Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Post DevCon3 Roundtable: State of Ethereum, Cosmos Retreat and Parity Hack

Episode Date: November 10, 2017

For the very first time, all three Epicenter hosts found themselves in the same location. After attending Ethereum’s DevCon 3 in Cancun, we were at a Cosmos Retreat and discussed the conference, retreat, state of the Ethereum ecosystem and recent Parity hack. Topics covered in this episode: Recap of Ethereum’s DevCon 3 conference Current state of Ethereum The most interesting new projects at DevCon The post-DevCon Cosmos retreat The internet of blockchain thesis The case for blockchain’s having sovereignty The massive loss of funds due to Parity’s flawed multisig contract The pros and cons of an Ethereum hard fork Episode links: Ethereum Developers Conference (Devcon3) Cosmos - Internet of Blockchains Many Chains One Ecosystem Slides Many Chains One Ecosystem - YouTube "Ethereum Client Bug Freezes User Funds as Fallout Remains Uncertain - CoinDesk" Parity Multi-Sig Wallets Deployed After 7/30 Issue : ethereum Paritytech - Security Alert This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Meher Roy and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/208

Welcome to EpiCenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and start-up decentralization and the global blockchain revolution. My name is Saba Sankujiu. And my name is Banffarwin-Krain. I'm a heroi. And today is a momentous occasion. Yes. And 200 episodes ago, we did an episode together.

in Yohan Barbie's apartment. Yes. And that was the last time that we did it also in the same room. Yeah. So that was 200 weeks ago. Two hundred weeks ago, yes. And now we got mayor. We're all sitting here in the same room for the first time.

In fact, this was the first time that we're all together in the same place. And it just so happens that we're all here in Mexico, which is also amazing. because we're at DEFCOM. We're now in Plei de Carman. We've been for the last few days for the Cosmos retreat. And so today we're going to talk about a couple of things. So we'll obviously talk about DEFCon. We're all at DEF CON November 1st and 4th.

And we have been in Plei de Carmen for the last few days for this Cosmos retreat, which was amazing. So we could talk about that. And hopefully a few other things. Yeah, I know it's an interesting. Rear setup doesn't feel familiar at all. Even like not wearing headphones, confuses me, stirs me. But yeah, it's... Yeah, the process to get this going was actually, you know, people often think that like it's easy to do a podcast, everybody in the same room. And I'm sure it is if you have the setup for that. But, you know, our setup is not made for that. So it's... Anytime we have to do something slightly different, like, even have two people on the same camera, it's... It gets me uncomfortable and anxious.

So hopefully this will work. I hope this will work. Yeah. All right. Well, let's get started to talk about DefCon. So first of all, this is DefCon number three. I was kind of a DefCon zero, which was like in Berlin three years ago, I guess. When it was like 50 people, but, you know, sort of if I was working, kind of helping Ethereum a bit then and sort of in the office.

Brian was on the ground show. Yeah, you were at 1 or 2, which neither of us were at, right, in London and Shanghai. We now are all together. And this is my first defunct. Yeah, yeah. Well, let's get started. I mean, what's maybe mayor of you, what is your impression overall of this year's event? Much bigger, first of all, I think.

So the London devcon was maybe like 400 people in one hall, Shanghai. was bigger 700 and this was 2000 and even for those 2,000 people the tickets sold out in a week or so so it's become a massive event lots of energy I think the the bubble market has brought like a super amount of energy into the space yeah lots of maturity as there what about you I would I would echo those points So it was my first F-CON, so I don't have anything really to compare against. But I thought that... I was just impressed by how massive it was.

It was at this convention center in Cancun. I mean, it was the biggest conference I've ever been to, period. I've been to other types of conferences and sort of trade shows. This is by far the biggest conference I've been at for such a nascent industry. I thought that was interesting. I thought that the technical level and the quality of the talks was really good. And there seemed to be something for everyone. There were some highly technical talks, and we'll get into that.

There were some highly technical talks about zero knowledge proofs and some of the progress that's going on there. But there was also a lot of talks about projects, and talks about Uport, for instance, that are more on the user experience side. And then somewhere in the middle, you know, a lot of development framework stuff. I was super excited about that. I talked about that a bit later. But generally I thought that good energy, a lot of cool people.

It was great to just meet everyone and just chill and hang out. That's one part of this that I really like is just to meet people. Yeah. I think the organizers did a great job this year in. getting a diversity of speakers. So I remember like in the previous two DefCon's I had a sense of disappointment that like there wasn't enough talk about apps or like social impact and things like that. But this time there was everything it's pretty much everything for everyone. Yeah so for me I agree I think

it's just the energy here and it's great. It's just not just just this conference I mean I remember previous conferences that have been here that just had this amazing energy I remember the very first conference where we went together and like brilliant 2000 early 2014 you had back then you know Bitcoin conference at that same kind of energy I had the very first conference that I was at I think in October 2013 and Amsterdam amazing energy back then so much enthusiasm and it's a similar thing here you know on a bigger scale this was like Bitcoin 2014 Amsterdam type scale energy yeah well I don't think it's quite the same back then you know in

Bitcoin you really had this blind optimism it's like look at this take over the world no really like we own the cost of something huge I don't think the Ethereum community is quite like that you know there's been enough setbacks right now with with hacks and it's you know very clear what the massive problems Ethereum has you know for example of scalability and and and There's lots of competition, right, that's coming and other projects that are competing. Even at the death point, right, there were lots of other projects present that are. So I don't think there's quite the same sort of complete utter conviction that this is going to take over the world.

What I mean, yeah, of course, just the blind optimism, but like there was, but on the same sort of scale, you know, if you look at this from the outside, you were talking about something that is that similar scale as where Bitcoin was at 2014 yeah yeah that maybe that may be true as it's a good point on yeah I think it's bigger today than Bitcoin was at the beginning of 2014 for sure so yeah I thought it was you know I honestly didn't see too many talks partially it was also because you know Cosmos were a lot of people here and there was a booth kind of cosmos booths and had just tons of conversations with all kinds of people of course that's you know wonderful because there's so many interesting people so many interesting projects and

including no meetings and people that maybe i knew online or was some kind of email contact with or or people listen to the podcast that was great lots of those it was so humbling to just just like you just be walking by and someone could come by to you and say hey i love your show that's all I want to say and then they would just yeah lots of that yeah even at one point we were just sitting there we were just having a chat and then some guy takes a picture what's this guy doing but yeah I mean I've definitely seen the throughout the years right like every every event you serve to see more and more people like in the show and that's been yeah really encouraging so thanks thanks for doing that

so mayor I think from the three of us you were the one who most focused on like the talks content, national projects, so what were the things that you found most captivating? Yeah, I did go to many of the talks, I think, except for one afternoon when I skiked off. I spent most of it I'm going to the talks. I found a lot of great projects, actually. There are things that I found that are conceptually interesting. There are things that I found that are going to be in like production soon. production soon and they could be game changers and then there were also projects that

gave me a hint of what are the kind of business model challenges we are going to run into soon so i'll kind of try to cover all all these categories in kind of brief so projects that i found super intriguing enigma catalyst so Enigma had its I see July I didn't appreciate their project much but this time around I realized like what a grand vision and I was what what it effectively allowed was a new kind of totally new kind of data exchange where like different people can upload data to a network this data is encrypted so privacy is protected And then when somebody else wants to run a computation on our collective data, they can still run the computation even though the data is encrypted.

So for example, this thing I could imagine is imagine all of us upload our browser histories to the Enigma network encrypted. So we don't leak our privacy. But then companies are able to run analytics queries on that combined data set without knowing the actual data. and they can reserve that that sale let's say how many people are visiting coin market cap on a particular day so it's a it's a network that allows that kind of data exchange and computation yeah or let's say I don't know if you have a whole bunch of farmers could upload their data about crops and yields and stuff and then somehow collectively analyze that get the insights about losing their particular yeah giving up their particular data and privacy yeah and

super relevant too I mean in the current context of things I think that's that type of thing is super relevant as people are more concerned about their data privacy GTPR the general data protection regulation in Europe yeah that sounds cool yeah then another another kind of like wacky project that I wasn't expecting to see at all was this project from UC Berkeley they are completely like remaking the electric grid they're solving an optimization problem So, for example, if you have the electric grid, where different people are producing power at different points in time, because solar is unpredictable.

Different people are producing energy at, and they peak at different times. And then there are consumers that want access to electricity at different levels at different times. Then you know there's this sort of optimization problem. Where do you take energy from at what rate and supply to where? And like this UC Berkeley project is each individual home can like forecast the demand and put their like demand forecasts encrypted and then the whole network sort of optimises the flow of electricity in an electrical grid and that whole computation is done via

blockchain. I found that like mind-boggling. So their claim is that they have figured out a way by which you could have like optimal energy exchanges without knowing individually what home is consuming at any point in time. So like that kind of project to me like seemed completely out of the blue something I wasn't expecting. Truebit looked amazing again. So we have interviewed true bit on the show and the true bit is this idea that we can build on top of Ethereum sort of global cloud where Ethereum smart contracts can outsource their computation and this people in this cloud can like do the computation and then furnish reserves to the Ethereum blockchain but by using some kind of game theory we are given

like very strong guarantees that the computational results will be correct. So Jason Tauch from TrueBit had this word for this idea of computation, trustless computation as a cloud. He called it the panoptic computer. So you know the panoptic all right, this is this device that ensures good behavior among prisoners because there's a guard tower in the middle which may or may not have a guard, actually but any of these prisoners don't know whether the guard is there or not so because the prisoners don't know whether the guard is there or not they put on their best behavior because it just might be there true bit is like that

it's like a global computational cloud where people are computing like results of programs and submitting them to the blockchain and they are at their best behavior because somebody just might be checking their work and If they don't give the results correctly, they might be slashed. So... What's interesting about that is, also, we saw the talk together and how that project seems to have matured since we interviewed. And just how good Jason has gotten at explaining it. Yeah.

Yeah. Jason has gotten really good. And the surprising thing is, I think in Q1 of 2018, they're going to demonstrate how the true bit Panoptic computer can be used to move Doge coin from the Doge blockchain onto the Ethereum blockchain. So this will be a proof of concept that at least we can see and maybe even use. That seems to be making a lot of progress. And the fourth interesting part of the ecosystem I saw is decentralized exchanges. That does seem to be one of the upcoming areas. Smart contracts.

it two years ago, maybe one of the things that's going to hit this year, the next is going to be decentralized exchanges in some form. So both zero X and ether delta had talks there. I think zero X by far looks the most well-functioning project there. And then like some releases that I'm looking forward to that were announced here is Maker Dow the project is going to release the Dai Stable Coin. So we'll have a stable coin working on Ecerium in December of this year. So we've followed, we've interviewed the Maker project and I've kind of followed their progress

over three years now. It's been a long time coming. System that's getting released is not the one that was promised in the white paper. There are certain aspects that are removed in order to simplify the system. And I'm not sure I like all the things they've removed, but we will have a stable coin. system on DCM blockchain I think I think that's a that's a big deal yeah it feels like I mean one of the things that I thought was really telling at this conference was how you can see sort of parts of the stack start to coalesce you know when when the very first version of Ethereum

came out and the very first client it was a command line tool and now we're seeing more and more are these higher level of abstraction development frameworks. So on the development side, there's been some structuring of the stack and making it easier for developers to build applications, but also in all the services and tools that are now close to being available for app developers. So Uport is one for identity. A stable coin is another part of that stack. So we're seeing like a, the entire structure has become more mature and so it makes it easier for

doubt developers to build apps and just great for the ecosystem in general. Yeah. What about you, Brian? What are the interesting things you came across in conversations? Yeah, I mean, I thought it was interesting to like Flats Casper talk, which... Did you guys understand that talk? Well, no, I mean, the talk was... very hard to understand. He mostly went through this mathematical proof.

And, you know, that was maybe not the best choice for how to explain Casper to this audience. But I do feel I have sort of started wrapping my head around a little bit. Casper and Casper has a contrast tendament, right, where I think, you know, Casper is really trying in some ways to almost build something like proof of work. work as proof of stay. And I think that's very interesting. Obviously, there's, you know, there's big tradeoffs, right? There's some, what they're trying to build is much more complex.

You know, there has other downsides. The blocks aren't finality only come. It's harder to get and all kinds of things. But it's still very interesting. I think it's conceptually like a nice direction. So I don't feel I understand Casper that well. you know I haven't I remember we had flat on once and I remember I didn't really understand it well then and but I feel like I'm starting at least wrap my head a little bit around some of the ideas in there

and I think you're very interesting actually one thing that stands out to me I you know talk with the affinity guys as well and I stayed last year in December at their house for a few days in Apollo on you know before i before i joined cosmos there was like a few projects i felt i got very very interesting definity was one of them and and yeah and those guys seem to make them great progress and they have like test net running and it's really really cool and there's a white paper on the way as well there's a white paper much better white paper on the way yeah there's a white paper coming and test net and it looks like they're going or they want to launch something you know in first half of next year. And so that's exciting too.

Yeah, also one project that I thought was very interesting to see, they didn't give a talk, there was no stand, but I talked with, I talked with the founders here, was DFINITY. So when I left, before I joined Cosmos, there was a few projects that I thought were, like, you know, promising and interesting and seem to have like competent people. You know, Cosmos was one of them, obviously, but DFINITY was also one of them. So last December I stayed at their house in Palo Alto for a few days, hung out with them, and just kind of got to learn a little bit about it, not that much. But, you know, I know, because we had Tom being on the podcast many years ago when he was,

with his previous project. And yeah, so those guys have live TestNet running now. They have scaled their team pretty well. They've been hiring, it seems like, really good people. And then you know the test net is just kind of awesome, right? So basically the way it works is they have this like, you know, 500 validators and then, you know, 200 kind of signing each block with these threshold signatures and this kind of randomization process chooses the next set of validator every block.

And you know, you have this like lighting up with every and they have like a second block time on this or something. So you see like every second and another 200 dots lighting up by the line. this 500 cloud. This is really cool. I think it's a really interesting approach to consensus. And I think that's in general also something that I'm just very interested and excited about is that these new approaches to consensus and how they're on blockchain that we're seeing now. And they're all, you know, getting kind of close, right?

So we have, you know, ten of a cosmos office, say, which is supposed, you know, scheduled to launch at the beginning of next year. DFINITY will be also, I think, the first half of next year, maybe slightly after, but you know, also coming pretty soon. And Casper, well, I guess Flats Casper may be much further out, but at least some kind of Casper version is also going to come. And it seems like at least Vlad is also very confident at least that he's on the right path and that what they're doing is possible. and that it will come even if maybe another year or two years or I don't know exactly no when so it seemed like a broadening of the consensus yeah algorithm consensus models yeah in blockchain what do you guys think that signals for the ecosystem as a whole well i think we have

of course known for many years that proof work just has these massive issues it doesn't scale it's like extremely expensive it's an environmental disaster There's all these problems and you know this idea of proof of stake has been around for a long time and it's coming now Right final it's here or you know at least just at the doorstep and And that's going to be massive I think most most transactions will move to change like that And it's just proof of say right and you have a lot of different variants and different experimentation different directions and and I also of course it's going to continue, right? I think we will see lots more things and, and, you know, if you look at, I don't understand DFINITY and Casper so well, but if you look at Casper, Tenement,

and Definity, they all are quite, very different, right, and very different trade-offs, very different benefits and downsides. So I'm super excited to see how this turns out. Yeah, it's good that there's all of these variations because it makes us more resilient, maybe if one doesn't work but the other might end up working and then everybody copies the one that works I so my my day-to-day doesn't involve a lot of Ethereum public network type of stuff I mean so at Stratton we're mostly doing consortium sort of detached but we're sort of distant from this community we we operate at the at the periphery and And this was the first, well I guess no, I mean, EdCon, I kind of had this similar feeling,

but what, when I came out of these conferences, I'm just like super inspired to write smart contract code. And as of previously web developer, I was really inspired by everything that's happened in the sort of development framework space. And like I mentioned earlier, like the stacks are coming together and coalescing. I was really interested in seeing a lot of those talks and so I saw talks like for instance DAP tools that are coming out with like really simple and easy use command line tools like query your smart contract send queries to the smart contract they've got different queries there

and so there's this other project called the name will come to me but essentially it's like a framework that you can just like launch your own local environment to develop your your blockchain so you've got like it launches an Ethereum blockchain chain launches your block explorer and all the tools so that you can develop locally. And I think that this is where, like, this is where we'll see a lot of projects come out of. Because like in web development, you know, when NPM and like Node started coming into the scene, like previously with like Ruby on Rails, that's when we saw like web development becoming sort of a massive thing, like full stack developers and everything coming into the space.

And there's a lot of way to go still. We're still pretty early stage. But I think that this is one of the areas where we'll see a lot of developers coming in. Like people from the web development spaces don't necessarily understand every, you know, low level of abstraction of smart contracts and public blockchain and stuff, but, or Ethereum generally, but that understand the technology well enough that they can build applications and just having those tools available and having like you port for identity for instance or having the stable coin is uh is really encouraging to see i'm i'm a bit super question about this and i i want to like just spend too much

doing to our contracts now just learning how to do it and doing some some interesting stuff so perhaps moving on to the next topic that like i cos one one short topic i'd like to cover is um while the technology is coming along really well, the business models around smart contracts are still... Are in the infancy. Yeah. I think so I kind of saw like many, many different examples where I just felt like the project is amazing but the business model is not.

So like an example is like Melonport. So, Melonport is this portfolio management. tool where it allows managers to create their own portfolios and then people to subscribe to those portfolios and have their assets invested as for those portfolios. So Melamport is doing really well on the development side. They are one year ahead of schedule and their app is going to be running live on Mainnet in I think February or so of next year. They're one year ahead of schedule.

So that's like unheard of. down in the ICA space. But on the other side, the Melonport has a token, the Melon token. And the Melon token doesn't have much of a linkage

to their system at all. Like, it is, it is, as of today, as I understand it, it's like a very speculative token, right? Like, the linkage between what software they have built

and the token is unclear. The hard part is, how do you monetize software, software tool that is open and a smart contract can be infinitely copied? So for many of these projects I felt that the smart contracts that they are building they're going to be commodities, they're going to be open source commodities and if these things are going to be open source commodities then how does the project monetize it. Another project that has very similar problems, like not, I won't call it a problem, it's and maybe it's also an opportunity, is Akasha.

So I don't know if you've kind of tried Akasha, I encourage you to go and try it. They gave a really nice talk. So Akasha is this project that builds like a proper social network where people can publish content and other people can like the content, comment on those pieces. and then people can also follow each other on the Akasha network. But all of this data, the content lies on IPFS, the likes lie on ETHERM, the social network of who follows whom also lies on the public blockchain. And Akasha, so Akasha doesn't hold any of the data, right?

So all of these data items are on either blockchains or IPFS. And then the other revolutionary thing about Akasha is that Mihai, the founder of Akasha, doesn't want to collect any data about what users are doing on Akasha. So as a user to Akasha, you directly connect to this Ethereum blockchain and IPFS, and you get to see all of the set of messages. There is no central Akasha server, and the Akasha app you use does not broadcast any data back to Akasha headquarters on what the user is saying. So here you have a social network which does not have any proprietary data, all of the

comments and social network is open, it doesn't have any analytics data on what the user is doing. And so the question becomes how do you monetize something like that? So again, for example in Akasha's talk, I saw that like Akasha is trying to create a token called Akasha East. I think they will ICO that token. You could see that the token model or the monetization strategy behind that token model is like so underdeveloped. Those are two examples, but I think a lot of projects, a lot of projects are suffering from similar problems. This is not, I don't want to point out these two projects, this is generally a pattern like everything else is

like this it sort of raises the question in my mind what does a good smart contract business opportunity look like yeah because I'm not too sure that making smart contracts auditing them and publishing them open will make for good business models but yeah I have some thoughts on that I mean I think first of all what's absolutely essential for something to be a viable business model in a in a sort of open, decentralized smart contract world, right? Where basically the operation of the thing is open, right, can be copied. It's the only way that you can win in this and build a viable business is if, you know,

the more people use it, the more useful becomes. Because if you have that dynamic, if you're a first mover and if you want to have certain momentum, it's almost impossible to this place. Now, I think Bitcoin being the best example here, right, which has gained such a tremendous position and even though everybody can see how it works and it's easy to take it and maybe build something much better than Bitcoin technically, but because it has such, you know, enormous network effects, it's, you know, it's a business, it's, I mean, not literally in business, but it's, you know, a very great, profitable thing. And, you know, for example, Ethereum may, how strong in the network effects?

Certainly not as strong as in Bitcoin. And, you know, one can wonder how that's going to turn out. And then, yeah, I think with a lot of these smart contract applications, that's really the key question. And I think the other thing that ties into our ICO discussion here, the other big problem that I'm seeing is that during ICOs is so attractive. You can make you can raise a lot of money with you know little comparatively little development little you know in very early stage you give up little control and one builds kind of a community in the beginning right all of these things are extremely attractive so it's tempting do an ICO right I mean who doesn't want to do a NICO

yeah But the one big problem here is, well, I think there's multiple big problems. One, it can be the problem that simply the token doesn't really fit, doesn't really make sense, right? And maybe there's a business, but it's not around the token. Maybe there isn't the business at all. And it's going to be something that's commoditized. So I think that's one big issue. And the other big issue is, I think once you do an ICO, now you have this token.

Now you need to really design the whole thing around that token to make that token valuable. and it starts becoming more about the token than about creating something that's a good user experience that people really want. And I think that's extremely dangerous because if you get locked in in a certain path and now you have to kind of run after that

and it can take away a huge amount of flexibility when really you should be experimenting and seeing and testing what actually works. I think those are huge issues. Of course, we haven't really seen that play out yet because not enough time has passed. All these ICOs and all these projects are still in this kind of phase where... Yeah.

It's like honeymoon phase and then before it really, they have to prove themselves. But I think that's going to be a huge issue down the line. And of course, talking about ICOs, we are now also seeing a first massive issue or some massive issues coming up. You know, with TASOS having a very big crisis and some kind of... standstill between the board and the rightments and the company and then I'm sure that's not the last because conflicts of interest will be huge issues actually I won't mention the projects but during Devcon I was approached by and

ended up participating in discussions with two ICO teams who proposed the concept did an ICO raise the money build an alpha did some early tests in the while and I've come to the realization that the concept itself isn't that sound and these projects are like shopping around for for tweaks on their concept to change and go down a pass I don't think it's it's pretty uncommon yeah I think a lot of projects behind behind doors suffering from similar data knowledge. It's not uncommon for regular startups and you know that raise funds through VCs to go

through this type of thing. Absolutely. Why would it be any different for? Yeah but this is a huge difference right is that you have a disconnection between the company and the token right so it's easy for a company say okay we're going to pivot do something else because the investors say okay we own 20% of this company You still own 20% of this company. If they think that's a better business, great.

But here is a different thing, right? Because, okay, I want 20% of these tokens, but now they're going to do something else. And all of a sudden, the token aren't what I thought it would be or they have no utility anymore. Well, I don't feel so happy about that, right? There's also the accountability to the investors. So if you raise one at the VC, you know, like someone feel accountable to that investor to find a new business model, whereas perhaps with an ICO, you might just decide to not do something different. Yeah.

And so, but let's come back to the conference real quick. When we were mentioning earlier that one of the things that was nice about this event is that it wasn't, of course it's a developer, a developer event that doesn't really tend itself to that. So in the Toxon sponsors, ICOs were not so present, but we did see them in the periphery as like the speakers, sorry, not the speakers, but the attendees and people that were at the conference, everybody was talking about ICOs. And I think everybody who was at the conference either, you know, was approached or spoke to people who were doing an ICU or thinking of doing an ICO. And amongst

those, my feeling was that, you know, a few of them, you know, tend to seem to be good ideas and seem to have a solid team and solid foundations. Whereas for the most part, a lot of the projects that, you know, were floating around were somewhere in between mediocre and a bad idea. And amongst those were projects that were throwing parties and throwing massive amounts of money around to, well, get some developers drunk really basically. But, you know, this is some of the, this is part of the negative effects, I think, of this Money. Right. Of money and and we attended some parties there were every night there were parties after the event. I didn't attend any of them. You didn't attend any of them? Well, okay, well, we

attended some parties and there's sort of this this sort of like, you know at some point I think I said to you like this is like an episode of of Salem Valley like there is just some absurd absurdities with these parties right like people doing like flame, fire breathing, and like rolling cigars and it's all very nice. But is this really what we need in order to build like the decentralized application of future? There's like, there's a disconnect there between having, uh, ICU parties or whatever, like throwing money around and, um, actually doing some meaningful work. And I think the one thing that we need to talk about in this community is,

How much of that are we willing to accept and how much of that is just undesirable? Because money corrupts, power corrupts, and we don't want to get into a situation where good people are moving to do bad things or moving to bad projects or we're just bad people are moving into the space and monopolizing the conversation or taking advantage of people. I think that it's an important conversation to have at some point. Yeah, I mean, I don't quite share your perspective here. I think both being at the conference and some of these parties, I didn't feel there was so much success. I felt it was kind of, I mean, obviously we have a situation, right, where there has been a huge amount of wealth created in a very short time in this community.

But I didn't, and, yeah, of course it has effects, right? People maybe stay at nicer hotels and people, you know, that you won't concede that this is no longer a poor community. It's become a wealthy community. But I didn't feel like it was such a... I didn't feel here. This was so disturbing. It's just... It's the beginning of being...

It's the beginning of being disturbing. I think that there's a conversation to be had now before it becomes more disturbing. No, I think where the problem is, is actually not so much the existing community. and like I feel like conspicuous display of wealth. I think where the disturbing aspect and problematic aspect is is all of these other people who see, okay, a lot of money to be made here. Let me go in and like also do an ICO and do because that's where all the crap comes. I mean, I have so many people, you know, who have just, you know, it's okay, this business opportunity.

Let's do this studio. That makes no sense. and and you know then run lots of Google ads and Facebook and I mean we get a lot of emails like from many some random projects that you know want to be on a percent or pay us to be an IP center and all kinds of stuff like that and I think that's where that is a polling right but here at DefCon I didn't really share the same I don't mean to say that it was massively excessive and massively present but there is there is a sort of, you sort of see the beginning of that.

And I think that for a project, so I want to just make a clear distinction. So for example, like, so we'll talk about this, like, we can talk about it now, so Cosmos planned a retreat after Devon and Cosmo paid for their employees and for external people to come in and like spend a few days with them and work together, collaborate, you know, have, bring the community together. I think that this is resources and time well spent. Take that same money and put it towards a party at the Koko Bongo in Cancun, it's utterly worthless. So I would rather see projects investing in things that are worthwhile and that bring value

and that build community than on like flamethrowers. Sure. Well, if people want to see some really amazing. video they should check for like karma ikelox or something like that i saw preston and present bernard retweeted this recently i saw the video it's they did some sort of icio launch party in l.a and they have all these models and like Lamborghini or some sort of fancy car with like karma coin on it and champagne and red car it's completely absurd so if you want to see something like that excess and in a crazy way i think that's probably like a level of

of excess that you know you didn't see here we didn't see here but I personally don't want to see that in the space like I I want people to talk about it yeah so well let's let's speak a bit about the Cosmos retreat well what do you yeah so it's some context I mean you know when I joined Cosmos in January or ten in cosmos we're like five people so it's grown a lot since then now it's around 30-ish people working on it and approaching launch so it's getting kind of close still a bunch of stuff to do. But a lot of us came to DevCon and almost everybody came to this company to get together after

DevCon and including some people, externals that are associated with a project, kind of working on tandem and or being involved in Cosmas. So Mayor and Sebastian both joined. Yeah, we're still going on actually. So yeah, thanks so much for you guys for coming. Thanks for hosting us. So what did you think of the university? So my kind of background is I worked in the vaccines industry for seven years after university

and I did epicenter in my part time, right? So while I've been involved with crypto, I came to the cosmos retreat. I can have realized I've never understood crypto culture so much at some level. So, you know, like I'm doing this podcast. I go to like, I've gone to like three or four conferences. And in the conference I just see the talks. I necessarily don't make a lot of friends, right? I came to the Cosmos retreat and this is like the first times I get to make a lot of friends

because we are working together and we are having conversations. And to me what's like stood out is how paranoid the average crypto person is. I knew it theoretically. I understood it practically at the cosmos tree. But that aside. Can you give some examples? So I won't name the people but like there are people in the crypto community that they want to for example, I don't know, build bunkers.

in certain nation countries in certain nation countries and they change laptops every few weeks and and they want to stock up just the crypto community it's like the security minded community

these people existed 10 years ago you know there yeah yeah travel with like a wiped second hand laptops and new personal data is on it yeah all that kind of stuff Yeah, but like as somebody coming from a very different background, it was an amazing cultural experience. It's not culture shock, but it's interesting to see how people in the crypto community actually think, right? Beyond the technology, the cultural side of it.

So you felt this at the Cosmos retreat specifically? Yeah, Cosmos retreat specifically for the first time. Second thing I realized is hump, like the link between like keto diets and meat eating and crypto. Like two things that I ordinarily would say are totally unconnected but they're not really unconnected. There's some correlation, strange enough. Yes. Oh, there's a lot of vegetarians too. Yeah.

So veganism is also strong in the crypto community. Yeah, I found quite a few vegetarian and vegan crypto people. So, yeah, I think, like, this has something to do with, like, crypto is revolutionary. And I think you need to be somewhat of a weirdo to be involved in a community. And maybe if you're weird this way, maybe you're going to be weird in other ways as well. But the event itself, so I personally have been of, like, I've been following. Cosmos since 2014 and I've been a fan of Tendermint back then right and I've always so in 2014 if you remember there was this thing there was the Bitcoin side chains

project like the project that was supposed to kill all other coins except Bitcoin and if you looked at the details of the side chain project even back then you could see that there was some glaring problems with that model so when you have Bitcoin the main proof of work chain, it's hard to move those coins around because the main chain could always fork and then you had to wait like in theory three days before you could move a Bitcoin to a side chain. So even at that time I had done this hot experiment that if Bitcoin is not the ideal consensus mechanism for side chains, what is?

So Bitcoin, the side change project was the idea that given proof of work, how can we be build an internet of chains. And you could ask the opposite question. Given that I want to build an internet of chains, what is the ideal consensus mechanism? And even in 2015, I sought, like, tendament was one of the contenders. So when the tenderment project ended up being reconfigured

as cosmos, I think, end of last year, I was very interested in it. and I participated in the crowd sale. It's only one of two crowd sales I have participated in. I was very enthusiastic to come here. And like the Cosmos community has made a lot of progress in conceptually designing the system and implementing it. And like parts of the system,

like the consensus and networking are all already working. And I think the questions that remain are mostly about, are mostly economic. questions now and I think like once some of the economic questions around cosmos has solved this could go online and actually it could be a powerful system so my thoughts about the retreat was it was just really fantastic to meet everybody on the cosmos team so I mean we just strut on bills on on tendermint and we don't get to connect very much I mean aside from just like

you know me and you talking so it was really great to meet everyone and specifically like talk to the dev team I got to go in like a lot more depth on how how time it works the consensus model and yeah it's just again it's like it's so inspiring to sit with the people that are building the stuff rather than just like reading you know like whatever the company blog or not even the white paper you like you just and so there was there were some different workshops that I tend to one workshop. So I'd like to talk about just like this team. It's so young. It's so, it's like weirdos. You've got these like keto guys and like,

but yeah, you've got one of your researchers, his name is Sunny. Sunny. Yeah, so Sunny is 19 years old and Sunny. Sunny. And Sunny, you, you've got, you've got, um, one of your researchers. His name is Sunny. Sunny. Yeah. So Sunny is 19 years old. And Sunny, Sunny. um it's just insanely intelligent and hasn't been in the space for very long he's found about bitcoin like a year and a half ago so yeah a year and a half ago um and i was sitting at the table with a dinner with you guys and um uh just the the even the sky was going over my head you know so and he gave a talk actually uh so cosmos was hosting so the side events um after the conference at DefCon. And so Sonny gave a talk about building the internet blockchain,

I think it was called, something like that, in which he talks about some of the things that are desirable. And one of the things that he talked about, I thought was really interesting. I've never heard this before of this idea that, specifically with Cosmos where you can interconnect different blockchains, it's important to have sovereignty in a blockchain. And what he means by that is that a DAP should have sovereignty over its validators, over its code. And so an example of that is if you're a DAP developer, well, maybe you don't really care what's going on with other DAPs, right?

Like you want to be sure that your transactions are going to go through. And as a DAP developer, why should I, you know, depend. on the health of the network when all these other gaps. It's kind of like shared hosting, right? I'm a hosting provider. If I were on a website, I don't want shared hosting. I want dedicated hosting so that my app's going to run the very best. And similarly, if you look at Ethereum and sort of as a trained complete language, we've seen

time and time again that that opens up quite a few. problems, right? Potentialism vulnerabilities. Let's just look at what's happening now with parity. And what he suggests is having application-specific blockchains with very few op-codes, and those op-codes are built for that app, and you don't need to forget this idea of a turn-complete language. And, you know, a term-complete language has its benefits. It's great for boot-structing projects and getting projects off the ground and experimenting. But the once you get to production, You should be building your own infrastructure and your own applications running for your DAP.

So I thought that was a really interesting concept. And I don't know if anybody else is thinking about this or talking about this. But I think it's really relevant, like given especially all of the... Yeah. Whether it's the Dow hack, whether it's like a parody hack, which, you know, looking at the source code, is pretty lately absurd that this function would be. in there. So what do you guys think about this idea? Yeah I mean obviously I'm not I'm biased in this issue yeah I mean Sonny's talk is fantastic and we'll link to the

to the presentation in the show notes yeah maybe on YouTube if so we'll link to it you know what one of the fundamental things about tenement was the idea of separating the application from the networking consensus So the sunny explains is in a really nice way, right? We have like in Bitcoin, we had, you know, the consensus, the networking, and the application's all one thing, right? If you want to build something on top, like, it couldn't really. It was, it's very, way hard. And then you have this, like, funny things like counterparty that were these like really worked very badly.

And then in Ethereum, it's still all one thing, right? You still have the networking and consensus and the application as part of kind of like one big monolithic software package. But then the application is like general things so you can write stuff on top, right? So you still have like no flexibility to change, like to make low level optimizations and changes to the blockchain to the BM or to just how it works, right? But you could kind of generally write things on top. and that has great benefits, right?

It gives you a lot of flexibility, but it has also great problems, right? I mean, one problem being performance and scalability, right, that gets very bad. And another one being that it can also get very insecure. And yeah, we have seen exactly, I mean, we see that today perfectly expressed any term, right? So we have basically a network that is, you know, at the scalability maximum, right? They will need to make some massive changes to be able to support all those projects

that are planning the building on Ethereum. And the other thing is these attack vectors. And of course, we're recording this actually the same day that the parody multi-sig wallet got hacked for the second time, right? Because there was a previous version of the multi-sig wallet that got hacked a few months ago. And I think something like $150 million dollars

worth of ether, stuff destroyed, stuff. You know, I don't know, maybe they're going to do a hard fork and recover it, but, you know, maybe not. Certainly disaster. And that's very much, well, I mean, so that's two expressions of the flaws of Ethereum. And the third is the lack of governance. And of course, that's cosmos as well as many other projects that are now also focusing on having proper governance.

Because now how is that decision going to be made? Should Ethereum hard fork or maybe include in the next hard fork and unfreezing of those funds and so that people can retrieve them from these multisequals or not? Well, there's no real way for Ethereum holders to decide, to vote, to voice their opinion. So even knowing what the community wants, like, you can't really do it. I mean, people kind of tried to do this around the Dow hard fork, and I don't think it was possible to get a clear view. So what's left? Well, it's a bunch of developers, you know, core developers, a very small group of people, maybe 20 or something like that,

that in the end will kind of decide this for the most part. And, you know, that's disturbing, right? It's not decentralized. And it also goes completely contrary to the original Ethereum Value proposition. which, you know, ironically, Gavin Wood, who is, of course, the founder of parody who developed this multisic, he was one of the most outspoken kind of, you know, advocates of that vision of having code his law. He came up with this term, a legality, which he described as, you know, systems that can't

care, don't care, you know, so if the laws change, system doesn't care, you know, people political influence, all of that. that this is completely immune to it. Now, of course, already with the DAO hard fork, we kind of, you know, people kind of said, okay, well, let's kind of throw that out of the water a bit. And now we have this again. And I think, actually, if the theorem community,

as a community said, okay, we want a hard fork, you know, that would be okay, I would have no issues with that. But the problem is because there's no way for them to do that. There's no process, there's no governance. They can't do that, right? So we may have some ether, but like, We really don't have any saying this decision. And then in the end, it's a small group of influential people that make those decisions.

And of course, with PolkaDot being one of the biggest victims of this accident, you know, then it starts with coming. It was an accident. Yeah, it becomes about political influence, right? It becomes about, okay, you know, how much weight do they have in the community? How, you know, how much can they influence the developers, how popular are they? And that is certainly not the idea of blockchain. Just look at the future.

You know, there's thousands of applications built on Ethereum and production applications. You know, is it conceivable that you have an application that's made worth billions of dollars? And now this one little, you know, this one application, there's a vulnerability that affects that app. And now the entire network has to afford it. I see it really just, it's like, just take hosting, you know, 15 years ago, everybody had neutralized hosting. And if one application, one website was getting like a lot of hits or whatever, it would just bogged down the other thing.

And that's why we got compartmentalization and VMs and Docker containers and all this stuff. So I think it's, you know, kind of inevitable for the space to go in this direction for applications to build their own blockchains, to have their own validators. So if there's a problem with that application, well, then the governance mechanism in that, you know, decide whether or not they want a hard fork or do whatever, you know, like, do a rollback, and it doesn't affect anybody else. And then you have networks like Cosmos that allows for the, for, for transactional exchange between those different blockchain.

So I think if we go and sort of the software development, or sort of the, the way that, web application hosting has gone, we'll probably. see the same thing going in the botchance space yeah and I think it's desirable yeah the the governance question looks super interesting to me because I read a statement somewhere so there was this blog about how when the internet emerged like very early 90s there were there were lots of people that thought you know like the internet was going to bring some kind of freedom some kind of freedom from the confines of the nation state and the cyberspace would be this place where the nation state couldn't reach and

and we could build like new kinds of communities and then over time like as as like as the internet became became more and more mainstream the politics of the mainstream has started to enter or has entered into the internet right so like starting from geopolitical censorship across sites like China restricting things, Iran building a new internet and stuff to like corporate control, etc. So there was this statement which was whenever a mass of humanity enters a new technology, it brings along its own politics to that new technology. At some level, the question is, this year when you look at it, lots of big players are entering into the Ethereum space. So there's certainly large hedge funds entering. That's obvious, but you have like institutions entering.

And ultimately maybe someday you'll have like central banks and huge banks also a stakeholders to the system. So given that there are going to be such parts. there are going to be such powerful stakeholders in the Ethereum system with differing political capabilities. How do you, how you resolve, like, whose bugs and theft of wants to fix and whose you don't fix? It's going to become, it's going to become like a big political question. Right now it's just like parity.

Well, I mean, I do think cost Muslims, what you were kind of talking about, or that direction is sort of the answer, right? Because you will never have a central bank issuing money on something like the Ethereum, right? Something where they don't control the underlying network, this is just not going to happen, right? They may have their own blockchain that they fully control, right, where they issue money, they may allow that money being moved elsewhere and people building application on top, but they still control the source of the money, right, fully.

I think there's otherwise there's no way that you will get those kind of institutions onboard it because they will never cease control over such essential parts to you know anonymous minors somewhere or these like stakeholders and token holders that they don't know they can't contact they you know and they you know and it is even all kinds of legal issues probably right if it's like okay but maybe they're from countries that are sanctioned and politically inappropriate. So I think the aspects of companies and organizations and groups and communities to really control fully their own blockchains and those then being able to interact, there's no way around that.

I think that's the only way that this is going to really become a big thing. Yeah. So you should probably wrap that stuff. What are you guys looking forward to until the next devcon? Yeah. This devcon, I, for epicenter specifically, I did a small experiment. And whoever I met, right, so whenever I met somebody, I asked them a question. The question I asked is, what is the most mysterious project for you?

for you. And in order for a project to be mysterious, it has to be something that you don't understand. But there must be something about the project that makes you feel that this could just be a very big thing. So I asked everyone what's the most mysterious project they encountered. And I have this huge list now. I have this huge list of 25 projects. So I'll read out the name so Althea.

That's a mesh networking using Ethereum. There's Mysterium, VPN using Ethereum. Zero net. There's this thing called Singularity Net, which is a network of AI's running on top of Ethereum. So I have this list of 20 or 25 projects. I'm going to thin them down. And hopefully we're going to have some of them on epicenter so be prepared for some you know crazy episodes crazy technological futuristic

episodes was there like one or two projects that kept coming up again and again projects that kept coming up again and again actually not actually um i got i got like varied responses and um yeah there weren't too many duplications And I say it again, I'm looking forward to next year more tools and seeing more developers coming from outside the space. Yeah, I really think that that is the key to building the DAP future is getting people, just regular developers, right? Regular web developers or app developers to now have this whole,

other set of tools that can allow them to build decentralized apps. And so by tools, I mean the development tools, the networks, you know, whether the IPFS or IPDB and those coming to maturity, or whether it be just like proper training and proper tutorials and lots more YouTube videos and maybe this being talked about in schools perhaps or events that are more accessible to those communities of developers. that's one important. Yeah, I mean, of course, there's one thing I'm mostly looking forward to, which is the launch of cosmos and how that's going to turn out.

So that's certainly my number one focus and interest and what I feel super excited about and super interested how it's going to turn out. Yeah, so that's my number one thing. Great. Well, thank you to our listeners for once again turning in. Episendor is part of Let's Talk Daycon Network. You can invite on this show and lots of other great shows at Let's Talkbackcom. And so if you like the show, you can support us by leaving us a tip.

The tipping adjuster will be in the show description. And you can also leave us an iTunes review. And I also always help people find the show. And we very much appreciate it. So thank you very much. And we look forward to me back next week when we will be in different locations again. Good. Thanks so much.