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.

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.

Chris Beams: That’s a Bitcoin standard. Bitcoin has this so-called Bitcoin improvement process. So you see these proposals get put together about ways to enhance the overall Bitcoin ecosystem or Bitcoin protocol, or certain things that wallet providers can standardize on, like this seed words approach. So that’s usually something that’s proposed by people who are pretty close, sort of core Bitcoin developers who understand what’s possible with the technology, and they’ll write it up, maybe give a presentation on it or something like that, and then often leave it to the community to pick up the idea and really run with it and take it through to the state that that stuff is in now, which is a completely accepted standard. Anybody downloading a wallet today should expect seed words support. It’s basically a broken wallet if it doesn’t support that.

By the way, one ideal profile, or kind of state of the art for security is not just the seed words, but a hardware wallet as well. So you might have the wallet that you spend, and maybe people have a wallet on their phone that they keep basically some pocket money in, if you will, enough for whatever it is, buying your coffee or paying a friend back, or something like that…

[24:04] Those wallets will have seed words too, so you can protect those funds, but when it comes to storing any kind of larger amount – what’s Bitcoin as we speak today? It’s around $4,500/coin, so if you have even two or three of these things, much less 10 or 20 or more, that’s not anything that you want or need to be carrying around on your person probably, right? So what people do is store those coins, the larger amounts for sure, on a hardware wallet. Those take different forms, but generally they’re devices that can plug in via USB; they have dedicated, very simple chipsets that are just exactly for signing Bitcoin transactions and storing private keys, and so on. So they can be designed in a very security-conscious fashion to make them as impenetrable as possible.

You see products like Trezor or Nano ledger, or what have you… These are hardware wallets that have become quite popular. And when you combine seed words and hardware wallets and all this, you can actually begin to fulfill this promise for yourself of being your own bank.

It is possible, but back to what started this thread of the conversation, we’re still in pretty rarified air. This is not easy for grandma at this point, still. So also to answer the question you asked along the way, is Bisq on a mission to make that easier - frankly, no. Not at all our core value proposition, if you will. Of course, it’s in our interest to make it as easy as possible…

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.

Tom Occhino: [00:56:08.15] [laughs] So do you know the expression “In life there are no such things as solutions, we only have the ability to trade off one set of problems for a different set of problems.” I think there are no solutions, only trade-offs. And I have to find attribution for the quote.

What we’ve done is we’ve traded denial of service, which is “Oh, a lot of people visited my host and it went down.” We’ve traded that for something that we affectionately call denial of wallet, which is like “Hey, we’re not going to go down, but we’re going to provision a lot of compute, and that compute costs money.”

So here’s how we’re thinking about solving the denial of wallet problem. The first thing is, we have to have spend controls. If you’re building your profile or portfolio website, there’s no world where you’re willing to spend more than 20 bucks a month to host this thing. It’s like, look, it’s not a business. So spend management and the controls to get it right. And we have some of those things, but I actually don’t want that at all. I want our platform to be so smart that we know the difference and that we alert you when something is happening, such that every time you have that, not only are your costs under control, because we’ve reduced the underlying costs of running and provisioning that compute - which we’re working on with things like in-function concurrency we could get into - but you don’t have to think about it also because you know what happens when that happens, in advance. You’re going to get an alert. You’re going to be able to have control, you’re going to be able to say “I want to use the firewall to be able to rate-limit, or block, or slow traffic.” But in the fullness of time, we make this zero configuration and we just take care of it for you.

And so our platform is getting smarter and smarter to be able to not have the denial of wallet problem. We actually have an active initiative around preventing denial of wallet. So yeah, the sort of like serverless, the original serverless pitfall, which is like “Wow, this thing is working too well.”

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.

Jerod Santo: Yeah, there’s lots of challenges there. I like the idea of really the user’s phone, their network plan, all these things as user concerns that people – I think they are waking up to them more and more, because they are more tangible costs than privacy costs. Trading my privacy is very hard to intellectualize exactly what am I doing here, but especially if I’m on a capped connection, or I’m paying per megabyte, or my battery is dying in the middle of the day, and I’m seeing actually using this application is causing me really hard costs, right there in my wallet - I think people are starting to make decisions around that.

[28:09] We see it happening with the phone operating systems starting to percolate up to the user “What is draining my battery right now?” “Well, it’s this application.” “Oh, you know what - I’m sick of that application. I’m not gonna use it anymore.”

So I think the caring for your user, part of that is for their resources on their devices. And the more you can do on the server, especially when you’re talking about heavy computation, there more you’re actually caring about them in that way… So good point.

Amal Hussein: Exactly. [laughter] Open your wallet, LOL… Funny.