The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Gitcoin: sustaining open source with cryptocurrency (Interview)

Episode Date: January 26, 2018

We're joined by Kevin Owocki, the founder of Gitcoin. Gitcoin is a platform to monetize or incentivize work in open source software. We talked about how Gitcoin sits at the intersection of sustaining open source and cryptocurrencies, their history and roadmap, their decision to leverage the brand name of Git, bug bounties, funded issues, web3, MetaMask, and the future of Gitcoin and how open source benefits.

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It is the foundation we're building upon. News and podcasts for developers. Head there now. Subscribe today. On today's show, Jared and I talked to Kevin Iwanki, the founder of Gitcoin. Gitcoin is a platform to monetize or incentivize work in open source software. We talked about Gitcoin and how it sits at the intersection of sustaining open source and cryptocurrencies. Two topics we absolutely love. We covered their history and their roadmap, their decision to

leverage the brand name of Git, bug bounties, funded issues, Web3, Metamask, and the future of Gitcoin and how open source benefits. So Kevin, Gitcoin sits at the intersection of two topics that we've been tracking for a while now. The first one is sustaining open source. And the second one is cryptocurrencies and blockchains and all that jazz. So let's start with the sustainability side of Gitcoin. Why is this a problem that you're personally interested in solving? Yeah, that's a great question. And I love starting with why,

because I think that everything sort of flows from that. But I've been a software developer for the last 15 years. I have a degree in computer science way back in 2006. And since then, I've built my entire career off of open source software and the GitHub ecosystem, which I think is like a pretty generational thing. If I was born 15 years earlier, I probably would have been doing a lot of Microsoft Stack stuff and a lot of closed source stuff. But my career has been built upon Python and Django and Nginx and Postgres, tools like that.

And so those are all open source projects. And at least the pattern that I've seen with my own open source projects, if you go to my GitHub, you'll see that there's about 15 of them, is that they kind of shark fin in that the interest really peaks when I get a fit of inspiration.

I put something out there, build a small community, and then something else happens that I'm interested in and I move on. But the bug reports and the community relying on the software doesn't end. So by using blockchain for incentivization mechanics and to sustain open source and to delegate tasks to the crowd, we're meant to try and fix that problem a little bit. So you're doing it with Gitcoin. Give us the elevator pitch of what this is

and what it does for people. Yeah, sure. So Gitcoin is a portmanteau of GitHub and Bitcoin. And what that means is we take any GitHub issue, you already work on'm relying on, and I can see that that issue board is overwhelming or it's got a lot of issues on it, I can place a cryptocurrency bounty on that issue in order to incentivize the repo maintainer to turn around the scope that I would like turned around preferentially. So it adds incentivization mechanics to open source software.

And let's see, the community is about 1,700 people at this point. I'd say that people join Gitcoin A, to make a little bit of money in open source, but also just to learn about blockchain with a set of peers that are also excited about Ethereum and Bitcoin and the web three, the evolving web three ecosystem. Cool. We'll definitely unpack the web three topic here soon. Let's talk about the name. That's the first time on the show too, web three. Nobody's ever said that yet.

That's right. We're cracking it here. You started the web 2.0 show back in the day, didn't you? Yeah. So yeah, that's an interesting aside there. The web 2.0 show obviously came around with Web 2.0. A lot of gradients, a lot of rounded corners, we used to always say. And, yeah, that was a fun show.

It started back in 2004, and I think it ended around 2009. Okay. Maybe we'll have to get the Web 3.0 show going after this. There you go. What do you think? Bring it back, man. I just find it so amusing that you're describing, like the way you define Web 2 is rounded corners and gradients.

Like for me, it'd be iOS apps and social media, but, you know. Oh, really? I think iOS came after Web 2.0. I think Web 2 was, for me, the epitome at the start of it was Ajax, specifically Dig.com. Okay, so you had like the democratization of content. Dig.com was huge. And they had their little dig button.

And the first time I remember this very distinctly, I clicked that dig button and the counter update without the page reloading, I lost it. I flipped out. I was like, what is this magic? You know, and that was when Ajax just became the bee's knees and to me that's that's what to win oh but definitely Adam speaks to the design style back then because he's bringing a designer's eye to the game yeah for sure uh I forgot about dig.com wow it's it's been so long uh you know reddit is where it's at reddit was like the

number two back when when dig was like the number one content aggregator of that of that era so times have changed kind of self they kind of self-destructed i was anti-reddit because i was such a dig uh fanboy that i skipped reddit went straight to hacker news and then hacker news became a cesspool so i went back back and found Reddit and I'm like, okay, I have, I've got a few cesspools to hang out in. And that's the current state of affairs.

At least in my life. Yeah. Interesting. So web three. Web three. So we'll, we'll, we'll table that for a second.

Well, let's get to the name get coin. Cause Adam, you and I were arguing about this and, uh, we were searching for like at least 20 minutes. Like what is, is it really a coin or not? Right. Because you said, you know, people can place bounties with cryptocurrencies. And so the assumption that I made and I was searching for it, I was wondering the current sale price of the G.I.T. coin of Git looking for a token and a ticker symbol and all that. And to be clear to the audience,

and you can explain some of the mechanics there, Kevin, is that there's no Git coin. It's just that portmanteau or two of GitHub and Bitcoin or Git and Bitcoin. But there's no Git coin. Yeah, and that's actually a question that we get a lot. And I don't know how many of your listeners are familiar with the ICO phenomenon, but there's this phenomenon in blockchain right now that's called ICO. And it stands for initial coin offering.

And the way it works is that if you have an idea for a startup you want to build in the blockchain ecosystem, you typically, the standard has become, you publish a white paper describing the idea. And the white paper also includes a specification for something called a token sale. And tokens are just unique assets that are available and trackable on the blockchain that entitle you to some right related to the project. So if you had like a distributed file storage network, then you could release a token called

Filecoin that would give you rights to store information on that distributed file network. It's like a very basic example of what a token is. And so we've kind of gone through this last year in which token sales have become really, really hot. People are 100x this last year in which token sales have become really, really hot. People are 100x-ing their money on some token sales. And people kind of expect a blockchain project to have a token and a token sale associated with it. I have 15 years of startup experience and I've never seen anyone ever raise $50 million, $80 million without even having a product to market yet. And so just like spiritually, it kind of felt wrong to back a token, back Gitcoin with a

token when there wasn't even a network. You know, I'm talking about this fall when I was putting the project together. So what we decided to do is sell funds for a little while and um and build a community and reach product market fit and it's possible that there will be a token down the line but i think that it's really important to have a culture that's focused on building things and learning about the ecosystem instead of like you go on the telegram channel for some of these some of these tokens and in all they talk about is the price of the token it's just it's just like the it kind of like poisons the culture i think if you if you

tokenized too early so that's sort of where the project is at uh but you know it's something that we're trying to work out with the name is how do we capture the the conciseness and the spirit of the project with the name but also let people know that there's no token it's just a network that's built around building we've been camping out in this sector for a while now and have have never really had deeper conversations like this on the show other than the ethereum show and the shows we've done around blockchain and hyper ledger but then you just said tokenized too early which i had never heard that phrase yet so i guess if you're on the end if you're where you're at maybe that's a often thrown out thrown around phrase but maybe another thing to talk about might be you know the attachment to

the brand git right we've seen some brands use it obviously github is the most influential user of a git based business brand and there's several others that have come and gone or still exist git labs another one that's direct competitor to git git hub um you know what's your attachment to you know what's the financial ramifications of that what are some of the downfalls were there some reasons why you chose the name git coin or even you know get involved anyways why is Why is that thing? Yeah, I mean, I think that there's obviously the attachment to Git, the version control system. When I moved from CVS to SVN and then over to Git

with version control, it was just kind of one of those mind-exploding kind of moments to see how easy it was to do branching and merging with the Git software. of technical careers and open source software being a path to middle class life for millions of Americans and probably tens of millions of people worldwide. So I mean, I think that there's that. There's obviously the sort of like action oriented way that you can use the coin with a double entendre. You're getting coins, which I think is cool. But yeah, so I mean, and, you know, I think that there's, as you mentioned, there's GitLab, there's GitHub, there's another project out here in Colorado where I'm based called GitPrime. And I think that, you know, hopefully we don't see any fatigue or, you know, any of these projects kind of at each other's throats because of the mutual use of the word Git.

It's kind of becoming an overloaded term. Isn't Git itself trademarked and owned, copywritten by Linus or the Linux Foundation or some legal entity that would own the rights to that? Yeah, it's something that when we were starting the project, we talked to our friends at another project that had used the Git trademark, and we had worked out sort of a scheme

in which we had thought that we can use that and still be in good legal waters. But I'm trying to get, you know, it's not that easy to email Linus, believe it or not. So I'm trying to find a way to get in touch with them. And well, A, I just think that, you know, it's not that easy to email Linus, believe it or not. So I'm trying to find a way to get in touch with them. And well, A, I just think that, you know, they're the spiritual ancestors of a generation of open source software. And I'd love to get in touch with them and see what they think about using blockchain

for incentivization. You know, if you read the cathedral and the bazaar, all the stuff about being open to the point of promiscuity and delegating everything. I think a lot of that came from Linus. So I'd love to get involved in that respect. And yes, obviously, the trademark stuff is something that we're looking at also. Cool. So the general flow of this conversation, I want to talk about really the idea and the model first, and then we'll dive into the technicals and the details.

And you can unpack a lot of these words that are either confusing or jargon that we don't understand as people who aren't building blockchain technologies, MetaMask, ERC-20, Web3, Dapps, like all of these things that can intimidate people when they're coming to this space. We'll dive into all that afterwards. So let's talk about the concept a little more. You mentioned incentivizing open source contribution through currency, right? Really through a programmable currency. What does that look like?

The obvious one is bug bounties. Is bug bounties, in terms of the model of payment, the end-all, be-all of Gitcoin, or is it just getting started? Yeah, I mean, I think that we're focused on incentivization on any GitHub issue. But that said, there are specific types of issues that are more easily delegatable than other GitHub issues. You know, obviously if you're kicking off a large epic or a large project, you don't

want to delegate that just to the crowd because that's going to need central architecture and the left brain talking to the right brain on that project. So we'd like to say that any issue where the ROI is high of crowdsourcing it is a good issue to put on Gitcoin. And I think you gave the example of bug bounties. And I think that that's a great place to start, provided that the readme is up to date, the code base is well tested, and the issue is reproducible. All of those things make it very easy to specify a bug that needs to be fixed. And those type of issues are really delegatable out to the crowd. What are the kinds of projects that would be able to fund?

In other words, you're creating a marketplace, right, of workers and payers, and you're using cryptocurrency as the mechanism for payment. But that's not necessarily generating the money, right? So like, if I have an open source project, and I have some stuff that I want done on it, and maybe it's really valuable in certain ways, but not necessarily, you know, I'm not a big business or I don't have a stack of cash on me. I can't really, I can't incentivize work on that based on Gitcoin because I don't have any coin, right?

So who's going to be bringing the money to this platform because it's classic, you know, two edged network problem of of chicken and egg. You need to have you need to have bounties. You need to have money there for developers to be interested in the developers, for people with money to be interested. So how are you going to bridge that gap and bring those people together? Yeah, I mean, I think that starting a double sided market, as you noted, is kind of a chicken and the egg problem, right? So how is Gitcoin going to do that? So there's the short-term strategy and there's the long-term strategy.

The first, I'll start with the short-term strategy just so you can see how we're getting the wheels turning. Gitcoin has now partnered with ConsenSys, which is a large blockchain venture studio based out of Brooklyn, New York. And they also happen to sponsor some of the best projects in Web3 in the Ethereum ecosystem. Projects like Metamask or Truffle or ConsenSys Diligence, GridPlus are using Gitcoin to incentivize action on their repositories. And, you know, those names might not mean a lot to a lot of your listeners. But if you're in Ethereum, wheels on the double-sided market. And right now, since we're all in the same portfolio, blockchain venture fund, due to all being involved in consensus, there's kind of uh i don't want to use the word synergy but i'm just going to use it because i can't think of anything else don't do it

there's a synergy there where we place bounties on their issues and it gets more issues to get or gets more users to get coin and it also pushes their repos forward so that's how we're getting it started. But the long term vision is to sell into projects that are cryptocurrency based and to let them see that, you know, if you're a project that just raised an ICO of 10 million dollars and a token sale of 10 million dollars and you've got some ether to spend and you're trying to hire up. Gitcoin is a great way to augment your development team with crowdsourced tasks. And it's also a great way to recruit because everyone I know who's recruiting software engineers likes to do a little test pilot project with them. Or at least some sort of technical interview to see what it's going

to be like working with them and what better way to figure out what it's going to be like to work with someone than to work with someone on something that's actually on the roadmap as opposed to something that just approximates what the working conditions would be like. So that's the short-term view. And then the long-term view is that Gitcoin is building up a suite of tools that are meant to help incentivize work in open source software. And in the future, it will not just be paying money in return for directed action on your repo. We'll actually allow repo maintainers to raise money using their GitHub repos. And the first step that we've taken towards that is by partnering with

Codesponsor.io and Eric Berry, who is the CEO over there has done an amazing job of building an ethical advertising network for open source software to allow repo maintainers to make a little bit of money off of the value they've created for the world. So I think that that project pairs really well with Gitcoin in that repo maintainers can raise money with Codesponsor and then potentially spend that money on pushing their repo forward. Very cool. That's exciting.

We're big fans of Codesponsor and friends with Eric, so happy to hear that that's going down and he continues to be able to work on that project, which otherwise looked like it was going to stall due to limitations on GitHub's platform. So that's very cool. Have you considered, so we mentioned like directed action

and it makes tons of sense to me that your prime place to get people to bring funds to the platform is blockchain companies because like you said, a lot of them have a lot of dispensable money that they may or may not have earned through displaying the abilities or future potential of their networks and products.

And like you said, they're also looking for people with applicable skills. What about security audits? Because that is a necessary thing, especially now that more and more of these developers who are working on these projects are writing code that directly moves money in and out of people's pockets. Surely security audits are going to become more and more essential as more and more companies have programmatic money. Have you considered Gitcoin as a potential platform for soliciting audits and that kind of stuff? Yeah. And yeah, I mean, just to take a step back before I answer your question, it is horrifying to go from web development where the worst thing you can do in the world is like drop a table in your database or like send an email erroneously to a place where you're moving

tens of thousands of dollars programmatically using your code. I mean, I think that that's a conceptual that if you're coming from web development, then it's sort of like a skill that we as a generation of software engineers needs to build. So I think you framed that really nicely when you said that these smart contracts are moving around a lot of money. But to answer your question, the applicability of Gitcoin that we've seen has been around security bounties in this area. So basically what you do is you put out a bounty for, let's call it, two Ethereum, which is worth roughly $2,000 right now. And you say, I invite anyone in the community to find a security hole in my product. And according to the OWASP model, if you find a critical bounty,

then, or sorry, if you find a critical issue, then you earn out the entire bounty. If you find a major one, you earn out 60%, et cetera. I think that when you're talking about security audits, which are more of like a,

you don't really want the crowd working on a security audit. You want someone who's got a lot of experience with smart contracts and you probably are better contracting with consensus diligence in order to get that done i think that's an interesting take too on on funding open source because like you know traditional models have been um you know here on your home page you've got find funded github issues which is the exact reversal of like, hey, just give a community or a project or several maintainers just money and hope they do well with it. Where this is actually funding directly, not so much somebody buying issues because somebody could just say, hey, project, here's $10,000 US dollars.

Convert that to ETH or bitcoin and fund whatever issues you need done like this is an interesting model of like funding the work rather than like just you know hopefully give you money altruistically or charity wise and you know what i mean like this sort of like puts value on the table on both ends you know monetary value for those doing the work but at the same time ways for open source to thrive and move forward in terms of progress yeah and i think on both ends, you know, monetary value for those doing the work, but at the same time, ways for open source to thrive and move forward in terms of progress. Yeah, and I think that one of the things that's really important in the Gitcoin model is that the people who are funding the work are aligned on the roadmap with the leaders of the repository. There's a Venn diagram there of the incentives and the governance of the repo.

And the ideal case is that that Venn diagram has heavy overlap. But I mean, I think that the macro turn that you're seeing with Gitcoin and some of these other projects that incentivize software development is the unbundling of corporate sponsorship of open source software. So, you know, there's the Red Hat Foundation and there's the Apache Foundation and there's all these other corporate sponsors of open source software. What if you could unbundle those business models

and allow the crowd to sponsor open source instead of just having corporate sponsorship of open source? And I think blockchain allows you to manage things a lot more granularly than the legacy financial system does. Yeah, I mean, I think from a developer's perspective, eventually you may find, if we find success with this model, a potential race to the bottom in terms of we're commoditizing our work

to a point where it's not worth as much, which, you know, maybe that's just the fact of life, but that seems like a potential downside for developers is now you're, you're basically, uh, not necessarily bidding.

It's not an auction for these things, but you have the projects placing the value and more and more people coming to that. Now you have people, you know, the competition gets stiffer, which will be fine. But then the other side of that is you have kind of a local maxima problem

where the work that is going to be done needs to be very small chunks and very well specified. And it's never the big picture stuff, kind of like you said earlier, Kevin, your left brain and your right brain talking together. It's difficult to crowdsource a Vitalik buterin to do his job that kind of a thing yeah so your thought your thoughts on those yeah i mean i think that that's uh that's that's a great point um and the commoditization of work is something that i think about a lot because Gitcoin is a fairly mission-driven project and it's built by developers for developers. And I'd like to think that we're building into a world

that is going to be better for developers, that developers want to live in. And there's sort of like the Upwork problem or like the Topcoder problem where you're basically racing to the bottom to bid for for for work that's not priced very well. And so we're taking steps to to make it coin a place where people can can build their careers

and build their portfolios and gain leverage over their lives. And I think that like one major step that we've taken since we last talked about Gitcoin is taking a stand against spec work, which I think is spec work is just basically like you turn around work for a bounty submitter and you might get paid or you might not get paid. So it's called speculative work. So we're trying to do a better job of allowing someone to claim a bounty and then have like a semaphore, like a lock, so that they're not doing spec work. And the other thing that we're looking to do is to branch Gitcoin from just being bounties and tips for open source softwares to being an entire suite of tools that allows you to be successful in this new blockchain-centric world, where the work is unbundled from working for a company and more centric around what project am I working on and what issues am I working on this week.

And a couple of products that you might see come from us that are meant to support the community in that vein in the next several months are A, a mentorship tool. So if you're a junior developer and you wanna get paired up with a senior developer, someone who has experience in blockchain, then we will hook you up with that. We're also looking at putting together a project, like a co-founder matching sort of system.

So basically, if you're a technical person and you need funding for your project, if you're a funder and you're looking for a mission to get involved in, then Gitcoin has a lot of candidate flow and a lot of developer flow right now. So Gitcoin can hook you up with people who can help you advance your agenda and advance your career in the longer term. But those are all things that are on the roadmap and it's an evolution that we're looking to go through in Q1 and Q2 of this year. I actually think that suite of tools addresses my other statement as well regarding the

small chunks, I think. Yeah, the small chunks as well. I mean, I guess the point I was trying to get to is there's certain developers or certain minds that the best model for them is to find a sponsor or a group of sponsors and that allows for them to just work and just do their

thing and the world will be a better place if that just happens you know and uh and so maybe you know with a suite of tools um you know you're not just bug bounty you're not just tips you have this mentorship thing you have co-founder matching suddenly you're like a tinder for developers oh that's crazy and you know perhaps there's even space for different kinds of scenarios to be built into the platform so i think that answers it yeah i mean i think what we're doing is we're basically building the emergent future of work uh and if you think about the the legacy model of how people find work, it just seems very broken to me. I mean, I wrote this whole series of blog posts about two years ago about how recruitment for software engineers is just fundamentally broken. I mean, you get this spam message from someone

on LinkedIn who barely understands your profile and barely understands the job that they're pitching and they get paid out 15% of the first year's salary of that engineer in exchange for getting getting that recruitment task turned around. And I just think that you're fundamentally better off when you have the people that you're working with involved in finding work and matching those people up directly. So I think that what we're looking to do is disrupt the way work has been done traditionally in large corporations and bring that more in sort of like a granular blockchain direction. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Linode.

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four months free with their basic server 20 in hosting credit once again leno.com changelog Kevin, why don't you tell us how Gitcoin works from a user's perspective, and then we'll talk about from a technical perspective after that. Yeah, sure. So Gitcoin, as we mentioned before the break, is a double-sided market that allows you to crowds, click on the fund issue button. And when you paste in a GitHub issue, we will preload a bunch of different metadata about that issue, like the title, the description, the keywords associated with the skill sets that you would need in order to turn around that issue

and provide you with a nice little fund issue button that you can click and that will submit that funded work to the blockchain. And once that funded work is on the blockchain and you've staked some ether or some Ethereum based token associated with the work, it'll get fished out to the Gitcoin Issue Explorer. And the Gitcoin Issue Explorer is the repository of work that bounty hunters can turn around. So we've got a community of about 2,000 software developers who are looking to learn blockchain,

who are looking to make Ether or Ether tokens in exchange for doing software work. And from there, they can claim the work, turn around the work, and they can get paid out in exchange for turning around the work. And so that's sort of like the end to end use case. But the the outcome for both parties is that the repo maintainer got some work that was on their roadmap turned around and the bounty hunter makes some Ethereum adds to their their Gitcoin reputation. And they also have formed a new relationship that could lead to future work or maybe even a full time job in blockchain. So that's sort of like the end to end of the bounty flow on Gitcoin. Very cool. So I'm looking at the issue explorer now.

And for the listener's sake, Kevin and I have chatted a while back, maybe about a month, month and a half ago. And it looks like you got a lot more open issues today than you did back then, so congrats on getting a little bit of progress on that front. Yeah, I think the statistic is $50,000 has been exchanged off the platform over the

last couple months, and we didn't even realize when we passed that milestone, our community guy was saying oh, we should have celebrated, but I guess we'll have to celebrate once we cross 100K. There you go. But on the technical side, as you load up in the top left corner, I don't know about yours, Adam, but mine says Web 3 disabled. Yes. Please install MetaMask.

So here's where whatever the current web is meets this new web 3 thing tell us about this and and what web 3 is and why i need to enable it to use gitcoin okay yeah so um web 3 is uh oh man i gotta like take a deep breath because it's just like once you start going into blockchain you're just in the rabbit hole of this whole world. But yeah, hold on to your butts because we're about to go there. So Web3 is what the Ethereum community calls our vision for the web when the web is blockchain enabled. So just to unpack that a little bit, you have, when you browse the web, you're using a web browser.

I'm a big fan of Google Chrome, but I also have Brave and I have Opera and Safari installed. And those applications are great at making HTTP requests to a server and then receiving a response and rendering all of the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, that kind of stuff. And in the Web3 model of the world, specifically the Ethereum Web3 model of the world, your browser will become blockchain enabled. And what that means is that it can read from and write to the Ethereum blockchain. And that's an important capability for a browser to have in the Web3 world

because the Ethereum blockchain is a store of value and a store of information that can be shared across the entire internet. It allows for something called FAT protocols, which is just basically a way of saying that Gitcoin can share bounties information with the bounties network is another bounties project that's out there. And what this does, the reason why it's pretty neat for it to be on the blockchain is that it prevents us from having vendor lock-in for our data. So, I mean, if you think about some of the problems with Web2, or at least in my opinion, some of the problems with Web0 is that your social network is locked into Facebook. Your search history is locked into Google. And if you wanted to transfer them to somewhere else, then it's not self-sovereign. You can't just go to a different social network and take your

Facebook social graph with you. And I think that this is a real problem if you look at the prevalence of hacks that have happened, particularly if you look at the Equifax hack that happened about six months ago. You as a consumer don't have self-sovereign control over your identity. And in the Web3 world, you will because there's these fat protocols where the data is stored on the blockchain in a way that can be migrated from site to site. And you as a user have control over your identity and who you want to give that information through, through your web three enabled browser. So, um, I know I just took y all through the rabbit hole of what some of this means and what it could potentially mean. But like the TLDR, like the sum is that if you install

a browser extension called Metamask on your Chrome, Brave or Opera browser, then that will give you Web3 capabilities in the web browser that you already know and love. So is Web3 an Ethereum thing or is it a blockchain thing? You know, it's like you're in a car and you take a look over your shoulder and you almost don't know your own blind spots. I don't know. I actually don't even know where I'm where i'm going with this analogy this is like

yeah i i i think i screwed up the analogy but i i think i don't know what i don't know because i'm so ethereum has 30 times the developer interest that the next biggest smart contract platform has so i mean like maybe there's other projects that have this vision of web 3 but ethereum's kind of by and large the one that's got the most momentum towards building it and i also don't pay attention to the other platforms because i just think ethereum's becoming the emergent standard for this for this so so i guess this is a long way of saying, I don't know, but who cares if it's not Ethereum? Okay, I mean, I think there's maybe tunnel vision was the analogy you're trying to apply there. Or maybe that has more of a negative connotation than you'd like to apply.

Because it seems like, and I'm getting now from the technical details to kind of more philosophical once again but um it seems like you're saying that you're there's these silos of information and they live on in these you know in in your facebook in your twitter in your in your gmail and like the web 3 is this this you know freedom of my data to move about and these other things as well as as basically payments involved. But if it's all on the Ethereum blockchain, then I'm basically just moving from one silo to somebody else's silo. And Ethereum is definitely the initiator of the smart contracts movement and the very first thing of its kind,

but rarely is the very first thing of its kind the only thing that has success in that space, or even often not even the main thing 10 years from then. So I'm just wondering if the Web3 is very much like Ethereum people are doing this, or if they're trying to bridge all the blockchains. Yeah, no, I mean I think it's good to have this this check on our the ethereum vision i mean i think that one of the powerful things about blockchains is that if you don't agree

with the governance of them you can fork them just like you can fork a github repo if you don't believe in the product roadmap or the product maintainers, you can fork it. And you can do the same thing with the blockchain and just create your own, you know, I could create Kevtheorium and do whatever I want. And the more people that agree with my vision in the world, the more people will follow my fork instead of Vitalik Buterin's fork. So, I mean, I think that, you know, it's a little bit apples to oranges to compare Facebook's and Google's data silos, where they've built this like, business model off of spying on their users, and they're not going to give up that data, like they're going to hold on to the doorframe on the

way out. Whereas Ethereum is built around this open model, in which anyone can fork it. So I think that that's a primary, that's a primary difference there i think the law the line i was drawing is more along portability not necessarily like evil intention but i definitely agree with you that those are definitely two different things let's talk about metamask because it says web3 is disabled we'll get back to the technical side and also maybe the adoption side because when it comes time to web3 we talk about like you have your normal browsers and then now we have web 3 browsers which aren't don't really exist

so metamask is a chrome extension so sure please install metamask so right now to ride the web 3 the ethereum based web you're basically talking browser extensions is that ever going to be really adopted to a point where it could be big?

I mean, I'm sort of here to shill Ethereum, so I'm going to say yes. He's honest at least. More seriously. So, I mean, I think that, you know, when you look at any new technology, it's all about drivers and barriers for consumers so you know one of the big drivers for people getting into blockchain is they want to get rich like in you know i've purposefully not talked about the price of any of these assets on this blockchain because it's just like not something you know it's it's not our niche and it's not something that uh that i think is the best use of our time. But I think that it is when people read the articles about the price that you see the press writing bring a lot of people in. blockchain, hopefully their incentivization moves from just getting rich quick to seeing this whole

vision of the Web3 world that has less intermediaries, can disintermediate the financial system. And I think that the potential that I sum up the drivers in this ecosystem is, I think that blockchain can do to the financial industry what Napster did to the recording industry. That's how big I think this could potentially be.

And so that's how I like to sum up the driver side of the equation. And then the barrier side of the equation is just like how frickin hard is it to use and the answer like you know and this fits into your question about meta mask like meta mask is beautiful it's this like they've got their logo is this like polyfill Fox that follows your browser like your cursor around and it just looks very nice and polished, but you still have to install it in Chrome. And the answer in 2018 is, yeah,

it's kind of a pain in the butt to install this onto Chrome, but we're building a platform for the future of the web and the time horizon for what we're building is 10, 30, 50 years, and so I think that you're gonna see adoption increase. If you build the right products for the next five years, you're going to see adoption massively increase over that timescale.

Yeah, I don't know about you, Adam, but when I see install MetaMask, I'm just like, close tab, I'm done. And I'm an early adopter, generally speaking. Well, I guess it depends on your real reason. Like if we're just here as journalists, you know, doing a podcast, you know, maybe close tap. But just kidding. It kind of depends on your on your motives.

Right. Because but any sort of hurdle that is like above and beyond the norm of like everyday Internet as we know it, it's probably like I'll wait till i hear feedback from really close friends or a really good article from said thought leader and then i'll dip my toe in so maybe we need some of those to say hey or a killer app right like something that's so compelling something that drives you for developers get coin could be that because like i said you could get paid which is what i think kevin speaking to is like well there's good money to be made here and so that's a great driver for people as we see people talking about price action are mostly trying to make money quickly and so that

could be a motivating factor um or some sort of website that you go to and everybody's talking about and it's not like a crypto kitties type of a thing but it's like actually like somewhat revolutionary and just says you install MetaMask. At that point, you're like, I really want to use this thing. I guess I'll do that. Is a browser in the works then at some point,

do you think, Kevin? Or is this like you'll just leverage the fact that Chrome and others are out there and you have extensions? Yeah, I mean, I'm not, you know, the honest answer is I don't really know. There's the Mist, you know, the Mist browser is the Ethereum native one

and I think its adoption is like 0.0001% or something like that, but it's more of a reference client. So that's not a good direction to go then. Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I don't know what penetration is going to look like in the next several years. And one of the routes that we've thought about going is having a custodianship model of your funds on Gitcoin. So basically, you know, in this hypothetical version of the world, Gitcoin would hold your private key do all of the web3

bridge stuff and then you could just interact with it with a deposit or a withdrawal function on your like on on gitcoin.co so i mean i think that that's one direction where things might go and i think that the big question that's up in the air right now is how much of this blockchain enabled functionality do we want to put in the end user's hands? Yeah. Uh, it's the pros, even in like a prosumer's hands and how much do we want to hide from them and

just have blockchain in the back? I honestly think that that model makes a lot of sense for the short term because, you know, people are, especially with small amounts, you know, like if I want to sign up for get coin,

maybe I make half an eath this week maybe at one you know we're talking like hundreds and then maybe thousands of dollars over time of course it would build up but then you could just transfer out i mean people trust exchanges like you said with a custodial model for small amounts and small amount of times yeah and it greatly reduces that barrier of people who are intimidated or don't want yet another extension or to use Mist. Doesn't Brave have a lot of the stuff built in? I think Brave's an up-and-coming browser that a lot of us nerds would be more willing to try.

But yeah, I think that might be it. I mean, we're not necessarily here to give you product advice, but maybe we are. So that might be a good idea to try. What he's describing is very analogous to the freemium model of web apps. It's like you you got to provide some sort of path to give people the option to try and you can do it with limitations you know so in your case you can do that with say limited funds

or some restrictions to protect both them and you and incentivize them to take the plunge and install metabase or do whatever necessary hurdles or hoops required to become a full-fledged Web3 user. Yeah, and I think that it depends on the, you got to build the right product for the audience that you're going after. One of the reasons why we're sort of making a strategic bet on Metamask is that we're building a product that's for open source software developers who by definition want to work on blockchain stuff so i mean if you if you're not going to install metamask on your browser and and and use web3 then you're kind of not willing to put up table stakes to to even be serious about this about the system but as gitcoin grows and

we try to capture more web2 projects, we're going to have to either adapt or the users are going to have to adapt. And that's just a reality of consumer internet. This episode is brought to you by Google Cloud Platform and their awesome weekly podcast where Google developer advocates answer questions, get in the weeds, and talk to experts, customers, and partners about GCP. Here's a preview of episode 111, where Mark Mandel is asking Sam Ramji about products he's passionate about in the future of cloud. Are there particular technical products that we have or potentially may have in the future that get you really excited? Anything you're particularly passionate about right now? Oh, boy.

I mean, just pick one. I was going to say, clearly, I'm not a very passionate person. I'm really lucky I get to care about all the things I'm doing. There's a lot of real interesting things happening in terms of how we take code, which is a developer's set of intents, and turn it into running production systems that developers and operators can both collaborate on. There's a whole chain of technologies there, both first-party technologies and third-party

technologies. Third-party like Spinnaker that we've gotten into. It's an open source project that was started by Netflix and we've gotten really involved in it. It's a really nice way to do multi-cloud computing. And all of these things really need to come back to giving developers control of exactly how they want their code turned into an artifact like a container, how they want it structured into services and pods, and where they might want to run it. So I think part of what brought me to Google is this core belief in open hybrid cloud. When I left Cloud Foundry, I had spent two years committing all of my heartbeats to putting technology back under the control of the companies that use it rather than the companies that sell it. And part of what brought me here was Brian Stevens said, you know, our mission is to be the open cloud. I said,

you must be kidding me. That doesn't make any sense. Every hyperscale cloud provider is clearly an ambitious monopolist. Not at all. Right. So when we look at this. So if you're looking to move to the cloud or generally interested in deeply technical cloud focused conversations, check this podcast out. It publishes weekly and you can subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, YouTube and more. Head to GCP podcast dot com and look for the big subscribe button at the top right hand corner. Once again, GCP podcast dot com. gcppodcast.com So let's dive into the technical nitty gritty from an implementation perspective. And we'll talk more about MetaMask because you can tell us exactly how that browser extension that represents the user somehow as a wallet, I suppose, interacts with Gitcoin specifically. But I'm sure it'll apply generally to Web3 websites.

Explain to us how it works from a technical perspective. Implementation of the Gitcoin website with MetaMask and the interactions between the browser extension and the website, and I'm sure there's servers, and there's the blockchain. Tell us how it all works technically. Yeah, so I mean, I think you can think of the blockchain in the Ethereum blockchain as a giant distributed database. And what the blockchain does is it allows you to manage trust between parties across the internet. So one of the reasons why that's really powerful is we can store all the information about the bounty task on the

blockchain and that can be the source of truth for all parties about the state of the task. So in contrast to a legacy financial system, crowdsourcing platform, like let's say Upwork, for example, Gitcoin never actually is an intermediary that holds any of the funds between the bounty submitter and the bounty hunter. So when you post a bounty to Gitcoin, you're actually submitting it to the Ethereum blockchain. And the funds that you're associating with the issue live on the Ethereum blockchain, which is just a massive, massive simplification over the credit card and legacy financial system where we would have to deal with translations between currencies and having a legal structure associated with doing escrow and stuff like that. So basically the task goes onto the Ethereum blockchain.

And the way MetaMask works is it's just basically a Ethereum wallet that allows you to confirm that you meant to put that information on the blockchain. And the technology that powers MetaMask is actually RSA public private key encryption. So if you want to do a transaction to the Ethereum blockchain, you're signing it with your private key. And that's how the rest of the computers on this giant distributed database know that the funds are authorized to come from you and that the information actually came from you. So it all goes out there into blockchain world and then other people can pick up

the funded work and turn it around by submitting their own transactions to the blockchain, which claims the funded work on the platform. So this all is functionality that lives on smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. And that's a pretty powerful way of removing the need to have an intermediary, the need to do international translation of currency. And the other powerful use case that this enables is the ability to pay your bounty hunters with tokens. So if you think about all these ICOs who have raised $10 to $20 million to fund their projects, they probably have some ether on hand that they can use to incentivize actions out of their community.

But they also probably have a native Ethereum token that they can use to incentivize work on their repo. And that's powerful because it allows them to tie their incentives as repo maintainers with the incentives of the person who turned around the work because they both hold the same token that rises and falls with value, rises and falls in value associated with the work that's being, or the success or failure of their project. So I think that that's an interesting use case that could never even exist in the legacy financial world. So Ethereum is the network, and so Ether is the token, but you're saying that people can use their own compatible tokens for their specific projects yeah and in the the in that standard is called erc20 uh erc20 is just it's like think of it like a java style interface that defines functions like

deposit and withdraw and transfer uh and things of that nature and so you can basically mint your own token that, uh, that can be used for, uh, think of it like a software license for a product that, that you're putting out there. It's a unique, scarce, uh, asset that you can put out on the blockchain. Very cool. So you could actually post those on Gitcoin as let's just say there was a log token and it's just for us. It's only for us. We have, we have issues, and you can say it says five log, and then people will get paid in log, and then that would be fungible with Ether, or do you have to convert it to Ether

before you actually post it? Yeah, I was just giggling over here a little bit, because I'm a very visceral person, and I think of log, and I think like a little tree stump or something like that. But yeah, I mean, so it's yes, that's basically how it works. It's sort of a contrived example, though, because like the tokens that are most valuable represent some sort of enforceable right to do something special with the tokens like your log tokens don't do anything other than have a sort of like branding association with your project like the in order to give the log tokens actual value so people

would care about them they could be redeemed for something associated with with your project ideally well you're just assuming our log tokens don't have any value, but maybe they have all sorts of value that I didn't tell you about yet. Well, in today's ecosystem, I wouldn't be surprised if they went 10x. I'm cranking out a white paper tonight. We're going to have logs in the morning.

But, you know, I try to take a long-term view on this because I think it's really 1996 right now for blockchain. I mean, that's how early we are in this this whole new this whole new world. And the pump and dumps and all the tokens that are that are just cash grabs are eventually going to get filtered out just because of the Darwinian nature of capitalism. But what's going to be left is the facebook or the google of web 3.0 uh well i don't know invite me back on in 2025 and we'll see what happens we will yeah i mean i don't know specifically about you know web 3 and ethereum although it's definitely like you said has huge a huge advantage and and the developer focus is is on it But my current take, and I've been watching this space relatively closely,

is that is it a mania and a price bubble and all that? Yes. Is it also actually revolutionary technologies that someday will change the way things work? Yes, I think both those things are true. And so it's tough to see the long term when you're staring at all of the frauds and the scams and the people who like the bit connects and stuff that are you know going to zero while everybody loses

their savings but yeah that doesn't mean there's not like there isn't real value underneath and i think there is so that's my take. Yeah, and I largely agree with you. I mean, I think that another parallel is the internet bubble. And I think the key is to invest in the Yahoo or the Amazon and not the pets.com. Right. And the internet bubble was a bubble, but it was also a fundamental shift in the way the world organizes its information. And so I think that what we're seeing here is a fundamental shift in, possibly a fundamental shift in the way the world organizes its finances. So I think that blockchain,

what TCPIP did for information, there's the potential that blockchain will do for the financial system. And there's obviously huge upside there. But under the guise of upside, there's going to be the BitConnects of the world or projects that are just looking to hang on to the trend. And this is actually one of the one of the reasons i started gitcoin was to allow people to have the skills to uh to thrive in this new blockchain ecosystem i think that uh educating people and and helping them learn to use the tools and build meaningful relationships is how we mature the ecosystem so it's it's one of gitcoin's missions well let's actually let's let's go there then so let's let's imagine a developer who would love to get on you

know gitcoin and and get paid um pick an issue most of these are related to the ethereum network um so they're gonna have to have working knowledge of Here's, I'm trying to pull one that would actually be good for our use case, multi-auth methods per resource. These are hard to parse. Sounds simple. Yeah, these are hard to parse live on the air. But let's just say they pick one out, and it's for a specific, like here's one that was posted by the Truffle team.

How does somebody get started? I mean, maybe you can even tell us about how you got started, although I'm sure it's better now than it was back then. It's been a couple of years of maturation, but you know, the jargon, the interaction with the browser extension, with the EVM, the Ethereum virtual machine, writing a smart contract, what are the best ways that people can actually, you know, dip their toes in the water and see if this is the kind of coding that they want to do? Yeah, I mean, I think that everyone's got different learning styles. Me personally, I learn best through immersion.

So I went to hackathons. I read the Truffle Docs. I built one of their little tutorials. What's Truffle for the audience? Oh, yeah. I'm so saturated in this that I forget that I'm using buzzwords even when... But anyway, so Truffle is like... Think of it like Ruby on Rails, but for the Web3 ecosystem.

So it allows you to manage your smart contracts and your tests for them, your migrations, your deployments, stuff like that. So it just makes Solidity and smart contract programming way easier. Okay. So you said immersion, you went to the hackathons. Yeah. I mean, I think that the number one value proposition that Gitcoin has for its users is immersion in a community that's excited about blockchain. So if you join our Slack, there's channels for Python, for Solidity, JavaScript, C Sharp, anything like whatever programming language you're into. And there's people in there that are excited about blockchain

and helping you gain the tools in order to be successful there. So I think that's the first place that I would recommend people check out when they're trying to get involved in Gitcoin. And then the second thing that you can do is you can go claim an issue out on the issue explorer. And that's just an opportunity to get paid to work on open source blockchain issues. hourly rate for a blockchain engineer on Gitcoin has been about 40, $45. So if you're into making a little bit of extra capital while you learn a lot, then that's a, that's another way to do it. That's an interesting perspective too.

Cause like some people out there will be doing these things and not really finding a way to, you know, financially gain. Right. And this is one way you can do kind of what you just said there do something that you already kind of know a bit about use your expertise but at the same time learn a bit more and and also get paid that's not something that you see often yeah i mean i think

another piece of upside that's that's sort of important here if you're playing the long game you know is is the relationships that you're going to build in this ecosystem. Because the people that you're going to meet on the Gitcoin Slack or when you turn around an issue for Truffle are going to start companies or important open source repos that could potentially be hugely important in this new blockchain based ecosystem. So I think that's one of the one of the upsides that I think people should be focused on in addition to the extrinsic monetary capital gain stuff. Yeah, definitely. It feels like an ecosystem, which is burgeoning, but small enough that you can definitely make connections. Like the projects there, there, there is a, some sort of of a i don't want to call like a

symbiotic relationship but there's like a an interesting i don't know like a crossover between open source and blockchain technology so we're like most of them are open source projects as well they're just like open source projects that are like have their financials either as the foremost thing or at least figured out right up front. They have issues with how they're going to run their governance and there's people trying different governance things. They have issues with how the funding all works and then they have the code and who does what and the bounties and I just there's a huge

crossover between the two and so it'd be familiar and yet different I guess when you when you dive into those things but I guess the point I was trying to get to at is when you get involved in open source project and over time you make friends you know you said, you network, and there's a real community that forms. And in this case, that same thing can happen. And the people who are building these things, because it is small and burgeoning, often can go on to build interesting and different things as well. Yeah, and I think the key thing about Gitcoin is it's a way to get involved in the ecosystem when you're not exactly sure what your play is. We've got a lot of people in there who have corporate jobs that they're looking to make a next move from or they're freelancers who

are looking for their next gig. But they recognize that blockchain is this new frontier that could potentially be important. So, you know, it's only one way to do it. Like I'm going to the Boulder blockchain meetup tonight, uh, to nerd out with people in the local community. Uh, and there's going to be a hackathon and Ethereum hackathon out here in Colorado called ETH Denver in the middle of February. Uh, and by the way, applications are still open. Uh, if this airs before January 30th, applications are still open. But there's a lot of people in the world who aren't privileged enough, like who aren't like privileged like I am and get to just go down the street and go to a blockchain meetup. So by providing an online hangout for

people to figure out this ecosystem, I think we're going to help people immerse and be successful. And, you know, that's really what the mission is. It's to push open source forward and to help people navigate this new ecosystem. Well, I mentioned your updates to the website since the last time you and I chatted. You've also slightly tweaked your mission statement, your tagline, which was push open source forward.

And now it's push open source repos forward slight change maybe we're looking staring at the trees and not looking at the forest here but just that was curious to me i wonder what your your shift in in uh motivation for adding the word repos in there was uh i think you've stumbled upon an ab test that we're running right now i'm a b test too then because I've got that as well. If you're listening to the podcast and you want to tweet us and let us know whether you like push open source forward, push open source repos forward, or grow open source,

it's something we're trying to figure out right now. Very good. I like them all that doesn't help me call a test though yeah exactly I think I would go for your original one just because it's just one last word and it's implied and also has a larger context because things might live outside of repos

if you're also reading into the language pushing sometimes can be slightly aggressive right even if it's for the goodwill of the the person or the thing or the object you're pushing you know sometimes it's not even willingly being pushed so yeah that's true i kind of like you know i think of open source uh i'm kind of leaning towards grow open source and it's because i kind of think of open like growth is something that happens sort of naturally when you give it the right condition when you give something the right conditions to grow and i think that open source like well obviously like if you look at a map of how linux has evolved over time it kind of looks like a tree but uh i like the analogy of the

natural world just because let's be honest i live in colorado and i'm kind of a hippie and i love spending time outdoors but i actually the more i think about it i think i like grow open source too all right i just i switched my i went to from a to c i don't like c the most on my ab on your abc test well kevin anything else uh you want to chat about with regards to get going before you let you go uh you know I think like my parting thought would just be that the ecosystem is kind of crazy right now, the blockchain ecosystem. And, you know, if you hold on to your values and you focus on building and don't get caught up in all of the hype and all of the hubbub about price and just focus on building skills and making meaningful relationships, then that's how I advise people to get going in this ecosystem. So build something meaningful. What about to those maintainers out there that are thinking,

geez, I can find more support or find interesting ways to leverage this new stuff happening out there and also fund issues or fund the future. Yeah, I mean, so the way to get involved with all of that is to follow Gitcoin on Twitter. We're Gitcoin, G-E-T-G-I-T-C-O-I-N, or to go to Gitcoin.co and sign up for the Slack channel. There's a bunch of smart people in there nerding out about blockchain technology,

not the price, and building great stuff. So that's a way to get involved in the community. Cool. Kevin, we'll leave it there, man. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you very much for having me. All right. Thank you for tuning in to the changelog this week we love doing this show and if you love this show share it with a friend rate us an apple podcast time go to changelog.com and subscribe

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