Why I'm interested in gno

Hi I'm Jacob and I write a lot of code and validate a lot of networks in Cosmos as notional and well, we have been given a writing prompt and it's pretty interesting because the GNO project is also pretty interesting.

I'm interested in it from a number of different angles so maybe let's start with the social network angle, I actually became exposed to tendermint for the first time in 2016 because I was interested in building a decentralized social network to replace steemit.com: I felt that it was corrupt.

Out of that came Dawn:

Https://GitHub.com/dawn-network/dawn

But realistically dawn was a little bit too ambitious for its time, and I was a little bit too insane and a little bit too high.

Today my more sober and more sane self, sees a lot of truth in what I wrote about Dawn and also my beliefs about technology, that it is basically fundamentally corrupted. Yeah most people don't rant in their readme files about how medical patents are morally bankrupt but that doesn't change the reality that medical patents are completely morally bankrupt.

One of the missing components of the digital revolution let's say is free speech. That's why Ricardo and I built blurt and it's why I'm so enthusiastic about applications specific blockchain technology.

Free speech is a really hard thing to preserve and realistically all of our viewpoints have a cost. With that said, I believe that truth has a certain vibrational frequency that people are intuitively able to feel and that more or less explains my deep belief in open source software.

When I was an early user of tendermint technology, I noticed how much easier it was compared to graphene consensus, which is similar but written in c++. Of course, there are very important differences between the two and fundamentally, tendermint is the more secure technology. There are a lot of clear trade-offs in the design of tenderment consensus and overall, safety was chosen instead of speed in many places and in fact that's one of the reasons for the overall performance of tendermint networks when compared to graphene blockchain networks, which indeed can handle more transactions but also are even more prone to the formation cabals, and takeovers by errant whales.

So just like as a person, I'm interested in GNO because I think that it's going to help people to express themselves better.

As a technologist, I'm interested in GNO because it's the only contract platform that I'm aware of that executes contracts as their source code instead of as a compiled binary. Recently on the Juno network, which I am also involved in, I have gotten to see first hand, some of the difficulties that are involved with closed source smart contracts that are executed out of foreign platform, namely that they're incredibly difficult to audit, meaning that users are at risk. Furthermore, property rights are harmed. Because the contracts are uploaded in a compiled state, it is difficult to verify the provenance of the actual code that is being executed. This has both security and ethical implications for blockchain networks.

GNO has very few dependencies. Because it has so few dependencies, it is unlikely to suffer from upstream software shocks. You will notice that blurt itself is a monorepo, we're all code lives in a single source code repository. It's my opinion that this makes blurt easier to audit. The thing that is difficult to audit about flirt is the reality that very few people including myself fully understand the type of concurrent c++ that was used to build blurt.

Blurt is not regular c++. It is highly specialized, highly concurrent c++ written using the boost libraries. I did learn that type of coding in order to build blurt, but I certainly cannot say that I am a world expert in it. The fact of the matter is that go is a highly approachable programming language, and folks like myself who have difficulty with mathematics can still easily learn go. Reading go source code is much easier than reading the source code of many other programming languages.

Now let's go through some things that I feel like I have learned in a fairly concrete manner:

• Smart contracts are needed even if only as a way of extending the primary consensus and protocol of a blockchain network
• Rust code is to symbolic and difficult to read
• Relying on compiled binaries poses security and ethical and provenance risks
• Tendermint consensus is the most likely winner of the proof of stake consensus game. It is very flexible and there's still a great deal of room for optimization.
• The Graphene source code cannot be separated from Dan larimer
• Dan larimer is friends with the funny hat guy, Brock Pierce, and his hat is not really so funny and that should be questioned for certain
• Dan larimer is friends with Brendan Blumer and that should be questioned
• Dan larimer discovered something quite powerful with the decentralized blog platform known as steem
• Decentralized exchanges are the only way to bootstrap a decent layer one without compromising ones morality
• I have found go to be pleasant to work with
• The founder of GNO, J-Kwon is unfortunately correct a shocking percentage of the time, especially about software but also about society, and this should scare you.
• We need better information repositories and we need better discussion forums, blurt will always suffer from its consensus mechanism.

So I'm super interested in blogging and dissemination of information and the proliferation of open source technology both on the hardware and software level because I kind of figure that it's possible to open source society at large.

I figure that it's possible to open source all of the important medications, all of the important technologies, all of human knowledge, and that the actual basis of wealth is your capacity to serve others. Any other wealth is not true wealth, it is plunder.

I also think that what we're seeing in the development of proof of stake blockchain networks and the economies that surround them is in fact a business model for open and transparent information that did not exist a decade ago. This is really important and should not be missed.

Personally I'm interested in GNO because if there was one person who pulled me into this industry it was Jae and not once but twice:

• In 2016 he taught me how to use tendermint
• In 2020 I had a job as his personal research assistant, looking into open source hardware.

Today I do a great deal of work on technologies that originated with him but this isn't only about the founder, this is also about the correctness of the technologies, and I've got to say it's probably right to give a little credit there. GNO looks like it's going to be the first fully auditable smart contract solution, and I think that's going to matter a great deal. I do enjoy working with CosmWasm.

I think Juno is going to make an amazing playground for it, and that that community is going to prosper over time.

There are a number of things that Juno and the CW stack desperately need and one of those things is transparency. GNO may provide this.

I also have some questions about GNO:

• To What degree is it going to follow mainline go?
• Should we be investigating vlang, for its more or less miraculous performance and at least equal clarity to go?
• Should I be trying to port tendermint to VLANG, given that performance issues do seem frequently crop up?
• Can non-market oriented validator sets provide the same level of security that market oriented validator sets can provide?
• What are interfaces between the chain and contracts like?

But the thing is since GNO is a baby block chain right now, we don't know the answers to this, and part of my interest comes from not knowing the answers.

Sometimes it's a really great sign when things aren't clear, I didn't realize what Juno could become until it started to become it. I think we still don't know what blurt may become, because at its essence what we have here is a community and that community can make choices collectively and do as they wish to with the chain platform which is of course what I always desired when we created it.

So I guess to summarize I'm interested on a personal level end well my person has become quite technical, I think that GNO pursues a secure and sound method of smart contracts for public blockchains, and makes clear improvements on the current state of the art. I also think that it's going to be sometime until it is safe enough and mature enough for widespread public usage but that it's minimalism and it's design are going to benefit it in those areas.

If we are lucky, it's openness will help us to have better conversations, and that's the same reason that I built blurt. For those who are not too technically oriented,
The key difference between blurt and GNO is the ability of GNO to execute arbitrary code, tiny little programs that are uploaded to the chain, and can interpret new transaction types.

I'm sure that Members of the blurt community who have been around here for longer can remember some of our chain upgrades and probably can remember that they were a little bit traumatic and some of them involved enormous penises. One of the neat things about smart contracts is that they provide a platform for users to build on. Where blurt stores static text, gno stores the tools for interpreting that static text.

I suppose that in the last matter I can say that I'm a little bit politically aligned with GNO. I always wanted to see the Bitcoin movement branch out and you know to a large degree I think that we really have. Because people who own Bitcoin have gotten wealthier, our voices have gotten more powerful. Hopefully, GNO becomes the platform where some of the more radical ideas explored in cryptocurrency come to light.

I still want to see Dawn happen. I still want to move blurt into Cosmos. And I'd like to do so many things. These days, I have been spending time adding Pebble DB to a library in tendermint called TM-db. Basically, TM-db is a wrapper tool that allows tendermint to use arbitrary databases. I have also been having a damn fine time running validators in Cosmos, and learning more about the construction of decentralized technologies, both the bad and the good of it. So I don't know I guess I just want to play with some new tools, and see what comes of it. That's what's gotten me here this far and I'd like to see how much further it can go.