Episode 55 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen on Spotify (subscribe there for ad-free), Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you listen. Paid subscribers get the ad-free version right here on the page.
To make Nori work, the data of carbon removal must be somehow transferred from a model like COMET-Farm to the blockchain—and that is precisely the infrastructure that Jaycen Horton is building at Nori. So, how does communication between the software work, exactly? Why did Nori choose to build on the Ethereum blockchain? And what is the benefit of building in an open-source community?
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still goofing around.
The books that come up on this show are collected on my Bookshop shelf.
🎧 Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube
Paid subscribers get this episode ad-free. The ads in the free feed are inserted by Spotify when you press play. They are not in the file I make.
Full Transcript
Announcer: listening to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast by Nori, the world's first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Christophe Jospe: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast. I'm Christophe Jospe here with Ross Kenyon as always and producer Paul Gambill. We're in the Nori office looking forward to record something a year before you actually hear it, but happy 2019 everyone. Also very happy to have one of our own sitting across from us as the guest. It's nice for us to be able to take the time to reflect, talk about some of the things we're doing internally and how all this relates to reversing climate change and building a carbon removal marketplace. How about you introduce our guest, Ross?
Ross Kenyon: Sure, Jaycen Horton is Nori's principal blockchain architect. What a beautiful title you have. Jaycen, why don't you just start from the beginning how you got involved in Nori and blockchain. And you've been involved in blockchain for a very long time, probably as long as anyone I know.
Jaycen Horton: Since 2010. The stories are a little bit different for each of those questions, one being, "When did I get involved with Nori? When did I get involved with blockchain?" Question goes all the way back to 2010. When I was studying at Arizona State, I was working at a place that had some access to some pretty high performance machinery. And 2010 is really really early Bitcoin days.
Ross Kenyon: Do we have a sense of how much it was back then for Bitcoin?
Jaycen Horton: I remember the lowest I saw it when after playing around with it was around like eight cents.
Ross Kenyon: So if you're feeling FOMO right now listening, you are not alone. Well, but the interesting thing is when you first hear about something like blockchain, like crypto, it's like, okay, yeah, eight cents, but who's buying? They're all kind of sketchy exchanges. And I think you had to know a lot of technology to even get involved in it. Very strange world.
Jaycen Horton: When we started kind of playing around with the idea of like, okay, we've got this high powered machinery. We don't really know what to do with it after 5pm. The idea or the topic of this Bitcoin thing starts popping up and I kind of piqued my curiosity. It was this currency that was supposed to power the internet. It sounded like a lot of BS, frankly. But then you, you, you start to spend a little time with it and it starts to just really [unclear] your interests and just various ways. And so the first thing we started doing was we had all these GPUs. We've got this high--
Christophe Jospe: Sorry, GPU?
Jaycen Horton: Yeah, sorry, graphics processing unit. It's a video card in a computer.
Christophe Jospe: Good thing I used to bug my dad for as a kid.
Jaycen Horton: So we had all these video cards and because we ran effectively a visualization center for projecting 3D simulations into these 270 degree room. So we had these cards and we wanted to kind of play around with this idea of Bitcoin. And so we started spinning them up and seeing exactly what this thing was. Myself and another individual there at Arizona State, we were, I guess, taking it like a science experiment and trying to figure out, okay, this thing sounds interesting, also sounds like BS, let's try and like test it, let's see what you can do once you have some of these. And so that's what we did. We saw the landscape at the time, which was hauling back in 2010. It was, it was not a pretty place. It was also just like a kind of place where nothing was developed yet. It was hard to move these currencies around. It was impossible to do anything other than moving currencies around.
Ross Kenyon: Wasn't it kind of similar? I remember Protein Folding at Home being a project that kind of was more popular back then. And I remember seeing Bitcoin and thinking like this is basically the same sort of concept.
Jaycen Horton: The one difference there, and I would say those folding at home ideas were slightly more interesting than Bitcoin because effectively you have this idea of useful work versus what Bitcoin has, which is proof of work, which more or less just means you're expending a lot of energy to create. You're expending a lot of useless energy to create something versus folding at home where, or expending useful energy like folding proteins to find cures to build something else.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I'm trying to remember this. Now that you say it, it glimmers in my memory. And it was something like people would take through these, try to fold protein at home, they would use their computing power to solve problems of what exactly? Did it lead to anything?
Jaycen Horton: Yeah. I don't know. I don't know whatever came of that. I know they're, they actually, and I don't even know if these are 100% linked. But I remember there was a folding coin that came into play at some point where there was actually a currency being traded around based on the work that was being done on these folding of proteins. But yeah, I don't know what really came of it, but it was more of a game, I remember it. You would fold proteins, try and find whatever combinations that you could come up with with them and see if you can find something useful with them versus Bitcoin, which is more or less useless energy in the sense that it doesn't do anything other than create that currency.
Ross Kenyon: Only other than make it possible to exchange value in a decentralized global fashion instantaneously.
Jaycen Horton: But that part's not obvious when you first get into Bitcoin, right? It's 2010. Nobody's using it. So what do you mean by powering the world with this currency? Nobody's using it. Nobody's accepting it. Nobody's spending it, which is kind of the scenery at the time. So I remember seeing all kinds of things starting to pop up and it was starting to pique my interest like after these science experiments, if you will, where you see these markets start to emerge where people don't know how to exchange Bitcoin for anything valuable, especially dollars. So these markets start to pop up where, okay, we don't have Bitcoin to dollar markets, but we have Second Life dollars to real dollars.
Ross Kenyon: Something else happened in 2010. There is a Bitcoin to pizza transaction.
Jaycen Horton: There was, yeah, 10,000 Bitcoins for a single pizza. But frankly, those were pretty rare. You'd be lucky to find those. You could potentially purchase an iPad and then never get receipt of it because you don't know how to really track the Bitcoin transactions yet. So these markets were pretty interesting. It was interesting to see people come up with solutions like these Second Life dollars to dollars and then effectively recognize that that market exists and then figure out, okay, I can't do Bitcoin to something like PayPal because PayPal starts to ban it, but I can do Bitcoin to Second Life dollars. That market's super easy. So you see that as the first real arbitrage type market pops up. And then you see the transition from that to, "Okay, now I've got Second Life dollars. Now I have real dollars." And then you see all kinds of really, really sketchy type exchanges pop up like in the day, which effectively will lose all of their users' funds because we still don't know what Bitcoin security is, crypto security, blockchain security is.
So yeah, it's been an interesting journey, but it's not until probably smart contracts, specifically Ethereum's smart contracts come around that I start to really realize, okay, this is not just a currency system. And I say just, okay, yes, it's a big deal to have a currency system, but it's a singular use case for technology. When the smart contracts come around, I say, "Oh, okay. This is something you can actually build a business around. This is something that you can build financial agreements around, some kind of in which two parties or multiple parties enter into and just execute some kind of financial eventuality based on some agreement" that you can write into code and automates based on certain criteria being met.
Ross Kenyon: Yes. Pretty exciting. So why is that a big deal though?
Jaycen Horton: Well, so imagine a few use cases here. The most simple one, and I think Nick Szabo might have framed this one up, which was the idea of a vending machine being a smart contract. You put a dollar into a vending machine and you expected soda to come out. It's the most simple generalization of a smart contract. When you give money, X happens. And so you start with that and that's maybe not revolutionary, it's a soda machine. But then you start to think, okay, well, if I can, fundamentally, what's to stop me as a real estate broker to say, when you purchase real estate from me, what's to stop that actual transaction, like the transaction that has to happen for me to get to sign over the deed? What's to stop that money being the thing that executes the transition of the deed from myself to you? Not unless you have programmable money, programmable currencies, programmable technology is possible.
Ross Kenyon: Change hands of the documents and the money, right? And so you're saying, what if you could just program that with code such that that escrow agent is out of a job? That's what a smart contract is.
Jaycen Horton: That's exactly. So what was even the need for that third party to be there other than the money couldn't do it. So now we need a person to handle.
Christophe Jospe: So you mentioned Ethereum and you also said the words world computer and starting with Bitcoin, but then also transitioning to Ethereum, kind of explained for our listeners who are quite savvy as reversing climate change aficionados, but novices are not necessarily experts on the blockchain side. So what does that mean? Like what is the ultimate play with Ethereum? And you sort of said that that grabbed you in and got you really excited. But what was it about that shooting opportunity?
Jaycen Horton: The fundamental difference between things like Bitcoin, which have the kind of, I guess, sole use case, and things like Ethereum, which have smart contracts baked into it, is that you can start to program those agreements. You can start to think of every transaction being not necessarily financially oriented. It's just a change of some state to some other state. And when you have that programmability, and you have that ability to associate value with that programmability, then you have smart contracts, and then you have any code that you could typically write, except now you've got this built-in notion that transactions have value associated with it. It's valuable computing. It's much different than really anything.
The point is relatively simple in comparison words. People have tried to build smart contract layers on top of Bitcoin, but it isn't something that's that reason why Bitcoin exists. And then next generation projects like Ethereum, which is what Nori has built on, came along and said, "Hey, smart contracts are our focus. It isn't just about financial transactions. It's about programming agreements between people who don't necessarily know each other or trust each other and not having to rely upon a third party like a bank," something like that.
Christophe Jospe: Mm-hmm. Is that pretty good?
Jaycen Horton: Yeah, and you can, I mean, you can tear the world of blockchain apart into a thousand different pieces and each one of those pieces going to be interesting in some way, the fundamentals.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Are you saying that they are interesting or are they definitely not interesting?
Jaycen Horton: Oh man, no comment there.
Ross Kenyon: We cut our conference budget if that tells you anything.
Jaycen Horton: Yeah. I mean, some of these, yeah, there's a lot of use cases for blockchain that fundamentally are not use cases for blockchain. It's frankly, fairly, I guess if you've ever really worked with blockchain, it's pretty obvious when something is a blockchain use case and when it's not. But when you haven't worked with it, it's like, oh, blockchain is that new secret part of my solution or secret part of my idea that's going to finally make it work. But that's not the case. It's a tool in the tool shed.
Ross Kenyon: Is it like a couple with a failing marriage saying, "Hey, if we have a kid that'll solve all of our problems?"
Jaycen Horton: Yeah, I feel like sometimes that's exactly what it is. Oh, man.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I think you, well, for everyone who doesn't know, Ross is a certified blockchain professional, which probably should put you on the Blockchain World PR Committee. I'm volunteering you Ross. But Jaycen, you got in a little bit to use cases where you think blockchain fits, where you think it doesn't fit. So what are some of the most egregious use cases where it just makes no sense for this to be on a blockchain?
Jaycen Horton: So at least in the way that we know blockchain today, the way that we see the speed at which it can process transactions, the speed at which it can do certain location, you see the trade-off being, okay, this is much, much lower than a high-performance computer. This is going to be much more expensive than a high-performance computer. Anytime you have any idea that requires one of those two things, transactions or low cost transactions, a blockchain is not where you want to be, period. And for, I feel, 95% as a rough estimate, pitches of this should be on a blockchain, should not.
And so when you think of things like AI, or if you think of things like VR, or if you think of anything that needs to be fundamentally part of the blockchain, where you're not using blockchain purely as a settlement layer as like, okay, we have state that happens elsewhere. We have gaming or we have AI, medical processing or protein folding. If that's happening in some kind of other like high assurance computation network, that's where it probably should be. And then you should check that state in when necessary onto a blockchain. So you've got a medical application and you're processing or folding proteins and you find that these two genes can do, or these two genes working together do X and that X is some kind of highly relevant finding. Then maybe you check that state into something like a blockchain, something that has permanence transparency and can potentially be persisted much longer through time. Then only that state should be checked in and not the computations around.
Ross Kenyon: Some of that last little bit, I lost some of it in translation, but I guess one way to bring it back is that there are trade-offs between different blockchains, right? And so some of these things that you're describing, I think I've actually heard you say Ethereum is like a donkey. It's something like this, but like it's not the fastest. It's not the sexiest. I mean, there are projects that come out all the time that claim to be much better than Ethereum in various capacities. But Ethereum is just sort of this like stalwart thing. But if you need transactions to happen immediately, there are other blockchains that have fewer nodes in the network that need to come to consensus and they can do this much quicker. So if you have a project that or blockchain that only has seven nodes or something like that and they're all trusted parties.
Christophe Jospe: Sorry Ross, can you explain what is a node and why is that relevant? Come to consensus for securing blockchains?
Ross Kenyon: Okay, so like a node in computing must just be, I don't even know how you would say this, it's like an agent that has some sort of authority that must be checked in with some such.
Jaycen Horton: Fair enough. And participants in a system.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, which so to go back to Jaycen's story when he was at Arizona State University, his science experiment was, and what's amazing is that the professors are cool with it, which is kudos to ASU. You know, let's become a node and be effectively a Bitcoin miner where we're discovering new Bitcoin. And just to define proof of work, which you mentioned is a lot of useless energy consumption, where basically you have these nodes racing to solve a math problem and then you have other nodes which validate that they got that math problem correct. And the other thing the node has to do is download the entire network and the information stored on that network so everyone can trust that to be true and that's distributed across many different layers. How am I doing, Mr. Certified Blockchain Professional?
Ross Kenyon: You're good. I know what I'm talking about.
Jaycen Horton: I'm always hesitant when everyone says it's just purely useless energy though because what Bitcoin does is quite important and you are spending energy to secure a global network of financial transactions and information changing hands in a transparent and new kind of way.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it's like that math problem is like it's not helping anyone solve cancer or protein folding or anything, right? And that's, that's the useless part.
Jaycen Horton: Like it's, yes, what you, the outcome is not what's being measured, like the thing that comes out of that useless energy be something interesting, something valuable, in this case Bitcoin. What's not useful is what is you or like the process that is required. That's just me being a little bit pedantic. But yeah, I think you explained the rest of it just fine.
Ross Kenyon: But there are other blockchains you could use if you needed a very instantaneous transaction. But then there are also cases like if you need those elements of the blockchain to be successful for your business case, why aren't you using Azure or some other cloud-based computing solution? So in blockchain protocol development, there's this classic trilemma that you can have three different things. There are decentralization, security, and speed. And you choose two. Can only have two of those because necessarily the other third one just won't fit with those. Ethereum has chosen decentralization and security. And that's why when people bring up that Ethereum is dealing with scaling issues right now because of transaction speed, pretty low, but there's a lot of work being done to upgrade that and make that feasible for broader application. But some of these other blockchains that you're talking about, they're choosing different pairs in the trilemma.
Jaycen Horton: So you start with the question of what do I do with this idea? I've got an idea. I want to bring it to life. And maybe one of the questions you have to ask is, okay, does this belong on a blockchain, which become like an increasingly common question, which sometimes is yes, sometimes it's no. But then even if you choose yes, then it's like you have to decide, okay, there's not just one of these things that I can build this in. There are [unclear] of experiments out and frankly a lot of them don't work and some of them do. But you have to choose, okay, I've got the idea. I want to put it on a blockchain. Now where, which one do I put it on?
Christophe Jospe: So why, why Ethereum then? Why did we go that way? I wrote an article about this, we'll link to, but I'm going to play dumb. Why, Jaycen? Why is Nori built on Ethereum?
Jaycen Horton: Yeah, the biggest reason we are built on Ethereum is because of the open source community that surrounds it. There's a lot of other reasons.
Ross Kenyon: I thought you were gonna say because we like hexagonal stickers.
Jaycen Horton: We also like hexagonal stickers and where else do you get them?
Christophe Jospe: So excited for the Nori hex sticker there. Let's get it. Yeah, I've been waiting.
Jaycen Horton: So with Ethereum, we've got a fantastic open source community, a lot of developers working on a lot of open ideas. You've also got a functional blockchain. You don't have something that's going to happen. You have something that's happening right now. You have a lot of developers working on the future of it. You have a lot of developers, like really bright developers, trying to figure out how this thing scales or can solve this problem or that problem. Frankly, what it does now does mostly what we need it to do.
Really the only things that we could add to Ethereum at this point that would actually be relevant to us are things around like, okay, we have these side effects of what the blockchain does, and that's kind of around the energy consumption. But there are tons of proposals about how to not have a direct impact that energy discharge. There are things like running efficient side chains, effectively running another blockchain in parallel, which has zero, near zero energy footprint and then you check state in when applicable in a single batch. So that's the big talk over here.
Yeah. I mean, the biggest thing you really derive from building something on a blockchain is that it's public. It's that it's verifiable that everything that has ever happened happened in the context of that blockchain. So as soon as you have a private blockchain, well, you should not be using a blockchain. You should be using a database or any other.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you mostly hear about private blockchains or permissioned blockchains as sort of being enterprise solutions. And they're maybe worried about the scalability or the security about being fully on the public side of the blockchain.
Jaycen Horton: I think the main thing that they use them for in those cases are for state tracking. But yeah, there are lots of other solutions for that that have been around for a very, very long time.
Ross Kenyon: Which good things might grow out of that, right? Like maybe we don't see the benefit right now, but there's been lots of cases where research has on something in a way that you didn't expect it. So maybe some good things will come out of it. Although sometimes it is hard to see. You're like, why? If you already know and trust these people that are also on the private blockchain, like why? Why do you need it? Because one of the main features of the blockchain, as I understand it, Jaycen, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that you're able to work with people that you don't actually trust. You can assume that they mean to do you harm, yet you're still able to transact on a blockchain. And you can mostly assume that the incentives will line up where it will work out okay.
Jaycen Horton: Exactly. Yeah. It's one of the few examples out there that you can take, acknowledge, or effectively flip incentives as you know them today, it's looking on their head. You take this idea where everybody in your network is an adversary. Everybody is out to get you. And effectively you incentivize like the behavior to, you fundamentally incentivize the behavior to cooperate, whereas it becomes disproportionate to instead being an adversary.
Christophe Jospe: So I'd like to pull some things out of you as you talk about it. Organs, right. You know, you could probably make some kind of market for that using blockchain technology, but I don't want to go there. Just continuing your story, it's been almost two years when you first started thinking about the integration of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and blockchain technology. Can you talk about that and then kind of the evolution since?
Jaycen Horton: Yeah. So this is relevant to what we've been talking about till now. It's when, I guess, Paul pitched this idea. And when he pitched it to me, I was like, oh, OK. This is maybe the first time I've heard a blockchain application actually makes sense. Like, OK, this is where that--
Paul Gambill: I remember your conversion moment there because Jaycen and I knew each other just because we'd been, well, that research center at ASU that he was talking about earlier. We both worked there. And I think Jaycen was basically hired to replace me after I graduated. So we never really overlapped much. But Jaycen and I have been talking for a long time about crypto trading, just making various investments. I started investing in Ethereum in early 2016, I think. And up until then, I've been talking to Jaycen all throughout the fall and winter of 2016 and saying, man, this Ethereum thing, this is really cool. You should be checking this out and getting a lot of poo-pooing from him in return.
And so it wasn't until, I think it was in February of 2017 when there was a hackathon that was being hosted here in Seattle hosted by a combination of a couple different groups. One is IPFS, the interplanetary file system, which is not a blockchain project, but it's related to the decentralized movement. And then MetaMask, which is an Ethereum tool to connect your browser to the blockchain. And I remember this being on Super Bowl Sunday, and it was that Super Bowl when the Patriots were down like 28 to three in the third quarter. And so I went to this meetup with a bunch of other computer science nerds who were clearly not interested in the Super Bowl and thinking like, ah, I don't care, this game's over. I went to it and turns out, you know, game was way more interesting. But, uh, Jaycen was home in Phoenix and watching the live stream and we were chatting online during it. And like that was when I saw from a thousand miles away a light bulb going off for you.
Jaycen Horton: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it was, it was, you mentioned one of the, I guess, groups associated with that was, was IPFS, was Protocol Labs, really, it's this kind of phenomenal startup that's, that's more, more so part of the decentralized movement. And prior to really working directly on blockchain, very interested in mesh computing and decentralized computing, things like that. So when I saw this, this amalgam of ideas just come together in that same room, I saw the link, I saw that you could take each of these things and start composing them, putting them together and building something real. And so then I suppose after getting effectively sold on the Ethereum blockchain, then comes this idea like, okay, let's participate in this thing. Let's see what we can build for this, these groups of individuals.
Christophe Jospe: This is this hackathon. This is the very first hackathon.
Jaycen Horton: Yeah, this is for a project called Carbon Harvest.
Christophe Jospe: Carbon Harvest. How can we go with that name?
Paul Gambill: I don't know. I think we had a hard rule that carbon was not allowed to be in our name. Nothing green, nothing carbon.
Jaycen Horton: And so it really was Paul's idea to do the Carbon Harvest idea. And he started pitching it to me. And I remember hearing it. OK, yeah. This is absolutely, these are the types of things you can do on a blockchain that makes sense.
Christophe Jospe: What was different about it then? Is that what you were going to say?
Paul Gambill: Well, I was just going to say what a carbon harvest was. So just a little bit of context background. I started a meetup group in Seattle in 2015 called Carbon Removal Seattle with the intention of ultimately building out a business that ended up becoming Nori. And as part of it, we were always trying to think of what are the different ways that you could build a business model around removing CO2 from the atmosphere. And I'd always been taking a sort of like products-based approach like indirect air capture and that sort of thing. And when this came up, we'd also inside our meetup group had been looking into embedding or storing carbon in soils through regenerative agriculture. And the basic gist of Carbon Harvest was, and we learned that a lot of this wasn't actually possible, but simply pay farmers a token for storing carbon in their soils. And we thought that it could be as simple as just embedding a sensor into the soil at different spots.
Christophe Jospe: So cute, so nice.
Paul Gambill: Right. And that it could be all automated and truly decentralized and all that. The basic gist of it was, yeah, we were creating a token and we were giving it to farmers for embedding carbon. And the value creation around it, like where the value for the token comes, that kind of springs forth from that.
Jaycen Horton: I couldn't have said [unclear].
Paul Gambill: And then Nori came along and I think people probably know the rest of that story quite well.
Ross Kenyon: Jaycen entertains all of my bad computer science questions as a noob. You're gonna add something there?
Paul Gambill: I was just gonna say, if you want more about the Nori origin story, you can go to episode 13 of this podcast to hear the rest of the story.
Christophe Jospe: Yes, yes, very good plug. Let me talk about the Comet Farm. I mean, I actually think Carbon Harvest is a great segue into that to knowing what is actually feasible because at the end of the day, what Nori needs to be very good at is finding ways to estimate and quantify carbon dioxide removal. And if you're just sticking a probe into the soil, I'm saying, give me a reading on the carbon and then I'll measure that over some other future date and then subtract the difference. That doesn't exactly work.
And so what we figured out we needed is we need a model, and the best data model available and something that's open source has been built by a group at Colorado State University and funded by the US Department of Agriculture and the NRCS, which is a Natural Resources Conservation Service. And what they've done is they have basically built a data model that is able to estimate incremental increases in soil organic carbon based on certain inputs, which you're now intimately aware, and that model can be calibrated through different soil tests and is kind of key to making the whole back end of everything that Nori is doing work. And we recently, well not too recently, but a significant milestone, which is integrating the API with the Nori API, which without putting words in your mouth, Jaycen, is a way for data to talk to each other. But can you tell us a little bit about how we fit with Comet Farm and why that's a big deal? How that all works?
Jaycen Horton: I mentioned earlier when I was talking about my aha moment about why Ethereum might work with all these different technologies. Fundamental piece of open source computing is like this idea where one thing can compose with another. And a fundamental building block of that, of that composability is the API, programming interface, which is more or less the communication fabric between closed source, open source, software, so like, which basically just defines a language in which you, or like one piece of technology can talk to another piece of technology. It's a common language between two completely different things.
Christophe Jospe: Give me an example because I can imagine listening to this and not quite grasping that.
Ross Kenyon: I can give you one. Say you have a weather app on your phone. And that app is just a container that shows you all sorts of things like, and it'll put up an image with a sun or a cloud or a raindrop or something like that. But it has to get the data from somewhere, some meteorology service that's telling it what the weather is at that time. So that app might send a request over the internet to the National Weather Service, for example, who would have an API that you could query it and ask, "What is the weather in this zip code right now?" And it will then return that to you. So as far as your app is concerned, you don't have to program anything about measuring what the weather is. You can just go extract that information from somewhere else. So now we have an equivalent version of that more or less with between Nori and Comet Farm.
Jaycen Horton: Yeah, and I even want to take that step back further just to really like let this sink in because this is a huge thing for all of tech. And something that we, I think maybe take for granted as like, okay, this is just, you know, if there's a weather service, we can get that information. But APIs are really like, think about them as two completely different things. Like we have an application that does this and it uses this code, like it uses JavaScript. And the Weather Foundation has something that's using C++ or some other completely different language. Until APIs really started to become a huge thing in the world of information technology, we had no way to connect those two things. If you wanted that information, you'd go talk to the engineers and you'd get that manually.
Christophe Jospe: It's like siloed, truly.
Jaycen Horton: Yeah, it's siloed. It's the fundamental, I think, door opener for most of open source technology. Without APIs, we can't build good things. And so for us, to bring it back to Comet Farm, Comet Farm is just a fantastic tool, and you summarized it pretty well, of estimating the soil carbon, or the carbon in soil. And effectively, what they do a good job of is taking highly complex scenarios and just running them through a ton of simulations and outputting all kinds of data. And for us, because we're building the carbon removal marketplace, it's perfect. It's a match made in heaven. We need to get data in order to support the claim that people are removing carbon. And so where better to get that than from the most highly accurate potentially model or programming simulation than Comet Farm.
Christophe Jospe: Some of the things that they like about us is now they're getting verified data which is going to improve the model. We're collecting data that they may not ask for but may work as a substitute which also enables certain refinements of the model. And there's a whole suite of things that they're not even thinking about, but we can still collect and give to them in the future and sort of do things that ultimately will enable better science and more reduction of the estimation error or the uncertainty around the soil organic carbon.
The open source question is really interesting too. So kind of from the science side, it's very clear on how those estimations are made, the calculations that go into that, the assumptions, that's kind of a very clear role of science, right? If you're going to publish something for peer review, you need to state up front, here are my assumptions, so that other scientists can come in and say, okay, I can replicate this set of experiments to get the same outcome. And that's super important and why we wanted to start with Comet Farm as opposed to some other baseline generators, which are not public and it's not clear how you come to those estimations. And similarly, with the code, you want to be clear, here's how the code works, here's how it might get improved. And so what are some of the parallels between thinking about this from a scientific perspective and thinking about what Nori's doing from a software perspective?
Jaycen Horton: Yeah, the parallels between the scientific method and open source software are very, very similar. You've got this idea where if I've got some open source code and you want to, and others want to use that code, there's at least a couple really radical benefits of this idea that they can grab that software, do whatever they want. The first is, if it doesn't do exactly what they need it to do, you can make the modification yourself and you can make it do that additional thing so that it satisfies your constraints. But the more, I guess, important part as relates to science and peer review, we can point out something is not working the way that it should be working. It's like publishing a scientific paper. It's putting it out there for peer review and you're waiting for feedback and you're waiting to improve and iterate on that idea. And so with open source software, you have this idea where I can put software out, I can let others point out what might not be working as intended. And we can iterate like as a kind of independently as businesses, as individuals, on top of that software to improve it.
Christophe Jospe: If I'm a developer, and believe me, I am not a developer, but if I were to be a developer, you believe me, okay. And I'm really excited about what Nori is doing. How might I contribute? Am I welcome to just go on to GitHub where the code is stored and poke around? What would I do?
Jaycen Horton: Yeah, we have various repositories out on GitHub. GitHub, by the way, is like leading, open source, place to get software or place to collaborate on software. You can go to github.com/nori.eco, spelled out, N-O-R-I-T-E-C-O. And then you can see all of our various repositories of code there. But probably the better of the couple that are there are going to be our contracts, our smart contracts, are fully open source, right? You can go to this repository, there's instructions there for how to play around with them, to tinker with what other types of things you can build. There's a list of things that we as Nori could definitely use help from the open source communities so that we can improve effectively the removal of carbon and the market that surrounds it.
Ross Kenyon: There's a very funny paradox that it makes sense if someone just told you this, but on looking into it even a little bit, it starts to unravel very quickly, which is that a lot of software is built with privacy in mind. Sometimes you'll talk to people who are either creating some new tech or new business and they're in stealth mode and they don't want to tell anyone about it because they're worried someone's going to take their idea. In many cases, technology that's developed in those ways is less safe than something that's developed out in the open. Because when it's out in the open, you have more eyes on it. People are able to proof it, make sure it actually does what it's supposed to, that there are gaps in it. But if you just have this little set of people looking at it, who kind of like, imagine if it was just the people internal to Nori, we would almost certainly miss things if it was just us looking at the code, right? So if you're deploying something out in public, sometimes it's just better to just be like, "Hey, here's the code."
Jaycen Horton: It's like any idea though, right? It's if you have a very fundamental belief in politics or whatever, and you're just talking in an echo chamber, you're only ever going to hear the same viewpoints. You're only ever going to hear exactly what you need to hear. And you will never be able to hear something that might make you the way that something works, be it in a thought process, be it in science, be it in code, to make it potentially adaptable or usable places other than that close to circle.
Christophe Jospe: So you're working on the backend, which I'm just going to play dumb if you could define what back-end even means, but if you could also explain what about the back-end has to do with blockchain and what just has to do with good software that enables blockchain ready data that can be queried and make.
Jaycen Horton: Yeah, so we talked about the Comet API. So let's start there. With our technology stack, and also just as a fundamental problem for computer science, it's how do you take the physical world and how do you mix that into the digital world? They don't cope, they don't play well with each other. They're completely different locations, if you call it a location. And so with Comet Farm, we start with this idea that we need to get data. And so we access Comet Farm's data and we pull that data in and then we take that data and we process it. And this is all happening and what you have called out as the back end. This is something that's happening kind of behind the scenes. It's happening not in a graphic interface. It's not something that you can kind of watch as like the stream of.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, contrast it with the front end, which is something that you're experiencing when you go on a website or you use an app. That's all the front.
Jaycen Horton: So we've got that data, we pull that data in, then we capture that data and we process it. This happens in traditional computing and traditional software. And then we take that data and we store it and we encapsulate it into effectively a representation of value and data. And then we take that and we store that into a smart contract that will exist at some point on a blockchain, which is another backend technology, but there are categories of this backend technology. You have things that are on the front end, which would be like a graphic interface. You have things in the backend, which are like APIs. And then you have like almost like a step further removed, which is things that are existing like this public ledger. Things that are potentially out of your control, yet you can put things there once, but once they're there, they're out of your control.
So that's kind of the life cycle of the data from Comet to the smart contract. Then you have this front end, the Nori application, which serves as a marketplace for people to purchase and sell these carbon removal certificates, which in and of themselves encapsulate those data sources that we, then you have the final part, which is, okay, once that data is out there, you have a full marketplace. You have a way for people to even external of the Nori application, whether Nori even exists or not, can continue trading or can continue using those bits of code or bits of data do other things completely independently of Nori.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, that brings to mind a comment that came up on a previous podcast I think we did with one of our advisors, Ramez Naam, where he said his favorite phrase to explain Nori is, "Nori is building an API for carbon removal." Paul likes to say, "It's like we're making an app store." Apple didn't know exactly how people are going to use the app store, but they put it out there. Have a system that people who are interested in removing carbon dioxide, either in the buying or selling part of it, can use this API. Is that about right?
Jaycen Horton: That's exactly right. Yeah. So a fundamental, like one of the building blocks of patient are these smart contracts that allow for selling of digital assets really. And so when we have an API that can interact with such a system, then effectively, really, you put it out to the open source community and you say, you build what you want to build with this. We have these building blocks. What can you come up with to use those or consume those? And potentially, one of the easier ones to, one of the external use cases for such an API would be imagine you are building some other applications, some mobile application, and you want to incentivize your users to be a little bit more sustainable. Well, in this application, you can tie into the smart contracts and you can look at that user's historical carbon removal footprint to see or to incentivize behaviors or to allow for the use and consumption of carbon, data, and other applications.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, that scalability is really important. Building something, I mean, one of the reasons why we chose the name Nori is as an organism seaweed is, you know, it's quite simple, but can also grow very, very fast and into complex ecosystems. And that's what we're about. We want to make the infrastructure that makes the rest of it possible.
We actually, we've had a lot of discussion about this recently too, because it isn't just the code open source for Nori, but there's also this discussion of to what degree will methodology development be open source? Are people going to independently develop new methodologies left for carbon removal? Like we're starting with regenerative agriculture via cropping, but what if someone had an idea for methodology? Do they get the idea and say, "Hey, will you develop this for us and then release it to the public and we can comment on it together?" Or do they just go and develop the methodology and bring it to us? There's different ways of doing it. In some ways, these questions all end up political about who has control over the API and over Nori, and they're all quite interesting.
Ross Kenyon: And I'm sure there's plenty of stories in software that end up with people, even in open source, it isn't always so clean on who gets to decide what. Sure, there are some nasty commits that happen.
Christophe Jospe: That you as listeners can't quite see how evil Ross's grimace is when he talks about open source software.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, it's terrible. No, it's really great there. It's, um, I think we, we want to be able to take advantage of the momentum and genius of people who are not directly attached to Nori. We have a lot of entrepreneurial energy that is circling us both from the development and software side, but also from the methodology side. And how do we, how do we integrate this in a way that works holistically and isn't distracting and also is adding value and make sure if someone has a really good idea, how can it get implemented as fast as possible and things don't get siloed. And I think that's one of the beautiful things about open source, the open source ethos in general, that you have to be open to change and it isn't, you're not so worried about people stealing your idea because what matters is the execution and the relationships. More so like the idea of a carbon removal market by itself isn't incredibly novel, right? The idea of tokenizing carbon removed. Would you say that's a particularly unique idea, Paul?
Paul Gambill: Creating an API for carbon removal, that's definitely new and unique and has not been implemented.
Ross Kenyon: Are you worried about someone stealing it though, even though we haven't launched, but we've been talking about it for a long time?
Paul Gambill: No, because this stuff is really hard. Not only that, it's why I have always groaned and rolled my eyes when people talk about needing to sign an NDA to learn about their startup idea or something like that. It's like, give me a break. If your thing was really providing value in a way that other people weren't, then people wouldn't duplicate it just because it's hard to do. And if you were able to demonstrate value to the point where it would be worth duplicating or copying, then you've already got a head start on everyone else. So just put the idea out there. People riff off of it because that's going to make you better and stronger and probably less susceptible to being overtaken by a competitor in the future.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, when I was in Los Angeles and I was doing screenwriting and sending scripts out over email, sometimes people would get really weird, like, "Oh, is someone gonna steal my idea?" But the rule I've always heard against copywriting or getting into bunker mentality was that your idea should be so unique that only you could write this version of it. And if that's not the case for your script, it's probably not that good anyways.
Jaycen Horton: Yeah. By the time something is easy to duplicate, it's no longer known.
Ross Kenyon: You have a great way to turn a phrase, Jaycen. Why don't we start wrapping it up and tell people about some resources to learn more? We thought a lot this episode about who our listeners are and I imagine most of you, we should probably send a survey out at some point and just get a better sense of what people like and what they don't. I think most of them probably come from the environmental side. We probably have less blockchain listeners, so we try to do it that way and bring the blockchain to the environmental people rather than vice versa. What might be a good way for people to dive into learning about this, Jaycen?
Jaycen Horton: There's a ton of [unclear] about a story or the blockchain. I mean, there's all kinds of books out there now. There's an Antonopoulos [unclear] book, got tons and tons of things on me.
Ross Kenyon: You didn't plug yourself, so I'm going to plug you. You are one of the authors of that book.
Jaycen Horton: Contributors.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Contributors of several dozen. Very modest, yeah.
Jaycen Horton: And there's all kinds of, personally, I have a piece in Hacker Noon, which people can read about any of the various underpinnings of blockchain that I write about, specifically, or typically around smart contracts. And there's just a lot of resources out there.
Ross Kenyon: Shocking that you did not mention any of the overpriced blockchain conferences as an option to learn more.
Jaycen Horton: There are just too many. Don't know which one to pick.
Ross Kenyon: There are a lot. Yeah. The, uh, Andreas Antonopoulos, when he, when he writes, you should definitely listen. He's, he's one of the best at just giving, uh, amazing analogies, uh, or visualizations of what blockchains enable in such a beautiful way. I could listen to him lecture for hours and often have. The Internet of Money, both volumes of that are very good. Mastering Bitcoin is great. And that's what Mastering Ethereum is, his new book, which is quite technical, which should be released by the time this podcast is out. I've had it pre-ordered for close to a year and I'm dying to get it. A bunch of other books. I used to give away Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper until Audible told me I could no longer give it away because I think I give away like 30 copies of it because the first one you give to someone who doesn't have Audible is free.
Christophe Jospe: That's how he got me. Yeah, didn't you reach out to Nathaniel Popper and tell him that?
Ross Kenyon: I did, I did. I said I think they, they disabled me so I'm one of your biggest evangelists. It's, it's such a great book because it's the earliest, pre-Ethereum, it's just Bitcoin. It's just an early history of the ideas that led to Bitcoin, which there's a prehistory and then where it's gone in the couple of years since it was release. That one's great. I gave a copy of it to my girlfriend and it got her a lot more interested in cryptocurrency. So that's a plug. It's a complicated story. And I mean, no one would care about it if it wasn't for the crazy speculative nature of it, because it's quite esoteric. But it tells the story in such an amazing philosophical way. There's also a book called That One Hour Book on Blockchain. I think it's Jonathan Morley. That's maybe the best, really simple, easy introduction that I've read.
Jaycen Horton: For me though, learning about something, you can learn about something by reading things. For others, you have to actually dive into it to fundamentally understand or fundamentally think about it in a way that gives you that aha, like this is something I should think about more.
Ross Kenyon: I think I know where you're going.
Jaycen Horton: And so for people, if they want to actually get more interested or kind of are curious about this technology or any of the associated ecosystems, you should start building things. If you build things, you'll see very quickly that this is something to act.
Ross Kenyon: And I've tried many different times in many iterations to learn the basics of coding and programming. I've dabbled a fair amount, but the best service that I've used, and it's also free, is called CryptoZombies, and you can actually start using Solidity, which is the language of smart contracts on Ethereum, and use it to build crypto collectibles, sort of like CryptoKitties, if you've heard of that. You can build your own version of it, and you build it sort of like front to back. The entire thing is built by the time you finish it, or pretty much. And I thought that was a really unique experience and very good. So maybe that's an intermediate step, but they're not ready to build something totally their own.
Jaycen Horton: It's a, yeah, it's a very, very simple step for anyone. It's got a nice graphic interface. It's got some easy code to write. It's easy for anyone to really learn some of this stuff. I mean, there's also just various tools for people who have a little bit more programming experience like Truffle and so many others. So really, it's, I would say, just get out there and build things if you want to learn.
Christophe Jospe: Great advice. It's been a fun podcast. Just to close this out, Jaycen, and it might be old news by the time podcast airs, but from a software development perspective, what can we expect to see coming down the pipe in the Nori product side?
Jaycen Horton: I would hope that we start to get our application out there. We're getting pretty close to having, I mean, we have a minimum internal product for our, I guess, employees to use. But my hope is that very soon we'll have something out there for consumers.
Ross Kenyon: Great, well thanks for letting us rope you in here against your will. Let's do another one here soon.
Jaycen Horton: Oh yeah, yeah, you should probably do that. Let me talk about Desert Blockchain real quick. So also one of the things that got me interested or kind of continuing on my path, how I got in blockchain, starting with Arizona State and then kind of exploring Ethereum and various blockchain and smart contract technologies. Arizona has a, it's like 1500 plus members now of a meetup called Desert Blockchain, which I organize alongside the main organizer who does all of the, which is Jay Carpenter. And I think most of the people around this table have now met that person. He runs a fantastic meetup in Arizona. So I would encourage that if there are any listeners in Arizona.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we'll have Jay on the podcast, I'm sure at some point here, we'd love to have him on. We're coming for you, Jay Carpenter. That's our new creepy sign off here. And you know, we're coming for you too, Nathaniel Popper. I'm sure he's listening.
Jaycen Horton: Yeah, I'd be honored to have him.
Ross Kenyon: His column is great whenever I see it come out. Yeah, well, thanks for being here with us, Jaycen. Let's do it again soon. I'm sure there's a lot more to this. I want to track the life of data all the way through the Nori system. Let's do it some other time.
Unknown speaker: Yeah, let's draw
