Mihai Alisie (Ethereum & AKASHA) - EDCON

Transcript

hello everyone does it work is it okay yeah so I am me hi Alicia I'd like to start by saying that it's a pleasure to be here and it's simply amazing to witness firsthand how far you know this whole space has moved I mean just think about it from this idea that block chains can be used for decentralized digital currencies in five years we leapt to the notion that they can be used to run a decentralized world computer and the crazy thing is that it still feels like we're barely scratching the surface and we're still figuring out what and how we can build with it so

with that in mind today I'm going to present Akasha decentralized social network powered by the etherium blockchain and the interplanetary file system but before diving into a cache I'd like to briefly mention the defining moments that led to this point and my story in this space begins in 2011 when I discovered Bitcoin and this year was no wakening for me in many ways and this is how a few months later I created Bitcoin Magazine together with with Alec in the room and I served as editor-in-chief until late 2013 when my full attention was required for what was shaping up to be the etherium project as a co-founder in the early days I've led

the Swiss effort to establish the business and legal infrastructure which was critical for the helium presale campaign and [Music] it's like Google trying to update in a thang speaking of Google we had a situation where it was calling for fonts on a Google server and like people that have installed the Akasha application like what is he trying to connect to Google that was kind of fun now in the middle of the presentation so getting back to helium after the successful deuterium crowdfunding campaign I oversaw the helium operations a strategic manager and vice-president of

the team foundation until late 2015 now following a successful atiim Genesis when everyone was like yeah it actually works look now it's time to build our dreams on top of this thing I focused on my energy on Akasha and today I'm going to show you how far we've come in the last year as a project now Akasha as a word has written in Sanskrit and means ether and in this culture eater or Akasha was envisioned as a sort of ethereal network connecting humans with each other and in infinite knowledge through this thing called Akashic records aji you know to some extent act as well acted like a sort of universal

database for storing emotions idea starts and experiences forever an Internet of consciousness if you will and Akasha also stands for an acronym namely advanced knowledge architecture force for social human advocacy and we'll touch a bit why so now that we covered the meaning behind the name let's move on and understand the why behind the project so in my opinion Akasha is at the same time a technological and a social experiment designed to offer us a glimpse at the future in which our human I mean human relations in general are not owned by corporations a future in which freedom

of expression and privacy are not outsourced but back in the hands of people and through our work we wanted to prove people that it is possible that we can do better and that the original dream behind the Internet is not dead it can still be achieved if we creatively combine these new tech gbgt Liam's mother blockchain interplanetary file system there's a whole array of tools that are now available which haven't been before so getting back to the dream the dream was about empowering and connecting people not about mass surveillance and mass manipulation which sadly is today's reality but you know even if it sounds fancy and Noble and like yeah sure let's

do that it also means that we have to solve some big problems that have been challenging for quite a few years when it comes to internet things like censorship for example and censorship is becoming more and more of a problem these days as we've seen on various occasions from Facebook to Twitter to YouTube and everything in between from accounts banned to twist delete it and post removed we have witnessed increased censorship on on all major news stream and you know social networks in general another big and spiny one is privacy now even if the majority of the existing web services and social

networks presenting cells are free you are invisibly paying in micro violations of your privacy one like at the time one email at a time one chat message at a time until this whole thing and your data that you are leaking there like a snail trail behind you takes the shape of an abomination which can predict not only where you are how are you seeing and with whom but also where you'll be tomorrow with whom in a 10 meter range and that's quite spooky and for those raising their eyebrows I strongly suggest reading networks of control a report on corporate surveillance digital tracking big data

in privacy's like it's even it's even worse than you think it is like it's terrible and this leads to you know another big one collective memory I mean today we are in this situation where our posts are you know given Wikipedia and stuff we Google online are hosted on server sitting somewhere and operated by some entity so you have that some one there and this parallels with George or was you know 1984 quite strikingly when we look at ourselves and our society as an information based society when you're also putting into perspective the latest

you know fake news problem you have the perfect conditions for the emergence of a Ministry of Truth as depicted by George Orwell so in other words basically we have like the ideal mass manipulation tool automatically serving only the true news to billions of people yeah so we got rid of the fake news problem but if things keep going the way they are soon two plus two equal five could be the new truth discovered by humanity but you know maybe we are a bit harder than the internet and like these corporations because these problems are older than the internet and we've bombed on more you know more than once in in

our history in them for from books and libraries destroyed to people being tortured and everything in between we have seen many many many bad things manifesting across ages as symptoms to these problems then this new internet thing appeared and you know in the beginning it was all this excitement yes we finally have with humanity and powered liberated a new kind of revolution and it was believed you know like truly believed by the pioneers and everyone in this space as it was proclaimed also as an independent home of mind in the classic independence of

the cyberspace declaration but however today again we find ourselves in a position which is quite different from what we were envisioning twenty years ago and our freedom of expression and collective memory are outsourced in the hands of corporations with absolute power over them and to make things worse actually this is what like no there's no internet action there if you want privacy or free speech you're not really getting those on the internet currently and since the data pass is true their servers technically it is their corner of the internet and they can do whatever they want with it and after you clicked I

have read and I accept these terms which you know it's like the most popular lie these days you already gave them the right to do whatever they want with your data so they don't care anymore about respecting them you just sign and getting back to like problems these problems are older than the Internet even though you even if the problems are older than the Internet the scale at which they manifest today is unparalleled in you know like human history since we're talking about billions of people affected by them and this is where Akasha comes in as a product and it was envisioned as a simple to use but meaningful channel of expression and I'm about to show you

shortly some you know features limited limited set of features we can only have but the intention is to leverage these new technologies in an attempt to build a social network that has basic human rights embedded in software so where you have like this freedom of speech thing and you have this privacy thing instead of making them like feature an optional premium they are like just default because this is how the entire thing is designed to work so we are in this situation where we have the old problems and they are faced with new solutions and this you know changes things a bit since the problems such as you know who owns my data and should my data be sold

without my approval which should be like no are now faced with new ways of thinking and even some of them can be solved from design stage because in the end the root cause behind all this mess is currently on the Internet is that you have some one handling your data from censorship to privacy it all starts from someone being in the middle having your data in full control over it but what if we do things differently what if we connect users directly with each other and what if we put users indirect control over their identity and data well we're about to find out this is Akasha running on a Mac by the way how many in this room have tried

Akasha okay oh nice yeah way better than expected I was like maybe one two so for you it there is there won't be so much new stuff to show but there are some new features coming that I'll present mainly in 0-5 3ds so basically getting back to the application when you start it like there's no like downloading a blockchain synchronizing timestamp TX comes from all that stuff like for for a user starting you know like one of these things I could give you more Bitcoin or crypto in general is like oh man I see myself like in mr. robot now it's like I'm like doing cool stuff like maybe

I'll leave this as a screensaver sorry I look smart so in in this case you know it's like you make it simple you even have a line there if you haven't heard of these things just don't worry simply keep click next and we'll take of it take care of it so you have an extra set up which is recommended currently it runs in the private net so it downs like a private chain and it's recommended not to mess too much with it but there are also advanced advanced option I'll skip the advanced just focus on you know how smooth the entire process is so let's see yep click next and this is where it starts get client since it comes bundled

with a get client and an IPSS client and this is where it connected to a bunch of peers it downloaded the chain and now I'm up to date now regarding the complexity you can see in the true the status window that we can see the stuff happening in the background like chain downloading synchronizing chain imported all that stuff and we also have die PFS log showing like the daemon is ready listening and you know you're all ready to rock so the important key or like the important takeaway here is that when you start a kasha you do not connect to a server right that's that would be bad but instead of connecting to a server

you connect to a swarm of peers and you know otherwise it wouldn't be really a decentralized social network as we it would still depend on some entity operating a server somewhere and we already covered why that is a bad idea now let's get back into the DAP and see how identity works like walking through the process of so here it is I clicked to create an account and you know it's pretty standard what you would expect from a normal social sort of web thing you have an ID you have a first name a last name you select the passphrase

and you also have like optional details like your avatar your background maybe a short description some links to your Twitter Facebook whatever other social media you're using but we'll leave that out so this is how basic account works you just input that data and here in the background you're also creating a neat ileum key you're also receiving a token transaction from our faucet which is like you know just to testing things out and all these stuff happens you know like in a pretty user friendly way you don't really have to understand what's happening you get some updates in there and after the ether is sent to the newly

created key you're actually publishing a smart contract profile so without having to understand you know a lot about blockchain and all this cool stuff you're just creating created a smart contract profile that can be accessed only by you through the private key you generated and as you can see in the background we can also find the transaction ID which was behind launching the smart contract now this is how by using a tearoom in this case and ipfs for storing things like the avatar the background image and all that stuff we can move from this

paradigm where we have to rely on this central provider for managing your credential on and online identity to a paradigm where each user is in full control over their identity and this is pretty cool because this leads to personal identity freedom online which is a thing completely you know like missing from the internet these days and here's the kicker your identity is also your wallet because you have created an eg Liam key in the background you're all set with a new team address so it wouldn't be much of a you know a leap to have also payments embedded in this so this is my account you see there's an ET

room address in there and this is an idiom address of the newly created account I'm just going to login with this with this account to show you a bit how it is inside so this is on on darkish attack inside the stream I'm just going to this is like the profile panel where you see notifications and stuff but this is the people tab where you can see all the latest profiles created on the cache on network and for example this Rick Hall is one of the latest users created that created an account as you see as you just saw I clicked follow and since we have this 14 second delay between blocks we had to you know like some of the interactions

are happening in the background where you're able to do other stuff like for example now I'm sending a tip to his address and in the meantime I can also read for example his post which is like he is curious about blockchain anything in projects seems like a smart thing and another cool thing is that the app votes have a quadratic voting mechanism which have micro transactions attached so you can send anything from one cent to about dollar by simply playing with the weights in your voting the value being in eater so this is pretty much how the financial interaction works and as you

can see you can easily tip other people by simply pressing the three dots and you know just click the tipping button same dialog you have automatically prefilled this is something that ENS probably yes we should talk yes definitely and again we have the same scenario where previously we had this entity in the middle and data centers holding your stuff for processing processing your payments but the cool stuff is that since we are building on top of it area we already have like a payment network in place we can you know this is like a side benefit a side effect when the synergy by bending on top of it lyrium and this is quite

interesting in the possibilities it opens and the synergy is born from this Bank for example for any tier iam service outside the Akasha ecosystem because we contracts can talk to themselves and basically you have like addresses to you know sending money home to your friends or family or crowdfunding the next idea are all like you know viable options suddenly because you don't have to worry about this stuff it just works so this is freedom of transaction which is also pretty cool to have and then here we are the the big one censorship resisting publishing this was a bit of a challenge since storing all the stuff on blockchain is like

super expensive and it wouldn't like be smart so here we use like the ipfs for storing content and ipfs hashes pointing to the content are stored in a smart contract so that's happening in the background but to exemplify how like publishing works again I'm going to login with random cat because on Akasha nobody knows you're a cat yeah that was sort of a joke yes it worked so here we are

Bonjour party we are writing some stuff in the editor is like simple medium like you know get away the clutter and all the stuff that's not interesting we are communicating through the ether eating applause ipfs equal love all that stuff and then that we have you know like the Romans in there we hit publish and this is where you add some tags for example a car shop Paris a net corn seems to be relevant and then you can for example change the preview shown in the in the car that generated for each published article he also has some license options from all rights reserved to we're in the

middle attribution to Creative Commons you can also select like which one you want to have as default and here we are publishing stuff on ipfs and the etherium network so for the user you know like pretty much resembles publishing on a normal app but what happened behind was completely different and some of this complicated stuff is actually hidden on purpose because it's not exactly you know helping users to publish things it would definitely be something interesting to learn but ok yep five I try to squeeze so again we remove the publishers each one is there you

know you don't have to rely on some entity or server somewhere user just communicate and share information directly and by taking this approach I think we are solving by design the censorship problem since you know no servers no problem well there are some other problems but not those problems like these problems are better than those problems we are working on it will touch upon that later so here I am connected from the other identity my identity and I can vote so basically I'm seeing the entry

publish from a different account and as you can see on the right screen you also have like zero ad which is like our test token currently as I'm typing a comment saying Bonjour and to everyone you should also see the balancing in the right corner updating so the user has now received zero point 1 eater promising simple app so this is completely separate from clipping which are like no no transactions and this is freedom of speech you know like you don't depend on anyone not even asked to publish stuff it's there the infrastructure is in place you have this application making it simple to use it so just go ahead and enjoy this this right now whisper is a really cool layer

in each idiom and recently we started to experiment with it a bit more and the first feature we implemented was chat which is group chat and you have like a slack like or IRC similar interface where you know you can type messages and you can also like join various chat rooms I'm just clicking like it con writing something it's just me maybe later I'll see you there and I can get back to our cash offer to see that messages are published and all that stuff now the cool part again is that instead of relying on some entity you know passing the messages from one user

to another we have this protocol that allows people to communicate directly to each other without any you know third party interference and there are a lot of privacy enhancing things that we just started playing with and this is the most recent experiment whisper based searching and this is quite cool I think because it you know it solves the problem of like really intrusive user tracking like what you're looking for when you're looking for what goes on in your mind when you are searching for that thing and just to showcase how how simple it is it looks in this you have that you know the

search button which was disabled until now and now I just type Paris and magically you have like the article there yes we can search for content which is like a big achievement in itself and just you know like to brag I'm going to search horse or something like it here you might think yeah so it works it's quite news it might be glitchy from time to time but soon we'll also introduce for people and and more areas in inside application as you can see it works also for a Tyrian project so it Helium articles that have the keyword in there and again this touches

upon the entity managing the searches for you and then this entity is selling also your data and your searches to other third parties which are analyzing uses like a an inception fractal of you know like really bad stuff but here by using whisper you just you make a request you can see the request and what data you're getting but you don't know exactly who made the request which is kind of cool you have untrackable or private searching this is privacy and from the beginning what we made to achieve with this application is to make it simple in the user interface but significant in the way it works so you have this rights

that we want to see respect to the online we embedded them in software and like provided a nice UI and this is something i'd like to stress and i'm running out of time but akasha in the current form is just like an experiment scaffolding of sorts which should allow us all to test ideas to test bold ideas and one of the ideas that you know many people ask is like tokens when you doing an ICO is Akasha going to have its own token and so on so we said we're going to leave that at the end we're going to take an experiment driven approach we're going to test various token models and see which one actually

fits better in a context of a social network and you know the idea is that we deserve a better web we now have the tools to build it and this project can be about taking back our freedom of speech which is something we should hold dearly personal privacy and collective memory and you know in the process of doing this stuff we get from this producer we're like the Internet and free speech and privacy are totally unrelated things to this paradigm where the Internet privacy and free speech can be united by these new technologies making the original dream behind the Internet real and even if we don't know everything from the start there's someone pointed out a bit earlier we know something

these basic human rights such as freedom of expression and privacy must be part of the solution because otherwise they're not good solution and you know this is quite exciting and in the opening someone said something very inspiring that we have it like who we have it good and this is like a crypto renaissance you know you having your laptops travelling to the world coming up with brilliant ideas on how you can put these things together and build something that can truly change the world change the world to bludgeon was also a word that I've heard quite often and this is our take on how we can you know build a better future because the future is not a place we get to visit but a place we get to create together

and on this note I like to end by saying that there are still problems as pointed earlier and this will be a marathon not a sprint but we expect every every step of it to be enlightening and things like tokens and incentives are one of the challenges we invite all of you to you know brainstorm and come up with ideas we have a few ideas related to how we can incentivize the creation of you know like open knowledge and I think someone from Kuala is here yeah we need to talk also identity and reputation is another big one reputation was like reputation would

be so cool but it's still out there kind of theoretical now we have this framework that we can use to test the idea we have it might not be perfect but probably it won't be perfect but at least we have a starting point on top of which we can iterate and you know not least scalability and architecture when it comes to building this stuff the contracts and like the user interface is not yet open source we are planning to open-source them by the better launch but in the meantime anyone that is interesting you know like helping out collaborating or coming up with ideas on how we can solve any of these challenges or has some interesting idea from the ATM ecosystem on how we can collaborate

is invited to get in touch and we can also exchange information if you have further questions and stuff I'll be around thank you very much for your attention