Dialogue with Polkadot founder Gavin Wood: I don't want people to become slaves to tokens

This article was published on August 6, 2019, in the Orange Paper, authored by orangefans.

In 2013, 33-year-old Gavin Wood finished reading Vitalik's white paper and quickly decided to help this 19-year-old young man realize the grand vision of Ethereum. Later, Vitalik became the genius boy known worldwide, and Gavin Wood's life changed forever.

Everyone knows Vitalik, but few really understand Gavin Wood.

Vitalik fits all the imaginations people have of a genius youth, while Gavin Wood appears to be a typical engineer, the kind of story you have seen countless times about a tech whiz. People know that this British programmer was once the CTO of Ethereum, wrote the technical yellow paper for Ethereum, is the inventor of the Solidity language, the founder of the Ethereum client Parity, and has now founded the popular star project Polkadot, which is seen as a competitor to Ethereum—so what then?

To ask who Gavin Wood is, in fact, is to try to inquire about Ethereum, to question the earliest forms and ideas of blockchain after Bitcoin.

As creators of a world-changing product, Vitalik and Gavin Wood belong to two completely different types of people. The 90s-born Vitalik is an unpretentious youth, shy and reserved on stage; the 80s-born Gavin Wood appears much more seasoned and at ease, often speaking in a somewhat oratorical manner, accustomed to taking a bottle of beer on stage, holding a PPT clicker in one hand, drinking while doing technical evangelism.

People talk about Vitalik's idealism, praise his ability to speak multiple languages, even understanding Chinese, and are enthusiastic about his wide range of interests. In this regard, Gavin Wood and Vitalik share some similarities.

Gavin Wood started programming at the age of 7, designed board games with friends, enjoyed philosophy in college, holds a PhD in music visualization, and after graduation taught fractals and art courses to children at a school in Italy. He has worked on video games at Frontier Developments, designed smart lighting controllers for a nightclub in London, and even proposed a new voting system to the UK government.

Gavin Wood speaks English, Italian, French, and Spanish; enjoys photography, is proficient in Taekwondo, and can snowboard. Before the interview with the Orange Paper, Gavin Wood was practicing writing his Chinese name "林嘉文" in a small notebook he carried with him.

In summary, Gavin Wood is not a typical tech geek. On the contrary, we find that he may be even more idealistic than Vitalik. His role as the early CTO of Ethereum, combined with his current identity as the founder of the popular project Polkadot, has given Gavin Wood double the experience of participating in two projects from 0 to 1. This has made him one of the most worthy technical figures to converse with in the blockchain world.

Surprisingly, from encountering Ethereum to eventually leaving Ethereum and founding Polkadot to compete directly with Ethereum, Gavin Wood and Vitalik do not resemble the typical story of co-founders parting ways. Gavin Wood claims that his ideas have not changed since the Ethereum era; establishing Polkadot is merely an attempt to realize what he initially considered the "correct idea," while Ethereum for him is "just an experiment."

The following is the content of the Orange Paper's exclusive interview with Gavin Wood. For a better reading experience, some content has been adjusted.

1. My Story

If I hadn't entered the blockchain industry and hadn't founded Polkadot, I think I would probably still be writing code in some corner, after all, this is something I've been doing since I was 7 or 8 years old. I don't know what else I could do.

In a sense, writing code allows me to focus and relax; it is a way for me to coexist peacefully with the world.

There was a time I went backpacking in Central America, spending 3 months in Panama and Mexico, during which I didn't touch any code. To be honest, I was a bit frantic at that time, always feeling like I needed to write something, I needed to create something.

Of course, there are other interesting things in the world besides code. My PhD was about music visualization, and music has always been my interest; it is an art form and a "language" through which we can communicate and connect with various other media.

How to express this language of music in a visual way was what I studied during my PhD. At that time, my roommate was an electronic musician, and we collaborated on a few concerts. That was a very interesting time.

After graduating from university, I entered the gaming industry and lived a 9-to-5 life. But soon I realized this was not what I wanted to pursue. There wasn't much wrong with the job itself; I got along well with my colleagues (some of whom are still good friends), but that state of being did not align with the life philosophy I wanted.

A year later, I left the gaming industry and became a freelancer. I did programming consulting work, as it didn't require too much of my energy, while I could spend a lot of time on things I was interested in.

During this time, I was constantly thinking about how to reform world governance and political systems.

I had previously proposed a new voting system to the UK Supreme Court, but the outcome was that the UK Supreme Court did not want to change the voting system, which was indeed a bit frustrating. But in any case, this proposal was based on a broader concept of an internet-based governance system. Moreover, even without the internet, one could participate in governance, which is similar to the governance ideas later designed in Polkadot.

2. Bitcoin Without Borders: Another Ability to Predict the Future

In fact, I came across Bitcoin in 2011. But at that time, I was completely uninterested. I thought it was just another financial currency.

The turning point came in 2013. I saw some interesting signs in Berlin. There was a bar on the streets of Berlin that gathered many artists and wanderers, and this bar was experimenting with some anti-establishment principles, where people used Bitcoin as a medium of exchange.

At that time, I vaguely felt that there seemed to be some impending social change hidden within. The decentralized idea of Bitcoin suddenly made me realize that a decentralized platform could break through existing jurisdictions, which was quite interesting.

The reason society establishes rules and laws is that they make people's lives easier and facilitate business operations. Fundamentally, these rules are about managing people's expectations. Generally speaking, people tend to do things that have predictable outcomes in the future.

For example, we can deposit money in a bank largely because people are certain they won't lose money and can withdraw something similar to what they deposited. This is key. If I don't have that expectation, I wouldn't put my money in the bank. And in countries that do not provide effective rules or laws, you cannot have such expectations.

Without the ability to predict the future based on current behavior, the entire concept of decision-making from the perspective of economics and game theory becomes invalid.

Bitcoin in 2013 served as an alternative for managing people's expectations, largely due to its non-jurisdictional nature. Although Bitcoin primarily targets the digital world rather than the real world, it remains an important tool. Bitcoin fundamentally changed people's ability to understand how the future will operate based on current actions.

Bitcoin can form a new legal form, a more flexible, faster, and borderless internet-native law. The most interesting part is that this law is based on mathematics; if mathematics continues to exist, this law will exist.

3. The Birth of Decentralized Platforms: Encountering Ethereum, Leaving Ethereum

Before encountering Ethereum, I believed that decentralized technology could promote the birth of decentralized platforms and thought of some scenarios for future applications, but it wasn't until I truly joined Ethereum that everything became logical.

Ethereum was for me an attempt based on curiosity, a great learning process. Although I understood the principles of Bitcoin, I never thought about developing anything on Bitcoin. I couldn't see the point of programming on Bitcoin.

But after reading Ethereum's white paper, I felt that Ethereum was different. I realized that I could write truly useful code on Ethereum, and more importantly, I could learn more than just programming.

Because Bitcoin cannot be replicated, but Ethereum can be transformed. At that time, the Ethereum white paper was quite detailed, but there were still many issues that needed to be optimized and improved. I spent some time developing Ethereum; I thought it might be feasible, but I wasn't sure. The only way was to keep going down this path. Fortunately, it wasn't too difficult, and after a few weeks of experimentation, we finally proved that Ethereum was feasible.

For me, Ethereum was an experiment, a prototype to validate whether the technology was viable. Ethereum was also my school; I graduated from this school, and I wanted to try to do more things.

In fact, what I learned the most from Ethereum was not the technology (at that time, Ethereum had a dedicated research team responsible for managing technical details), but social experience. Governance was one of them. I believe that enhancing the system's capabilities through governance in blockchain systems is very important; this will be a revolutionary new feature, and this is precisely what Ethereum did not do.

Hard forks are not a good thing, but Ethereum's mentality seems to be: we just need to hard fork, and a rough consensus or social consensus outside the blockchain is enough. I think this is wrong.

Another thing I have always been skeptical about Ethereum is that it binds users' freedom to the void. Ethereum has always promoted itself as a "decentralized platform for free competition," saying "you can do anything you want," but the reality is not so. If you use Ethereum's services, you must be tied to it. For example, if you develop a DApp on Ethereum and need to make a transfer, users not only need to have your token but also need to have ETH to pay gas fees.

Ethereum has somewhat deviated from its original intention; originally, people could use any token to pay transaction fees, and Ethereum did not need to be the medium for every transaction, but Vitalik refused to do so. This means you will become a slave to that token.

Of course, I think this is a good way to make money. For those who hold a lot of Ethereum, companies operating Ethereum-related businesses (or Ethereum's co-founders), they like to promote that the Ethereum network is free and open, a component of the next generation of the internet, and so on.

In many cases, it is meaningless for users to have to indirectly use DApps through ETH. The goal of Polkadot is to give users and developers freedom, breaking this economic triangle, directly connecting users and developers.

For developers, users using your service do not need to pay Polkadot miners. You also do not need to be tied to a specific token or platform. I think this should be the basic awareness of any DApp development team.

4. The Essence of Polkadot: An Ambitious Sharded Blockchain

We should always allow people to have the right to choose, to freely decide what their economic system looks like. And to ensure the security of these systems, everyone can accept the protection of the same national army, sharing security. This is the basic philosophy of Polkadot.

A common misunderstanding in the market is to compare Cosmos and Polkadot. The two have many differences, one key difference being that Cosmos does not provide shared security. Cosmos is essentially a token exchange.

If you read the Cosmos white paper, you will find that its idea is to connect different networks through a relay, and once these networks are connected, they can transfer tokens to each other. Therefore, the initial use case of Cosmos would be a decentralized exchange, focusing on the role of the bridge.

But Polkadot is actually a sharded blockchain; it is a multi-chain that can be sharded, with each shard capable of doing different things. This is the essential difference from a relay bridge. Of course, allowing different blockchains to send tokens to each other is something both Polkadot and Cosmos can do.

However, Cosmos is not an ambitious project; they are keen to emphasize that Cosmos (and Polkadot) have the same application scenarios, leading people to believe that the technology we develop is similar, but in reality, the two only happen to have an overlapping applicable scenario.

This reminds me of Ethereum and colored coins in 2014. Colored coins were eager to emphasize that they could fork Bitcoin to create smart contracts, and Ethereum was also a way to create smart contracts, so the application scenarios of the two were actually the same. But anyone with insight knows that Ethereum is a completely different technology that can support more things and possibilities. Just because the two have an overlapping use case, the less ambitious side will be very eager to emphasize this scenario while ignoring the biggest differences between the two.

Polkadot is essentially a sharded blockchain, so it is a scalable blockchain. Cosmos is very different from a sharded blockchain. On the other hand, this is also why Ethereum 2.0 has taken so long, because building a sharded blockchain is very difficult.

5. The Significance of Cross-Chain: Only Stories That Can Build Networks Can Become Religions

Currently, we only have a few truly valuable chains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polkadot, etc. Some may feel that cross-chain is unnecessary. But interoperability (cross-chain) itself is very important, and let me tell you why.

An individual only appears exceptionally important within the network effect. For example, people believe in the creation story from thousands of years ago, which has a huge network effect, and then it can form a religion or establish a nation based on it. This story becomes a means of connecting people.

Interoperability is actually a somewhat technical way of saying "connecting individuals." In plain language, it's like a story, a dialogue between families; if they speak different languages, this story will never realize its potential. Only when everyone speaks a similar language can this story spread.

I love philosophy and often ponder philosophical questions by myself. You see how philosophers communicate; they actually have a set of philosophical dialects. They argue with each other but do not need to reach a consensus on viewpoints. What is truly important is that they must understand what other philosophers are saying and push the debate forward.

If I want to answer a question, I must first understand certain parts of the question. You may have different views on what is correct, but first, you need to understand what everyone considers to be correct so that the discussion can continue. The ultimate goal of communication is to help yourself and also help others reach a consensus.

The role of interoperability is similar; it can promote the development of network effects, allowing economic activities to achieve exponential growth. Polkadot cannot yet be considered a universal interoperability solution, but it is preparing for this exponential growth. Blockchain is the first step to achieving this goal; with blockchain, everyone can connect and interact on the blockchain, but we still cannot interact with people off-chain.

Ethereum says what we want to do is break the blockchain into different shards, which are called smart contracts. As long as there are users on the smart contracts, they can interact. But smart contracts do not create any network effects; they merely create a more interesting way to organize users.

In the Polkadot system, each chain is closely connected to each other, making it more powerful than a standalone network, allowing you to try more things. Ethereum 2.0 hopes to achieve this through scaling as well. So fundamentally, Ethereum and Polkadot have taken different paths to achieve their goals.

For Polkadot, our network can have many Ethereums. What I truly want to build is a "non-localized" network.

If you look at the logo of Polkadot, Bitcoin's symbol is a B, and Ethereum's is an arrow. From a symbolic perspective, they are both limited. I hope to create a network that is limitless, so the Polkadot logo will not point to a single centralized entity.

The significance of Polkadot lies in its lack of starting and ending points. The logo of Polkadot represents two meanings: one is continuity, like the ocean, boundless; the other is diversity, as you can see that the network in the icon is not just a single dot, but composed of many different dots.

In the article "Why We Need Web3," I wrote this: the internet is like a giant baby; it has aged but never grown up. What I really mean to express is that today the internet has a vast number of global users, but due to architectural flaws, the internet has never truly taken on the responsibilities it should fulfill.

Technology often reflects its past. People have replicated previous social structures online, and the internet has amplified social flaws. Ultimately, the problem lies in the initial design of the internet, which lacks the power to resist societal changes in another direction. The goal of Web3 is to fill this power. Polkadot aims to provide a truly open and free platform for various social innovations.

This is the ideal of Web3, the ideal of Polkadot, and my ideal.