so that it does not need to detect a specific account holding some tokens when verifying each incoming transaction, and deduct some from the account to pay the transaction fee, just like Ethereum does the same. And now you just check and make sure the account is connected to Facebook, and that Facebook account is still active, is verified by Facebook, or has a certain number of friends, and it hasn't done a few transactions, or whatever else you want Rules will do.

Polkadot exists lower down the technology stack. Ethereum, we call it a layer 1 blockchain because it's conceptually layer 1 on top of which you can build layer 2 applications.

Polkadot exists lower down the technology stack. Ethereum, we call it a layer 1 blockchain because it's conceptually layer 1 on top of which you can build layer 2 applications.You can think of Polkadot as a layer 0 blockchain, as it sits below the Ethereum layer.Original video link: