Jerod Santo: Yeah, these are hard to parse live on the air. But let’s just say they pick one out, and it’s for a specific – here’s one that was posted by the Truffle team… How does somebody get started? Maybe you can even tell us about how you got started, although I’m sure it’s better now that it was back then; it’s been a couple years of maturation… But the jargon, the interaction with the browser extension, with them EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), writing a smart contract… What are the best ways that people can actually dip their toes in the water and see if this is the kind of coding that they wanna do?

Tim Coulter: Yeah, as far as I understand, Solidity is only used for Ethereum. There are actually other new Ethereum languages, if you guys are interested in those. Viper is one that takes its ideas from Python, LLL (Lisp-Like Language) is another one, which obviously takes its ideas from Lisp… I don’t know if any of those languages are – if people have written compilers for the other blockchains or if they’ll work on other blockchains.

Now, I have heard of many other blockchains that use the EVM, so for instance they will change the consensus protocol around, or change something about the blockchain itself, but still use the Ethereum Virtual Machine under the hood, and in that case those languages are likely to work.

Jay Phelps: Yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s one of the most exciting things about WebAssembly to me… It’s not tied to the future of browsers and all that stuff per se. There already are places and people who are using WebAssembly in completely unrelated web cases. The Ethereum Virtual Machine, for example, is being rewritten to use WebAssembly as their instruction set. And there’s other use cases, as well.

[11:55] There’s even a person who’s on the community group who is trying to create an actual micro-kernel, the core functionality of an operating system, that runs WebAssembly natively, without needing to use system calls for – like, if you know a lot about OS stuff, they have different rings to the security privileges of an operating system… And with WebAssembly, the way it’s sandboxed, you actually don’t need those rings if all applications were written and compiled to WebAssembly. So you could do some very interesting optimizations.

There really is not a lot of precedents for this. The long-term viability of it is an open question, but it’s kind of a really cool and exciting thing… Because I would love to see WebAssembly be that gap, that bridging of native applications to web applications and making it so that eventually the browser just gets absorbed into the operating system and there’s no distinction.

Chrome OS is the perfect example of what does the future maybe look like, where the browser and the OS are one and the same. I think WebAssembly really helps bridge that gap. I could see – this is a huge bet type of thing, but I could see companies like Apple and Google, with their Android and iOS, deciding to eventually support WebAssembly as a first-class application format, instead of their proprietary solutions. Because they both have to do sandboxing, and they both came up with their own proprietary way of doing that.

Brian Behlendorf: Exactly. So there’s Sawtooth, which is a different approach to building distributed ledgers… I can go into that if you’re interested. Another one called Iroha, which came from some of our Japanese members, which is tightly-coded C++ design for small systems, mobile clients, that sort of thing. Actually, an interesting project there with the bank of Cambodia, of all places… Then the fourth one is called Burrow, and this is actually an implementation of the Ethereum virtual machine, which is really exciting because there’s a lot of good academic research, as well as a lot of market validation going on around the Ethereum VM and a smart contract language called Solidity. So now being able to graph that on top of the other DLT’s is suddenly much more possible than it was before.

Brendan Eich: The story of my life. I was a Unix kernel hacker at Silicon Graphics before I ended up at Netscape, and I always worked on platform code… I think you see - it’s pretty explicit now - open fintech through the Symphony Foundation and other things… You see a lot of companies realize that open source is better for quality assurance, recruiting, lots of things that traditionally they would have to pay for themselves, so they can share the cost of platform code, or what Georgios Kontaxis calls evolutionary kernel code. This is the sort of stable code that’s conserved like the best DNA in a population. It’s like the TCP/IP or JavaScript - once you stabilize it, everybody can build huge systems above, and sometimes even below it. You can have multiple link layers and go from Ethernet being 10 Mbps on copper, all the way up to fiber (metropolitan Ethernet or whatever ATM cells) and still have this TCP/IP in the middle, and sure, IPv6, but it’s not really taking over, and it’s all evolutionary. JavaScript ES6, here we go again!

The platform code, the evolutionary kernel code that’s sort of “the commons” in the best sense of the word, is a cost center. When I was at Silicon Graphics, as I developed hot, killer graphics, workstations and then high-end multi-processors and low-end desktop graphics workstation machines, eventually to be killed by the PC and the GPU in the ’90s, the kernel group that I worked in and the network software group got kicked around. It was a cost center, it was an albatross, or else it was a source of talent for building out something important for the multiprocessor business. So they got kicked from the “hot product” group to the “not hot product” group and back. I think it even got divisionalized a little bit, not fully forked. HP did the same thing.

I see a pattern here, where open source is serving the commons, it’s not serving the differentiated, risky or for-profit innovation, that for better or worse some of that stuff stays proprietary. But anything that starts to become a platform, starts to become a cost center and needs to have its costs shared if it’s of interest to many other players. And how do you fund that? I wouldn’t say it’s exactly like publishers, because publishers often are for-profit. But not always - Dow Jones was a long-time family-owned and subsidized… In some ways we need Carlos Slim and Jeff Bezos to prop up the nation’s number one and two papers of record, right?

[01:00:22.27] Newspapers have been in a decades-long decline, and they always relied on advertising and subscriptions, and subscriptions never paid for the whole thing; they were always a minority of the revenue needed to run a newspaper business, even back in the heyday, the golden age of newspapers. Because people would subscribe, and there was some revenue you made there, but advertising paid the bulk of it, and that’s still true.

The way I look at this is not to say “We must have advertising. Advertising is always good.” There was a TV executive I heard about in the ‘50s who said, “It’s inconceivable that television will ever be other than free and advertising-supported”, and of course we have Netflix now, so never say never. Maybe the Brave donation model, in some future frictionless micro-donation, micro-payment, micro-royalty world will suffice. We still have free television with ads for sure, even with Netflix. But if you look at how costs are covered, you have to look at what’s happening today. If 70 billion is spent on ads in the U.S. (I think this year, or maybe it was last year), and Facebook and Google are taking a lot of it (they’re taking 80%) and the increment in spending from last year - maybe it went from 60 to 70 - of that 10 billion increment they’re 90%, that’s not leaving a lot for the publishers. And if you look at how the publishers do their ad businesses, they have to pay if they sell direct ad space. If they do indirect, they’re at the mercy of malware, like I said, but they’re also getting far less, because there’s so many people in the middle, cutting out from the pie; by the time the pie gets from the marketing side to the publisher, there’s very little left - 35-40% or less.

Still, that’s a lot of money. That’s billions of dollars a year, and these companies need to get it, so how would you go about replacing that? Assume for a moment things need to be replaced as is, that we won’t get a better model, we won’t find fusion energy, like Sam Altman thinks would make electricity free - I kind of doubt that - but ceteris paribus (all else equal), how would you replace that 70 billion? I think about that a lot. First of all, I think a lot of it is wasted on ads that never are viewed. This is the big scandal that’s been breaking for the last year or so, thanks to my friends at White Ops Security; there was another group whose acronym I’m forgetting - ANA I think, that did a study that showed there was a lot of fraud and kickback nonsense going on…

[01:02:56.04] A lot of ads aren’t being viewed. Facebook recently announced that its video ad metrics were off, way high from what they actually were. And they were charging accordingly, so people are kind of mad about this. But we have computers, we have smartphones; we could theoretically do a very private platform that measures what you’re interested in without giving away your data profile or your privacy, and matches valuable opportunities to you and give you a cut. That makes me think there’s a way to fund the web even if it’s not a commons. But certainly, for things like a publisher site that is more of a commons - obviously, Wikipedia is an example, but there are others - or all the open source software that everybody wants to share the cost of, because it is a cost centre, it is even an evolutionary kernel in some sense, and it has to be sustained by everybody who’s chipping in. I think there are ways to fund it, it’s just we haven’t found the ways to do it. That’s why Brave’s doing Bitcoin under the hood. It’s not because we love Bitcoin; we don’t want everyone to learn about Bitcoin. We do not intend people to have to become Bitcoin gurus. We haven’t announced yet, we’re doing a deal where you can easily just trust us with your credit card to do a recurring small charge to get Bitcoins; you don’t have to think about it at all. Currently, the way you fund your Brave wallet while we’re doing this Brave payments, beta is with Coinbase (we’ve partnered with Coinbase), but you still have to think a little bit about Bitcoin. And the publisher side, they’re getting Bitcoin out; we’re gonna make that easy to get fiat [currency] out.

We’d like to use something like Bitcoin though because we think there’s a future where you have a frictionless system - no interchange charge, none of the hidden charges that are associated with the credit cards where fraud sticks the merchant with the overhead or the cost of having funds clawed back to the bank. The interchange charge is like 2,15% or something (it varies), but the hidden cost of fraud is high, and a lot of merchants have to eat it. It’s not a good deal for them, especially the small businesses.

[01:04:57.10] So I think there’s something coming to the web in terms of frictionless payments, whether it’s Bitcoin, or Ethereum classic, or son of daughter of redhead’s stepchild of both… There’s something coming there, and the important properties are the permissionless property, no intermediary, frictionless property… Ideally, it would be anonymous and capable of doing micro transactions with Bitcoin as not currently. But that’s why Brave has this Brave payment solution - we solve that ahead of some next-generation solution that is coming to Bitcoin. And we want to, again, make it just work with your native fiat currency. If that happens, then I think it will be easier to micro-tip, micro-donate, have micro royalties.

Think about the Ted Nelson’s project Xanadu vision, and now think about VR if it ever takes off, or AR, because it really should be in our sunglasses. In ten years it probably will be, then all the great stuff creative people build for the augmented or virtual world - you can’t really DRM it. It’s a shared world, there’s too many eyeballs to ray trace and path trace to. You can’t say, “These are encrypted pixels and you cannot touch them, or we’ll put you in jail under the DMCA.”

All your models and your texture art - they’re gonna be out there, just like they were in Second Life. How do you protect that stuff? Well, you can watermark it; that’s a traditional method, it goes back to real-world paintings and documents. That is more of an identification system for prosecuting gross copyright violations after the fact. What if you could just have automatic micro royalties, like

Ted Nelson envisioned? People are looking at or using, or borrowing, or creative-commons-ing, meshing up some bit of art - there’s a micro royalty associated to the artist. That can be automated too, and that’s another thing that I think you can do with cryptocurrencies if you do them right. That should be part of the web standard, future AR web. I’ll pause there because I’ve said a lot, but you can see that there’s a big vision here, and I hope it’s exciting to everybody because it goes way beyond just browsers.

Amal Hussein: Yeah, good example, a welcome tangent… I think a good case study too, for some of these ideas, and also just being able to share and reuse wealth in some ways… But bring this conversation back to the What a little bit. First of all, I just wanna say really quickly, I 100% agree with you - web developers, we are reinventing the wheel in different ways, and it is a point of huge frustration for me… But that’s a topic for another show; we’ll have to do that another time.

But to kind of bring this conversation back - so you are really a person who is very prominent in the educator community, and you are really big on teaching, and sharing your knowledge… And it’s so funny - a fish swims, a bird flies, Nader teaches, Nader gets into this crypto space, Nader is new to this space, and the first thing Nader does is write a full guide on full-stack Ethereum development, and it goes crazy viral. So can you tell us about that? What that was like, and what inspired you to do that, and then what’s life been like after…

Raul Jordan: Yeah. I think it’ll be really hard for Bitcoin to switch over. Bitcoin prides itself on kind of being unchangeable, immovable. It’s unlikely that they will adopt something as radical as this. They have a very strong perspective that proof of work is the only way to go, for example. We don’t share that mindset.

The one mindset that I do share though is that I think it is risky to launch a proof of stake network from scratch. So proof of stake, by virtue of its name, you are staking something; you’re putting something up at risk, that has value, that you don’t wanna lose, in order to secure the blockchain. If you launch a project with proof of stake - where does the value come from? You’re staking something that doesn’t have any value, and you’re telling me that it’s gonna go securely?

So I’m a lot more skeptical of projects that launch pure proof of stake. I think it can be very dangerous. But like I said, Ethereum is already proof of work for a long time, it already has this massive security pool, and migrating to proof of stake makes sense for Ethereum. So I think there’s a trade-off. But yeah, we’re working on that…

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…