Date : 15 April 2021
Host : HunterX & GemFlair
Guest : Saito Team ( David Lancashire — CO-Founder )
Hello! Spykefastians & Blockchain Enthusiastic!
We recently hosted an AMA with Saito, on 15 April at 2PM UTC. So here we are up with AMA transcript, for those who missed the live session, this post will be saver & feeder of knowledge for them.
HunterX — Q1. Kindly give brief introduction about yourself, Crypto experience and your role at #Saito?
David Lancashire — I’m David Lancashire — co-founder at Saito and one of the key inventors of the mechanism design. My background both tech and economics, and I’ve spent most of my adult life living and working in Asia.
Heard about Bitcoin very early (2009/2010) but didn’t get involved until 2013 or so, when I bought some and then promptly lost it. So I guess the first take-home is that I can guarantee you there are no longer 21mm Bitcoin available….
HunterX — Woahh.. I guess that’s the earliest I heard from any team member in any AMA. 🙌🙌
David Lancashire — the first meet-up I went to the guy unveiled… an ASIC. it was the first actual ASIC (maybe not the exact machine, but def. first wave of them)
HunterX — Great background, and aaaaaah.. Sorry for the Bitcoins you lost.
HunterX — Q2. Let’s talk in detail about #Saito project.
Interesting name. What are the main features of the project?
David Lancashire — The name comes from Saito in Inception, actually. Great film. Maybe I’ll just quickly state the problem we solve first…
Here it is — as blockchains grow they get too expensive for volunteers to run. Some chains like Bitcoin respond by staying small. Most others ask companies to find business models that will pay for infrastructure.
Developers don’t really understand economics — so they don’t really see why this won’t work. But it won’t. The incentives are actually wrong. What happens is that those companies basically start strangling the inner blockchain — because they won’t collect money for it for free.
The Infura issues with Ethereum are a really good example of how things can go wrong. And ETH isn’t really even very big yet.
Anyway — Saito solves this problem by turning “routing work” into something we can use to secure a blockchain instead of “mining” or “staking”. Routing work pays nodes in the P2P network. We can talk about how it works if people want. It is REALLY different than POW and POS. People have to burn money
make sense?
HunterX — Yes.. It does.
David Lancashire — Basically, think of a network that pays the P2P nodes. Instead of everyone running miners, people start running ISPs. There’s no shortage of access nodes.
People get paid if you use them instead of someone else. So any infrastructure you need — someone will pay for it if it will convince you to use them (sending them txs / money) instead of someone else.
no hidden fees, no extra fees, no monopolies like Infura.
HunterX — Super Stuff..
David Lancashire — Yeah. It’s one reason we are working with the Web3 Foundation. The guys at DOT are terrified their network will end up like Ethereum and be totally reliant on one company and it totally defeats the point of having a blockchain, that’s for sure.
HunterX — Q3. What are the major utilities of holding the #SAITO token? How does team plan to enhance it value so as to attract users onboard?
David Lancashire — The way the network works, Saito is 2x as expensive to attack as Bitcoin. And it doesn’t have hidden fees for access providers like Infura. So that’s basically 4x cheaper on a per-byte basis
So the network is built for big-data uses that would be waaaaay to expensive to run elsewhere. That’s the foundation for the value of the token.
There’s also a staking component, so people can actually stake their tokens and get more Saito over time (a portion of the fees paid).
HunterX — $Saito does have a lot to offer.. ✌️
David Lancashire — Yeah. We’ve already got a bunch of apps that people are using. A bunch of users aren’t even blockchainers.
Encourage everyone new to Saito to check out the Saito Arcade for instance. A lot of the community and usage we’re seeing now is happening through gaming. Poker, boardgames, P2P games without “blockchain casinos” etc. Just you and your opponent using crypto to deal shuffle roll, etc.
HunterX — Strong foundation is the key to a successful infrastructure. 💪
HunterX — Q4. What is the present progress of Saito Platform? I find there are already 30+ Blockchain DApps live on platform?
There are a lot. Some are big like the Saito Arcade or the games that people have built. Others are tiny — like an application that adds a menu or something to the default Saito wallet.
A lot of people think our “website” is a website. It’s actually an application itself. You can see that you get a wallet created when you visit.
HunterX — Are there any links for the games
David Lancashire — https://saito.io/arcade/
Come there later tonight and I’ll take your money in poker ha haha
integration with other cryptos is actually part of what we’re doing with Web3
HunterX — Anyone there who can win from David tonight.. 🤔😉
David Lancashire — so one of the “valuable” things about Saito is that we want to build modules for other cryptos that suddenly give them all these games
I’m actually not that good at poker. Although I’m getting better
But yeah — come to the Arcade. Check it out. Everything on there is real
David Lancashire — what else can I tell you?
HunterX — Keep telling.. Haha
David Lancashire — we love gaming. we love DOT (think NFTs + games). we love putting data in TXS. and we love paying for the actual network
HunterX — Q5. Does Saito have any competitor? How is Saito Different from others?
David Lancashire — there are a bunch of cryptos that are supposed to “pay for the network” — they’re basically all smart contracts. you BUY tokens, DEPOSIT tokens, and then the ISPs withdraw them.
Saito is an actual blockchain. So the point isn’t buying VPN access. The point is… we need infrastructure for our blockchain, because otherwise the blockchain itself will suffer.
So… we’re quite different from other stuff. I think the BIG question is whether the really massive blockchains are going to be public at all
HunterX — Saito is the real deal.. 🎉
David Lancashire — it’s a public blockchain that pays for infrastructure, yeah
that’s the hard part
it’s trustless because it doesn’t have an owner.
i think a lot of OG Bitcoiners get that, and that a lot of POS people don’t. It’s a huge divide intellectually
ha ha — you’re tempting me to slam some POS projects. But I’ll resist until someone asks.
We have an IDO on April 22, and the token will list soon after. I’d encourage everyone to join our Telegram Group:
HunterX — Q6. What major events can we expect in the 2021 Saito Development Roadmap?
David Lancashire — so public sale, exchange listings, thats all finance stuff
on the dev side
we’re rolling out this web3 integration with other cryptos. the idea is that if you want to play poker with DOT or a DOT-powered parachain, etc. Or really any games
the DOT folk like it not onlybecause suddenly there are apps for parachains (that run in the browser) but because the guy running the access node that supports those apps is making money from Saito
HunterX — Would it be limited to Poker only..
David Lancashire — no, we have a ton of games. The most popular are
Poker, Twilight Struggle, Red Imperium… check out that left sidebar
we even have a game of solitaire, although I think that was a joke
Arcade is pretty much the community focus so we put the most work into it
we’re actually hiring for someone to be working on it fulltime — NodeJS if anyone knows a good dev who wantsto work on this stuff
HunterX — Alright.. I was just surfing the arcade part of Saito.. 😊😊
David Lancashire — here’s a tidbit
you know who invented Mental Poker? that’s the technique we use to shuffle cards, etc. P2P — totally different than “casinos” that take deposits, etc.
HunterX — No i dont.. 🙁🙁
David Lancashire — RSA, those guys they invented public key cryptography and then … used it to figure out this problem kind of a neat bit of triva. if you read their paper they say, “of course, this is far too much information … so it isn’t practical because we can’t really do this over the phone.”
no problem for Saito though
HunterX —😁😁
David Lancashire — yeah, it’s fun.
most people think “blockchain apps” are smart contracts. Saito apps are all about doing advanced crypto in your browser and sending other people sigs
Round 2 — Questions Asked on Twitter & Telegram For Saito
Amina Peter —Q1. Smart contract are being run on L1 on POS/ POW, but Saito prefer L2, why? What are the advantages to Saito and users? Also, I read that you got a call deal from a founder of a major Chinese exchange who wants to get Bitcoin supporting Saito’s Data prunning mechanism, so how was the deal and progress going so far?
> @aminapeter8 — Smart contract are being run on L1 on POS/ POW, but Saito prefer L2, why? What are the advantages to Saito and users? Also, I read that you got a call deal from a founder of a major Chinese exchange who wants to get Bitcoin supporting Saito’s Data prunning mechanism, so how was the deal and progress going so far?
Smart contracts introduce a ton of economic problems. How do you price on-chain storage? They require ALL nodes to execute those programs. And they make the blockchain superslow — — because you end up running what is basically database software.
We can’t afford that for actual scale
Layer1 needs to do two things: (1) generate cost-of-attack on the network, (2) pay for everything the network needs to remain self-sufficient without an owner.
If you run smart contracts L1 you NEED to compromise on those two properties. This is why all of the POS developers talk about “technical tradeoffs” etc. Whenever they need to fix one thing, they end up breaking another. That doesn’t happen if you move the smart contracts to L2.
Bob — Q2.How does Saito prevent blockchain bloating ? How does it provide stability to the infrastructure with consideration to scalability?
this is a 6 minute video that explains how Saito handles data-pruning
Maybe to connect to Amina’s question. Note that the solution is actually on the economic level.
POS networks and smart contracts are forced into very technical “solutions” like sharding because their problem is “how do we manage all this data when the miners / stakers get all the money?”
Saito says the problem is actually economic — you can make money by putting data on the chain TODAY and you get paid TODAY and someone else has to pay those costs tomorrow. the fix is actually on the incentive level if you watch that video you’ll see it
Bob — Q3.Will there be monopoly in releasing advertisement module in SAITO apps . Like Saito advertisement module for different apps.
When you use the Saito Arcade (https://saito.io/arcade) you are running a lite-client and the games are applications that are running in YOUR browser, not in a smart contract or on some website
Want to view adverts? You can install a module that shows you adverts. Want to install five of them? Go for it. How exactly this works is between you and the advertiser.
we are planning to roll one out, but Saito is open, anyone can install anything, So there is no monopoly here. It’s impossible because Saito is open. But it’s a great question, because it lets me say something I think is really exciting and different. which is… notice that advertisers are paying users tokens…..
but now notice that the TX FEES that users make go to… iSPS
we need to get massive scale, because at massive scale Saito’s consensus mechanism funds infrastructure with advertising.
and ISPs SHOULD be competing for users
For Now —Q4. Polkadot’s main objective is to reshape the current structure of the Internet, making it completely decentralized, what they call Web3. What would be the benefit for Saito, in becoming a Polkadot parachain?
OK… so Saito is not a parachain. Parachains run on POS. The market problems that POS have…we can’t fix running on POS
What Saito does is… force nodes to COMPETE for tx inflow. So if you’re running a node you can say to people, “hey, connect to me because I RUN A DOT FULL NODE”
“Those arcade games you like? I can power them with all of these NFTs because I can give you instant access to that data.” that’s value to the user, that can convince a user to use THAT end-point over another
Saito is paying for infrastructure, It isn’t even our infrastructure
the hard part is how the mechanism is designed. this stuff sort of flows naturally from having a consensus mechanism where fee-collection is what secures the blockchain
Sourav —Q5. If Saito doesn’t have hidden fees , then a portion of the fees paid would be very less to be considered as an incentive for staking ?
POS and POW have this problem. If you pay for the network, that takes money away from miners and stakers. This is one of the BIG problems. Because it means extra fees. And lower security.
Saito doesn’t have this problem because paying for routing actually PROVIDES security.
Let me share a PDF — http://org.saito.tech/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Saito-2021-Routing-Work.pdf
that’s a really simple introduction to Saito’s consensus mechanism
the way Saito works… if you are using honest txs (paid for by users) you make money even though you only collect a small percent. if you are an attacker you lose money
part of the security mechanism is that we force people to give money to other people. that is what you get paid for (“routing work” — if you don’t route you don’t earn anything)
this is in the “advanced saito” section of the whitepaper, but the staking mechanism actually INCREASES security because it decreases the amount of cash an attacker can get back … and they need to use their own money to attack the network.
i think that was probably a horrible explanation, but maybe it will make sense if you see the routing work PDF and then read the whitepaper.
CLOSING REMARKS:
sourav — Thanks @trevelyan22
Amazing AMA..
David Lancashire — thank you SB and thank you Hunter and everyone else.
HunterX — Thanks @trevelyan22.. It was really an eye opener to many of us.. 👁️👁️
Thank you for your enthusiastic responses and time and efforts put in for the AMA. Have a great evening. ❤️
Important Links
1) Saito Website : https://saito.io/
2) Telegram : https://t.me/SaitoIO
3) Twitter : https://twitter.com/SaitoOfficial
4) Spykefast TG : https://t.me/spykefastofficial
Contact Spykefast Group (TG Members — @realsch & @Gem_Flair) for promotions and AMA!!
