468,270,545 ERC Saito have been moved from the Seed and Private Round Vault for distribution to Investors. We are glad to get these tokens to our supporters and thank them for their continued contribution to Saito.

Not all funds will be vested immediately. We would kindly remind anyone who has been sent and has yet to respond to a conversion request or confirmation emails that our Terms and Conditions require active response and that distribution may be delayed. We plan to process late responses on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to prevent late submissions from creating an unnecessary processing burden on our admin.

No SAITO have been distributed for other reasons since our previous update.

Vesting disbursements resulted in an 28% increase in resulting supply.
This represents the last substantive distribution of ERC20 tokens under the vesting program.

We hope to provide a ‘year in review’ update on finances and tokenomics in the coming weeks via our blog.

Treasury Safes:

Saito Private Sale Token Vault

Saito Foundation Token Vault

Saito Contributor Token Vault

Saito Holding Token Vault

387,240,275 ERC Saito have been moved from the Seed and Private Round Vault for distribution to Investors. We are glad to get these tokens to our supporters and thank them for their continued contribution to Saito.

Not all funds will be vested immediately. We would kindly remind anyone who has been sent and has yet to respond to a conversion request or confirmation emails that our Terms and Conditions require active response and that distribution may be delayed. We plan to process late responses on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to prevent late submissions from creating an unnecessary processing burden on our admin.

No SAITO have been distributed for other reasons since our previous update.

Circulating Supply

Vesting disbursements resulted in an 28% increase in resulting supply.

These tokens will be held in the Saito Holding Token Vault and are included in the Circulating Supply calculations.

An update will be provided on token distribution at the next substantive change.

Treasury Safes:

Saito Private Sale Token Vault

Saito Foundation Token Vault

Saito Contributor Token Vault

Saito Holding Token Vault

This document is a reprinting of information originally published on the Saito Blog.

171,955,463.49 ERC Saito have been distributed to Seed and Private Round Investors. We are glad to get these tokens to our supporters and thank them for their continued contribution to Saito.

No SAITO have been distributed for other reasons since our previous update.
Some liquidity SAITO have been placed in UNISWAP liquidity.

Circulating Supply

Vesting disbursements resulted in an 28% increase in resulting supply.

Some funds remain outstanding from this vesting period. We would kindly remind anyone who has been sent and has yet to respond to a conversion request or confirmation emails that our Terms and Conditions require active response and that distribution may be delayed. We plan to process late responses on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to prevent late submissions from creating an unnecessary processing burden on our admin.

These tokens will be held in the Saito Holding Token Vault and are included in the Circulating Supply calculations.

An update will be provided on token distribution at the next substantive change.

Treasury Safes:

Saito Private Sale Token Vault

Saito Foundation Token Vault

Saito Contributor Token Vault

Saito Holding Token Vault

The Saito Network just recently held its third monthly Town Hall, hosted by its founders Richard Parris and David Lancashire, here you can find a summary of the updates they gave to the community and highlights of the questions asked that evening:

General Update

• The Ultimate Saitozen campaign has been launched to explore different approaches to take when generating community and engagement beyond giveaways.
• The Ambassador program continues to roll out, a few quality people (particularly from the community) have been brought onboard. We want to extend an invitation to people who want to represent Saito independently and talk more broadly to the community and would like assistance to do it.
• DOT arcade has been out for a month and work is being done on generic crypto support so that more tokens can be easily incorporated with Saito as the underpinning layer.
• There was collaboration with StackOS (The Ultimate Saitozen is running on their infrastructure)
• Saito’s ramping up hiring, new positions are being open at https://org.saito.tech/jobs/ If you or anyone you know is interested in taking part of the future of blockchain please let us know

Tech Update

• Work is currently being done to move from Saito Classic (a basic implementation of a single node, with routing work and a golden ticket every block) towards adding the pieces the production network needs, the biggest three being:
• Automatic Transaction Rebroadcasting
• Networking: Saito nodes now have fully binary channels, as opposed to JSON
• Staking Mechanism is being put in place
• Rust Client progress is still on timeline and is expected to be done in two months and a half.
• Once the Rust Client is completed a new updated Roadmap will be released detailing what comes next, including things like Token Persistence.

Questions Section

Sergeant Saito: What are the possibilities of a Saito mobile app?

David: It’s a question of whether we are prioritizing when Rust is on the network and what our priorities strategically be. We can do a lot of this stuff, but if we are doing that, we are not doing something else.

Richard: One of the things to look forward for the Saitoverse if for third party developers getting involved and putting out their own apps. We’ve built mobile wallets before, and we think this is something that will either come organically through partnership or will be something we’ll prioritize when it becomes the best thing for growing an userbase and community.

Globalnode: Regarding Marketing/Promotion of SAITO, and the pending release of the full protocol. What’s the strategy of hiring internal marketing team member versus a PR firm or team to handle independently, potential larger reach and increased efficiency?

Richard: We are building a base capacity now, we need to make sure we have the ability to execute things ourselves or to instruct and work with a firm, where we need to, in a way that honors what the project is about and that’s effective. An example would be what we are doing with the Ultimate Saitozen, we need to find out the kind of fun outreach that gets any traction. What works for us and what doesn’t so that we can then start measuring metrics, etc. We don’t want to blindly spend tokens, because spending tokens means more whales, we can get more investors, but they are going to be dumping at some point.

Without throwing cash around in a silly way, how can we find out what’s worth spending money on that has a net positive effect in terms of getting the word out. In that sense, as a project rather than a company, I don’t think a large PR engine sits that comfortable inside the project so we might be more likely to use different thing and we might also be more likely to look to much more community-based ways of doing things organically.

David: What I see is that most of the PR firms in the space treat your token like a shitcoin and don’t focus on the fundamental value question. I would be open to hiring one, the challenge is that it’s hard to get people that understand Saito. I don’t think our growth strategy we can throw at a PR firm, what I’m hoping is that by generically adding support for cryptos much more easily, when that is rolled it will be a lot easier for people to understand the value of Saito because it will connect with third party cryptos in a tangible way. I’m hoping that the narrative that we have will get better moving forward and that will allow PR firms to understand us more easily. I don’t think we should do it for another two to three months because I think that the stuff we are talking about will happen by then.

Globalnode: Regarding UI/XD, what strategy is being implemented for the roll out of 2022 level web3 experience, with all the graphic bling, and usability requirements needed to put the SAITO NETWORK in the best possible light/position in the market?

David: The strategy is to make the games as best looking as we can, we bring in designers to improve on it within the structures of what they can do, and we see if integration with third party cryptos can get us promotion and integration into other crypto communities and spread that way. I personally think getting web3 cryptos integrated is more important than flashy design, but I’m perfectly comfortable with us hiring for graphic bling as well.

Richard: We should remember that the Arcade is principally a showcase to show what the network can do. The game stuff developed out of us asking ourselves “How do we get enough traffic?”, people doing real things in the network to test it and stress it. We got to be very careful about over polishing things, since that makes people think that’s the product. On the other hand, if it’s not polished enough, people don’t spend time with it, and we don’t get the usage and testing we need. Particularly with the Rust backbone and nodes running on Rust, with the extra capacity we get out of it, stressing them is going to be really hard.

David: We can get someone to redesign the site so that it looks better, but if they start touching the Arcade and the applications, then suddenly, we got more tech work that hits us. We are punching on this right now until Rust and web3 crypto integration are done because at that point we think we’ll have a better onboarding flow for people.

Greenweeny: Curious about what brought the team to Beijing? Any particular reason for choosing that city as your HQ?

Richard: David and I came to China before crypto. We met through the Bitcoin community in Beijing, so in a way we owe a lot to the community here, especially in the early days when it was pretty insane and cool. Right now, David is Thailand, some of the team is still in Beijing, but we are not operating in China. We are not a Chinese company; we are an international project.

Finesto: With so much exposure to China, how will Chinese regulation negatively affect Saito?

Richard: China’s regulations have the same impact on us as it does on other projects in that impacts Chinese users and what they can do. We are not DeFi or shitcoining like crazy, so we are not doing anything that the regulation is aimed at curtailing. For us, the impact has been mostly what the regulations have done to markets and people’s general attitudes in the industry rather than impacting us specifically as a project. Yes, we should be aware, as anyone that is here, and be very attentive to what the authorities are doing and the regulations, etc. but we are quite confident that’s not an issue.

Biko: This will be a very broad and open question, but what’s your main concerns about Saito? In the sense of development, tech, marketing, everything considering Saito. I can’t name a lot because I don’t understand the tech on such a profound level, hence my question to you!

David: for me, it’s that we are really struggling to get people to understand. We can explain the problem in a straightforward way, but because of the way the industry is, they don’t care. They don’t care about their blockchains having these problems, they are not interested in making solutions and that puts a greater burden on us. We can deal with it, but in means in some ways we have a longer roadmap because we need to make these things ourselves.

When people understand, they get very enthusiastic. You can see it with the people that have stuck around and really dug into the ideas over the last 3 or 4 there has been a realization of how people don’t understand these problems. It’s great for to see people coming around to our way of looking at things and acknowledging these are real problems.

Markus: Do you have any idea when I’d be able provide a Saito node? I’d love to play around with it. Also, is it theoretically possible to build my own JS Saito app?

David: You can run a Saito right now and you can build apps on it. If you don’t know how to do it, send an email to me at david@saito.tech and we’ll walk you through it. If anyone’s interested in this, let me know what you want to develop, because you can build and deploy and depending on what you want to build, we might be able to help as well.

For those who missed the live meeting, you can view the town hall recording here.

For more updates, please follow Saito Network’s official social media pages:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaitoOfficial

Telegram: https://t.me/SaitoIOann

Blog: https://org.saito.tech/blog

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/HjTFh9Tfec

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SaitoIO/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRUhZVAUH4JyWUFmxm5P6dQ

The Saito Project will rotate liquidity provided on the uniswap pair: 0xdfcf744c8ae896e8631ba9b9dc717546646f6708. The rotation will be executed after UTC 04:00 on 2021–09–09 over several hours.

Liquidity ownership will be migrated from the existing wallet (0x7cef1f635c41e5a80946adac6724532026cc5285) to a multisig vault to improve security and better support future migration to Uniswap V3 and conform with project policy.

The project will move the liquidy over several transactions. Total liquidity in the pool provided by the project should not fall below current levels at any point.

Follow our telegram and twitter channels for regular project information.

Let us resume where we left off in Part 1 of this public debate between David Lancashire and Vitalik Buterin:

David: You are confused because you think public goods exist in the same form in every network simply because they exist in that form in Ethereum. This is not true: no-one considers staking a public good, but there are incentive mechanisms in which it could be.

Vitalik: Of course I consider staking a public good! It just happens to already be incentivized in-protocol because it is easy to measure.

David: This is wrong, Vitalik. The benefits of staking are excludable in networks that measure and pay for staking. They aren’t public goods in those networks by definition.

You don’t get to call something a “public good” because you think it has diffuse social benefits. Lots of things have diffuse social benefits. The term “public good” refers to a specific type of good with a defined set of properties which leads to market failure by making defection-from-provision the dominant strategy for profit-maximizing actors.

Staking can be a public good, but not if you are measuring it and paying for it. That introduces excludability as only the participant who has staked is eligible for the payment that is provided to induce staking. If you want to make staking a public good, you have to design a mechanism where you need it for security but either stop paying for it or distribute your fees to everyone equally regardless of whether or not they stake.

Vitalik: By this logic, is scientific research not a public good once the government starts paying people to do it?

The benefits of staking are not excludable: each staker’s staking helps secure all transactions on the network, and there isn’t a realistic way for different transactions to pay for different levels of security (people have tried to come up with designs that do it, it ends up being way overcomplicated and breaking composability and allowing profitable small-scale 51% attacks, and so is not a good idea). So each staker’s staking really is a public service that confers non-excludable benefits to all network participants. The protocol compensates for this service by issuing a reward for it, but the existence of that reward doesn’t make it not-a-public-good anymore, much like public goods elsewhere don’t stop being public goods just because a government or philanthropist pays for them, or someone happens to enjoy the warm moral fuzzies for building and releasing them for free.

David: People call government-provided services “public goods” because they’re lazily invoking the justification for government provision, not because government-provided services have the same characteristics as public goods. A government dictates who is obliged to provide and who is eligible to receive.

What determines whether something is a public good is basically whether there are benefits to provision that are exclusive to the provider (excludability) and whether others can avoid contributing if that is an option (openness). It’s the simultaneous existence of those two properties which creates the problem.

>The protocol compensates for [staking] by issuing a reward for it, but the existence of that reward doesn’t make it not-a-public-good anymore.

Yes, it does. You have a private payment for the service. The benefit you offer is excludable. You cannot call ETH staking a public good if the term “public good” means anything close to what it does in economics.

>There isn’t a realistic way for different transactions to pay for different levels of security (people have tried to come up with designs that do it, it ends up being way overcomplicated and breaking composability and allowing profitable small-scale 51% attacks.

You keep saying that things are impossible. They’re not. As above, you just don’t understand the problem space because you are conceptualizing this as a technical issue instead of an economic one.

You need to sacrifice either non-excludability or openness to fix this problem. Fixing non-excludability is only possible on the incentive layer where value measurement happens and is broken. This is why all of your upper-layer technical solutions only work if you add closure to the network.

Closure defeats the point of having an open blockchain and introduces economic attacks, which is why you are running in circles. The only solution that won’t drag you around this way is adjusting how you measure and pay for value. You’ve said this is impossible and I gave you an example up above. Pay for fee collection and your consensus mechanism will incentivize the private sector to do whatever it takes to maximize fee throughput. If documentation is needed, you’ll get it.

How do you implement it? Not easy. In practice you need a way to measure fee collection and payout that cannot be gamed by the block producer. And it also needs to simultaneously preserve the spam-resistant and cost-of-attack properties of PoW/PoS so that participants can’t just game it by driving money in circles.

Hard, but not impossible.

Ersikan: I don’t really understand your point. You say that, for example, Ethereum should first start to modify their consensus layer so that people are incentivized to do Y instead of X, but isn’t the consensus layer a government protocol to decide which changes to add to the ledger?

David: It is an incentive structure. Governance mechanisms require closure. Closure adds trusted-third parties. The entire point is not having those.

Ersikan: Why would governance mechanisms require closure? And what do you mean exactly by closure?

For example, in the coin voting governance system criticized in this article, if anyone can propose to make a change to a setting in the smart contract, and every token holder can vote according to what they own, there are no trusted third parties. The security of the vote is insured by the security of the underlying Ethereum blockchain. Where are the trusted third parties? At most, the nodes of the blockchain and the consensus layer are the trusted third party, but nothing in the governance protocol itself involves trusted third parties.

David: Governance mechanisms that solve collective action problems require closure. Vitalik is talking about a collective action problem concerning public goods provision.

The underlying reason is that with non-excludable (public) goods you cannot force those who consume them to pay for their provision so there is a natural tendency for people to overconsume and pass costs into the future (tragedy of the commons) or underprovide and pass costs to other participants in the present (free-riding). A lot of people (including Vitalik) mix these problems up and get confused because they imagine the problem is just a failure to pay, not the fact that closure is needed to induce provision.

Another example is quadratic voting. Using it to encourage users to subsidize public goods that provide diffuse benefits only works if participants cannot vote to pay themselves so the mechanism requires a closed slate with non-open gatekeeping and compulsory participation, because as soon as anyone can nominate themselves for payment, the Nash equilibrium shifts back to everyone voting to pay themselves with their own money, and public goods continuing to be underprovided.

Vitalik: This is actually not true; QV/QF works totally fine even if you allow voters to make and vote for proposals that say “voter X gets Y coins”. Only voter X would vote for the proposal, everyone else would vote slightly against.

David: Nope. Your Nash equilibrium is not everyone else playing nicely while X votes to pay themselves. Every letter of the alphabet has now introduced a proposal to pay themselves and is supporting it with all of their votes.

You have not found a solution to the tragedy of the commons. You have begrudgingly permitted one additional farmer to put one additional sheep on the pasture while denying that ability to every other participant in the system. Adding a trusted third party (you, the gatekeeper) is a known solution, but it isn’t an acceptable or open one.

thetagodfather: What innovations at the base layer would you add to help address the stated problem?

David: You have to eliminate the discrepancy between the value that participants can extract from the network, and the value that they contribute to the network. This is not possible if you have a fractured incentive structure.

The most important change at the base level is adding cryptographic signatures to the routing layer so that the network can measure who is doing the work of collecting transactions (fees) from users and routing them further into the network. That information on who is doing work and its objective value to the network is then available to consensus and you have a shot at solving the problem.

Routing subsidies can be hacked-on. The real challenge in solving the problem for good is turning this form of work into something that has the security properties of PoW and (to a lesser extent) PoS and can regulate block production. The only known solution intersects with POW and not PoS, so making modifications to Ethereum would require its own developers to understand the problem. The requirement to burn energy in the PoW version might be something that could be replaced by a form of token burning in a PoS mechanism.

For more updates, please do follow Saito’s official social media pages:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaitoOfficial

Telegram: https://t.me/SaitoIOann

Blog: https://org.saito.tech/blog

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/HjTFh9Tfec

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SaitoIO/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRUhZVAUH4JyWUFmxm5P6dQ

While discussing the issues faced by current blockchains, sometimes great minds come at odds with each other regarding the nature of these issues and their understanding of them. This was the case recently, in a debate that ensued between Saito’s David Lancashire and Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin regarding the Free Rider problem and governance structures in blockchain. The Saitozen Voice now brings this exchange to you, as it occurred:

David: The sad thing about this write-up/essay is that it shows how clueless the ETH developers are about economics, particularly in terms of how they think about collective action problems and public goods.

Public goods exist when, despite the fact that overall welfare is maximized when we do Y, everyone nonetheless does X because that is what maximizes individual income regardless of what others do. Thus, the tragedy of the commons where people put more sheep on the pasture because they are better off *regardless* of what others do. Or the free rider problem Vitalik is describing here where everyone mines/stakes rather than fund protocol upgrades because that maximizes my income regardless of what others do. Vitalik is missing something fundamental about economics and it is astonishing no-one is correcting him: people pursue individual interests not group interests. He is running into a public goods problem because his incentives are pointing to the wrong place.

The source of this problem has nothing to do with governance structures. His problem is not created by governance structures. And it is not solved by governance structures. All a governance structure can do is add more problems by further distorting incentives and inducing more complicated ways for people to avoid spending money on Y. Making matters worse, “governance” structures necessarily require adding forms of closure (i.e., closed voting rings, etc.) which is pointless if one is supposed to be designing an open system (i.e., a public blockchain).

Vitalik: I’m quite aware that [people will pursue individual interests], and this issue is exactly what both this post and many other posts are about! So I don’t feel like I understand your critique here.

About the solution you propose:

X = network security. Y = research, development, education, documentation, community building. Incentivizing X is easy because X is easy to measure. But how do you measure Y? The difficulty of measuring Y is exactly the core reason why this entire problem is hard.

David: The critique is that all attempts to solve this through the creation of meta-layer governance structures are doomed to fail because they (1) add closure, and (2) create complicated and game-able incentive structures to solve problems created by complicated and game-able incentive structures.

You are dealing with problems caused by openness (non-excludability). That is why they are creating problems that take the form of public goods provision (goods which are non-excludable and non-rival). You have to stop seeing your problems as technical patches and go back and read Mancur Olson to understand what they actually are; he explains why all solutions to funding public goods (i.e., your network) that do not align your mismatched incentives on that layer require closure, cartelization and monopolization. Technical complexity will only make these problems worse, and the market will add this closure as a last resort in the absence of any other solution.

[Rather than “how do you measure Y?”], a better question would be “what you are measuring?”

I suspect the reason you assume this problem is unsolvable is that you are treating the challenge as a technical problem of paying for specific activities (“research, development, education, documentation”) rather than measuring and paying for value. If you pay nodes for value, you solve the problem on the most fundamental level because you suddenly have an incentive structure cannot be gamed; the only way to extract more wealth is to provide more value to the network. That eliminates the problem without the need for closure/monopolization/Cartelization.

I have no idea how you can pay for documentation. But the value users get from the network is directly quantifiable in the fee they pay to use it. And that means that the value the network provides the user is also quantifiable in the same way. In fact, you do have an objective and quantifiable starting point for measuring the value that nodes contribute to the network and compensating them in proportion to value contributed.

You won’t make progress until you stop going down technical dead-ends. You should be able to see the form of work that is needed, and your challenge is to turn this into something that has the same security properties as PoW and PoS. But pay for that and if education/development/documentation is needed to get more fee-flow, you can bet your life that the network will fund it. And if it is not needed then you shouldn’t be paying for it anyway because you are just creating a complicated and game-able incentive structure and killing yourself that way.

Vitalik: OK, so for the sake of argument let’s accept the claim that value is adequately measured by TX fees as given (I have quibbles with it, but we can ignore them for the moment). Even still, how do you know to what extent a given action contributed to those TX fees? In the case of mining, you can measure not only the fact that mining happened, but also exactly who contributed how many blocks to the chain at what time. With writing documentation, or development, or research, you cannot measure this.

[When you say “the network” will fund it if it’s needed to get more fee-flow], who is “the network”? There is no agent called the network; there are a bunch of various actors (miners, stakers, transaction senders, potentially coin voters). Who specifically would fund the public goods, and how, in the absence of an explicit governance mechanism issuing rewards, would they internalize the benefit of doing so?

David: >Even still, how do you know to what extent a given action contributed to those TX fees?

You don’t. You simply intuit the fact that X produced value to the user by virtue of the fact that the user handed them money. How did they do it? Perhaps they provided edge-node access infrastructure like Infura (congratulations, you are now paying for infrastructure and killing free riding on Joe Lubin). Or perhaps they developed software or provided documentation and support for developers. Perhaps they are a small shop and get transaction flow simply because users value the fact they aren’t Google (congratulations, you’re now quantifying the value of “decentralization” to your users).

You cannot see the actual work that is done in the same way you cannot see miners actually pushing electricity through ASICs. You measure the output and intuit the existence of the input based on the need for participants to do the work to make money in a competitive environment.

>With writing documentation, or development, or research, you cannot measure this.

Of course you can: if you want the docs or development or research then use the endpoint that belongs to the person producing them. Free-market firms do this every day, it is exactly how documentation, development and research activities are typically funded by investment banks and corporate software shops.

Some activities won’t be funded, but in that case they are by definition extractive and siphoning off value (i.e., you are creating a free-rider problem and possibly circular economic attacks by paying for them). Not paying for stuff that induces economic problems is a feature. And at worst, even if you can find one or two examples of public goods that persist, you’ve reduced your problem space from a “we are failing to pay for practically everything of value and the providers of that stuff are enclosing and monopolizing our network” to “we can pay for everything except X.”

>Who specifically would fund the public goods?

What public goods? You now have private goods being provided by a functioning market and no problems with under-provision, market failure, or central economic planning. The entire point of having a solution is that it eliminates the need for public goods.

You are confused because you think public goods exist in the same form in every network simply because they exist in that form in Ethereum. This is not true: no-one considers staking a public good, but there are incentive mechanisms in which it could be.

This is a digression as the original post was simply pointing out that there are systemic problems with the way ETH devs approach collective action problems by treating them as technical issues that can be solved without addressing the underlying incentive mismatch. The point here that we actually *can* measure value was simply an example offered to rebut Vitalik’s claim that it is impossible to objectively measure value in the network if it is not mining or staking. All nodes participating in consensus have full access to transaction data. We may not know what activities were performed in exchange for the fee, but there is no question we can objectively quantify who did how much work.

If there’s an epiphany that ties these two streams of thought together, it’s that once you shift to paying nodes for the value they are providing to the network, you will by definition only be giving money to those who bring more fees into the network than they extract, eliminating the possibility of defection (“consumption-without-contribution”) without adding closure. You don’t have public goods problems in this system because there are no public goods: asking how to pay for them misses the point.

To be continued in Part 2 of the Deluxe Edition of the Saitozen Voice.

For more updates, please do follow Saito’s official social media pages:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaitoOfficial

Telegram: https://t.me/SaitoIOann

Blog: https://org.saito.tech/blog

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/HjTFh9Tfec

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SaitoIO/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRUhZVAUH4JyWUFmxm5P6dQ

Welcome back Saitozens! This time around we are going back to the basics behind the workings of the Saito Network, let us get right into it:

I’m having trouble wrapping my brain around the issues that SAITO solves, and it’s primarily because I’m unable to relate it to real life examples of how things are traditionally. Can anyone explain it to me like I was born in the 1950s?

POW needs volunteers to do non-mining work in the same way Halloween needs volunteers to do candy-buying work. Scale means volunteers stop doing this stuff as costs rise. So the work needs to be done by for-profit firms. POW and POS networks think this will be fine because their networks are decentralized.

Try to think of a business model that will pay for the network infrastructure nodes to serve data to users and collect fees for miners/stakers that doesn’t increase fees, lower security, or introduce cartels and monopoly economics. Try to find a business model that makes for-profit firms behave like volunteers. There isn’t one.

The free market HAS to add closure to anything it pays for, because otherwise you have a public good and market failure. But closure makes a blockchain pointless and uncompetitive.

Saito fixes the problem by noticing and fixing the underlying problem: the fact that participants are incentivized to do only a subset of the stuff we need done. Suddenly an open consensus algorithm can provide all of this network activity without the need for the free market to fail-to-provide or provide-but-cartelize it.

The solution requires switching to measuring and paying for the collection of money. The challenge is giving this activity the security properties of Bitcoin since we are now burning money directly instead of indirectly through hash power.

I know this is discussed in the whitepaper, but I am wondering what exact purpose staking serves in consensus? Is it just extra security?

Classic Saito assumes we have a golden ticket every block. But we can’t guarantee that because golden tickets are found in a random process that involves hashing. And any difficulty which produces an average of 1 solution per block will sometimes produce 2 golden tickets per block and sometimes 0.

Assume we have 50% of the blocks dropping off the chain without a golden ticket. Either;

• Their tokens drop off the chain and we have deflation, or
• We recapture tokens and redistribute them as a block reward. But if we are redistributing them as a block reward, we are giving free money to the block producer.

Charging money to produce blocks and giving a large block reward? Systematic problem.

Having the staking component allows us to solve 1 golden ticket every N block, and the variance just sorts itself out over the long run. It doesn’t matter if we produce 0 golden tickets for a bunch of blocks because over the long run it will work out.

The blocks that aren’t paid out immediately get paid out when the next golden ticket is found.
If a golden ticket solves payments for 2 blocks, the random number is now picking 4 winners (miner, router, staker, staker-block-router). Even though the network is spending a smaller percentage of its overall revenue on hashing, generating a golden ticket that pays you off (your routers, etc.) at profit becomes exponentially more expensive.

The beautiful thing is that the cost-of-attack rises above 100% of fee throughput in most situations. I think our expected cost-of-attack is currently 125%. The cost-of-attack falls to 100% (i.e.an attacker can at best recapture all of the money they spent) in the situation where the attacker controls 100% of the staking table.

Basically, staking is treated the same way that mining is — a mechanism to pull funds away from block producers rather than as something that controls the pace of block production. Very different than POS.

And we obviously don’t lead with this, because if people don’t understand Classic Saito, they won’t even have a clue why you might want to do this (and most people can understand the mechanism without seeing this potential problem). Shorthand benefits anyway:

• Exponential increase in hashing difficulty
• Halving of energy spent hashing
• No problems from natural variance in golden tickets being “found”

Can we do anything with the Rust client yet? if I run it on my local machine, would there be any way to interact with it in a browser app or something?

We’re working on the networking API right now, once that’s done you should be able to get two nodes to connect to each other. After that we’ll start integrating it with Saito-lite and you should be able to get the JS demo apps to send TX to a rust node(with a bit of effort)

It’s a bit unclear how much effort that will be, the TX and block format has changed so Saito-lite will need significant changes. It may also be possible to simply interact with Rust at the network level. But you’d need the other side of the connection to at least be able to serialize/deserialize blocks and TXs and sign TXs.

Are there more exchanges listings in your roadmap? is any work happening in that front?

Yes, we are in on-going discussions with exchanges. As noted previously most exchanges will list projects for a fee and some kind of distribution for their users. That obviously negatively affects token price. The size of these fees and distributions is generally bigger with bigger exchanges (we have been listed by some smaller exchanges without action on our side). Exchanges also tend to reduce or drop these if there is sufficient trading volume, or buzz around a project.

I think there is also an assumption from some that an exchange listing necessarily has a positive impact on price. This is not true. Without promotional and outreach support a listing does nothing. So, we need to balance how we spend money and time between promoting the project and growing our community and lobbying exchanges.

Can new Saito tokens be minted or are we fixed?

There’s a multisig around the smart contract. it is possible to mint more although it isn’t unlimited as burning is required to withdraw to mainnet and there can never be more tokens in existence that exist in the token supply.

Total token supply is fixed at 10b long-term on mainnet, and the network is intended to be zero inflation and zero deflation.

That isn’t a promise that there will be 10b tokens. But it is a promise there will not be more. In terms of the ERC20 everything involving it is publicly visible. Will say that if we were interested in rug pull, we would be doing things quite differently and I would be doing a lot less coding.

For more updates, please do follow Saito’s official social media pages:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaitoOfficial
Telegram: https://t.me/SaitoIOann
Blog: https://org.saito.tech/blog
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/HjTFh9Tfec
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SaitoIO/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRUhZVAUH4JyWUFmxm5P6dQ

Welcome back Saitozens! We are here once again to bring to the forefront the best of the discussions happening on the bastion of culture and wisdom that is the Saito community, let us get right into it:

Would someday other dev be able to use the Saito blockchain to create their tokens in the same way Ethereum and BSC are used today?

A smart contract EVM is really just an application that runs on a blockchain. Install the EVM atop however many nodes you want and they can process transactions set to specific addresses as inputs to contracts.

That stuff runs naturally L2 on Saito. When will we get around to this? That really depends how it falls into the hierarchy of things that needs to be done and when it becomes a priority. Definitely not soon in my opinion. We can chat about this in the townhall if people want.

You explain Saito as a solution to problems that other blockchains don’t even recognize as problems. From what I hear/read, I think e.g. Vitalik is a very smart guy within the Ethereum space. Why wouldn’t he see these problems? Are they really that much of a “thing”? Will they be in the long run?

What the ETH guys tend to do is see a problem with POS, notice it exists in POW, and conclude it must be a universal problem. Practical examples of this are the “scalability trilemma” and “sheep-and-wolves” problems.

Vitalik has written about some economic attacks that Saito solves, particularly discouragement attacks. He doesn’t wade down to the economic level very often, perhaps because — as he wrote on that occasion — these classes of attacks are “a cheaper way of attacking a consensus algorithm” and “one of the hardest classes of attacks to come up with defenses against.”

The question I’d ask is why has there been zero progress on those problems in the last three years and if the ETH guys consider these problems a priority? As far as I can tell, what they do is declare the problem as unsolvable in order to remove it from the list of things they need to worry about. The scalability trilemma has been invoked to justify practically every bad design decision ETH has made.

Part of the problem is lack of understanding of actual economics. But part is that when development communities attract people who see economic problems as technical problems they attract “experts” whose solution is central planning.

In Plato’s cave, Socrates explains how inaccurate perceptions of problems within Blockchain lead to complacency in addressing them. Only by actively seeking out the truth can one arrive to the wisdom that is Saito

What are the weaknesses/downsides of Saito? I understand some of the downsides of BTC and ETH (or rather PoW/PoS blockchains) — and I can’t quite believe that Saito is as perfect as you say it is. I want to, but I’m still skeptical could you expand on that?

I’ll answer your question as best I can, although my experience is that when people ask this question what they often want is reassurance that Saito exists in the same spectrum of “technical trade-offs” as other projects. So before I answer with something specifically, I want to comment on why this is not true, with reference to what was new about Bitcoin.

Before Bitcoin was invented the trade-offs that applied to early forms of “digital money” were caused by the fact that the interface with the objects that held real value were outside the control of the networks themselves. You needed trusted third parties to handle the interface with those assets, and usually also the government to sanction them having access to the banking system. Bitcoin “solved” this problem by putting the “value” in the system under the direct control of consensus. The “trade-off” space that existed previously no-longer applied because there was no need for a trusted-third party to manage the money-interface.

Saito does the same thing with cost-of-attack. The addition of cryptographic routing sigs allows our consensus mechanism to increase the cost of producing blocks (and collecting payments) so that it is always expensive for people unless they are using work generated by fees that have been paid for by other people.

The trade-offs that exist in PoW and PoS exist because they have external markets for work (hash/stake) that permit costless transfers and anonymous laundering of work in ways that enable economic attacks. Saito changes the game in the way that Bitcoin did — something that used to exist outside the network (cost of attack) — is shifted in Saito and put under the direct control of consensus itself. Economic attacks disappear because the consensus algorithm can see when it has been transferred and assigns a penalty that you can only ignore if the fees don’t come from you.

In terms of specific issues?

The hardest technical problem happens if we assume that people are willing to burn money to attack the blockchain. At this point PoW and PoS are dead, and it isn’t clear why Saito needs to worry about economic irrationality and no-one else does, but let’s take this seriously.

Some people will argue that the security of PoW is driven by the fact it is hard to purchase miners (i.e. pretending that hash-rental attacks or miner-collusion is somehow off the table). I don’t personally buy this story at all — if the supply curve of hashpower is what keeps PoW safe then we can expect PoW security to collapse as the block reward falls and the R&D costs of producing more efficient miners require more and more money over time (see CPU market).

But what if it’s true in the short run?

Saito addresses the problem by using routing policies to force attackers to produce blocks in sequence (spamming your peers with blocks at a specific depth doesn’t get them routed, so it isn’t a viable attack). And we require chains to have a certain number of golden tickets per N blocks in order to be considered valid — so that it isn’t just a matter of spending money. You also do have to burn hashpower.

The fact that we require a certain number of tickets per N blocks (rather than every block essentially being a golden ticket) means that the cost of spamming the network is lower at the tip of the chain than in other networks. Or potentially lower, because higher fee throughput and scalability means that there is more money to pay for the golden ticket mining.

We already know that Saito costs far more to attack. But what is more spam-resistant? A network with X in fee throughput that spends all of its income on hashing, or a network with Y in fee throughput that spends 25 percent of it on hashing? It depends on the scale and throughput of the network.

Why did no other blockchain come up with a similar solution?

Why did no-one else come up with Bitcoin? This isn’t an easy problem to solve. And the solution is counterintuitive — it requires both the cost of and payout from producing a block to float according to information that does not exist in POW and POS.

And you have to solve two problems, because what is the use of scaling routing if you’re stuck with a permanent ledger?

Do you fear someone else implementing your ideas faster?

David: My last business in China was copied. So — yeah — I used to be afraid of going out and talking to people and trying to get them to understand and then just being copied and jettisoned. That was one of the big reasons for the patent application.

These days I’m a lot less worried. It’s legitimately hard work to think through the mechanism and most people are lazy. And someone copying us would probably be good for us and we would outcompete them anyway.

What type of projects that can be developed on the ecosystem outside of gaming. If someone were to develop a consumer product requiring transfer, collecting and holding of consumer data, How would one go about qualifying the type of projects to develop on Saito let alone any blockchain ecosystem?

When you meet a friend, scan a QR-code on their phone to get their publickey and add them as a friend in your keylist. Use Saito to run a Diffie-Hellman key exchange over the blockchain. There is no MITM attack. Do this with 500 people? Have them create off-chain spontaneous communication channels over IP. If you need group encryption you can do N-player Diffie Hellman key exchanges so everyone in your group has the same encryption/decryption key. Replace wechat/facebook/telegram/whatever. Use plain TCP/IP communications for most data-heavy actions. Retreat to on-chain communications for payments and for things like IP-address updates that are hard to handle otherwise.

This sort of thing is possible in any network where people can communicate and exchange signed messages. But to be useful it needs to be scalable, as we’re sending a lot of transactions. You’re definitely not going to build a decentralized version of wechat on a network that can’t break 100mm transactions a day.

For more updates, please do follow Saito’s official social media pages:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaitoOfficial
Telegram: https://t.me/SaitoIOann
Blog: https://org.saito.tech/blog
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/HjTFh9Tfec
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SaitoIO/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRUhZVAUH4JyWUFmxm5P6dQ

Saito is consolidating its treasury wallets into a more secure vault.

On 2021–08–10 SAITO will be moved from the existing wallets to secure vaults to improve security.

No tokens will be released at this time and total circulating supply is not changed.

Private Sale Disbursement Wallet
Foundation Wallet
Contributor/Devs Wallet

To secure vaults:

Saito Private Sale Token Vault
Saito Foundation Token Vault
Saito Contributor Token Vault

No tokens are being released at this time and total circulating supply is not changed.

For historical information on previous treasury token movements please refer to:

https://saitoofficial.medium.com/saito-token-distribution-ad8a7b58e73a

and:

https://saitoofficial.medium.com/token-distribution-update-ac1f5915c88a