Baselining the End Consumer …

or How I learned to love Mainnet though I did not care before, and still don’t

Normal People do not care about Blockchain … or technology

People only care about technology when it does nice things for them! And even then they do not care about which technology does something nice for them — it only needs to work all the time. So then how do you get people to care about the Ethereum Mainnet, also simply called Mainnet, and adopt it?

Answer: You don’t!

You just build something really useful for them and do not tell them about Mainnet, Blockchain, or even the Internet. Irrelevant details!

If they love it, they will use it, no questions asked! So we need to do exactly that — sadly we have done a really shitty job with it so far! Let’s change that! There are plenty of use cases where the Ethereum Mainnet as a simple hash state management and provenance layer is enough to build things useful to both end consumers and enterprises. Is it fancy and cool, and does it use tokens? Not really, but who cares!

We have to start somewhere and sometimes boring is the best place to start — as long as it makes people happy.

Boring is good … at least when it comes to Mainnet

John Wolpert hit this theme of boring but safe on the head with “Why I won’t use Mainnet for Business” — the serious, and senior, IT professional will not touch Mainnet with a 10-foot pole since “I see what happens to careers of people like me when the scandal hits when PII is exposed.”. This is partly since responsible, and senior, IT professionals should be looking out for the business paying them good money, and partly CYA since there are most likely somewhere kids to put through college soon.

In the same piece, John outlined great reasons why that sentiment is not correct because Mainnet can

• Automate B2B workflows without new silos
• Integrate new relationships without losing system integrity and without increasing complexity
• Enforce consistency between Books-of-Record without having to move data or business logic out of legacy environments
• Enforce continuity in multi-party workflows without compromising business-sensitive data

These ideas have shaped the Baseline protocol.

A method to seamlessly synchronize different Books-of-Records without having to do IT surgery on those systems. Synchronization is achieved by enforcing agreed-upon business logic on transactions changing that agreed-upon Book-of-Records state on Mainnet, all the while preserving the privacy of business-sensitive data — elegant, simple, and … wait for it … boring! Supply chain people love it, and integration between two ERP systems was recently demonstrated between SAP and Dynamics365.

Gamechanger for Mainnet?

Is this the game-changer for Mainnet adoption? Possibly, time will tell! There are tens of billions of B2B transactions worldwide every year.

Yet, when thinking back to Internet adoption I do not end up with names such as BMW, JP Morgan, and Unilever driving adoption, but rather with pirated music and porn.

Ok, so while Spankchain is a worthwhile Mainnet project, the combination of porn and state machines in the same sentence does not come naturally.

But wait, state machine = trust machine sounds not half-way bad. What rhymes with a trust machine? Truth? Enforcement of Truth? Hm, so if we had a truth problem, we might have something here. How about credit card fraud and identity theft? Big problems for businesses and individuals for sure … but pretty well covered by banks already. Plus banking and Mainnet in the same sentence, while not unheard of, is still a stretch for most, especially businesses.

Ok, so what else do we have?

Well, if you have to tell the truth then you cannot cheat. And cheating is a problem everywhere; especially in the digital world, and especially with computer games as Alex Castro points out in the Verge this year.

While cheating in video games is as old as video games themselves, the latest cheating has taken on the form of malware with an ever-escalating cat-and-mouse game between game producers and professional cheaters selling their cheats for-profit and defrauding the entire industry — a global survey by security firm Irdeto found that over 70% of players would stop playing a game if other players cheat and almost 50% said they would purchase less in-game content, leading to less revenue for game producers. This is big business, as we all know since video games are played by over a billion people in the world today generating over $170 billion in revenue.

Video Games and Mainnet … who would have thought?

So how can baselining, and thus Mainnet, be used by over a billion people today?

The key insight here is that to prevent any of the 1 billion+ players in the world from cheating, players need to commit to a particular state of their physical and/or virtual game console and let the game console manufacturer and game producer know about that commitment and sign off on it — there is then a shared and agreed upon state between player, game console manufacturer and game producer.

Baseline allows the agreed-upon state to be provably anchored and verified by anyone on Mainnet.

Updates to the shared state in the form of for example more gaming credits or new games or game updates need to be approved as appropriate by all three parties before they become the new “state of play” so to speak.

What does this then do to avoid cheating?

Well, cheats are like malware, they change the state of your system. However, not in an approved way! And if a player needs to commit to a state of its system to start or continue to play, for example at the beginning and during regular intervals of gameplay, and that state is not what everyone agreed upon, such as when a cheat is installed, then the Baseline system will immediately throw up red flags.

Why?

The attempted generation of the state proof fails because the new state is incompatible with the rules established by the console manufacturer and game producer, and agreed upon by the player.

With such red flags, console manufacturers and game producers can take immediate action such as suspending player accounts, disable consoles or even disable a player identity which would be a de facto ban on video gaming on all participating video gaming platforms and games.

So what is required to make this happen?

• Everyone needs an identity — player, console, console manufacturer, and game producers. The game console manufacturers such as Microsoft or Sony are typically best suited to be the “identity issuer” since players, console, and game producer already exist in their systems — also known as the “Root of Trust”. Since players usually use more than one game console, we need an agreed-upon identity standard in order to make identities portable. Luckily, there are new standards that are Baseline-compatible such as Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials from the W3C organization that sets the standards for the internet. The advantage of the Baseline system is that it enables the required transparency to avoid cheating while preserving privacy towards the larger community.
• The right incentive and disincentive models for the participants need to be in place. For the console manufacturers and game producers, the incentives are clear; less revenue loss for the console manufacturers and more royalties for the game producers, and also less back and forth about fraud claims in the royalty payments. For the players, the disincentives are pretty clear as well, potential loss of gaming credits, consoles being blocked from games, and even the player themselves being banned from video gaming for a period of time or even forever for repeat offenders as an extreme measure. Incentives should be introduced such as additional gaming credits for “honest play” and player reputation that can be used to get early access to games or discounts. This would counteract the narrative of console manufacturers and game producers being the only ones that have benefits from such a system.
• A highly scalable Baseline system since with over 1 billion players and thousands of games there will be trillions of state changes that would have to be recorded every year requiring novel approaches to reach such a scale such as advanced Layer 2 scaling solutions for Mainnet using zero-knowledge or optimistic roll-ups.

While these are appreciable hurdles, they can be overcome with currently available technologies.

The Road to Adoption

What then remains to get to broad adoption?

• Stir the appropriate interest amongst console manufacturers and game producers to save billions of dollars in revenue,
• along with the appropriate education on Baseline capabilities,
• and get them to join the Baseline community where such solutions are built collaboratively.

And for the 1 billion+ video game players?

They would not know that they are using Mainnet, or any type of Blockchain, or any fancy technology whatsoever — they would only be frustrated that they can no longer cheat but delight in a race to earn more and more reputation through honest play that gets them video game goodies they love.

And that is all that matters!