Jerod Santo: Another thing that’s happening is that there’s more opportunities now, in addition to the speculation, because there’s now more use cases. We’re also in a bull run for cryptocurrencies, so that’s gonna bring in more people, of course… But back when Ethereum first launched, you had the DAO use case, the ICO, so you had the crowd investment use case… There really wasn’t much else you could do with these things besides speculate. And then the DeFi thing started to happen - decentralized finance - and I think there’s a lot of snake oil in that whole deal, but maybe it’s just unregulated markets; I don’t know, there’s some features there for lending stuff that’s cool, maybe… And then what happened recently, in addition to the stuff you all are talking about, is NFTs really have become this interesting, wild, new use case for these decentralized networks… And a lot of people wanna mint NFTs and don’t know how to… So what do they do? They hire somebody who can do that for them.

So there’s lots of opportunities to get involved in and around building auction houses, and minting platforms… So this is really brand new. I mean, 2020, 2021… I’m not sure how long it’s been going, but the NFT thing is very real. Now, maybe it’s just a fad, but it seems like a legitimate use case that’s bringing lots of people to the table.

Jerod Santo: …that it’s going to be a stumbling block, or something you’ll have to overcome. Now, if it starts to work and work well, and it’s on Ethereum you said, so that’s proof of stake, so it’s not proof of work like Bitcoin, which a lot of people have problem with energy draw… So it doesn’t have that particular problem, and maybe you can overcome some of the anti-crypto stance of the developer community at large. Is that fair to say?

Matti Ranta: Of course, yeah. I’ve contributed to drone.io, the CI/CD. There’s a fork of it called Woodpecker that I’ve also contributed to. I maintain several Golang libraries for automation. Probably the biggest thing outside of Gitea that I do is something called xgo, that lets you cross-compile Golang binaries on two different platforms. Normally, Go lets you do this with just like changing a few environment variables, and like “Hey, this is like targeting Windows now.” And just say “go build target windows.” Unless you’re using cgo, which is pretty common for the SQLite library for Golang; it’s using cgo, so you can’t use all those just fun tricks of the Go command line just to build a binary for – if you’re on Linux, building it for Windows, or for Mac, and vice-versa. So xgo as a project was originally created for the Ethereum Go project, but it went by the wayside; the maintainer wasn’t able to support it, so I picked it up, I added support for different targets… PowerPC, FreeBSD, Linux/PowerPC, FreeBSD/AMD64. Because it’s not just the OS, it’s the CPU architecture you need to target as well. And built in automations to be able to – when a new Go version is released, then a new version is taken and built. Because the way that it works is you’re actually just distributing the headers of the development library. So you’ll have the kernel headers, the GCC stuff for Multilib, and whatnot. And so it’s a great, big, beefy binary or Docker container that takes a ton of time to build… So I just have a cron job that checks go.dev whenever a new version of Go is out, builds it, pushes it, and…

Jerod Santo: Right. Whenever you talk to or read from the real builders, the ones who are there for principles and for technology and not for gains, and ponzis, and like quick things - which many people just come for that - they like the down markets, because all of the hype and all of the noise and all the scammers kind of just go away, and they can just put their head down and build cool stuff… Which is what they were doing the whole time anyways. But all of this stuff surrounded them. And so they tend to like times like this, because they say “Okay, we can just quit explaining it to everybody, quit talking about it, and we can build, build, build”, and eventually, show us to the Promised Land.

It’s getting to the point now for me where it’s like – I remember when we first had Gavin Woods on the Changelog talking about Ethereum, and I asked him “Where’s the application?” And I’m still waiting for the killer app; and we had ICOs, and we had NF Ts, and neither of those had been killer enough. So it’s like, “When’s it gonna hit?” Is it gonna be the Twitter replacement? Well, it seems like we’re going federated for that, not full blockchain for that. All those people trying to do it, but… I don’t know. I’m still waiting for real-world, “How’s this gonna make my life better?”

Bill Kennedy: There are times when somebody comes up to me and they say – so here’s the most recent… Just to have this conversation. And I know everybody hates blockchain, but Ethereum is moving now to their new proof of stake blockchain, right? They’re very close to putting it in production. I met one of the developers on that team, and he was like “Bill, we’ve all watched your videos when we were beginning to build all this code…” And my brain went “Whoa…” That’s kind of surreal, right? Because I’m not directly coding, let’s say Ethereum blockchain proof of stake, but there is some aspect of what –

Ken Kantzer: Oh, yeah. Auditing, and also just bug bounties. I think I read somewhere that someone found a bug in Ethereum, and the bounty was like $10 million, which is – that’s a lot of money. It definitely dwarfs – the interesting thing is it dwarfs a lot of the bug bounty money in like traditional software. I think Apple three or four years ago made huge news in that they upped their like top bounty, if you find a vulnerability in iOS or something to like a million, and that was huge news, because it was like 10 times more than anyone else was giving out. And now you have the smart contracts, where there’s tons of money flowing through, and the bounties are even higher.

Jon Kuperman: It’s really interesting, because we offer gateways, like for Ethereum… So you can hit one of our public gateways, or whatever… But we haven’t done a ton in the cryptocurrency space. We do a ton in the cryptography space, but…

Quinn Slack: I think that a single person writing code can have a huge impact on the world… And I worry that we have lost that, or forgotten that. There were some cases where that’s been really clear, like with the creation of Bitcoin, and Ethereum… But what you see more of is people that can write code being pushed to go and build a software business, usually an enterprise software business around it… And in many ways, there have been successes, but I think there’s so many people out there that just through their code can have a huge impact on the world. And I don’t want to just have two data points from that, I want people to be able to build big businesses, and build products that tons and tons of people can use just on their own. And that happens today if you’re a writer.

If you’re a writer, you can write a book, you can write articles that have a huge impact on people. And when you do that, no one says “Hey, you should go start a publishing company.” But if you’re a coder, that’s what people tell you to. And I worry about the skill and ambition and enthusiasm we’re losing from those people, and also from all the people that say “Well, I don’t wanna get in the business. All I wanna do is code”, and knowing that that doesn’t seem possible, they don’t even get started.

[01:11:56.21] So if one impact we can have at Sourcegraph is making it so that a single coder can have a much bigger impact on the world, that would make me very happy. And certainly, I feel this as someone who loves to code, and who is now a CEO of an enterprise software business… There’s so many things I love about that too, but sometimes I think “How can that single person coding have even more distribution, even more impact? How can we celebrate that as something that someone can do for their whole life?”

Bill Kennedy: – with some sense that they have this real physical ownership of it. I don’t think Ethereum is going away anytime soon. I don’t know about all the other platforms that are out there… Because it’s scary; overnight, your NFT doesn’t exist anymore. Like, the painting does, unless you have a fire, obviously… But do you understand what I’m saying? So I am struggling with this idea that an NFT gives you real ownership over some digital artifact. I don’t know. I’m trying. I’m trying… But I’m struggling.

Mikeal Rogers: [laughs] What that means in different contexts and different chains kind of varies, so I wouldn’t wanna get really, really specific about that. But the NEAR protocol flows on a proof of stake. Ethereum is moving to proof of stake.

Jerod Santo: It reminds me of the original Ethereum blockchain, which was pure insofar as it was immutable, you could never make a change to it… And that was part of the system. “The code is the contract” was kind of the motto. And that was all well and good until they got hacked, and I can’t remember the exact details of how somebody made off with millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies… And the entire Ethereum ecosystem – actually, they divided in half over this. That’s why there’s Ethereum Classic and then the one now. They basically decided “That whole immutable code as the contract thing - yeah, let’s throw that out and fix this bug.”

Mikeal Rogers: [19:50] One thing that you figure out really quickly is that if you’re taking in all of these high-quality audio channels, and you’re taking them into one of the peers who is the host of the call, while the call is going on, then there’s not enough bandwidth for the actual audio quality to be good… So you can really saturate your connection really quickly. So what you actually wanna do is just buffer that kind of locally, and then send it at the end of the call. But then if somebody closes the browser, then you don’t have the audio… [laughs]

So actually, what it turns out that you wanna do is send this to a server. This is actually a place where a central server would be quite nice… And there are some products now that do this really well, where it’s using a real-time audio channel, but then sending all of the background channel to a server… And then at the end you’ll see that it’s like “No, no, no. Don’t stop yet. We’re still uploading.” So there’s some UI around that that’s really nice. I never really got to that part of it… And I looked into solving some of those issues with some other technologies. I looked at potentially using WebTorrent to do the file portion of it, and that didn’t quite work, so I started looking at IPFS, and at that time - this was three years ago - IPFS wasn’t quite ready.

The next bucket of projects, the peer-to-peer projects that use this because it’s the only thing to use - there’s a lot of cool stuff in that category. Feross was talking about WebTorrent, and WebTorrent is amazing… IPFS is something that I work on a little bit - it’s really nice now; it uses that channel as well. And then IPFS is really built on some primitives that also take advantage of this. I work on IPLD, which is like the data structures… And we don’t do anything specific with WebRTC, but if you wanna take our data structures and decentralize them, you would have to use WebRTC in the browser.

The whole networking layer behind IPFS is a project called libp2p, and this is really like a peer-to-peer networking stack. If what you’re looking at is the whole problem of peer-to-peer networking, and content discovery on a peer-to-peer network, and if you wanna run this in the browser, in Linux, everywhere, and every kind of environment, you’re gonna need all these kinds of fallback logic, and all these different protocols on different devices, and you’re gonna have to think about this in a much bigger way than you would if you were just targeting one system. That’s what libp2p kind of does.

So yeah, if you have that whole problem, it’s a really good project. I think that if you wanna hack together a cool little web project, it’s a little bit heavy for that one thing. Ethereum 2 is gonna be built on top of libp2p, because they have this whole problem…

Matthew Hodgson: …I don’t think you’d want me to. So the core team, when we set up New Vector as the spin-out in 2017 was 11 people. Since then we have scaled up to 41, I think, as of this morning. So we’ve taken on funding, as well as the revenue I mentioned earlier. We’ve taken on funding, both seed and from Status, the Ethereum decentralized communication project. They wanted to support us, because they like decentralization and wanted the project to survive.

And then more recently from VCs in London, specifically Notion, Dawn Capital and firstminute, who – I think we’re very lucky to have these investors, because they get the mission and the idea, as well as see the commercial possibility, in that we could become the Netscape of the Matrix ecosystem… And if Matrix takes off properly… It’s a bit of a long shot – as we said, it’s a bit of a slightly hamstrung moonshot, but we’re quite close to the moon at this point, and assuming we don’t overshoot or crash into it, hopefully we’ll have a beautiful landing… And that’s allowed us to scale up the team significantly.

For the foundation we don’t hire anybody; it’s just the directors basically looking after the governance and the IP and the evolution of the protocol… But for people paid to work full-time on Matrix, that’s what we do, is New Vector… And then lots of other contributors from other companies, and individual open source contributors. Probably 600-700 into the core project, and easily thousands into the wider projects which people happen to have built on top.

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah. I did see the recent news from Shell. They had a big investment in Ethereum I believe it was. It wasn’t very popular on the news feed, but it was interesting to me, because I was like “Here’s this big oil company, trying to find a way to use blockchain to essentially ensure that we as consumers, when we buy electricity, that it is–” Because they have a network of electricity, essentially, this energy…

Brian Bondy: The way that ICOs work is basically – for an ICO funding, when I say 36 million, it’s not 36 million in BAT that we have; it’s 36 million that people used in Ethereum to buy BAT with. At that point, we’re not speculators, so most of this is converted to USD in fiat to run the company.

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?