The Ethereum Community in 2020

Transcript

that's as much as French as I know this is the live stream on sure that should I start all right well thank you for being here what did I do with the clicker yeah yeah but I lost the clicker No ah this is what fell

okay so my talk thank you for being here right early in the morning it's 3 a.m. or 2 a.m. in Texas so it's quite early for me if you're gel-like like I am so my talk is about the theorem community in 2020 we're going to talk a bit about history and about challenges in front of us so first some history which is basically I'm just going to ramble for a while about stuff that you know I lived and you might have lived or hopefully you find interesting and yeah so like you know you know a theorem started in

2013 it was an idea then it was a white paper it was you know people talking in Toronto that's where like Joe Lubin met vitalik he'd already written the white paper I believe or at least it was in draft maybe hadn't published it yet then of course 2014 was the Miami Bitcoin conference in January and like a theorem really started to form the community there was a big push for meetups and at the time I remember thinking it was sort of crazy that they were spending all this money to fly people around the world to give meetups meetup talks that had you know 20 people and yet in retrospect like so many early projects so many projects came out of

those early meetups so yeah I mean it worked and I have to say like the the meetups were actually a strength of aetherium in the beginning you know our aetherium was started and I think like I think actually was started in 2013 technically but people started going to it in 2014 and that was the community place there was in forum 3 org but nobody ever really went there it was always on on reddit and of course the EF form in Switzerland the sale began in July it was perpetually promised through all of 2014

like it's being two weeks away and then it eventually happened in July so 2015 then maenette launched and also in July seems to be a propitious month and re trader formed and I think that was actually a big point in theorems community formation is that there was a conscious decision by that a lot that everybody basically agreed with I was actually a dissenter on reddit of this decision but the the idea was to split the anything price talk and market related to another forum and a lot of a theorem came out of the the what we saw as the problems with Bitcoin so at the

time like our Bitcoin had well I guess so that was a big censorship problem and like beyond that it was also just like price talk and memes and so the thought was like well we will put that in a separate subreddit and we will keep our theorem to be protect a different one that also was a reaction to Bitcoin was that we wanted to have multiple clients for governance issues so that there was decentralization and there were three client teams led by Jeff led by Vitalik and by Gavin so that go the Python and the C++ client respectively and you know that's important for you know those sweet folks really led their own client

teams they're in charge of their client and then there was there's other folks probably like Stefan Toole was probably you know led the sort of like non dev community as well so there were a bunch of different leaders and the biggest each city was probably London and then Joe Lubin went to New York probably in early 2015 so 2016 of course there was auger and maker and digits like the early sale and technically you know auger was in I think like September 2015 but you know the early sales happened project started forming the DAO happen of course in yeah q2 and there was like the rise of a million slack channels

which from a community perspective was sort of like the first like branching out from our theorem like it used to just all be on our theorem and then you know it was a sort of thing where you started seeing for the first time people that maybe were like active in some specific slack channel but they weren't necessarily in the broader aetherium community which is definitely something that has happened a lot since then and New York and Berlin started becoming bigger bigger each cities because of consensus and because the dev office was in Berlin so 2017 was a billion slack channels of course there were a lot of token sale scams and you know everything went crazy if you remember that time it

was it was pretty nuts of course Waterloo eath Waterloo happened in like October 2017 and then in 2018 the youth global hackathons really became a thing which is from a community perspective like it was the fulfillment of developers getting together and like if theorem has always been tech focused so yeah of course like the rise of discord and telegram and and then defy happened in SF which is sort of interesting that it didn't happen in you know a more financial hub like New York or London or something like that it really was something that literally happened among the defy projects that were in SF talking to each other although they were

talking online even though they're not SF and saying like hey we should come up with the term for this and they came out with defy and then of course like there was the each writer and he financed fork which i think is is interesting and I'll talk a little bit about later so okay this is I would've deleted this I didn't think was gonna show up on the oh well so what does it matter blockchains are ultimately about community right like the the whole like we say it's trustless and whatnot and that's true but like the ultimately the trust assumption does basically rely on community I mean Bitcoin is very proud of their 21 million supply cap we'll see if they can pull that off from a

security budget standpoint I don't think they can but like even so it's just a social contract what bitcoin is good at is is being very firm on that contract but ultimately it is communities that decide what happens in blockchains of course along with core developers and exchanges etc etc but like ultimately the people matter and the people that care matter and and that's why I think it is intrinsic that community matters so I guess like you know my previous slides started with twenty twenty dot dot like I think one thing that is underrated is how much the etherium community has decentralized in the past

five or six years I mean there are subreddits like there was the youth trader and he financed you know moderator split there are a million other theorem subreddits there are like frankly like Twitter is probably the main if they're in discussion platform now there are discourse forums like developers go to opens up Lenoir east of less than they used to go ask questions on our theorem there is a fans in China and like the rise of language specific communities you know there are still some slacks you know I used to be a member of like a hundred slacks and personally we use slack anymore so hey there's you know discord and telegram and then as I said

like everybody has their own little community for their project and its really splintered off and and frankly like a lot of times it's even people that met on reddit now have their own like private chat group with their friends from you know 20 16 or whatever so it's really like it's really you know that like if you did the the graph it's it's really changed a lot anyway those miners and those magicians I mean basically like everything has but there is no central point anymore which is good and bad I threw this slide in there because I think it's interesting hat tip to Joe Schweitzer for correcting some of my data you know you can just see the rise

at this point it's basically about you know venue and whatnot and and even then like I think a lot of people because of the way the etherion foundation has sold tickets people didn't come because they didn't think they could get a ticket but basically in the last two Def cons everyone who wanted again and eventually got in you know it wasn't always an easy process in the early things all sold out immediately and you know in a matter of minutes or seconds but yeah but to be fair I mean I also talked to you know dozens and thousands of people that didn't come because they didn't think they got a ticket so it is sort of interesting to see the annual gathering

has blown up that much so I want to talk a little about about reddit you know it is the main gathering point for the online community or it used to be you know it it's certainly the the the bubble changed things in 2017 2018 but like I remember even in like q2 2014 people complaining about how our etherium wasn't as good as it used to be like pining for the early days of January 2014 where we still talked about the tech so you know any any forum is what people make of it right and that is it you have to have people showing up

who care which is kind of the point of my talk here you know each writer any finance have forked and you know each finance house all the active people and it's actively moderated whereas like eath trader has all of the people who are like you know more like traders like day traders it's barely even eath friendly at all anymore I've had people tell me how iota is a legit tech project over and over again I don't know how you show up to Easter Egger and think that anyway so I have some graphs which are actually publicly available on separate stats are I theory I'm like that is the

subscribers to our theorem and you can see how it was hard to like maintain a community through 2017 right it was went from fifty thousand to three hundred fifty thousand in six months and certainly the quality on our theorem during that time definitely was was not great and then of course it's leveled off which is basically what I'm going to talk the rest about this is basically the same graph but I do think it's interesting you know if you actually see like in 2018 in the in the in the peak of crypto prices there we like we actually were lower so we were a bigger

subreddit than we are even today anyway challenges like community matters because of of these things so our challenges from a community perspective are like governance I'll talk a little bit about more about that lazy hostile uninformed news sources I mean like between clickbait between just people that are focusing on Bitcoin and don't understand a theorem etc etc coordination problems the original you know our theorem has declined like people that used to show up that were you know deeply technical and would give long detailed technical answers in 2014

and 2015 in 2016 they just don't show up in common anymore and then our meetups as well frankly are are not as vibrant as they used to be I'm gonna talk a little bit about news now I mean there's a lot of clickbait media out there and crypto and yeah I mean and there's also like Bitcoin focused media oops who carry more about sensationalism because that's what gives pageviews which brings add ad dollars then truth and like I've always said like it's it's actually impressive how lazy the maxi's are like there's a lot of valid criticisms of aetherium and some of them I'm making in this endless talk but like

they they never get there because they don't even understand ethereum enough right like they come up with like the note is like 20,000 million terabytes and aetherium is dependent on in Fuhrer and actually think like a lot of Maxie's actually think that like if an Fuhrer went away to duck tomorrow a theorem would no longer be a thing which is like you know crazy but it is a challenge for all of us as a community to communicate what aetherium is about because it is not super easy to understand if you are not deeply into it so someone I've seen it at three global hackathons I just saw this like this week complain about a dev tool that she'd never seen before and I probably like put it in my newsletter five times and you know of course why I

have to show my own newsletter it Eadie's it's frustrating when you you know like we all try to get our news out there but attention is scarce and yeah I mean getting in a decentralized community communicating to the people is it is hard and you know I've been doing this newsletter for like three years now three and a half years and it's my attempt but there are lots of I mean there's it's hard to communicate to people and like even to developers and let them know about tools not easy running out of time so I guess I will be

relatively quick there are you know I think if global is like an interesting manifestation of aetherium culture because it is like the subculture of hacking and it allows like developers to come together and you know hack together and if you talk to people about eath global hackathons they inevitably say it was super high energy even at the ones where I feel like weren't super high energy because there's something about developers coming together and getting to be with other people they care about the same things and really just want to hack and build stuff is is invigorating and I would say even from like when Eve global hackathon started so from like eath Denver in 2018 the submissions of

course are going up until the right but also the quality is up and to the right like Edith London we had some amazing submissions from from firts we also just had people that were brand new to a theorem or brand new to developing on a theorem who frankly had some great great submissions and I think it shows that the dev stack is starting to mature so that's that that's awesome and that is definitely something that we were doing well but like a frank discussion of challenges like our online communities like our aetherium the post quality has declined in 2017 and it's mostly returned but I'm probably for my newsletter I probably get most of it on Twitter and but like as I said earlier

the comment quality isn't really there anymore I mean like it you used to be able to like most of what I learned in this space I actually like learned from comments on Reddit and that is not a thing anymore like you won't have people showing up and giving you long technical explanations of things like you used to which is in my view a real shame you know you have some of that on III search but that is a very research focused form of researchers talking to other researchers meetups is another you know frankly like our meetups aren't super vibrant right now like a lot of organizers have burned out like some of the biggest groups are dormant attendance obviously is down I run my own local meetup in Texas and you know it's hard just to get people to show up

and I think I think like you know I I want to issue a little bit of a call but like this stuff matters and like as I said like it is the people who decide what black chains are about and so we have to do better at these things and then like frankly like vitalik like one valid criticism bitcoiners have is that like we are too centralized around Vitalik and I think that is like false from a government of governance perspective like Vitalik is probably too uninvolved and if they're in governance but like one problem is that he is the one that can like solve coordination problems because he is the one that has like almost a million followers on Twitter like he is so much more high-profile and you know like you know

the like number two is like so far behind and then like Danny Ryan who's probably the CTO of f2 has like three thousand followers and that's crazy so you should go follow him Danny Ryan on Twitter anyway we I think my time is up but we need to do more dogfooding or a status calls it drinking your own champagne like I see people that like own efj and tell me how much they care about Eve but then they don't use app apps and that's crazy so you know just like basic things we can do right like we all need to care about community and we need to go out there and do it and I like you know as a small call-to-action and I think all of you

should like when you go to Reddit like you should vote in downvote the stuff that is good like you can leave comments and our high quality that would be great I also like people need to start going to their local meetups again and like revive the sleeping giants of like the dormant groups like prod them get them to let you start organizing whatever it's all really important I think meeting people in person even for a bunch of nerds like us is intensely important to a lot of people really feeling like this stuff matters like there's something about just meeting people in person I mean that's why we're at a conference right and of course upholding infinities which you know I put brief lists like being inclusive and

tech focused and pragmatic I think these are all like things that we can all agree have been values of the theorem so my time is actually I think I'm over time so yeah thank you Cheers [Applause] um thank you very much we'll be for coming would any of you like to do any questions please raise your hand if does a case mmm lovely Prague pal Prague Pella who wants to talk about prop Cal no for the for the technical people that have limited time these days what's the most efficient thing they can do with

what free time they have to help community issues yeah that's a great question I think we all feel a little pressed for time yeah I mean I guess I would say that like if we had more people coming to our theorem I think it would give it it would improve in quality and I guess you know making it a regular part of your routine like when you're like you know it's relatively downtime I know it sort of would feel like work if you're making yourself to it but I think just going there answering the occasional noob question or you know li5 or whatever that was that's probably what I would say fantastic

please give it up for our guest it was special Travie here and you're more than welcome for the next chart as well thank you very much [Applause]