I'm Mohammed Simba's Effie I've been
working on ephraim since two years ago
and first on ephraim one and now if I am
to and I'm part of terrorists the name
is team so most of you know studies us
for free things the messenger the web
free browser and also the browser and
the wallet on mobile but we're also
involving in core infrastructure as we
eat new challenges within the African
ecosystem so the main one I will be
talking today is a frame m2 so at first
for this talk I had a big plan secret
plan to come like Steve Jobs with the
new iPhone and show you frm to on
Raspberry Pi there's another one behind
but this was revealed one month ago
drains the inter up in Canada and all
the Twitter sphere was all over the
place with this plus what happened at
the interrupt so instead of talking
about that I want to take a step back
and explain why this is important for
Ephraim for blockchain and also for
society so the real program today is
while running on the PI is significant
some experiments and outcomes feature
and unknowns so the main focus will be
on sustainability and energy consumption
which one which was one of the main
critic of blockchain and especially
proof-of-work so without further ado if
you were this morning at the
introduction talk by photonic we talked
about Byzantine fault tolerance and this
paper from Lamport in 1982 which
presented the Byzantine general problem
which was about how to reach consensus
between life if you all are generals of
an
you have to attack a city and maybe you
have to communicate so that not half of
you attack the city while half of the
other retreat and you come to a strong
decision despite spice maybe messenger
dying or flee and one of the main
advancement of Bitcoin was using proof
of costly resources work to help solve
this this general problem so here you
have I suppose one of the first mail
that introduced Satoshi's work with an
example of attacking I don't know maybe
your company through and trying to crack
the crypto hashes and consulting many
attackers for that the main point is
that you need a lot of compute so a lot
of energy to do that and to introduce
more context I want to talk about
externalities and also sustainability so
externality is an economic term that
explain that tells you it's a cost or
benefit that affects a party who did not
choose to incur that cost or benefit so
to give you a concrete example suppose
there is a factory somewhere that pumps
in clean water and exhausts dirty water
downstream people downstream didn't
choose to have dirty water and they are
not paid to clean it so this is a
negative externality on the other hand a
positive externality would be the same
Factory is building a road where there
were none before and all the villages
and the city along those road benefits
form much better transportation so this
is a positivist analogy and
sustainability I guess
now everyone is familiar with the term
so the idea is that it's meeting the
needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future
generations to meet the needs
how does that play in a frame so the
public opinion is that a lot of the
proof of work is a waste of energy and
that's an issue there is this EU
blockchain Observatory report that was
sent to the European Commission that
said that proof-of-work consumes as much
energy per day as the country of
Singapore it's not shown in the slide
but they said that there are lots of
work in progress to improve that and
that thankfully the blockchain community
is aware of the energy consumption and
wants to tackle that another paper was
in magazine nature and that said that
blockchain may might contribute to
global warming by 2 degrees Celsius the
paper is the code behind the paper is
actually public which is a very good
thing and if you want you can check out
how they arrive to those estimates you
can also do your own you can criticize
it put a PR or an issue but I'm not here
to talk about if it's to degree or 1.5
or maybe one or maybe three I want it to
be zero or maybe even negative like if
we have more efficient carbon market
with the blockchain another negative
externality is the space used so this is
an image of Iceland US Air Force Base
that was completely transformed into a
Bitcoin farm and I guess space today is
at a premium with many country like
Japan who are struggling to get space
either for food or for people
so just to not be always negative there
are also positive externalities in the
blockchain space so we have all these
permissionless trustless decentralized
transparent and so ship resistant that
everyone knows but also who heard about
formal verification before hearing about
blockchain here
Oh first one well blockchain is also
driving all the innovation in formal
verification for software formal
verification has been used by Intel for
example for the past 20 years for
hardware but this is very new and thanks
to blockchain that formal verification
is used for software and there are
others like game theory cryptography
that are being driven by blockchain so
now let's go back to a frame - if I am -
we change is the proof of work the
wasteful algorithm like the public may
want to call it - ever itself so now we
can run it on that something that can
fit into my hand
we go from a big data center to the
small frame I've been running tests in
the past
Monza's on the raspberry pi 4 so this
one is raspberry pi 3 and raspberry pi 4
was out in june i think a bit more
powerful - gigabyte of ram i use the
default distribution so that people can
reproduce it and Nimbus Zoe for him to
client called name becomes in the
configuration I used was called minimal
this is what we use for interrupts we
also have a main net one I used minimal
because unfortunately we're not yet at
the stage we're missing a bit of extra
step to get magnet for performance but I
did try to make it harder than minimum
so instead of interrupts which was using
sixteen validators I use 192 which means
992 times 42 if state on this 64 shards
eight slots per epoch so one thing is
that you might think that minimal is
really a dumbed down version but an
epoch so if you're not aware of a
freedom to terminology a slot is six
second it's how fast we create new block
on the blockchain and an epoch is a
group of blocks a group of slots that
make sense together and we will have
special processing after each epoch so
that brings each equal to 48 second
instead of six minutes and so when I say
processing is costly this is the lists
of what we do
justification finalization so this means
making sure that the blockchain cannot
go back in time cross-links rewards and
penalties slashing validators inducing
no new validators removing roles that
are bad and updating balances also what
I wanted to do was giving you very
precise power consumption figures and it
happened that I had the initiative
electrical issue at home a week ago so
about this fancy equipment but I
couldn't use it because I needed a cable
with a different electricity in and if
electricity out so I'm sorry now for the
actual demo this is output life from the
Raspberry Pi that is behind you and it
shows you it has been running for 40
minutes now and show you that first
didn't crash and it's also running and
you have the output of three nodes so
it's a bit fast and this was a video
backup that I used just in case the live
demo didn't work now some key figures
about running affion and Nimbus on the
rest
pi sorry pi maximum power consumption
per draw is seven point six watts to
give you an idea for a typical laptop
nowadays it's about 30 watt so it's four
to five times less power consumed and
also a Raspberry Pi is about ten times
slower than an entry-level CPU for a
desktop so this means that and it runs
into runs perfectly on this kind of CPU
so if we can get to three times more
performance we would be okay for
maintenance and also if people were
worrying because they are ten thousand
if to stake and we didn't know what kind
of hardware they needed well it's easy
so in summary outcomes of those
experiments it runs even and optimize on
representative workloads you don't need
the power plant in your backyard just to
ensure that you always have electricity
and you don't black out the wall
district and we also have clear targets
because has Danny said this morning the
main blocker and most of the time is
spent on cryptography and the
cryptography that we use on a forum - is
very young it was developed by Dan boney
at Stanford but there is no either
hardware or software optimization yet
and everyone also a frame to team
currently have an optimized and very
young library but as the ecosystem
mature it will get much better also
there is an effort to standardize across
many blockchain like a friend on C cash
cycle Al Gore indefinite each network I
guess one or two over I forget so varies
an incentive across all blockchain to
collaborate and get something really
strong so bad so as I said we can run
minimal we cannot run main net and well
processing takes over six second maybe
ten or something we need to get twice
faster so ugly I'm sorry but if you want
it to hit your home in the winter you
will not be able to do it with proof of
state so you will have to stay with
Bitcoin or something else now some ideas
I have for the future to optimize this
the Raspberry Pi default distribution is
run in 32-bit mode but cryptography in
64-bit is much faster
we had no multi-threading yet even
though this has four cores we only use
one and as I said before we have an
optimized crypto library like Bitcoin
has for the curve called SEC P 256 k1
also at Nimbus even though we are one of
the team targeting low-power devices
there is an over team lodestar who's
trying to run as a friend to on the
browser on Chrome or Firefox so we also
have huge challenges ahead so it's kind
of a team effort also what's coming next
Raspberry Pi 5 so maybe it's twice
faster and we can sit and do nothing and
for use cases for people I didn't expect
actually to for people to run that on
the Raspberry Pi maybe we will rent an
instance like the rent WordPress today
and people will be able to just launch
some kind of always with a freedom
installed and everything will be done
for them and the consumption the CPU
that would be rented would be just
powerful enough to run Efram
so regarding the unknowns for a freedom
to performance in the future as I said
verifying validators attestation is
quite costly this is cryptography it's
about 42
50% of the time spent in that if you
read prismatic lab news from a week ago
apparently if I spend 99% of a time on
BLS signature and now it's only 20% so
we can get lots of improvement
another issue is when we scaled 100,000
validators we have an aggregation
protocols in research we have no need to
connect to every peer so a lot of
optimizations where as well so for me is
a big unknowns of phase one and phase
two is the execution layer which is
equivalent to EVM and what solidity
compiles to I don't know how heavy it
will be so key takeaways after this talk
there are a couple of teams that have a
vested interest to make a frame to as
efficient as possible also it will be a
significant upgrade in terms of carbon
footprint so no one will be able to say
anymore blockchain is wasting energy
even though we we know that it's used
for securing some so ship resistance
permissionless and stuff
the consensus layer is quite solid we
need only just focus effort and the
unknowns that I talked about natural
radiation phase one and phase two
thank you very much
[Applause]
you