Three Things #34: September 11, 2022

The most common questions I get about Spacemesh

There are three questions that I consistently get about Spacemesh. I was at a conference recently where I got a lot of practice answering these questions, so I thought it would be a good idea to record my answers here for posterity!

My first Spacemesh mining rig. Image source: Stable Diffusion. Do, uh, I get credit for this or does the AI get the credit? 🤔

Thing #1: What is Spacemesh? How is it different?

There are very many possible ways to answer this question, but I think the most straightforward answer is that Spacemesh is a smart contract platform not unlike Ethereum with a bunch of important new features, and one in particular. In addition to all of the features that other smart contract platforms have, like accounts, expressive transactions, and a Turing-complete VM, Spacemesh is designed specifically to enable sustainable mining from home, which gives it a shot at becoming the most decentralized cryptocurrency and blockchain in the world. In order to achieve this, we had to design and build a novel consensus mechanism from scratch: proof of spacetime.

Proof of spacetime works a lot like proof of work, but replaces energy-intensive computational work with storage that uses spare hard drive space. Basically, each miner generates and stores a very large file filled with random “cryptographic junk” and submits a proof to the network every so often that they still have the file. A related question I often get is, why not store useful information the way Filecoin and Arweave do? The short answer is that proof of spacetime is designed to emulate proof of work mining, which does intentionally wasteful computation to achieve sybil resistance. Spacemesh cannot store useful data for the same reason that Bitcoin miners cannot do useful computational work.

Proof of spacetime is sort of a hybrid of proof of work and proof of stake with the best qualities of each: it’s permissionless like proof of work while also being environmentally friendly like proof of stake. It addresses most of the shortfalls of proof of stake: you don’t need coins or anyone’s permission to start mining, and the current set of miners is not responsible for validating the incoming set of miners. On top of this, home miners receive regular rewards and do not need to join a pool or work through an intermediary to participate: they’re full network peers, just like all other miners. Finally, the unit economics are designed such that home miners won’t be priced out by professional mining operations. The economic model is very simple and easy to understand (unlike some projects).

That’s really it, in a nutshell. Of course the devil’s in the details: Spacemesh is a very complex protocol, and a great deal of design and engineering has gone into making proof of spacetime viable and secure. There’s a great deal more to say about the other features we’ve added like account abstraction, cooperative mining, etc., but let’s keep it short for now and use future issues to explore these features in more depth.

For more: Read this paper to learn more about proof of spacetime.

Thing #2: What’s your go to market? What are your target use cases?

I almost immediately get this question after the first one and I’m not sure why. To me, as an engineer, this is a strange question. Maybe it’s just that the people I spend time with tend to be aggressive, business or financially oriented types. It’s not that I think the question is uninteresting, but it’s pretty far down on my list of questions to ask. I’d much rather learn about a project’s technology, its approach to community and open source strategy, its governance, or any of the other topics I outlined in this series (you’ll note that “go to market” was not one of them). More than anything I think this question speaks to the degree of financialization and commercialization of blockchain technology, and to the ludicrous amount of venture capital that has poured into the space the past few years. This is an investor question, not a builder or community question. And no one used to ask me this question years ago (did Bitcoin or Ethereum have a “go to market strategy”?).

When people ask me this question, I tell them I’m going to give them two answers: the “right” answer and the honest answer.

The “right” answer (in the sense that it’s the answer people, especially investors, like to hear) is that we have a marketing team that’s spent years developing an active community that really believes in Spacemesh. They’ve sponsored NGOs in Latin America, worked with artists, run contests, and given talks. These strategies are working well for us and we’ll keep doing them. Spacemesh is especially fond of working with artists in the developing world. One way to describe Spacemesh is as a platform to allow artists, builders, and creators everywhere to bootstrap their work, join a supportive, global community of like minded people, and build tools and platforms for transacting on their own terms (think fair NFT royalties).

Another promising approach we’re considering is to target gamers: gaming rigs have the resources that you need to profitably mine Spacemesh (large hard drives, graphics cards, reliable internet connections), and young gamers are less likely to have bank accounts, credit cards, and access to crypto exchanges, meaning they’re keener to earn their first coins permissionlessly.

The honest answer, however, is that I don’t care. Not because I don’t care that people learn about and try using Spacemesh, and not because I don’t care about adoption, coin price, or market success. I very much want people to learn about Spacemesh and to try using it. There are two reasons I don’t care.

The first is that I think the product should speak for itself. My very favorite products and services are not things I started using or keep using because of fancy marketing. They’re things I discovered mostly through word of mouth and keep using because they work: they deliver value for money. In fact, marketing is often a turn off to me: every time I see a fancy, expensive, or overdesigned ad, I feel like it means the product is inferior because, well, good products speak for themselves and don’t need fancy marketing. Rather than invest in making Spacemesh look good or sound good, I’d rather invest in making it actually good: good infrastructure, good product, good documentation, good user experience. If we manage to get these things right, I’m confident that the rest will take care of itself. (I recognize that this is a naive, engineering-focused response and that there are certain types of products and markets where marketing is appropriate. I also recognize that, in reality, Spacemesh does need marketing to succeed. I just hate when people ask me this!)

The second is that, like Ethereum, Spacemesh is a general-purpose computational platform. While it’s true that Ethereum has become largely a “DeFi and NFT chain,” that outcome was not preordained, and under the hood Ethereum has a Turing-complete VM that can be used to build literally anything. The same is true of Spacemesh. My job as a protocol designer and core developer is to build a blank canvas: a credibly neutral, general-purpose platform upon which people far more creative and talented than me can paint their wildest ideas and aspirations. I have no opinion about how it’s used, as long as those use cases are constructive and prosocial. In fact, if I did have an opinion about who should be using Spacemesh or how they should be using it, that would bias me and make me unable to do my job well.

For more: Consider what role marketing has to play in open source projects or base layer blockchain infrastructure. Does a project’s marketing make you more excited to buy the coin or use the platform? Why or why not?

Thing #3: Why work on this? Why should anyone care?

If I get the second question more than I’d like, I don’t get this one as often as I’d like. I think a lot of people take for granted why someone would work on building a new blockchain (to make money). But, if that’s your goal, believe me, it would be a lot easier to use an off-the-shelf solution like the Cosmos SDK or fork an existing chain rather than spending years developing a novel consensus mechanism like we’re doing at Spacemesh. It doesn’t happen that often, but when someone does ask me why I’m doing this, it makes me happy.

Actually, there are a lot of reasons. I stopped working on Ethereum because I was unhappy with its governance, economics, and technical roadmap. Spacemesh, to me, is an opportunity to get these things right from the beginning. It doesn’t have the massive crowdsale and premine that Ethereum had, and its economics is much simpler, slower, more neutral and more predictable. Being able to profitably mine Spacemesh from home will make the coin accessible to billions more people than bitcoin, ether, or any of the myriad PoS coins, and hopefully will endear those miners to the network and make them feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. There’s no Spacemesh Foundation yet, but when and if there is one, it will be run quite differently than the Ethereum Foundation.

More than any of these, however, the single biggest reason is proof of spacetime. To be clear, there is technical risk associated with the design. It’s unproven, and certainly hasn’t been securing tens or hundreds of billions of dollars for years the way proof of work and proof of stake have. But those two consensus mechanisms are currently dominant, and there are major downsides to both of them. (The one big downside to proof of work is its energy intensity. The downsides to proof of stake are many and far more nuanced.) In short, the world needs an alternative. One way to look at Spacemesh is as a gigantic experiment to test proof of spacetime, and a wager that it will work: that it will anchor a network that’s stable, secure, and usable, and that also allows sustainable home mining.

As mentioned above, we’ve implemented lots of other nice features and are running many other smaller experiments in Spacemesh: account abstraction, cooperative mining, proof of elapsed time, etc. But the biggest and most important of these is proof of spacetime. If Spacemesh is able to deliver the same degree of security as Bitcoin through a long tail of hundreds of thousands or millions of home miners using hardware they already own—rather than acquiring expensive, specialized mining hardware, and burning lots of energy in the process—then Spacemesh will have been a resounding success.

For more: Read more about my motivations for working on Spacemesh (and blockchain more generally).