Adam Stacoviak: It was OSCON. That’s right. We met in 2017 way back there, and I got his card. I took a picture of it recently and I shared it with him… Like, “Did I get your card from like so many years ago?” It’s just cool how things work out. Anyways… I even asked him like “You know what - we’ve gotta get jack on Founders Talk at some point. Let’s make that happen.” And obviously, Jack is an A-list type, if you want to A, B, C-list folks, which I don’t necessarily do, but just to give… Jack is a major player in tech, from Twitter, to Square, to now Block, and cryptocurrency, and decentralized thinking… Like, he’s a big thinker, and the moves he often makes are larger moves, with large waves. And so Jack Dorsey - sat down with him for the main stage at Square Unboxed, because my friends at Square helped make that happen. He’s like, “Hey, you know what? We can make a fireside chat happen at Square Unboxed.”

And so we took that conversation knowing that that was meant to be for Square Unboxed, but also for Founders Talk… So this is like three layers later. Then it also appeared on the Changelog, which is where this list goes from, right? And got even more listens. I mean, it was great, so that’s one of my favorites; just as a bucket list kind of thing. Like, it was a great conversation… I didn’t get to ask Jack every single thing I wanted to, because it was kind of bridled, in the fact that it was meant for the main stage of Square Unboxed, so it had its guardrails, so to speak, of the direction of topic. If Jack is listening, or anybody else from Square Block, I want to get him back on Founders Talk, so we’ll have a different conversation, a deeper conversation… Although the conversation did open up with his hacker heart, which I think was super-interesting.

[01:10:03.18] Just because, you know, when you get to that level, you often get removed from the code, and get often removed from the things that matter. Maybe he shouldn’t be writing production code, but at the same time, he still tinkers with Rust, and fun things around crypto wallets and whatnot, hardware wallets, and fun things like that. So that was one of my favorites, just because - Jack Dorsey.

Feross Aboukhadijeh: Well, I was really sad when Mozilla shut down Firefox Send, because it was such a nice, simple product… And I was like “There’s no reason that this thing couldn’t be rebuilt and done in a way that is sustainable.” So that’s kind of what we wanted to try, was to make a version of it that wouldn’t get shut down. And it was also a really nice application of all the tech that I’ve been working on throughout most of my career. The peer-to-peer stuff from WebTorrent really does improve it, even beyond what Mozilla did with Firefox Send, because we can do that streaming that I mentioned, so the downloader can start downloading right away… The user experience stuff that we did too is actually another thing that Firefox Send didn’t do.

Here’s the thing - when you’re building a security product, you can either sell it to people as going into all the security details about why it’s great, like I just kind of did with you guys, and told you all about end-to-end encryption… And then you’re gonna get some people who are like “Oh, I am worried about people getting access to my files, so I’m gonna use this thing that is more secure.” But I think most people just care about the experience of using it… So I see this mistake made a lot when people are building, especially in the decentralized space, or even like in the cryptocurrency world you see this a lot, where people are making stuff that’s so hard to use that they only get the true believers, the really ideological people, who would use it no matter how terrible and hard it was to use… And everyone else who’s not really that bought into the ideology of “Oh, everything needs to be decentralized” or “Everything needs to be - whatever the buzzword is.” Those people are not gonna be sold by it, you know what I mean? If you’re making a Twitter clone, for example - a Twitter clone, but it’s decentralized. But it’s like ten times harder to use than real Twitter. You’re not gonna get any normal people to use it, “normal people”.

[16:12] So that was the thing I wanted to be really careful when we were building Wormhole that we didn’t do. I didn’t wanna be like “This thing is worse in a lot of ways, but it’s most secure”, and try to get people excited about that. It was like “It has to be better, even if you don’t care about security.” That was part of the challenge, like “Can you even do this?” Because usually, there’s some kind of compromise when you’re trying to increase the security or whatever… You’re making it harder in some ways; it’s more challenging from a technical perspective. And sometimes that tech leaks out in a way that the user sees it. Like “Oh, you’ve gotta save this key”, or whatever nerdy thing you have to do in order to use it. We’re trying to do it without any of that. So just be better, faster, simpler, quicker, get you the link right away, not at the end of the upload, all that kind of stuff. And then hopefully, they perceive that as being just way better. And then also, icing on the cake, it’s end-to-end encrypted. We can’t see your data. In that order.

Break: [17:04]

Raul Jordan: Definitely. I think Preston and I consider ourselves pretty pragmatic engineers, so when we first started on this journey, we were just excited by this concept of having this global computation platform that anyone can use. It was like “Wow, it’s so cool, the things that this can enable for the world.” And of course, blockchain cryptocurrency has had quite a negative reputation on a lot of fronts, especially because there have been a lot of nefarious use cases for the technology. And you can say that about any sort of new technology.

Why we got excited about Ethereum is because Bitcoin was, of course, the first blockchain, the original blockchain, and it serves its use case as basically a store of value; basically, the predominant narrative is that Bitcoin is like this digital gold. But on Bitcoin, interestingly enough, you can’t really run code, or run these decentralized applications that are Turing-complete. You can’t write a custom piece of software that basically can do whatever you want. Ethereum is the first blockchain actually that allows for these decentralized applications, for basically decentralized computation of software; and to us, that was really cool.

Ethereum has the most network effect, has the most developers, the most people building on it; it’s not controlled by a single company or a single person. People say it has a soul… It’s basically community-owned, and that to us is really awesome. That’s kind of like why we got into it.

Adam Stacoviak: I would probably say I don’t have a clue… I don’t have a clue what the next big thing might be. There’s indicators of what’s big, of what’s shaking out there… I know there’s a lot of attention around cryptocurrency, there’s a lot of attention around Web 3, and decentralized web, but they’re waiting for the killer app/apps to really break it open… I think it’s very focused on – the same with Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, it’s very focused on the tech… And you can’t reach mainstream really if you’re just so focused on the tech. I think that’s the hard thing happening there. I think that’s the bigger things really taking place currently. Well, those are unproven grounds. That’s where the pioneers are kind of hanging out; that’s where the proverbial gold is being mined, because that’s where the rush might take place, is in this new thing.

Oddly enough, Silicon Valley - again, they were building the web we deserved, right? They were building a decentralized web, built upon an algorithm that was all about compression… And that’s what it was about. And I think in many ways decentralized is becoming a more prominent thing, and I think that’s where you’ll see a lot of new and exciting things happen.

Spencer Kimball said it really good on the last episode, “There’s nothing new under the sun in terms of tech. It’s just reuse and redo’s.” That’s kind of where we’re at.

Jerod Santo: Well said, well said. You don’t use the cloud… Are you involved, at least the company – there’s a tie to the Solid project. I wanted to ask you about that project, Tim Berners-Lee, Solid. We talked about decentralized networks with cryptocurrencies, but here’s one that’s decentralized storage, it’s got of course Tim Berners-Lee attached to it… So it sounds like it’s interesting. Are you attached to that somehow? Are you working on that?

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?

Preethi Kasireddy: Yeah, sure. That’s a great question. I’ll be honest, one of the things that I’m always excited by are problems that are not figured out, and blockchain is definitely one of them in the sense that there is this amazing technology that got created, but the actual applications and use cases have yet to be created, and there’s so much room for creativity and innovation. I’d say that’s one of the main reasons why I’m so attracted to this industry… Because I naturally have the entrepreneurial spirit, I wanna solve unsolved problems, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m gravitating to it. But at a more fundamental level, I think the technology itself is super interesting.

I think earlier you were saying how blockchain is interesting as a digital currency… I’d go a little bit further than that and say I actually don’t get excited by digital currency per se, because digital currency is just one application of the blockchain. There’s so many other applications that I think have potential that haven’t been created yet, and I’m more excited about those applications. In my opinion, it’s really hard for the current currency system in any nation – for example, take the U.S. For cryptocurrency or digital currency to replace fiat currency, that would take a lot. The government has a really tight control over the monetary policy and I just don’t see what benefits digital currencies provide today that would make people switch over, that would make the government friendly to this, and so forth… Because in the end, what digital currency is - it’s completely decentralized, completely open, completely censorship-resistant, which is not something any government really wants.

So for me, I’m more excited by what else blockchain enables. At a fundamental level, blockchain is a decentralized technology where it’s maintaining a ledger of transactions or basically state changes, and the state changes are cryptographically secure because they are maintained by something called the consensus process. This consensus process in Bitcoin or Ethereum is called proof of work, where a bunch of miners are there and they run a bunch of complex computations to validate these transactions, and they get paid for validating this blockchain. So the entire chain is decentralized, it’s trustless, because there’s no need to trust any central party to maintain this database or this ledger, and then it’s completely censorship-resistant because you can’t have really any central authority trying to censor it… And it’s completely secure, because it’s cryptographically secure. So with those primitives you can do just so much on top, and that’s kind of what I’m excited by.

Baruch Sadogursky: There were and still are a lot of efforts in trying to do that… And it looks like - this is from our experience as well; we tried to come up with – again, back a couple of years ago when Go Modules only appeared, we heard this vision of “Hey, we will have some kind of a network of central module registries that will communicate with each other, trying to establish whatever truth really is, and make sure that the rest of them are not allowed”, and everything. This is where we actually started Go center. That was one of those registries. But with time, in a matter of the next years, somehow this vision morphed to “Hey, Google will maintain this central module repository, and whatever Google says is the right thing, is the right thing.” So this is where the usability of Go Modules kind of disappeared, because there was no more alternatives to whatever golden modules Google will give you.

But then it was a very useful experience for us to really try and evolve this idea of negotiating what’s [unintelligible 00:17:34.25] And I would say there are now two most important aspects of this system. The first is how do we know which module is the right module, in terms of “Hey, I have two of them, they’re named the same, they have the same version, but their checksum is different. Which one of them is lying, and which one of them is authentic?” That’s the first one. And the second is chain of custody of those modules that we decided they are the right ones. So I decided this module is authentic, and we can talk in a second why… And then, okay, how do I make sure that what I have now in my machine is really the same module, and the papertrail of the decision that it was the authentic module is actually preserved and cannot be hacked?

[18:30] That brought us to envisioning a system that everybody will be able to use in order to guarantee those two, and it’s called Pyrsia. Actually, Pyrsia - that’s an interesting story of the name… It’s actually a system that ancient Greeks used to convey messages with flames between each other. So this is why you have the torch.

The idea is a decentralized P2P network that will provide a consensus of what modules are authentic, and then make sure that they cannot be tampered with, with some kind of blockchain-backed ledger. I know that we lost two thirds of the audience right now, after I mentioned blockchain, but whoever stayed - you did the right thing; it has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies or Web 3.0. It’s just a ledger that you cannot tamper with; that’s the interesting part of it over there.

So basically, what we say is “Okay, everybody now can build modules from source, and publish them wherever they like.” The system will communicate and decide if that’s the golden build by comparing it to the build that the original producer of this module creates. Let’s say I have a library now that I wanna publish, and I create a build that because it’s my library, I know is the right build. Now, everybody can have their own CI producing the same module from my sources, because my sources are obviously open source; as long as the build produces the same result, your end result is as good as mine.

Now, we record it, so no one can hack into that and pretend that another result is the right one, and then we distribute it through a P2P network, because now we don’t care where it comes from, as long as we can guarantee that it’s the right results. So now Natalie builds it on her machine, and she’s behind a firewall and the connection to whatever central repository [unintelligible 00:20:36.12] but you see the next door, in the same intranet with her, in the same company, and as long as we verify that the build that Natalie produced is as good as this golden one that was produced by the original maintainer of the library, you can use whatever she built without downloading it again, outside of the firewall, and getting tons of approvals and whatnot.

So this looks like, from our perspective, the solution to some of the supply chain issues, because it guarantees the authenticity, and it protects the supply chain itself, because we verify on your machine that the package you have is exactly the package you need to have, regardless of where it actually came from. And you also have this network of the Go registry, npm registry, JFrog Artifactory, Maven Central, you name it, the sources that provide infrastructure for massive distribution and scale… And again, we don’t need to trust them in terms of “Are they giving us the right packages?” because we can verify ourselves. And also, in case they are down, we can also rely on the P2P network to get the modules in case they are not available.

Jerod Santo: Very cool. Well, I think it’s a very apt comparison then. Let me give you a little bit of the lay of the land from Adam and my perspective, as well as our listeners, what I would expect in terms of developer knowledge, what we’ve covered on the show, and then we’ll have you walk through – because one of the reasons why we have you on is to a) understand what Truffle offers, but also using Truffle as a lens, learning what all it takes to build these decentralized applications and what all the moving parts are, because as we’ve said, it’s all kind of new and different, and that means it’s also kind of intimidating and maybe difficult to approach.

[16:25] So we’ve covered Ethereum conceptually… Way back in the day we’ve had Gavin Wood on the show; we had shows about blockchains, and Hyperledger, Bitcoin, distributed exchanges… We had shows about the concepts around blockchains, cryptocurrencies, what have you - Ethereum specifically, we’ve covered smart contracts both generically and a little bit specifically with regard to Gitcoin, which was our most recent show. And with Gitcoin, we talked a little bit about how that application specifically works with regards to MetaMask, and Web3, and those kinds of things.

That being said, from a developer’s perspective, building an Ethereum-based application all the way through, even after myself having all these conversations, is still kind of a black box… So why don’t you give us the high level of all the parts that are involved, and then we’ll kind of dive into the specific regions?

Chris Beams: Yeah, well that’s where it starts to get really exciting for me. I’m obviously excited about Bisq itself, the exchange… I think it’s a wonderful thing. It’s what we are now rolling out, which is what we call the DAO, the Bisq DAO - for those who don’t know, it stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. This concept has also been called DAC - Decentralized Autonomous Corporation (or Company), but the kind of term that’s emerged and kind of got this rough consensus these days in the space is this idea of a DAO. So what does that mean and how does that relate to people participating and contributing?

The idea of a DAO, if you just break down those terms - Decentralized Autonomous Organization - well, we’ve talked so far about the application itself, which is definitely decentralized; the application is definitely peer-to-peer, it’s nothing more than the node of networks talking to each other, right? So it’s certainly decentralized in that sense. What’s not decentralized is the organization itself, the human side of the organization. To date, we’ve had contributors coming and going over the years, and indeed for myself, I got deeply involved with Bisq when it was beginning, in 2014, and I spent five or six months with the team in a kind of dedicated way, and then I left and did some other things; I was working with the Gradle team for people who know Java build systems - for about a year.

Then I decided to come back, and I decided to come back actually in large part because of what Bisq is doing with this DAO. So what does it mean to decentralized the management, the operations, the development, all the human sides of making a piece of software?

[01:20:04.08] This is really exciting stuff, because with the advent of cryptocurrencies, with the advent of Bitcoin in particular, it’s now possible for people to - like I said before - engage with each other at a distance, with a minimum of trust. Somebody working all the way across the world who is a JavaFX expert and wants to help improve the UI and put that chart in that we were just talking about, so far in the world of open source the ways that that contribution was gonna happen was a) just an industrious, helpful person over there, with this JavaFX expertise, that says “I wanna contribute, for the goodness of it all.” And of course, this isn’t so altruistic per se; it’s great reputationally for people when they contribute to open source projects, even if they’re not paid, and so on. It’s a virtuous thing all around, everybody wins usually in these kinds of scenarios. But this doesn’t scale very well, relying on just really helpful contributors. Contributing all the things that a project needs can be difficult. Certainly some projects do it, but I think when we look at the most successful, really world-changing open source projects that have been out there, there’s usually at some point an entity behind them; a company is sponsoring them, or they form a company or what have you.

This is really kind of personally important to me because I’ve been working in open source for quite a while now. For the last 10+ years, every job that I’ve had has been with some sort of open source organization, usually fairly prominent ones, so I’ve sort of seen all of the different incarnations of business models that attempt to get basically bolted on to open source organizations.

For example, I worked with the Spring Framework team - again, for people in Java, they’ll maybe know that name application framework, pretty popular one… And in the beginning, that was just a great set of ideas really well implemented in an open source project. Quickly, the team around that said “Okay, let’s find ways to make money”, and we did the training and consulting approach. That works; doesn’t scale very well, doesn’t make much money… And eventually, we were acquired, and so on and so forth. So you sort of move through these different models, but none of them feel like a native business model for open source. It’s always something kind of ancillary that you’re doing - training and consulting, or selling your documentation, or looking for someone to acquire you and kind of be a patron ultimately for the project.

What becomes possible now with cryptocurrencies and entities like DAOs is that open source projects can just fund themselves directly in a variety of ways. There’s a whole bunch of models that are being experimented with right now. You guys have probably heard something about - and many people listening to this will have heard about this - ICOs, right? Initial coin offerings that are happening. Like I said, a thousand of these tokens exist and are being traded, and dozens more are being created every day as people come up with all kinds of different experiments about how to fund projects.

Most of that stuff is people funding essentially good ideas, with good teams… Hopefully. Of course, some of them are bad ideas with bad teams, but…

Anthony Eden: Cryptocurrency has become normalized now, right? Crypto is normal.