Interview with Alex van der Sande and Fabian Vogelsteller of Mist at DEVCON1 in London

Transcript

so right now i'm joined by Alex and Fabian who are developers of missed the decentralized application browser for a theorem today they made a stunning presentation at they've gone where they displayed they basically showed us the browser and these things it could do so first let's have an introduction from Alex and then from Fabian so I'm Alex on the sunday I'm the lead designer for it even I'm favim focused Ella and then the elite def developer for a theorem and also the Builder of building mist and web 3gs partly so for for our listeners who haven't actually seen missed in action can we have a short explanation of what it's supposed to do ok so mist

is what we want for for the end user for the common user to be able to interact with smart contracts right now the only way to interactivity win is using the command line interface and in the end what we want miss to do is for for interacting with contracts should be as easy as using a website and it's a decentralized that browser because we will be using swarm and I PFS in order to be able to download all the contents so any applications actually the whole application yeah so it will any application that you are using would never go offline so yeah so the idea is that it's a browser its downloads the applications from from swarm or from IP

of aspects warm and it runs basically only talks to the same block chain runs to smart contract s like the back end as a database so so in the morning they demonstrated a decent like we could the own for lack of a better word a decentralized autonomous organization on the block chain or a company on the blockchain so essentially what they did was they created a contract and that contract had some funds the contract had shares that people could own and then you could do various kinds of actions on that contract like you know let's say three people get together and they pull 100 ETA into the front and

one of them wants to spend 50 third then he could read today's a motion to spend it in a particular way and the other people could vote for that motion and approve it so it was a very cool idea and maybe we could just walk through how how it works technically what what what parts of this run on a theorem what parts of it run on I PFS and what is happening behind the scenes when I user creates an a company like that okay so first we have to differentiate because the the demonstration was on the wallet so what we are being with the wallet is that mist is mist is supposed to be the front and interface for any kind of contracts but before what we have been developing the wallet which is a

completely separate its own standalone def basically it's its standalone DEP running inside the Miss prowess but you right now it doesn't look like a Miss browser because we taken away the menu and the browsing bar and it's basically just running right now the wallet app and the contract itself basically did our contract designed us out enormous our organization contract what it basically it was basically a mixture of multiple contracts it was once the tower contract then on the other hand it was a token contract which represented the shares the shares were basically tied to this down the season Reds organization and he takes away in account when any kind of voting takes place between parties for example moving funds paying

for stuff like where everybody votes on whatever happens with with the funds in the organization it takes two shares as a basis to how much each person has weight in the interval what if a very interesting fascinating about that particular contract is that the democracy contract has about a hundred lines of code including comments and you can upload it in a few minutes it will cost you at the current exchange rate less than once end of the dollar and yet it can build an organization that has always finances completely transparent and it works better and it works better than any reorganization out there because the money simply simply cannot be stolen and it works better than any other democracy

out there because the devotes are completely transparent and you cannot in any way alter or change the vote so what that's why I really like to showcase that and on the wallet what we were able to do is that the current wallet allows you to interact with any contract given that you know a little bit information about it meaning that you don't even need to build an application if you just get to a hundred lines of code copied from somewhere and use it on the wallet you can deploy your own organization and keep your money there and because it is able to interact with other contract which is one of the things I really like about the et rien is that it can interact with other contracts meaning

that you can use that democracy to execute other contracts so for example you could hold it use it to hold gold let's say go certificate and those do anything that you wanted to move those goat would be subject to a vote just like anything else you want in that democracy you basically can daisy-chain any a number of contracts and any number of of like actions so contracts can own other contracts they can create other contracts and if you want to have like as a basis this kind of proxy dao contract and everything is subject to avoid exactly like you say yeah so so so perhaps perhaps there they have been to a lot of different concepts introduced

so I'll just summarize so so so there are many many parts to it one part is the istick is a contract which is basically a company or an organization that coordinates people and the wallet that that you have produced is basically something that a user can use to interact with the contract like send funds to the contract or pass motions on the contract etc and and and the third thing you mentioned was that your your design your wallet is somehow also interfacing with I PFS or swarm what is that

okay the reason we be with build wallet is that we realize that missed we had a lot of work to do and missed and it was very far away and we really wanted to be able to to have something out that people could test it and give feedback and the wallet was a great example because the wallet is actually the first depth that we can develop and missed in order to be able to build that wall that we had to build a lot of things inside missed and we actually figure out a lot of things that we needed from gas which is the TV on model browser there so by building this one single app we were able really able to make a better Mason a better gas so what we are doing now is

that we just took missed we took all the browser parts out of it and we are disabilities need with a single Deb and what is seizing of that allows you is to get eaters and eater get any cryptocurrency that is based on the TV on and keep it and upload any new crypto currencies and upload any kind of contracts and interact with any kind of contracts so what were the challenges in building building the first in your building your wallet so currently building depth so to embed whizzing doing basic things is actually very easy but like if you want to have complex depth so there's a few challenges out by

our IP I still have so for example like to confirm transactions yourself and knowing that I actually like xblocks all and on like this is not yet so easy as I would like to have it but something I would like to see some kind of subscription you subscribe to anna tells you when it was mine that tells you when it was confirmed or so currently you have to do a lot of these kind of things manually so if you really want to be safe so simple things are easy if you want to make this complex things safe then you have to put a little bit more work on it but it's already very flexible and so the thing was when Miss comes out that would be actually fairly easy to just basically load any kind of

JavaScript location inside missed you have the web three object right away available you have a connection to the theorem node right away you see an account or serial counts as not just the user one the DEP to see so because the user can control actually what the depths are seeing so what kind of identity to see from you and with this you can right away start building stuff so we also provide a set of so we build the whole things with meteor as a framework just because it gives us a great tool to build interfaces fast and very like cohesive and we build all the tools for ourselves and for others to easily build Depp's like a CSS framework in a

simplistic form also just pieces you can put in and you already have something working and interacting with your contract so this should be fairly easy for people to get started with this there's also coming publication subscription API so currently a lot of things you have to request for you can select to ask the state etc etc so in the future will be simply subscribing to with specific events so we are also probably in the cryptocurrency space like one of the first ones to have this like more modern web technology API accesses and so I think like it's looking really good but it's still like in development so Miss will still take a few months because it's technically

already working so if you want to download it today and like load your definite it works but if you want to have an onboarding process account management and all these kind of things which an end user needs to really deal with this stuff so this still is in the making so so it's a bit unclear to me what is unclear to me is what is the vision behind miss like I can I can see that you have a wallet today that you can that you can use to store fronts send funds we create contracts like organizations but you refer to the fact that there is going to be missed which is going to be released later which is going to be a full-blown browser what will be the difference between your current wallet and Miss B what's the

vision for missed so what we are trying to do is that we really believe in trying to ship as much code as possible when as much as often that we can so the wallet is actually like mist zero in a sense because it allows you to interact basically with with some contracts but in order to do that it's not really very it it's a it's very geeky it's very technical you're interacting directly with function calls and variable names and you have to know how the contract works in order to be able to do it the best way in order to interactive contract would be to build a custom CSS and HTML interface for them and to build an interface and the web

technology is great for building interfaces so what you want to do is that Miss would allow you to download a lot of interfaces for contracts and those interfaces for contracts you'd be downloading them from a bittorrent like technology like a PFS and on the browser unform like the main the main ideas it is a browser which allows you to later have a tap store prowl steps which which you can just select an install or run but you just run it and it will be locally download to machine and executed and PU looks just like a web page behaves like a web page but it's kind of like downloaded from this decentralized

network run or locally and everything is basically just on your machine and so the whole idea is it's supposed to be a real browser for like a normal browser is an interface container for kind of interfaces or all the kind of web applications you're accessing websites so will be similar to this probably in the first time a lot of people will use just web-hosted websites and web applications which use a node which is run on the browser on the server side and they basically just do the key signing in the deb itself so to make it like secure and safe or untrusted in this kinda sense and I think like Miss

will be more once people really understand the benefit of gaps and this and you centralize applications and they have already a few and have a use case for them then they will download missed to run them on a daily basis to have them always on the machine to interact with the funds to have whatever that pension fund all the family funds or do whatever kind of things they want to do in this theorem smart contract world I think one of the key differences I see between a normal browser actually and mask that's nice is that a browser just like the name and the history is about visiting a lot of multiple web pages to read information it's like they're the original idea was you have a bunch of

documents linked together by by hyperlinks and the point of myth is actually using apps so if I really see that the most common case for most will be that you will have like 3 4 5 and X number of at installed and you'll be spending most of your time inside they're just running those few applications specific for you Tyrion and of course you can add some more you can add later but you won't be you won't be spending your time in Miss like browsing a bunch of different things which you actually could do like one once we have actually swam running you can also like discover content in suam itself so you're accessing accessing like a data

world data network a decentralized data network like browsing swamp could also will also probably fun and interesting though like it's really like meant as an application container where you run your descendants applications it provides the note it provides all the things in the theorem Deb needs and yeah it's basically application container right but if you even if you compare the idea of browsing for I think it really you probably be browsing swarm into a specific application because I think it really reflects the way we use the web today most of the time people are spending that their time in facebook and read it on very specific site so you can really foresee you like having a

decentralized ready to decentralize facebook and you spend your time their browsing your browsing swarm but you're browsing floor via one specific app and i think that's that's very Justin in the face yeah I mean yeah exactly but could also be raw content you could browse and then this is rock on that could be interlinked somehow but yeah definitely so it's it's really in that container and it's probably not for the newcomer so the newcomer with a rather use either like this we're so taps will for sure be on service for a period of time or using things like meta mask like this browser in browser and that's probably for newcomers interesting because they can start that it works right away it's kind of like secure and they can already

interact with it but once they actually have a use for themselves with this step they will use miss just because it's it's a proper towards the test application do you start when you want to do something and yeah and so have heavy heavy has your wallet for found some users or quite a lot actually I mean like so just when we least the last better three and accredit at the mist token just for fun like a bunch of people requesting me to get miss token and I send the batch of tokens out did you see that some crazy guy created a fake Bitcoin token it just created like 21 million fake Bitcoin the nature and it's distributed so I think it's funny to see people creating contrast because

I really want that I want people to be playing with contracts just like inventing like crypto currencies for fun inventing I don't know crazy schemes are very accessible I mean yeah even as a technical person the only thing in the upcoming release when we have even contract execution and so on in but better divided that it's like not a nice and separated sending funds in executing contract but what it allows you to do is to not only like send cryptocurrencies around like an addict on other cryptocurrencies but it also allows you to interact with contracts deploy your own contract see how works play around with it executing it and doing even as complex things as we saw today with the Dow which is a mean under the hood a pretty complex thing like you have one

contract interacting with another then executing something through that contracts on a mean this is pretty hot already I think it takes et rien from that abstract idea that people are excited to into something that they can actually play with and I'm very excited to see people play and invent things that we have an expected i'm doing it it's very it's it's definitely it's already starting so what what we wanted to intent with this early release cycles we want to get user feedback and we want people to yeah just to see also that what is happening right right if you people don't check normally get up so and then when it's happened in another

branch and I cannot see in the craft that there's activity they even think oh it's that you know I'm gonna dead the price goes down because it's it's that it's the next game coin Corrigan so we want actually to release these kind of things even they are not fully ready yet just so people see what is going on with so much produce every day a min decrypt like especially theorem is such a vibrant community only the people are working on a theory I'm working every day on such a mound of stuff and then we have all that startups around it and all this huge community building things it's definitely the most active so what what are you going to release next so or next Pro or next release box yeah it would be better for which is we are going to take

exactly what we've shown here on the presentation we are going to we are going to make it more releasable because we we kind of did a lot of work to be able to present it and we want we want to to release that as a better for then i would say that we will probably will probably be around the time that homestead is going to be is going to be out so we can probably really polish it to be the homestead release of the wallet because homestead immaterial is really everyone has a different definition vitalik has the definition of four weeks without real bugs but I feed more like a moment where it even has real graphical applications that

everyone can use that it's not only like common line developer things like et Liam has skin and a face instead to this separately skeleton that is the blockchain that everyone can use it and after the homestyle relief I plan that we will stop working on the on the wallet and we will be working only on the left side yeah I mean currently so from the technical perspectives what I see is a few things to do for example like i would like to exchange the under the hood contract so i would like to exchange the under the hood wallet contract to make it easier accessible and like actually it's like cleaning up and then the wallet is actually ready

ready for prime time and then it's really focusing on missed and the interface and improving it so this is already ready but like there things missing like i said already the onboarding account management and so on there are some low-level things like the new IPC coming with pops up functionality but so so we can I listeners find out more about Miss what are the resources you I mean right now we are not it's not this isn't you're not org because it will but we do we this soon but right now the best place to find out about Miss releases is just keeping an eye on the reddit on the twitter and you can always go to or github page and there that's where it is

latest yes we basically can go to the mist github page on releases and that you have to latest release you can download the binary and try it out yourself thank you so much for coming on