Alex Sexton: Would you build operational transforms on top of a decentralized blockchain web implementation? Is that what we’re talking about…?

Tess Rinearson: Yeah, that’s usually where I start. My house party explanation always begins with “Do you know what Bitcoin is?” 95% of the time people say yes, so I’ll just take it from there. The blockchain generically is the infrastructure that powers Bitcoin. It’s all of the distributed systems and cryptography in that design, that powers Bitcoin and allows for this decentralized ledger. And the decentralized ledger is the blockchain.

You can use that infrastructure to power all kinds of other things. The system that I work on at Chain is sort of like a blockchain for generic assets. We work with financial institutions like NASDAQ or VISA, who have other assets (non-Bitcoin assets) that they would like to put on a blockchain to get a lot of those same decentralized benefits without using Bitcoin itself.

Peer Richelsen: It’s very early days, yeah. It’s literally ground zero, and we were awarded with Product of The Day, I believe 400 up votes, and one of the tweets actually went viral with more than 250,000 impressions, and I think like 900 comments, and I don’t know how many hundreds of retweets.

To put it in a nutshell, we built an integration, and there’s many integrations. We have Zoom integration, and other integrations, that is Web3-compatible, which means you can request ownership of a certain token as a matter of verification to book someone’s time. I, myself, I’m in the Orange DAO, which is the Y Combinator, like the unofficial Y Combinator DAO, the Decentralized Autonomous Organization that is investing in other YC crypto projects. So it’s a mix of like a VC firm, but very decentralized. There’s no single CEO or president. Everyone can vote on proposals, and it’s settled on a blockchain. And we have our own token, which is the Orange token. And now what I’m doing is I can publicly send a link on Twitter or in the discord of the Orange DAO or on a public website, and only people from the Orange DAO who own the same token can book my calendar. And that’s amazing for office hours, for group calls, but even for sales meetings or some other stuff where you need a certain gate, and you don’t want to have everyone book your time.

Raul Jordan: Yeah. And you know, we’re all full-time at Prysmatic Labs. We have nine members on our team, and we’re looking to keep expanding our team. Like Preston said, there’s so many really cool challenges, and I’d really urge listeners to kind of dig deeper into this.

Some really cool innovations happening in cryptography, for example. The way that Ethereum and the blockchain that we’re building is able to work is thanks to some really novel innovations in cryptography… In particular, we want to make this blockchain as decentralized as possible, meaning that a lot of people can participate, anyone can run it on a computer across the world. And to do this, you need to make sure that basically cryptographic signature verification can be done at a massive scale. This means that when somebody broadcasts a message on the blockchain, it can be verified, it can be done efficiently. Ethereum uses this really cool technology.

Our project is called BLS cryptography, and it basically allows for aggregation and mass verification of cryptographic signatures in really efficient ways. That’s just one example… There’s some really interesting things happening around game theory, like how do you create incentives in this decentralized environment - adversarial thinking, security engineering, P2P networking. Basically, you have all these pseudo-orthogonal fields colliding and coming into this one place.

So I think that if Prysm keeps evolving, if our project keeps evolving over many, many years and [unintelligible 00:42:49.03] Basically, Ethereum needs to ossify, it needs to basically finish its upgrades, be done, and be settled. We’re excited to finish that, and basically our software will then move into maintenance mode, where you’re just maintaining/improving things, but there are no massive upgrades to the system.

For Ethereum to work, it needs to be stable, it needs to be predictable, and we’re working towards that over the next two years.

Jerod Santo: Suz mentioned blockchains, and I can’t help but think about that. I heard a comment - a lot of these teams are trying to rebuild decentralized social networks file sharing things, like DTube… It’s like, “You know, DTube is censoring things. Let’s have an uncensorable YouTube on a blockchain.” And then there’s another one I think called Steemit, which is like decentralized writing, with payment channels and all this kind of stuff… And I heard a comment that there already is a very popular decentralized social network for sharing files, and it’s called BitTorrent, and it’s been very active and very successful for years, and I thought that was a good point.

I can’t help but think, in the case of WebTorrent, you’re then introducing – I know there’s… What’s the term in BitTorrent? Not the seeders, but there’s like – kind of like the TURN servers, where there’s like a relay or there’s a broadcaster of some kind…

Jerod Santo: So Tim, one thing that I’ve been thinking as you talked, especially back when you were talking about the anatomy of a Web3 decentralized application is you have to wait… You have to wait, because it has to go on the blockchain, it has to be confirmed, what have you; consensus has to happen, these things have to happen on chain… And we’ve talked a few times I guess, Adam, I think - was it Preethi Kasireddy who talked about Ethereum scaling…?

Mark Nadal: Yeah, so I first wanna shout out and compliment my investors. It’s very likely that my investors are forward-thinking compared to other investors. I’m gonna pick up from the story that I posted to Hacker News; we were on the homepage, we got a lot of attention, I knew this was something that people wanted. Well, within two months of that, I got invited to an accelerator out in San Francisco called BoostVC, that primarily focused on Bitcoin, blockchain technology, virtual reality - sci-fi stuff.

I was like, “Wow, this is a really incredible opportunity”, so I jumped in. Within three months of me posting it on Hacker News and getting the traction and attention, that people want this technology, I’m already at an incubator and they’re helping, mentoring me on how to focus on the business side, helping me actually write Gun from scratch, because the prototype I had, the proof of concept wasn’t gonna go very far.

When I came out of that program, on demo day I got connected with the guy who had originally invested in Skype, which we’re using right now, which its big selling point was that you could make audio calls and video calls around the world because they’re using decentralized protocols - hint-hint; there’s a theme here about peer-to-peer…

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.

Gavin Wood: The blockchain is the underlying data structure that allows Ethereum to be both secure and decentralized. Normally, if you’ve got a decentralized system there’s no real way of… Well, because you don’t trust anybody on it, as it’s decentralized and anybody can be on it, it’s kind of hard to get a footing, to understand what’s the noise and what’s the signal. So the blockchain is a decentralized data structure that allows us to create a signal that everyone agrees on, despite the noise of malevolent actors or broken machines.

Critically, it’s basically what I would call a decentralized state transition system. If we imagine that there’s some shared state, and the state could be as simple as – when we imagine a state, we might imagine the memory of a computer at one particular point in time. This state is gonna iterate as transactions or operations are executed on the computer, in the same way that as you type something into a text editor, the memory of the text editor changes.

What we’ve done basically with the blockchain is create a decentralized version of that. We can place programs on, and the programs have some state, and the ongoing operation of the program will be managed by the network as a whole, rather than by any one computer individually.

Amal Hussein: I have to say, the communities piece is probably one of the weakest parts of the web. All those things exist within spheres that are outside of the web protocol… So I’m curious, with this web 3.0, decentralized web, blockchain-blockchain-blockchain, permissionless access to apps, and being able to do permissionless verification, which I think is the coolest thing ever - Jerod, we should do a show on that on JS Party. That’d be great. I’m curious, do we think that there’s a future for better web content through – can we push this community’s factor and engagement factor through tools like [unintelligible 00:49:53.28] I’m just curious.

Paul Frazee: Right, so that was the idea. And when I started on it, I said “I’m gonna branch out from just Secure Scuttlebutt”, I’ll take a look at some of the other protocols that were being worked on, and the Decentralized Web Summit was a really good timing because it was a bunch of different protocol teams getting together to talk about what they were doing.

IPFS was there, the Dat Project was there, I remember Mediachain, a couple of different blockchain-based things, Zooko was there with Zcash… So I talked to a lot of people, started to try to gauge interest for this idea, like “Hey, what if we had a browser we could throw all these things into?” So that’s how I got started.

It took maybe like six months to get a browser UI on top of Electron, get all the basics working, and then I integrated IPFS and Dat, and then over time I just took IPFS out and focused on that, and kept on packaging it and fixing it up, and now we have Beaker.

Mikeal Rogers: Yeah, they’re awesome. They’re non-fungible tokens. [laughter] If you want an explanation larger than an SNL sketch, we can definitely get into it. But yeah, the idea is pretty simple - you have these digital assets, digital things on the internet, and you wanna have some notion of like “Okay, who owns that digital asset? Can we trade it around? Can we buy it?” And what it means to own it and what it means to be the token is all nebulous, and I think that we could definitely get into that… But just foundationally, I think that you have to put yourself in this new headspace of a decentralized web, and this new decentralized web movement.

[04:11] It kind of comes back to something that Tim Berners Lee has been saying since the late ‘90s, which is that the web doesn’t have a data layer. We’ve got a presentation layer, we can link between applications and their views, but we don’t have a data layer. And they tried to do Semantic Web, which didn’t really work out, but now we’re actually seeing decentralized networks that are on the internet, that we can kind of leverage as part of the web, and they have a lot of web-like characteristics to them… And now we’re piecing together effectively this new data layer of a decentralized web. So you can make a web application just like you do today, but the backend data for that is not in Facebook or in Twitter or Instagram; it’s not locked up that way. You’re actually publishing data and building applications that work with data that is in public databases. Blockchains are effectively those public databases, along with networks like IPFS for doing the rest of the data delivery.

So the cool thing about NFTs is not – you know, people sold one for 68 million, right? I don’t have any comment on whether or not that’s gonna retain that value of 68 million dollars. That’s not my expertise.

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.

Nader Dabit: Yeah, we have a way to actually get around that by programming our own digital scarcity. All you have to have is an internet browser. You can now receive and send payments between parties.

The other thing is state. So to save information - how do we do that today? Well, we have a centralized database somewhere, like AWS, that if we don’t pay the bill, goes away forever and we lose all of our information. Maybe the data leaks, maybe it gets hacked, or maybe we just – I don’t know, there’s all types of stuff… Maybe it goes down because AWS has an outage in U.S. East 1. But there are a lot of things that are not ideal, and I think that with blockchain technology we’ve unlocked native payments and native state… And early on, with Bitcoin, it kind of jsut showed that these types of decentralized protocols were possible, but you couldn’t really write a program in Bitcoin. And I think the reason that you’re seeing it start to become a thing now is that the evolution of that technology and the improvement - you’ve had increased transactions per second, so higher throughput per second, reduced costs…

[40:07] For instance, Solana is a good example of a blockchain that has fractions of a penny for a transaction… So you have all of these things that are kind of happening, that are now starting to become mature enough for people to build on, that people are taking advantage of them… And the things that they’re unleashing are also, I would say, really interesting to people that are developers already, but they also enable people to make money. In the United States, where we can make like a couple hundred grand a year for a senior developer, we might not be that interested in this stuff… But let’s say you’re making 10k as an intermediate or senior developer somewhere else in the world, and you can partake in a protocol and increase your wage by 10x because all these projects are international and they’re completely decentralized, and they’ll hire anyone, anywhere, it doesn’t matter where you live… It’s just very, very interesting to a lot of people.

Jeff Meyerson: Some buzzword bingo that actually could make sense, eventually. Like, maybe we need a decentralized drone network because only the blockchain will enable the necessary crowdsourced security protocols that will secure our drone force, because the security problems are so difficult… Like, maybe. I don’t know. Whatever. That problem sounds difficult enough that you would want a collocated workforce who can really hash through problems quickly and effectively. But who knows…? Maybe communication will get good enough. Zoom VR, or something.

Jerod Santo: I mean, they’ve been around a long time. They’ve been valuable, they’ve been producing good stuff. But man, did they just find themselves perfectly positioned for both AI, blockchain, gamers… All the things that are still burgeoning, or going up, AI of course being the main one. And this massive new need for GPUs. NVIDIA has just been killing it.

Max Howell: We use Base, which is Coinbase’s blockchain.

Autumn Nash: That’s what I’m – and just like, we were just talking about how hot it’s been, and the fires, and I’m like “Yeah, let’s make heat even worse.” You know what I mean? I love the inventions of new technologies, and I am excited… I definitely use AI to be more efficient, and I think blockchain has its place, but I just think it’s like wild to do this kind of damage to the environment and spend this type of money and not know how we’re going to get the return. Everybody is scrambling and cutting costs… And just even the discussion between cloud and on-prem - like, DHH is always recommending something, and sometimes I’m wondering “Do you do it for like the views and the likes, or do you actually think these things?” Because there’s nothing in technology that you can say “This is what works for everything.” You know what I mean? Like, that’s a red flag in itself. So I don’t know, it just feels like everybody’s like lost right now. Everybody.