#208 : Post DevCon3 Roundtable: State of Ethereum, Cosmos Retreat and Parity Hack

Transcript

[Music] welcome to epicenter of the showers talks about the technologies projects in starch are essential is Asian and the global blockchain revolution my name is Sebastian Cuchillo and my name is Pham foam and crane hi Roy and today is a momentous occasion yes and 200 episodes ago we did an episode together yeah you wanna 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 yes and now we got mayor they're all sitting here in the same room for the first time in fact this was the first time that were together in the same place and it just so happens that we're all here in Mexico which is also an island he's worth death and we're now playing at Carmen we've been for the last few days for the cosmos retreat and so today we're gonna talk about a couple things but it's a wolf while he talk about Def Con we're all at DEFCON number first two forth and we have been in Playa del

Carmen for the last few days for this cosmos retreat which was amazing so we're gonna talk about that and a few other things ya know - interesting we were set up doesn't feel familiar at all even like not wearing headphones which uses me stir to me but yeah yeah the the process to get this going was actually you know people often think that like it's easy to do a podcast every 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 it gets me uncomfortable and anxious so hopefully this will work

I hope this ward yeah all right well it's this get started to talk about Def Con so first of all this is Def Con number three I was kind of at Def Con zero which was like in Berlin three years ago I guess it was like 50 people but I am sort of I was working kind of helping it here I'm a bit been sort of in the office but on the ground floor yeah you were at wanted to which neither was around right in London and Shanghai we now we're all together and it's my first of all yeah yeah well let's get started I mean what maybe me or if you what is what is your impression over all

of this year's event much bigger I think so in London Def Con was maybe like four hundred people in one hall Shanghai was bigger 700 700 and this was 2000 and even for those two thousand 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 is there how about you I would echo the spawns I mean so it's my first Def Con so I don't know

anything really compare against but I thought that I was just impressed by as if 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 trade shows and 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 the technical level and the quality of the talks was really good and there there was there seemed to be something for everyone you know there were some highly technical talks and we'll get into that and there were some funny

technical talks about who's your knowledge proofs and some of the project progress that's going on there and but there was also a lot of talk to those projects are going to talk about you for instance that are more in that user experience side and then someone middle you know a lot of development framework stuff I was super excited with that generally about that good energy a lot of cool people it was great to just meet everyone and I just chill and hang out that's that's one one part of this that I really like it's just yeah I think the organize that organizes be the the great job this year in getting a diversity of speakers I

remember like in the previous two def cons I had a sense of disappointment that like there wasn't enough talk about [Music] social impact and things like that this time there was everything is pretty much everything for everyone yeah so for me I agree I think this just the energy is great it is not just this conference I mean I remember previous conferences I've been to that at this amazing initiative the very first conference we went to together and like brilliant mm early 2014 back then you know Bitcoin comments at the same time and she the base response

time is that I think in October 2013 and Amsterdam amazing energy back then so much enthusiasm and it's a similar thing here you know and then on a bigger scale I said it was like Bitcoin 2014 Amsterdam type scale yeah well I don't think it's quite the same back then you know in Bitcoin you really had this blind optimism no really like we're on the cusp of something huge I don't think the human community is quite like that you know there's been enough setbacks right now with with hacks and and it's you know very clear with the massive problems if you're mass you know exact

scalability and and there's lots of competition right that's coming and other projects that are completing even even at this at that point I do a lot other projects present that are so I don't think this quite the same sort of complete utter conviction that this is valid in the world what I mean of course is the blind optimism but like if there was but on the same sort of scale you know if you look at this from the outside you we're talking about something like this is that similar scale as work Bitcoin was at the end 14 yeah there should be other person that may be that may be true as a secure point on yeah nothing's bigger today than Bitcoin wants 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 we were a lot of people here and it was a boom and a cosmic losers had just tons of colonization of all kinds of people of course that's you know wonderful because there's so many interesting people so many interesting projects and including meeting some people that maybe a new online with some kind of email contact wave or or people listening to the podcast I also read lots of DOS it was so humbling to just just like you just be walking by

and someone come by and say hey hey I love your show that's all I want to say and then they would just yeah lots of that yeah even one point we were just sitting there we're just having a chat and some guy takes a picture well yeah I mean I've definitely seen the throughout the years right like mMmmm every every event you serves to see more and more people liking the show and that's been yeah yeah really encouraging so thanks thanks for doing that Samir I think um the three of us you were the one who most focus on like the talks content Ashley project so what were the things that you know I'm most captivating yeah I did go to many of the talks I think except for one afternoon - kind of I

spent most of it I'm going to the talks as I found a lot of great projects actually there are things that I found a conceptually interesting there are things that I found that would be in like production soon and they could be that they could be game changers and then they were also projects that give me a hint of what are the kind of business model challenges we are gonna run into soon so I'll kind of try to cover all all these categories in in brief so projects that I found super intriguing enigma catalyst and I say so

enigma here is ICO July I didn't appreciate their project much but this time now I realized like what a grand vision is what the effectivity allowed was a new kind of totally new kind of data exchange 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 a 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 can on a particular day so it's a it's a network that allows that kind of theta exchange in quotations yeah or let's say a whole bunch of farmers can talk about their data about crops and yields and stuff and then somehow collectively analyze that get insights about losing their particular you know giving up their critical data privacy yeah it's super relative to 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 GDP are the general their protection regulation in Europe yeah that sounds cool yeah then another another kind of like vaca 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 want to producing energy and the peak at different times

then the consumers they want access to electricity at different levels at different times then you know there is this sort of optimization problem like 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 at demand and put the like demand forecasts encrypted and then they go and the whole network sort of optimizes the flow of electricity in an electrical grid and then one computation is done wire blockchain I found that like mind-boggling like so they 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 at any point in time so then that kind of project to me like seems completely out of the blue something I wasn't expecting true--but looked amazing again so we have interviewed two-bit on the show and the true bit is this idea that we can build on top of etherium sort of global cloud where each helium smart contracts can outsource their computation and this people in this cloud can like do the

computation and then furnish reserve so this here blockchain but by using some kind of game theory we are we are given like very strong guarantees that the computational results will be correct so Jason toys from true--but had this word or for this idea of computation trustless computation as a cloud he called it the pan optic computer right so you know the panopticon's right this is his 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 their strobe it is like that it's like a global computational cloud people are computing like whether sub-programs submitting them to the blockchain and they are at the best behavior because somebody just might be checking their work and if they don't lose it as a gives it as correctly they might be snatched so same with us also we saw the talk together and how that project sees matured since we interviewed them and just how how good Jason has gotten at explaining it yeah

yeah yeah Jason has gotten really good and the surprising thing is I think in q1 or 2018 they're going to demonstrate how the true--but panopticon puter can be used to move those point from the dough is blockchain on to the etherion blockchain so this will be a proof of concept that at least we can 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 these centralized exchanges that does seem to be one of the like upcoming areas so smart contracts if two years ago maybe the one of these things that's

gonna hit this year the next is going to be decentralized exchanges in some form so both 0 X and Easter Delta had talks there I think 0x by far looks the most well-functioning project there and then there some releases that I'm looking forward to that were announced here is making how the project is going to release the dice table coin so we'll have a stable coin working on a cerium in December of this year so if we followed we've interviewed the maker project and I've kind of followed their progress over like 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 select certain aspects that are there got removed in order to simplify the system and I'm not sure I like all these things they have removed but we will have a stable point system and easy and blocks you know I think I think that's it that's a big beep big yeah it feels like one of the things that I was really telling at this conference was how you can see sort of parts of the stack start to call us on the very first version of a theorem came out and the very first client it's a command-line tool and now we're seeing more and more of 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 and tools that are now close to being available for app developers so you porters one for identity yeah stable coin is another is another pro that stacks so we're seeing like a the entire stock just become more mature and so it makes it easier for developers to build apps and just great for the person generally yeah what about you Brian the interesting things you came across in conversations yeah it was interesting

to like flats Caspari Tom which 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 sort of started wrapping my head around a little bit Casper and in Casper as a contrast and amend right where I think you know Casper's really trying in some ways to to almost build something like group of work ask for first a hmm

and I think that's very interesting obviously this you know this big trade-off so I just some what they're trying to build is much more complex has other downsides locks aren't finality only calmness is harder to get and in all kinds of things but it is 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 me hat baton once and I remember I didn't really understand it well then and but I feel I guess nothing 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 of the affinity guys as well and I stayed last year in December at the house for a few days and you know before I before John cosmos there was like a few projects that had about a very interesting affinity was one of them and and yeah those guys seem to be making great progress and they have like test net running and it's really really cool and there were white paper on the beers but there's white paper better white people on the way yeah there's a white paper coming and test net and it looks like Tiffany 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 didn't give it talk there was no stand but I talked with top of Japan was here misdefinitie so I when I left before John cosmos there's a few projects that I thought were like you're promising and interesting and see to have like competent people you know cosmos was growing up mom David affinity was also one of them so last December I stayed at their house and in Palo Alto for a few days hung out of them and just kind of got to learn a little bit about it not that much but you know because we have Tom being on the podcast many years ago when he was his previous project and and yeah those guys have life Testament running now

they have scaled the team pretty well different hiring seems like little people and then you intestine it's just kind of awesome right so so basically the way it works is they have this like you know 500 validators and then you know 200 and assigning each blah and if these threshold signatures and this kind of randomization process chooses next set of validator every block and university actors like lighting up with every into him like a second block time of this or something so you see like every second and I know there are 200 dogs lining up but it was just 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 the wrong block change that we're seeing now and they're all you know getting kind of close right so we have you know a tenement cosmos always say which suppose you know scheduled to launch at the beginning of next year the affinity will be also offering the first half of next year maybe slightly after but you know also coming pretty soon and Casper well I guess flats Casper made me smush further out but at least some kind of Casper version is also close to home and it seems like at least glad 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 exactly know when so something like a broadening of the consensus yes algorithm consensus models yeah blockchain what are you gonna stick that signals for the ecosystem as a whole well I think we have of course known for many years of work just as these massive issues doesn't scale it's like a 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 my own leads here or you know it is just at the doorstep hmm and then that's gonna be massive but I think most most transactions will move to chains like that and I'll just say rather than evolve and different variants in different experimentation in different directions and and I also of course it's gonna continue right I think we'll see lots more things and you know if you look at I don't understand affinity in Casper so well but if you look at Casper tenement infinity 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 turned out yeah it's good that there's all of these variations because absolutely it makes us motors Indian maybe yeah if one doesn't work what the other might end up working and then everybody copies the one that works my day to day doesn't involve a lot of ëthere iam public network type stuff I mean so that's try to me were mostly doing search and change and so we're sort of not detached but we're sort of distant from this community we operate at the at the periphery and this was the first well I guess no I mean II decon I

kind of had this this similar spinning but what-what I come out of these conferences I'm just like super inspired okay smart contract code as a previously what developer I was really inspired by everything that's happened in the sort of development framework space and I like I mentioned earlier like the stacks are coming together in coalescing I really just been seeing a lot of those talk to so I saw talks like for instance Daft rules that they're coming out with like really simple and easy use command line tools like query or smart contract send crazy smart conflict a bit they've got

different queries there and so there's a set of project called the name will come to me but essentially it's like a framework that you could just like launch your own local environment to develop your your barching so you could like it launches is doing a blockchain launches uh your your block Explorer and all the tools that you can develop locally 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 and when NPM and like node started coming into the scene like pretty sure that Ruby on Rails that's what we sell like web development becoming a massive thing full stack developer is everything coming into this Basin and there's a lot

of them way to go still we're still pretty early stage but I think that this is one of the areas where we'll steal you see a lot of developers coming in like people from the web development space that don't necessarily understand every low level and abstraction of smart contracts and public blockchain stuff but or theory and generally but that understand the technology well enough that they could build applications and just having those tools available and having like you port for identity for instance or having the stable point is it's really encouraging to see it and I'm a bit super passionate with this like I I wanna like just spend too much doing smart lunchbox now it's learning

how to do it and doing some interesting stuff perhaps moving on to the next topic though like se owes one once our topic I'd like to cover is I actually felt while the technology is coming along really well the business models around smart contracts are are in their infancy here 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 melon pour so

import is this portfolio management tool where 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 many food is doing really well on the development side they are one year ahead of schedule and their their app is going to be running live on minute in February or so next year they one year ahead of schedule so that's that's like face but on the other side the melon put as 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 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 the smart contract can be infinitely copy 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 monetizing another project that has very similar problems like not I

won't call it a problem it's and maybe it's also enough opportunity is arkasha so I don't I don't know if you have tried at Asha I encourage you to go and try it they gave really nice talk so Akasha is this project that that builds like a proper social network where people can publish content and other people and other people can like the content comment on those pieces and then people can also follow each other on the attraction network but all of this data contained lies and ipfs the likes lie on on on this area and the social network of who follows home also

lies on the public blockchain and Akasha so Akasha doesn't hold any of the data right so all of these all of all of these data items are on the Block chains or ipfs and then the other revolution sing over Akasha is that me highly founder of Akasha doesn't want to collect any data about what users are doing on Akasha so as a user to Akash now you directly connect to this helium blockchain and ipfs and you get to see all of the set of messages if there is no central of Tasha 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 right all of these comments and social network is open it doesn't have any analytic stay down what the user is doing and so the question becomes how do you monetize something like that so you know for example Natasha's talk they I saw that like Akasha is trying to create a token or Akasha East I think they will I see oh that token you could see that the token model or the monetization strategy we had 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 it's not I don't want to point out these two projects this is generally a pattern like everything else is like this you sort of raises the question in my 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 it's absolutely essential for something to be by the business model in a sort of open

decentralized small contract world right where basically the operation of the thing is open I can be copied it's never different right it's the only way that you can you can win in this and build a viable businesses if if you know the more you use it the more useful becomes and because if you have that dynamic one if your first mover and if you want to a certain momentum it's almost impossible to this place now a big point being the best example here which just 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 become

technically but because it has such you know enormous network effects it's you know it's a business it's a mean not literally a business but it's you know a very great profitable thing and you know fix a movie theory of me or how stronger the network effects and certainly you know the strong is in Bitcoin and and you know wonder how that's gonna turn out and and then yeah I think with a lot of these smart contract applications that's really the key question and 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 but you can make you can raise a lot of money with you know little comparatively little development very early stage 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 standing do Nico I mean who doesn't want to do nicely yeah but the birthday the one big problem here is well I think this multiple big problem so at one it can be the problem that simply the toka doesn't really fit doesn't really make sense but

maybe there's business put its own token I mean it is in the business is all and it's gonna be something that's commoditize so I mean that's one big issue and the other big issue is I think once you do Nico now you have to stoke and now you need to really design the whole thing around that token to make that token valuable and it starts becoming more about 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 but now you have to kind of run after that and 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 that's a 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 you know it's like honeymoon phase and then before it really they have to prove themselves but I think that's gonna be a huge issue down line and of course talking about I cos we are now also seeing a first massive issue with some massive issues coming up with tasers having a big very big crisis and and some kind of standstill between the board and Brightman's and the company and then I'm sure that's not the last because conflicts of interest will be

huge issues actually I will mention the projects but during DEFCON I was approached by and ended up participating in discussions with two ICO teams who proposed the concept there Nico 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 the concept change and go down a path I I don't think that's it's it's pretty

uncommon yeah I think I think a lot of projects behind behind doors suffering from similar something under regular startups you know the raise funds absolutely yeah but this is this is what 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 gonna be able to do something else because the investors say okay we own dreams and it's not many still own 20% of its company if if they you think that's a better business great but here is a different thing right because okay I want 27 is tokens but now they're gonna do something else and all of a

sudden the tokens aren't what I thought they would be or they have no utility anymore well I don't feel so happy about that there's also the accountability to the investors so if you raised yeah and the BC you don't like someone feel accountable for that investor to find a new business model whereas we perhaps with an IC oh yeah you might just decide to not you something different yeah and so but just let's let's come back to the conference real quick what we were mentioning earlier that one of the things that was nice about this event is that it wasn't forced to develop a developer event that doesn t really tend itself to that so in the toxins sponsors I see ours were not so present but we

did see them in the periphery as a speaker they were certain that the speakers with the attendees and people that were that were at the conference everybody was talking about icos and I think everybody who was at the conference either was approached or spoke to people who were doing nicely or thinking of doing that doing an igt going amongst those my feeling was that you know a few of them you know Tencent 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 were floating around were somewhere in between like mediocre and a bad idea and amongst those were projects that were throwing parties and they're like

throwing massive amounts of money around to welcome get some developers drunk really basic but and you know this is some of the part of the negative effects I think right yeah of money and and we attended some parties there were every night there were parties after the event I mean I've been 80 of didn't attend any of them well okay well when we attended some parties there's sort of this like you know at some point I think I said to you like this is like an episode of Silicon Valley like there is just some absurd and absurdities with these parties right like people you mean like lame the

fire-breathing and like rolling cigars and this is all very nice but is this really what we need in order to build like the decentralized application future there's like there's a disconnect there between having ico parties or whatever throwing money around and you're actually doing some meaningful work and I think that 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 is just undesirable because many many corrupts power corrupts and we don't want to get into a situation where you know good people are moving to do bad things are

moving to bad projects or we're just bad people are moving into this space of monopolizing the conversation or they're taking advantage of people I think that it's an important conversation that have at some point yeah I mean I don't quite share your perspective here I think both being at the conference in some of these parties I didn't feel there was so much success I thought it was kind of oh yeah you know obviously we have a situation right where there has been a huge amount of wealth created in a very short time in this community and but I didn't and yeah of course it has effects right people may be saying nicer hotels and

people you know that you won't concede that this is no longer a poor community here to become a wealthy community but I didn't feel like it was such I didn't feel here this was so disturbing it's just it's the beginning of me it's beginning of the in disturbing that there's a conversation to be having now before it becomes more disturbing no I think well actually I think where the problem is is actually not so much the existing community and like I feel like speakers display of wealth I think where the disturbing aspect and problematic ask this is all of these other people who see okay a lot of money to be made here let me go in and like also and do

because that's where all the crap comes right I mean I have so many people you know who have just you know it's okay this business opportunity let's do this too I say oh that makes no sense and you know then run lots of Google ads and Facebook and then we get a lot of emails like money some random projects that you know wanna be honest enter or pay us to be in our Center and all kinds of stuff like that and I think that's where that is a calling right I've been here at their phone I I didn't really share the same III don't mean to say that it was massively excessive and massively present but there is a sort see the

beginning of that and I think that for project so I want to just make a clear distinction so for for example like we'll talk about that like I mean we could talk about it now is a cosmos planned a retreat after death pond and cosmos was 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 and I think that this is resources and time well-spent take that same money and put towards a party at the Coco Bongo you know in Cancun it's it's it's utterly worthless alright so I would rather see projects

investing in things that are worthwhile and bring value in that build community then you know on like flamethrowers sure well if people want to see some really amazing video they should check for like karma long to something I got a suppressed and prison burger meat we did this recently I saw the video it's they did some sort of ICO launch party in LA a goalie small like Lamborghini or some sort of fancy car or if like karma calling on it and champagne and red car but it is completely absurd so if you want to see something like that access and

a level of access that ya didn't see here we didn't see my I personally don't want to see that in space like I want people to talk about it yeah so well let's let's speak a bit about the cosmos we treat well what do you yeah so it's some context I mean you know when I joined cosmos January or tenement cosmos with like five people so it's grown a lot since then no 30-ish people working on it and approaching launch was getting kind of close so still a bunch of stuff to do but a lot of us came to Def Con and almost everybody came to to this company to get together after their

corner and including some people externals that are you know associated racial project and working on tandem in and or involving cosmos so mayor and it's my symbol join the eros is still going on actually so yeah thanks so much you guys for coming thanks for thanks so what do you think of the Russia my kind of background is I worked in the vaccines industry for seven years after University and I did epicenter in in my part-time right so while I have been involved with crypto I came to the

cosmos retreat I've I can I realize I have never understood crypto culture so much some day so you know like I'm doing these podcasts 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 hey 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 was like stood out is how paranoid the average crypto person is I knew it theoretically I understood it practically at the cosmos

duty but that aside can you give some examples so I won't tell namely people but like there are people in the crypto community that they won't know for example I don't know build bunkers in certain Asian countries and they change laptops every every few weeks and and they want just the community it's like the security minded community securing my people existed ten years ago yeah yeah yeah travel with like a white second and laptops and new personal data only yeah like yeah all that kind of

stuff yeah weird like that somebody coming from a very different background it's it was you are an amazing cultural experience it's not culture shock but it's interesting to see how people in the crypto community actually think beyond the technology and the cultural side of it so yeah you felt this up you know specifically yeah of course it was retreat specifically for the very first night second thing I realized is how like the link between like keto diets and meat-eating and crypto like two sayings that I have known you would say totally

unconnected but they're not really unconnected there's some correlation strange enough yes Terrence - yeah so the veganism is also strong crypto community yeah I I found I found quite a few vegetarian and vegan crypto people so yeah I think like this is something new with like crypto is revolutionary and I think you need to be somewhat of a weirdo - to be involved in the community and maybe if you're weird this way maybe you're gonna be weird in other ways but the event itself so so I personally have been off like I've been following Cosmo since 2014 and I have been a fan I

mean attend event back then right and I have always so in 2014 if you remember there was this thing there was a Bitcoin site change project like the project that was supposed to kill all other coins except Bitcoin and if you look at the details of the sidechain project even back then you could see that there were some glaring problems with that model so when you have fit coins I mean true for full chain it's hard to move those coins around because main chain could obvious for and then you have to wait like in theory three days before you could move a Bitcoin to a sidechain 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 XT sidechain project was the idea that given proof of work how can we build an internet of chains then 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 thought like the in Dement was one of the contenders so when when the tendonman project end up being ended up being reconfigured as cosmos in the last year I was I was very interested in it and I participated in the in the crowd say

it's only one of two crowd since I participated in I was like very enthusiastic to come here and like the cosmos community has made a lot of progress in kind of conceptually designing the system and implementing it in like parts of the system like the consensus and networking are all already working I think the questions that remain are mostly about mostly economic question now and I think like once some of the economic questions of Cosmos are 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 be different bidding on the Kosmos team so I'm gonna start on bills on on tender mint and you don't get to connect very much I mean aside from just like you know talking so it was really great to meet everyone and specifically like talk to the dev team I got to go and like a lot more depth on how how tenement works the consensus model and yeah again it's like I said it's so inspiring to sit with the people that are filling this stuff rather than just like a reading you know like whatever wait again put a blog or the white paper yeah you just and so there was there were some different workshops

that I attended one workshop we saw I'd like to talk about just like this team like its young and it's so it's like weirdos like you've got these like okay guys and like but yeah you've got one of your researchers Sonny Sonny yeah so Sonny is 19 years old and Sonny is just insanely intelligent and hasn't been in space for real home he's found it but Bitcoin like you know a few years ago so yeah year and a half ago and I was sitting at a table with a dinner with

you guys and just the even the stairs going over my head okay so and he gave a talk actually so cosmos hosting suicide events after the conference at Def Con and so certainly gave a talk about building the games I think it was balls I'm okay in which he talks about some of the things that are desirable and one of the things that he talked about I thought I'd never heard of this before of this idea that yes pacifically with cosmos were you know you keep interconnect different block chances it's important to have sovereignty in a baktun and what he means by that is that

adapt should have sovereignty over its validators over its code and so an example of that is if you if you're adapt 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 deaf developer why should I you know depend on the so the health of the network when all these other paths is closed it's kinda like you know shared hosting random on a hosting provider like if I were a website I want shared hosting I want like dedicated you dedicated hosting so that my acts gonna run the very best and

and similarly if you look at a theory and so as a trained completely language we've seen time and time again that that opens up quite a few problems right potentially burner abilities just look it's what what's happening now with them with both with parody and what he suggests is having application-specific blockchains with very few opto and those op codes are built for that app and you don't need to forget this idea of a Turing complete language and it you know turn complete language has its benefits it's great for bootstrapping projects and getting projects off the ground so experimenting but the once you get to production you should be building your

own your own infrastructure and your own applications running for your adapt so I thought that was a really interesting concept and I don't know if anybody else is thinking about this you're talking about this but I think it's really relevant like giving especially all of the whether it's a Dow hack whether it's like parody hack looking at the source code pretty lately I'm certain that this function would be in there guys think yes yeah obviously I'm you know I'm biased this issue yeah I mean Sony's talks fantastic I will link to the presentation yeah I may be a new tube if

so we'll link to it you don't want one of the fundamental things about tenement was the idea of separating the application from the networking consensus so the sunny explains isn't a really nice failure we have like in Bitcoin we had you know the consensus the networking and the applications all one thing right if you want to build something on top like he couldn't really I'd it's very very hard and then you have to select funny things that come to party that would is like really worked very badly and then then in here um it's it's still all one thing right you still have the networking and consensus and the application as part of kind of like

one being someone analytics software package but then the application was just like general thing so you can rise up on top right so you you still have like no flexibility to change they kind of make low level optimizations and changes to the near blockchain JBM or go to the to just how it works right but you could you could kind of generally write things on top and that has you know great benefits right it gives you a lot of flexibility but it has also big problems right I mean one problem being a performance and scalability right gets way bad and another one being that and also a very insecure and and yeah

you have seen exactly I mean we see that today perfectly expressed any syrup 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 to be able to support all those projects that are planning to build money theorem and the other thing is these like attack vectors and of course we're recording this actually the same day that the parity multi-sig wallet got hacked for the second time right because there was a previous version of the multi signal and I got hacked a few months ago and nothing something like 150 million dollars worth of ether stuff destroyed stuff you know I don't know maybe they're gonna do a hard for can we cover

it but you know it maybe not certainly disaster and and that's very much well I mean so it's twelve two expressions of the flaws of aetherium and the third is the lack of dominance and of course that's cosmos as well as many other projects that are now also focusing on having proper covenants because now how is that decision going to be made should if your hard fork or maybe included in the next hard fork and unfreezing of those funds and and so that people can retrieve them from these multi C quads or not well there's no real way for theorem rules to decide to vote to voice their opinion so even

knowing what the community wants like is you can't even do it well I mean people kind of tried to do this runs at all hard work and 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 it's a very small group of people maybe twenty or something like that in the end will what kind of decide this for the most part and you know that's disturbing well it's not decentralized and in and off also goes contrary completely contrary to original here composition right which you know it ironically gammon would who's who is of course the founder of parity who developed his multi-sig he was one of

the most outspoken kind of you know advocates of that vision of having cold is law he came up with this term a legality which he described as the insistence 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 and that this is completely immune to it and of course already with the dog hard fork we kind of you know people kind of said okay well that's let's kind of throw that out of the water a bit and now we have this again and and I think actually it's the human community as a community said okay we want to hard for you know now 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 gardens they can't do that right so we may have some ether but like we really don't have any say in this decision and and then in the end it's a small group of influential people that make those decisions and of course with a polka dot being one of the biggest victims of this accident you know they started Connie was an accident yeah it becomes about political influence why it becomes about okay you know how how how much weight do they have any community how you know how much can they fluency developers have popular

they and and that is certainly not the idea of long term you look at look at the future there's thousands of applications built on etherium and production applications you know is it conceivable that you have an application that's being 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 form I see it really just it's like you just take hosting you know fifteen years ago everybody had neutralised hosting and if one application one website was getting like a lot of hits or whatever they would just bog

down the other thing that's why we got compartmentalization and GM's and docker containers and all this stuff so I think it's you know kind of inevitable so for the space to go in this direction for applications to build their own blog chains to have room in validators so there's a problem with that application well the governor second in that you know decide whether or not they want a hard for could do whatever you know like do a rollback and it doesn't affect anybody else then yeah networks like cosmos that allows for the for transactional exchanges between those those different block chains all right I think if we go in and so the software developers really the way that web evolution hosting has gone will probably see the same thing in the bottom space

yeah yeah the the governance question looks super interesting to me because I read a statement somewhere so that there was this blog about how when we when the internet emerged like very early 90s they were there were lots of people that thought you know like the internet was gonna bring some kind of freedom some kind of freedom from the confines of the nation-state and the cyberspace would be this place by 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 become

became more and more mainstream the politics of the mainstream has started to enter has entered into the internet right so like starting from geo political censorship across sites like channel restricting things Iran building new internet and stuff to like corporate control etc so there was this statement which was whenever a mass mass of humanity enters a new technology it brings along its own its politics to that new technology right at some level like the the question is this year when you look at it lots of big players are entering into the

etherium space so there's certainly a large hedge funds entering that's obvious but you have like institutions entering and ultimately maybe maybe someday you will have like central banks and huge banks also a stake holders to the system so given that there are going to be such powerful stake holders in the TEM system with like differing political capabilities how how do you how you resolve like who's bugs and theft of forest of figs and who's you don't fix it's going to become an it's going to become like a big political question right right now it is like parity but

they are I mean I think cosmos what you kind of talk money or that direction is so it if you answer because you will never have a central bank issuing money on something at the hero right something where they don't control the on the line network this is just not gonna happen right they may their own blockchain that they fully control well where they issue money they may allow that money being moved elsewhere and people building applications off but they still control the source of the money or a bully I think this otherwise there's no way that you will get those kind of institutions on board because they

really Maris seize control over such essential parts to you know anonymous minor somewhere or these like stakeholders and open holders that they don't know they can't contact a okay you know and even 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 they're the aspects of of companies and organizations and groups and communities to really control fully at their own blockchains and those then being able to interact there's no way around that I think the only way that this is going to

really become a big thing yeah so probably got their stuff what are you guys looking forward to until that next step yeah this they've got ID for epicenter specifically I did a small experiment and whoever I met right so whenever I make somebody I ask them a question the question I asked is what is the most mysterious project for you and in order for a project to be mysterious it it has

to be something that you don't understand but there's something about the project that that makes you feel that this could just be a very big thing so I asked everyone what's the most mysterious project then doctor and I have this huge list now I have this huge list of 25 projects so I'll read out the name so he'll say oh that's a mesh networking using a Syrian it's mysterium VPNs using its helium zero net this thing this this this thing called singularity net which is a network of AI is running on top of aetherium so I have

this list of 20 or 25 projects I'm going to thin them down and hopefully we are gonna have some of them on epicenter so we prepared for some you know queasy 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 actually not actually I got a I don't like varied responses yeah they weren't too many duplications I said again I'm looking forward to like next year more tools and seeing more developers coming from outside the space yeah

I I really think that that is the key to building building that the DAP future is getting people like just regular developers right like regular what developers or app developers to now have this whole other set of tools gonna allow them to build these in troy's apps and so by tools I mean the development tools the networking with it IP a faster IP TV 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 to those communities of developers yeah that's one of the project yeah I mean of course this one thing and mostly looking forward to which is the launch of Cosmos and now that's gonna turn out so that's my number one focus and interest and what I feel super excited about and super interested how it's gonna turn out yeah so that's my number one thing great well thank you to our listeners for once again turning in epicenter is part of let's talk they can bet the network you can run this show and lots of other great shows a list I think I'm calm and

so you just if you liked the show you can support us by Livingston tip that's it the addresses will be in this or the description and you can also there was an iTunes review and I also always helps 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 location thanks so much [Music] [Music]