Steven Pyle: I mean, part of it, I guess, is - yeah, the models have never been perfect; we know that. That’s part of it. The other part is the environmental aspect of it. You’ve got all these servers… It’s a reminder of cryptocurrency, where it’s using all…

Jerod Santo: I enjoy sometimes trolling through subreddits, especially of cryptocurrency projects, because there’s a lot of people who are fanboys of a project, which is ultimately a software project with a financial thing attached to it… And yet they are unable to judge a software project, and they will often post how many commits they have been making this week on their GitHub repository as some sort of benchmark… Like “Hey, guys, 105 commits this week. We’re killing it.” It’s like, “Well, what is a commit?” Not every commit is created equally. It’s just funny, because you have these people mis-applying–

Matthew Hodgson: Some of the Rust community went to Matrix, rather than Discord… I’m hoping that the rest of the Rust guys will see the light and come back, eventually. So it’s honestly a weird mix of open source – lots of cryptocurrency projects, like Tezos, and Status, Ethereum, obviously Parity (that I already mentioned), open source cryptocurrency types… Also activists and people who really care about privacy and encryption, and then on the flipside governments… And that’s kind of the main uptake right now. And we haven’t yet shifted into the more mainstream people who are using Slack today, but that is the big challenge that we’re tackling really over the course of this year… Trying to get the UX glossy enough in Riot, trying to make sure that features like Communities are there.

In terms of first-time user experience right now there’s quite a lot of wtf moments, so to speak, for new users… We just haven’t quite polished it as much as we should, or we’ve let a bit of the protocol shine through into user interface. For instance, right now you can invite users in DMs. If you’re used to it, it’s really useful. Somebody DMs you, and you think “Aah, you’re not talking to the right person! Let me invite in the right person to direct you to!” Or if you want to invite a bot into your DM, so that it can translate it for you, or something like that. It’s actually kind of useful.

But the level of panic that some people have when they’re coming over from Slack and discover that the one-to-one that they were having with somebody can actually be magically upgraded, not even into a DM, but into a private chat, and it can even be made a public chat if you wanted to, just because you can, is a classic example of “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”

Tom Wilkie: I think he’s now at one of the cryptocurrency companies, but yeah. Unrelated…

Raul Jordan: Indeed. So as it stands today, Ethereum actually runs on what we call proof of work. People have probably hear about cryptocurrency mining - bad for the environment, killing trees, all sorts of things. Basically, the way that Ethereum and Bitcoin work today is they require people around the world to basically run these machines that are specialized computation circuits that use an extreme amount of electricity to basically solve this brute force math problem, and participate in the consensus of the blockchain.

The paradigm is that you’re putting in a lot of real-world electrical power into this system such that it becomes almost impossible that anyone can collectively try to revert that. You cannot revert the Bitcoin or the Ethereum blockchain without having more electrical power than all these people combined that put their effort into it.

So Ethereum is actually migrating to what we call proof of stake; so instead of expanding a lot of electricity, what you’re doing is that you’re instead locking up a lot of Ether, you’re locking up a lot of this cryptocurrency called ETH, and to participate in consensus, you need to put that up for stake. If you do anything malicious, you can start losing that stake. It changes the paradigm. You don’t need this crazy computational thing; it’s just basically anyone can run it on a home server. You can run it on a consumer laptop.

[58:49] Since Ethereum was already proof of work, the transition into proof of stake is very solid, because we can leverage all the security that Ethereum has already over the years into this new paradigm. So we are one of the teams that’s building proof of stake for Ethereum. Ethereum proof of work - the mining, basically - is planned to go away in less than a year, so basically no more shortage of GPUs on the market. You’ll be seeing a lot of really cool stuff happening, estimated I believe to be like 99.98% more computationally effective, and better for the environment. That’s something that we’re excited about, and just keep an eye out on that.

Brian Behlendorf: No, no. But then – so learning more about it, and spending time with Jim Zemlin, who’s the head of the Linux Foundation, spending time with folks who are part of pooling that together, from IBM, from a startup company called Digital Asset, from a bunch of others, learn more about the rationale and said “Okay, this is important to work on.” It’s not against the cryptocurrency side of the world, but in fact there’s ways that we need them and ways to work together, but maybe there’s some real opportunity here to build something that has some lasting impact.

Adam Stacoviak: That’s how we power the house, you know? So back to this unique thing - basic attention token… It’s so foreign to me. Ethereum-based, we’ve done shows on this - I get it; I understand blockchain, I understand cryptocurrencies, I keep hearing more and more that they’re coming of age, they’re about to be mainstream, or they are mainstream and there’s a small mainstream, who knows…? What’s the state? Where are coin in general being used? What is the state of this cryptocurrency system?

Cory Doctorow: [39:55] There’s two parts to that; the first one is a very practical thing that’s going on right now. As apps gained ascendancy, browsers lost some of their power; they became less significant to technology ecosystems, and this made browser vendors and the World Wide Web Consortium (which standardizes browsers) pretty desperate. In 2013, the W3C decided to add DRM to the core set of HTML standards for HTML 5, and something called encrypted media extensions. What these mean is that for the first time ever, the person who runs a website will be allowed to tell your user agent, your browser, how it must perform, how it must render content and whether it can render content. That’s never been the case; this is why ad blockers and pop-up blockers work, but also why I have bad low contrast vision, and when I get to gray on white type, I turn on a thing that turns the gray type black. All of that stuff only exists because users are able to configure their user agents to display the web in the way that’s convenient to them, and so what this is doing is it’s setting up this regime where it’s a felony to change the way your browser is configured, if that conflicts with the interest of the people who serve the content to your browser.

We have proposed to the W3C that it should take its existing policies and extend them to cover DRM. Right now the W3C, if you join, you have to promise not to use your software patents to attack people who want to employ W3C standards. The W3C’s position on patents is that standards are more open if you don’t need to license a patent to implement them, and so they have this policy. We’re saying, “Okay, well there’s this new right, the right to tell people how their browsers must work, that you’re creating by doing this DRM standardization. Surely, a standard is more open if you don’t need someone’s permission to implement it, because of DRM, just as surely as it is with patents. You should have the same policy for patents”. So that’s coming up for a vote very shortly.

We’ve been joined by some pretty significant parties there, the browser vendor Brave is in with us, so is the Royal National Institute for the Blind and Oxford University. They’ve all signed on, along with most of the crypto-currency and Blockchain companies that are W3C members, because as cryptographers, they are like “Yeah, of course people should be allowed to report vulnerabilities in browsers.” It’s a terrible policy to say that companies get to decide who can report vulnerabilities. That’s a thing that’s live and underway, and if you work for a W3C member, you should talk to your rep about supporting us there, because that is coming up any day now.

Asim Aslam: He’s right, there’s no new idea. It’s just about the timing. Usually, things show up a decade too early, and then they get tried again, and then something works. To me it’s sort of desktop, web, mobile, cloud, and then there’s some next piece, which is like edge, or networks, or something like that… And it keeps going, where we get to this ambient computing model where technology is everywhere and you actually no longer even carry around devices. It’s just like always on, it’s everywhere, it’s embedded in the world.

But networks - networks is a thing for me that exist beyond cloud. Some of that infrastructure is being done in this kind of blockchain, peer-to-peer cryptocurrency stuff… But you’re right, it’s like early internet, where they were defining the protocols, they were figuring out the use cases, there was no clear – once we started to develop the browser, that’s where the web really took off, and then the use case took off for the internet. But crypto doesn’t have that thing yet. I mean, people think it’s money, like banking and infrastructure, but… Right now, I’m more focused on this kind of cloud thing, which - a lot of it has been driven around centralized platforms, which is fair enough…

I just think GitHub really works for source code at rest, and you know, all these companies – and what you find is these things that exist inside of companies come out of the companies and become a social platform. Not just in terms of public social networks, but developer tools. So you’re looking at it as like “Okay, we have a public Git server that everyone can share code on.” The next - it’s quite possibly gonna be some sort of platform on which you host that code, that’s an entirely public and shared experience. Right now we look at cloud providers as that, but that’s not really that. That’s not social. Cloud providers is a personal [unintelligible 01:27:42.25]

Jerod Santo: BAT… So you have a cryptocurrency, and one of the gifts and the curses of cryptos is the price goes up and down a bunch. No doubt that probably had some implications on your runway, on your ability to pay yourselves. I know you’ve raised initially from China, you had a big ICO, and that 36 million I think you said that you sold in 20 seconds probably looked like maybe 360 million for a while there back in December, and now it might not look so hot. Is the volatility of the BAT price something that has come into play at a practical level for Brave Inc. or for the browser, or is it really something that doesn’t matter all that much, and you just kind of assume eventually is gonna hold some sort of value?

Nader Dabit: Yeah, those are actually fascinating points to me, because it is fundamental to how this space actually works. It also applies to a lot of different things in the Web3 space; the idea of ownership. Being an owner of Ethereum means you’re part of – you could almost think of it as buying stock in something like Tesla, or something. You want that company to win. I think one of the main differences here is that you’re part-owner of some token, and you might want that token to succeed, and you might be out there hyping it up… But you can also build software and applications with it. You can transact in the way that you might have in the bank with the U.S. dollar, but you probably don’t go out there and try to have the U.S. dollar succeed or fail. It’s not even probably an after-thought. Of course, you don’t want it to fail, but yeah, with the cryptocurrency you can kind of do all of these different things with it…

And it does provide incentives, in good and bad ways… So if the Graph token, for example, which is one of the tokens – I would say it’s the token that the Graph Network uses to make it function… People that have bought it in a speculative way might come into one of my tweets and say something stupid, because the Graph went up or down too much that week or that month, and they’re upset. So you end up having people that are interested either in the technology, or they’re not and they’re just speculating… You have all these people in the same discussions, in the same communities, and it’s definitely different.

Bryan Hughes: It’s an interesting question, I think… We’re definitely in a hype phase of IoT. It’s actually a little different than the hype that I have seen for other technologies in the past. I very much remember the HTML5 hype bubble, and that very much was a hype bubble… You know, cryptocurrency may be kind of a similar hype bubble…

Chris Beams: That’s right. And for completeness, I should actually say, it tends to be in practice that one side of every trade in Bisq is Bitcoin. We’ve actually recently added support for additional kinds of what we call “base pairs”. In the situation that I’ve just described, Bitcoin is the base of the trading pair, but we also support Dash, which is another popular cryptocurrency we support, Litecoin, we even have support for Dogecoin, which you guys may know and other people may not know… It’s kind of a meme, kind of a joke on cryptocurrency, but people use it and it’s even possible to trade against that as a base pair.

Jerod Santo: I think that’s a pretty good explanation. Speaking of nodes in the network and financial systems, let’s dig a little bit into Ethereum, just at a top level, maybe explain some jargon… But I think what might be useful, for your sake Gavin, is to give a little bit of Adam and my background with regard to cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Ethereum, just so you know where we stand in terms of understanding. I’ll just let you know that our audience is very technical - we’re developers, we’re hackers, some of us may be cryptocurrency day traders, but you also have those that are more like Adam and myself, casually following along, or perhaps not following along at all. But we all pretty much know what Bitcoin is, and understand how it works, maybe at a high level. Give us Ethereum, the elevator pitch in light of that level of background, and then we’ll go on to clarify a few of the terms here next.

Rich Burroughs: That would have still been when I was at the ISP, because even there we were dealing with – it’s kind of funny, when the whole cryptocurrency stuff happened… Because in like probably like ‘97 or something we were dealing with this thing called cyber cash, that was like one of the early encrypted currencies… And I was big on – there was this email list called The Cypherpunks email list, that was like the crypto nerds, and I was very big into that stuff. I would go to like PGP key signing parties, and stuff… And so it was funny when the cryptocurrencies stuff came up, and everybody was like “This is brand new.” And I was like, “No, it isn’t.”

Jerod Santo: In a piece titled, “Quantum Computing’s Hard, Cold Reality Check”, IEEE Spectrum lays out the bear case for near-term quantum computing applications, some of which has been hype-driven. Surprised?

Some of the more ambitious timelines proposed by quantum computing companies have suggested these machines could be impacting real-world problems in just a handful of years. But there’s growing pushback against what many see as unrealistic expectations for the technology.

The article also quotes folks are more optimistic about it. I guess we can add QC to the list (alongside cryptocurrency, autonomous vehicles, generative AI) of computing endeavors with smart people on either side debating their validity, timeliness & long-term effects on the human race. Me? I’m not holding my breath or my qubits.

Ken Kantzer: [01:01:47.11] So the one that happened the most recently, that I think I linked to in the article, is related to DeFi. Essentially, the smart contract had logic in it for being able to almost like index a lot of different cryptocurrencies and autobalance them. And so what the guy did was he found a way to inject a lot of like a very cheap cryptocurrency into the pool that was used for calculating the balance of the index, and through everything that was completely legal within the smart contract, was able to extract tons of money from the system. And maybe it’s similar to how the stock market gets manipulated sometimes, like pumping and dumping stocks. It felt a lot like that. It was legal, perfectly legal within the system, but it just was not the original intention of the developers.

Adam Stacoviak: [43:57] Since you mentioned cars, there’s two people in particular that are pretty bullish on Rust. Obviously, you’ve mentioned that you don’t know enough about Rust deeply enough to know the concerns or lack thereof, if there aren’t any… But in particular Elon Musk is known to be bullish on Rust. And then a counterpoint is Jack Dorsey, who famously created Twitter, Square… You know, a forward-thinker on Web 3, which we’ll probably talk about to some degree, in terms of decentralization of the computer, and obviously, cryptocurrency. Those two people tend to be “thought leaders” or influencers or mega-serial-entrepreneurs that have widespread, almost cult-like followings, and therefore they’re –

Justin Garrison: I stopped using Bitcoin when I saw the energy usage of the Bitcoin networks. And just cryptocurrency in general. And then AI came along and was like “Hold my beer.”

Kris Brandow: But it’s like, I was thinking about this the other day, where I’m like, blockchain as a technology is actually absolutely incredible. From a distributed systems perspective, to nerd out for a second, the thing about Byzantine fault-tolerant distributed system consensus algorithms, which is what blockchain is, is usually you have a lower threshold of the number of nodes that can fail to make it secure… And blockchain as technology has figured out how to effectively get you up to 50%, which is the same tolerance you have for every other type of consensus. You can’t have consensus with more than 50% of your nodes failing. And I’m like, it’s incredible. We actually made some major ground and have proven that this type of system can work and can function, even with adversaries. That is incredible. And it is tragic that it is attached to something that is so horrible. Even if you like cryptocurrency in general, the current state of it, with the scams and the Ponzi schemes and the people losing their life savings - it’s a disaster. And I feel like the same thing about AI. I feel like AI, the underlying technology is really interesting. Really cool. That thing it’s attached to, the name AI, the brand AI - no. I could do without it. Please, just…

Jerod Santo: So the full first paragraph is “Startup Blockchain.com said it raised new funding that values the company at about 14 billion, more than doubling its worth, in a sign that cryptocurrency firms still enjoy the favor of investors in turbulent venture capital markets.” And that is off of Bloomberg.com.

So after two rounds, the score is Jerod 3, Kball 0. I’m having a great time. I hope you are as well. Okay, headline number three… There’s ten of these, by the way. We’re three tenths, or 30%, for those who are good at math, of the way there. Next headline…

Lea Anthony: [laughs] I guess one of the key targets for this application would be somebody who wants the power of Go, somebody who wants to perhaps do low-level stuff, USB stuff… I’ve got a couple of projects that I noticed that are working in the cryptocurrency space, so there’s a lot of [unintelligible 00:09:36.27] that happens… And it’s for people who want to just present that sort of stuff visually, where you perhaps otherwise maybe use a web browser to connect to, but that’s doesn’t feel quite right… And it’s something that you wanna interact with in real time, but still have that power of go. That’s really your target.

There’s a keyboard company in Japan called ergodox-ez. They create these amazing keyboards, the ones that have like a million different parts and they’re super-ergonomic… One of their main developers contacted me a while back, and he was using WebView to do that firmware flasher. He’s recently ported their application called Wally, which is their firmware flasher - he’s ported it over to Wails. I’ve worked pretty closely with him; we didn’t have to do much. He gave us some great feedback, and… Yeah, I was really happy about that, because it really shows the depth of application you could do.

Paul Frazee: But I think they had a different concept of it. I tried it out, and whenever you went to a torrent, it actually sort of acted like a typical torrent client, as opposed to behaving like a website. I don’t know if they were quite tried to use it as a drop-in replacement to HTTP, which is what we started doing with Dat and that was one of the differences…

But back to Feross’ original question, the good news is that there’s a lot of projects out there right now that are attacking this problem. So for anybody that’s really into decentralizing the web, you should be happy to hear that. A lot of it has to do with blockchains. Beaker and Dat - we don’t use any blockchains; we’re really actually just seeing how far we can get with Dat… And there’s some technical similarities, because Dat has this append-only log behind every Dat archive, which retains all the history and it uses signatures on that log… But unlike almost every other blockchain, there’s no decentralized consensus, which is the major feature of a lot of the cryptocurrencies.

[16:23] But the Ethereum project has been really explicit about how they wanted to build a next iteration of the web with their tech; they even started, I believe, the Web 3 Foundation.

You know, I guess almost all of the blockchain-based solutions have payments at the core of what they’re trying to add to the web, which is cool… Payments are important; it’s important that people can make money off of their work, and it’s all sustainable… But the main difference, I feel like, between what we’re doing and what the cryptocurrency-based projects are doing is that by not using the blockchain, by not having decentralized consensus, we actually reduced costs even more. You can do this all with hardware that already exists, you don’t have to pay any money to transact on this network, and you end up getting a lot of the same kind of benefits, where you’re detached from any proprietary cloud, which is really what’s at the heart of all this.

So that would be probably the most significant difference between a lot of these projects - is there a cryptocurrency involved or not?

Brian Scott: Well, think about it… Soon, everything can be compute, and you can start literally leasing out your own computing to anyone who needs that time or that power to actually run functions. Now with the whole cryptocurrency coming out, it becomes more of a thing, right? Like, “Hey, let me go ahead and lease this out for some type of actual currency.” I think that’s even gonna drive down the cost of compute very much.

Kent Quirk: This won’t surprise any of you here, but my unpopular opinion is that cryptocurrency is worthless. Having spent two years doing it, I came away convinced – and trying to create what I was thinking of was going to be the ethical cryptocurrency, I came away with the conclusion that pretty much everyone in cryptocurrency is either a crook, or an opportunist who wants to take advantage of the crooks, or hopelessly naive and not paying attention to what’s actually going on. There is no useful use case for cryptocurrency still, all these years later. Web 3 is a disaster, and blockchains are not useful tech. And so yeah.