Mikeal Rogers: [32:14] Right. So if you wanna create one, you do what’s called minting. To mint an NFT means you take the data, you put it into IPFS… You can use this project that I talked about, NFT.storage, and that’ll handle getting all of the data in IPFS, creating the metadata file, getting you what you need to work with an NFT. But then you’ve gotta pick a blockchain you’re gonna use, and what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna develop a contract around how that NFT is used, and then you’re gonna reference that IPFS address for that metadata in that NFT. And then you’re going to use the user’s wallet. So the user that is minting the NFT, not the developer - this is the user’s wallet - will then sign that transaction and put that on the network.

We can link to an example of how this all works, actually. That’s probably a little bit better. There’s a blog post about this little project called Minty, that we wrote at Protocol Labs, that does some minting. If you’re pulling apart these different components, there’s parts of this that are on the developer, and parts that are on the user; so the user has to have a wallet around, and there’s different ways that different applications have approached having that wallet. There’s a project called Metamask, which is a very popular wallet for Ethereum… You can use Ethereum wallets on a lot of other chains as well. It’s a public-private key. But Metamask is really nice in that that stays in secure storage on people’s devices. It’s never shared with the application. So there’s no man in the middle stuff, there’s no custody issues. It’s always the user’s address. That’s a really great one.

But a lot of these projects that are getting people to set up Metamask, getting people to set up these wallets is actually a big barrier to entry, so a lot of the NFT minting sites that you might go to will just create a wallet for you, and they’ll hold on to the public-private key pair. And that can be problematic, because if they get hacked, your private key’s gone… And also, they can kind of run off with it. You really want to have custody of your wallet in this ecosystem… But again, it’s really young, it’s really immature. The user experiences around wallet custody are not entirely worked out very well. There’s a bunch of sites where you have an account with them and they have that wallet, and then they’re handling a lot of the signature stuff for you when you mint these NFTs.

Brendan Eich: You know, you can still get, as I say, search revenue. We actually have search partners already. DuckDuckGo is a search partner, and we’re making lunch money from them… Which is good. And we help build that up, because people who skew toward Brave do like DuckDuckGO. That’s an up-and-coming search engine that emphasizes privacy, so it’s in many ways aligned with us. It’s just not our default search engine because Google’s still the people’s choice, as far as we can tell. And as they say, on the long tail of multiple keyword queries, it’s still the best.

[30:02] If we didn’t make Google the default, we suspect a lot of our users would reset from our default DuckDuckGo to Google, and then we would be stuck, because ethically and in the market we wouldn’t wanna override their choice. We could never get them back on a default that might be a better search engine down the road.

This actually happened to Firefox - it’s public information, people studied this identity-solving search engine log. If you look at what happened with the Yahoo! search deal, in December 2014 they made Yahoo! the default search for Firefox, and we’d had Google since Phoenix, since forever. We had a good commercial deal since 2004. That Yahoo! default didn’t stick. A lot of users rest to Google over time. Yahoo! was probably paying - I don’t know, but I’m guessing they were paying a lot, possibly even a guarantee payment, for a declining traffic.

We don’t wanna do that in Brave, but we will make some search revenue from people who choose DuckDuckGo. And as the game theories would suggest, all the non-Google search engines generally are willing to pay for non-default traffic; that is for those users who choose to switch to DuckDuckGo or Bing. They’ll pay better if you make them the default, and Bing is still trying to grow, so they’ll do deals like I mentioned, Vivaldi, as far as I know they’re still using Bing as the default, but… We can get some money out of search, it’s just not gonna be huge and we don’t wanna count on it exclusively.

Another idea we have is the microdonations we’re already supporting with the Brave payments beta. If you use Brave right now, since 0.12 one or two, you can actually get money into your user wallet and have it sort of deterministically anonymously and with low transaction costs distributed among your top sites. You can turn off the sites you don’t wanna support. You have 30 days of ongoing personal chartbeat in your own browser - this is on-device only, no tracking. And at the end of that 30-day period, which is a personal period, there’s reconciliation. Anything you excluded or decided at the last minute you didn’t wanna fund gets left out. The other sites get what are essentially votes in sort of a zero knowledge proof voting system based on some cool academic work called Anonize and that gets sent through a VPN connection to our infrastructure, so we don’t even see your IP address. Then we mix it all together and we count the votes and we count the funds - a lot of people are putting $5/month in this system - and we distribute it to publishers; we’re starting to do that now, just this week. I think our publishers pays will be up very soon.

[32:47] That means we get some small fee-based revenue off of that, but we have to cover our infrastructure costs. I’m not sure that will make us a lot of money either, but that’s another way we’ll make some money. I think if everybody who used Brave donated $5/month, they’d be essentially replacing their average cost or median cost in terms of lost ad revenue. That would be cool. I don’t think everyone’s gonna do it. Also, we need to get a million users, ten million users, a hundred million users. But if all those ifs came true, everybody did $5/month, and we have a hundred million users, we’d be making $3/user/year - that’s $300 million. That’s enough to run a browser like Firefox. That’s what Firefox often ran on in the old days.

I think it would be nice for that to happen, but I don’t think that will happen. I think the donor cohort will decline as a fraction of our user base. NPR gets like 30% listeners donating, but they do pledge drives, they’re a nonprofit. We are getting early adopters skewing toward donating. We have like 11,000 wallets and we’re only in beta; the average balance in the wallet is over $5, so people are doing this, but it’s voluntary, so we can’t count on it either. But we’d like to build it up and see how big it can get.

We think it’s a good deal for publishers too, because they don’t have to worry about the lost ad revenue if they’re getting these donations trickled back to them through the Brave payments.

I mentioned Brave payments as an auto micro-donation system, but there’s general ecommerce we could do with Brave payments. If it’s just on the Bitcoin blockchain, it could not involve us, there’s no need for an intermediary (that’s one of the beauties of Bitcoin) and we wouldn’t make anything. But we’d like to enable that. We think that there’s upside there.

Generally, there’s too much friction buying things on the web, still. Obviously, if you have an iTunes or Amazon credit card relationship, it’s one click and away you go. But you don’t wanna do that with every ecommerce site you might wanna buy something from. It’s kind of scary to give over your credit card to another site, with all the breaches. People sometimes use Paypal, but Paypal has its issues and it’s not universal.

We’d like to make frictionless small payments a thing, a web standard, if you will. And there’s nothing proprietary about it, we’d like to have Brave just be a pioneer, just like pop-up blocking or tab browsing was known before Firefox or Phoenix, but we popularized it. We’d like to make future payments that are frictionless - no intermediary, no interchange charge… We’d like to make that a thing.

Jerod Santo: Some of your competitors don’t have that problem or that solution. They can run their own stuff. And I think if you’re trying to optimize for not denying wallets, one way you could do that - I’m not suggesting this as a product roadmap, but I’m just curious about it. Like “Hey, let’s just go down a layer and run our own stuff.” Is there initiatives for that? Is that something you guys are thinking of?

Jerod Santo: [11:54] Yeah, I have a couple of questions breaking off of this. The first one is perhaps speculative a little bit, with regards to exchanges being hacked and the analogy between a cryptocurrency exchange having custodial control over your wallet, or really your keys at that point, in order to have access to trade that coin, is very similar to banks… Like you said, “Be your own bank”; well, with a Coinbase or a Bitstamp or a Mt. Gox or whatever, you’re allowing them to be your bank, to a certain degree, and that’s problematic. And like you said, the more honey that’s in the pot, the more attackers are gonna come after those things. I guess my question would be why don’t we have more historical banks being hacked? Our Bank of America, our First National… Now I’m of course putting this in an American context, but they are very literally banks and they have online presences and they have web apps, so why is everybody going after Bitcoin exchanges and not after places where you can get cold, hard cash?

Brian Behlendorf: The chaos in there potentially could have been a lot less. Now, that’s an idealist speaking, so we have to be careful about that. For consumers it might not look that much different; this is still largely a backend story, but where I think it plays out is – so the idea of Bitcoin wallets really made real for people, like the fact that this is actually a currency - imagine that concept now applied to your health records, or to your land title and car title and other important documents that today you print out, or you probably don’t even have in digital form… They might just be pieces of paper you keep in a filing cabinet, which you hope you remember to grab with you when a forced fire is coming for your house…

Jerod Santo: Then you leave your wallet on a – you’re filling up gas, and you leave your wallet sitting there, and you drive away to the gas station… Not speaking from personal experience or anything.

Jerod Santo: You’ve got a wallet?

Jerod Santo: Which is who they’re selling it to, right? They want to tap into your nostalgia, and now you have kids or whatever, you have more money than you did before, and you’re going to take everybody to the theater. And they need to at least satisfy the person with the wallet.

Adam Stacoviak: I guess what I meant paying attention to it closely is not like “Man, let me check my watch. Let me check my dashboard this very moment”, but more like just paying attention to it. I think there’s a lot of people who almost live in bliss. Ignorance is bliss. They realize things cost more, they realize things are not the way they were two years ago, they realize money is less free, meaning not only is it worth less, but it also costs more to get it. Interests, right? And these are the levers that the Fed is using, specifically here to the US, and I think it’s probably similar in other markets across the world in how it works… Is that money is less free, you can’t get it as easily, you can’t borrow money as easily, and things cost more. I think that there’s a lot of people out there who are not paying attention to that directly. They’re paying attention to it indirectly by saying “I’ve got less amount in my wallet, I’m not making or I’m making more, or the same, or whatever, but somehow I have less.” They’re paying attention to it in the symptom, not the actual problem. I think a lot of people are like that. And so you mentioned fear, like what do you fear. Specifically, what do you fear then? Go into it more.

Nick Nisi: No wallet.

Chris Benson: You mean I get my wallet back at some point? [laughter]

Jordan Harband: Yeah. I mean, before I get to your question, I think when somebody sponsors me, or they ask “Hey, can I sponsor you?” I’m always appreciative. I say “Yes, of course. Thank you. It really means a lot.” It’s validation for me. Even if it’s $1, it’s still that somebody cares enough to vote with their wallet.

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah. No media is safe unless you have a physical copy. It’s like – I don’t know if you’re into Bitcoin at all, but the “Not your keys, not your wallet” kind of situation. Like, “Hey, not your media, not your –” Like, just because you own the discs too, you still have a license to use the disk. You don’t actually own it. But you can; you know, you have way more freedom than streamed, because you can find a way to change where it’s stored at. I don’t think ripping is against the law. Sharing - I’m not sharing my content with you. I’m not torrenting my media library. That’s not at all why I do any of that stuff. It’s really for convenience for me and my family.

[44:01] The experience of swapping out discs is like caveman, right? It’s like trying to create fire with sticks. Why would you do that? Like, if you have homelab sophistication or curiosities, why would you not find a way to run Plex? Why would you not find a way to have a small NAS, and run ZFS? Of course, not Btrfs or anything else, because nothing else exists besides open ZFS. I don’t know about you, Tim, but that’s how I feel… I’m just kidding. I’m not a hater. I do prefer, but I’m not a hater.

Anna Pobletts: Adam, you were talking about your mobile military ID, or something like that, that you use at Home Depot… This reminded me of a really cool thing that is kind of post passkeys. It’s probably a while out still, but I think it’s the future, and it’s a really cool thing to think about, called verifiable credentials. And it’s basically verified mobile IDs, and things that. And so letting you store your verified military ID in your wallet, in your iPhone wallet, or in your 1Password, and using that to verify over the internet, without you having to scan your phone all the time. And it’s very much similar to a passkey type of protocol. It’s sort of like the next evolution of that, and something that’s kind of coming after passkeys, and I think it’s cool how there’s just so much exciting identity-based new technology coming out in the next few years, I think. It’s just a lot of cool stuff to make your life easier on the internet. And the fact that you brought that up just kind of reminded me of that.

Jerod Santo: Because it’s in there, it’s part of the settings; it’s super-weird… When I have to show my parents that “Yeah, you can just get your passwords out there”, like how? I’m like “Well, I just swipe down and search for passwords.” And it’s had different names throughout the years, throughout the versions, and so it’s really just an unknown feature for so many people… If they had an actual app, just like they have a wallet app - have an app called Passwords, with all this stuff centralized - I think that would go a long way for people realizing how good their password offerings are. Because they have – I mean, you can do one-time password, you can do all kinds of stuff inside there… But people just don’t know about it, so… They should do that.

Jerod Santo: To a certain extent, that’s being built through the dependency graph… So you have the distribution. Of course, there’s different kinds of open source, but let’s just talk about libraries, where I write a library, and maybe it’s really fast JSON parsing, and everybody starts using it… Now I’m in their dependency graph, and now when these companies come to GitHub Sponsors and they say, “We’ve got 300k for the year. Here’s the invoice.” It goes into my – I’m sure I get a wallet, or something, and I’ve got a stash of fake money there that represents the money that I put there… And now I can divvy that out. And you’re showing them “Okay, you’re using this project. That project using superfast JSON library by Jerod. He’s available on GitHub Sponsors”, and so trickle down in that way, right? That’s what you’re trying to build. Or do you guys – is that there today? Can you do that today?

Angelica Hill: I only have two quick thoughts. One was making sure that all dietary requirements are met by the establishments we’re partnering with. Secondarily was a call for the environment, that we not have physical plastic cards, and we make them virtual and perhaps an Apple wallet or an Android wallet… I don’t have an Android device, but an Android device-based card thing…

Matthew Boyle: [06:04] Yeah, I think just to go back to a comment Mat made, firstly it’s about - like, obviously, you’re going to build software to model your problem space. What else are you going to do? And I think that’s such a fair comment, because it seems obvious, but I think one thing that domain-driven design gives you is it gives you sort of principles, ideas, and a framework to work through to help you figure that out.

So I think there’s so many key language and sort of ideas that domain-driven design sort of gives us, that helps us to think about what is the domain and what is the problem space. A couple of examples that I use in the book is - I think I build like a coffee shop system, right? And you may have a domain around ordering; like, ordering could be an entire domain in itself, because it’s like a vertical slice of the business, that has all its own rules, it has its own language, it has its own sort of ideas and thoughts… And so to slice that off into a domain makes a bunch of sense.

And then you may have subdomains off of ordering, like maybe order fulfillment is a subdomain of ordering, and that’s something that you want to kind of model separately, but use some of the same concepts you have in ordering. So that’d be one example.

I think another example I use in the book is like a wallet. You have the sort of domain of a wallet, and within that wallet you might have various different debit, credit, and - less relevant these days, but maybe cryptocurrency would be in your wallet, too… And modeling all those things separately makes sense, but they all kind of belong to this higher order idea of a wallet.

Jack Dorsey: So if you’re ever in a state where you can fund open source developers, not just around Bitcoin, but anything, you might get something back that’s extremely valuable to your company. It would have taken Cash App so much longer if LDK did not exist. And again, they weren’t building that for Square’s interest, they were building it for wallet developers that were not Cash App. Because Cash App had no interest at that time of using Lightning. I’m really proud of that. It just happened, and we didn’t force it to happen. It just happened.

Jack Dorsey: [39:47] So if you're ever in a state where you can fund open source developers, not just around Bitcoin, but anything, you might get something back that's extremely valuable to your company. It would have taken Cash App so much longer if LDK did not exist. And again, they weren't building that for Square's interest, they were building it for wallet developers that were not Cash App. Because Cash App had no interest at that time of using Lightning. I'm really proud of that. It just happened, and we didn't force it to happen. It just happened.

Jerod Santo: Enter your Bitcoin wallet address here for policy help…

Joe Percoco: Other things less so. So right now - and obviously, I think it’s a bit of a stage-dependent answer. Right now, we need to learn very fast, a variety of different things. Hypotheses that we have high conviction on, but nevertheless, we need to get data. So speed really matters. Maybe at a different stage in our journey, as we shift to, “Okay, we’ve gotten a ton of scale”, now we need to convince everyone that has joined our service to give us a high percentage wallet share. From there, we need to focus on high quality, not necessarily high speed.

So the question that applies to a business like ours, at least right now - I’m speed-first, and I think a bunch of the entrepreneurs I respect I think would also shake out speed-first. But the interesting is, does it change as you scale? That’s something that could pose a lot of really interesting debate.

Nicholas Mohnacky: So that’s what I mean by vectorizing and bundling your IQ and your knowledge; and potentially – like, you’re a walking, talking digital wallet of Chris’ intellectual property that you could contribute somewhere else, or just get paid on for everything that you’ve already contributed.

Nader Dabit: Some of the DAOs allow you to just join for free, some of them ask you to mint some type of token… But either way, you have to have, for the most part, some type of token to get in. And the reason that that’s the case is to kind of give ownership to everyone that’s there, and also provide them a way to liquidate that ownership.

So for a token, you can basically sell that, either on some digital exchange, or maybe like an NFT would be like OpenSea, or some type of NFT marketplace… But yeah, most of the time you can get a token or buy a few ERC20 tokens, or work for those tokens by participating in the Discord, and then you can participate in that way.

For the Developer DAO, which is the DAO that I have created for developers, the token is completely free. All you have to do is just go to the website and mint the token. And you do have to pay the Ethereum transaction costs. When you pay that cost, you get that token sent to your wallet.

And really, the reason that there is any type of cost at all is to kind of have some type of way to prevent civil resistance… Because if this token is gonna be worth money at some point, what’s to stop someone from minting all 8,000 of those for themselves? Like, how do we equally distribute ownership between a large number of people? Well, there is some type of way that we can do that with needing someone to mint.

But what I’ve been doing is actually setting aside a few thousand of my own dollars, and just minting those and sending them to people around the world that can’t afford even the $20 minting cost. But that way I know that that person is real, and that they’re kind of in it to be part of the community, and they’re not just in there to kind of speculate.

Gerhard Lazu: So we had two DNS tokens, one was for the old setup and one was for the new setup. The one for the old setup I have deleted, because we just didn’t need it… And then we had three DNS tokens left. One of them disappeared. It’s no longer there. And that was the one that was used by cert-manager to renew certificates. So the certificates are now failing to renew. We passed the 30-day threshold, and we have I think another 25 days to renew the certificate. But because the token is not there, the certificate will never be renewed, and then eventually, the certificate will stop being valid. This is the same wallet we use in Fastly. So a lot of stuff is going to break for many people.

Now, I’ve found out about this by just looking through K9s what is happening with the different jobs. There’s jobs which are failing, that are meant to renew things. It’s not the best setup, so the first thing which I’ve done, I’ve set up an alert in Grafana Cloud, when the DNS expires in less than two weeks, or in actually three weeks - whatever; some number of seconds, because that’s how they count them - I get an alert. So it should automatically renew within 30 days. If within 25 days it hasn’t been renewed, I get an alert. So I have 25 days to fix it, roughly.

So what I would like to do is first of all capture this problem in a way that we can refer back to it, and also fix it in a way that we also can refer back to it, like how did we fix it; what went into it, what was added, so that this doesn’t happen again. And adding that alert was one of the actions that I took even before we created an incident. So that’s one of the top things on my list. How does that sound to you both?

Gerhard Lazu: So we had two DNS tokens, one was for the old setup and one was for the new setup. The one for the old setup I have deleted, because we just didn’t need it… And then we had three DNS tokens left. One of them disappeared. It’s no longer there. And that was the one that was used by cert-manager to renew certificates. So the certificates are now failing to renew. We passed the 30-day threshold, and we have I think another 25 days to renew the certificate. But because the token is not there, the certificate will never be renewed, and then eventually, the certificate will stop being valid. This is the same wallet we use in Fastly. So a lot of stuff is going to break for many people.

Now, I’ve found out about this by just looking through K9s what is happening with the different jobs. There’s jobs which are failing, that are meant to renew things. It’s not the best setup, so the first thing which I’ve done, I’ve set up an alert in Grafana Cloud, when the DNS expires in less than two weeks, or in actually three weeks - whatever; some number of seconds, because that’s how they count them - I get an alert. So it should automatically renew within 30 days. If within 25 days it hasn’t been renewed, I get an alert. So I have 25 days to fix it, roughly.

So what I would like to do is first of all capture this problem in a way that we can refer back to it, and also fix it in a way that we also can refer back to it, like how did we fix it; what went into it, what was added, so that this doesn’t happen again. And adding that alert was one of the actions that I took even before we created an incident. So that’s one of the top things on my list. How does that sound to you both?

Patrick Ecker: [48:07] Yeah, yeah, sure. And companies like TinyMCE - they are building a rich-text editor platform with ReScript, and for that it’s also fantastic. These really complex domains - this is where ReScript shines.

On the team, we’ve got, as I said, Hongbo Zhang, who is now also working for Facebook, Cristiano Calcagno, who is one of the cleverest scientists I know. He has been working on the Infer project, if you know that, for code analysis and static analysis of all kinds of languages. He has huge knowledge about analyzing code, which is great for us, because we have a lot of dead code elimination analysis going on right now for ReScript, because it’s fully typed. Super-nice to analyze.

We’ve got Cheng Lou, who has a huge vision on products, and designs, and lean, clean interfaces. I love that as well. Maxim Valcke, who is our master brain on the syntax level. He has been investing so much time into writing a syntax parser that is efficient and small. It’s super-fantastic work. And myself, of course, for working on the documentation; I’ve been doing this within the ReScript Association, as you already mentioned. The ReScript Association was founded with the goal to support the community and support a language with financial infrastructure, so people can send donations to it who are relying on the technology. So if you are a company who wants the language to succeed, the best way to invest money is to invest it in the association. They’re reallocating the money for developing the documentation, growing the editor tooling, working on core essential libraries, finding other projects, organizing conferences… We had like two conferences already - ReasonConf 2018 and 2019, and also a Reason conference in the U.S, which will most likely of course be rebranded to ReScriptConf.

So in the past 2,5 years we also collaborated with research institutes and companies, we collaborated with Ahrefs, which I already mentioned, with the Tezos cryptocurrency - they’re also really invested in this, because they want their crypto wallet apps to be stable, and they chose ReScript for their web frontends, and stuff like that. Or subsidiaries of Tezos, of course. Tezos is a huge project.

So this is how we try to set a foundation for the language on the community side, on the open source side, but also we have a strong commitment on the business side with the core team, who is working at Facebook, and all other companies that depend on it.