Transcript

[00:14] SPEAKER_00: So I first heard about Bitcoin in March 2011. So first time I heard about it actually my dad told me. He just found out about it. He told me, hey look, it's this decentralized currency thing. And I actually discarded it for the first time because something that has no intrinsic value, why would it ever become valuable? But then I heard about it again after a few weeks and so I thought this might be something actually serious and worth getting into. So I went online on the Bitcointalk forums and I tried to figure out what are some ways I can actually earn some bitcoins. So I started writing articles for this website called Bitcoin Weekly. They were paying me 5 bitcoins an article which was actually $4 back then. So my first ever job paid about $1 an hour, earned 20 bitcoins, spent eight and a half of them on a T-shirt.

And then it just kept on going from there. So Mihai Alisie contacted me in about September 2011. He said, oh hey, I'm founding a magazine, do you want to become a writer for us? And so I became a co-founder for Bitcoin Magazine. Then it kept on going. In 2013 I left university to travel around and work on Bitcoin projects full time. So I went to the U.S., to Europe, Spain, Italy, Israel. And then eventually I got into this more interesting area of Bitcoin that people are calling cryptocurrency 2.0 which is basically to use, to look at the cryptocurrency, the blockchain technology and to use it for more than just Bitcoin the currency and more than just money.

So there's a couple projects called Colored Coins and Mastercoin that I was doing a bit of work for. And then I started looking at all these protocols with many different features and I was thinking how do you generalize them? How do you make something that allows you much more freedom without making an over complicated protocol? So I came up with this idea of having a blockchain with a built-in programming language. And that's basically what Ethereum is.

Yeah, quite a nice conference, lots of interesting people here. You know once you go through enough of these conferences you start seeing lots of familiar faces. So you know, just back to another great event with interesting presentations. Get Ethereum done.

The big crypto platforms that are being developed or that are out right now, I would, so the newest one that's just released their white paper a few weeks ago is Open Garden, basically a decentralized mesh networking protocol. The company has been around for quite a while now, but they've just recently released a white paper of the new protocol and they've put out a coin and they're going to have a crowdsale for it in a couple of months. So that's something that I'm very interested in.

Then you have MaidSafe, which is sort of like a full stack Internet decentralization, decentralized application platform. Also doing things like file storage. Another file storage one is Storj. It's done by a guy out of Texas, I believe, Shawn Wilkinson. Also something I'm following. I suppose there's also Invictus which is basically doing somewhat similar things to ourselves, but they're following a different path and a somewhat different target look. They're basically trying to create lots of different blockchains for specific purposes as opposed to general purpose computing, which is what we're targeting.

I'd probably say those are probably the big ones. There's also some smaller platforms like there's Mastercoin, which seems to be getting popular actually as a protocol for conducting crowdsales of other protocols, and Counterparty which is pretty much equivalent to Mastercoin. And there's also on the privacy side there's some interesting ones. So for example Darkcoin, it's basically like a currency with a built-in, more decentralized CoinJoin system. And of course Zcash is the one that we all really hope takes off.

I mean at this point it seems to be moving a lot toward these sort of cryptocurrency 2.0, more advanced decentralized applications. In our case, we're doing the Turing complete computing blockchain. Then there's also the multi-blockchain approaches, even other types of decentralized protocols. So things that are moving toward greater levels of complexity and functionality. And also at the same time there's going to be solutions targeting scalability. So it seems like it's going to be a combination of different platforms that are optimized towards different purposes and protocols using different ones together.

I would have preferred the thing to have a permanent linear model actually. I mean it is kind of unfortunate that by the time anyone has really heard of Bitcoin, 25% of all the bitcoins were already gone. It creates this sort of strange inverse effect where you know the people. Everything that happened in 2009 is suddenly a thousand times more important than everything that's happening in 2011 or 2012. So that probably is one of the parts of Bitcoin, the rapid deflationary curve that I don't like so much.

[06:01] SPEAKER_01: Right now I'm working with the Ethereum project which is a… You know what Ethereum project is?

[06:07] SPEAKER_00: No.

[06:08] SPEAKER_01: So it's a way of decentralizing transaction-based processing. So it's a bit like Bitcoin but with not just for financial applications, but rather for all applications that need some form of agreement between two parties.

The idea of different proofs in order to solidify the blockchain. So proof of stake being obvious, one proof of excellence as well are really interesting ways of reducing this problem of lost power and lost energy that we have with bog standard proof of work. So as far as the altcoins concerned, I'm really interested in the experiments that they provide in this direct.

I think the change is going to be largely socioeconomic in its nature as more and more people come around to the idea of not having to trust in authorities in order to provide certain basic rules and laws of society, such as the ability to have common currency, that's going to affect how…

[07:22] SPEAKER_00: People.

[07:24] SPEAKER_01: Look into their general interactions and how they build agreements with each other.

Web 3.0 might also be termed the Post-Snowden Web. So it's this idea that authorities are not always trustworthy. They don't always act in the same way as how they say that they act. Precisely. And so Web3 seeks to rebuild what is commonly understood as the web, but with a set of technologies in order to decentralize even the notion of having to trust such third parties and authorities.

And so what we can do is build trust relationships with each other when necessary and at other times not have to trust anybody at all in order to do certain interactions or agreements where normally an authority would be required. So Web3 is kind of, will deliver a certain trustless decentralized set of technologies in order to rebuild how we interact.

It's a hard question to answer. I would say you can't go wrong with studying the fundamentals of computer science and economics. I think those are really where things are going. We're going to see a real mixing between the two. How do we build systems whereby it's very difficult for any one individual party to game the outcome. So game theoretic specifically in economics would be a very useful area of study. But similarly the fundamentals of computer science and programming and how those two fit together, in particular the declarative paradigm of programming.

Net neutrality is a very important paradigm that the Internet was originally built on. And I think it really does need to be continued into the future. I would hope that Web3 will help cement net neutrality by reducing the necessity for having individual organizations that provide services and have services being provided by all of the people who want to take part.

Economic institutions tend to be built upon a notion of the middleman, of taking two parties and bringing them together and charging for that service. Because Ethereum exists as a method of arbitrating such interactions but in a trust-free authoritative manner, in a way there aren't many economic institutions that could not in some respect be substituted by the system. So really the question should become how will economic institutions change in order to best utilize the coming technology?

To answer that question I think is difficult to do up front. But certainly economic institutions should get used to the idea that authorities are not necessarily going to be needed to arbitrate such interactions in the same way that perhaps lawyers will, their job will morph into the future, into not necessarily people that arbitrate between parties, but rather people that explain repercussions to individuals up front. And so it will become hopefully a bit more of an honest game.

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