Jerod Santo: Yeah, the demographics that they show are split out by countries. They say “This year we’ve reached developers in 153 countries. The U.S. dominates with 24%, but Germany and Australia are both well represented with over 5% respondents each.” So that’s really the geographic breakdown. The gender breakdown is – this is showing who took the survey, but it doesn’t really show how they went about selecting or targeting certain audiences to take the survey… So yes, you might have some confirmation bias if the main source of the survey is the people who put the surveys on Twitters, and the retweets that those are gonna reach - it’s going to be highly correlated with the groups of people that it actually ends up reaching.

Bringing the Bitcoin conversation back, it reminds me of a poll I saw on Twitter a few days ago… I think it was – not Rand Paul… Ron Paul, the libertarian political figure in America - he was asking millennials what kind of currency they care about, and it was like the dollar, Bitcoin, bonds etc, what they would value, and Bitcoin was really highly represented… And it’s like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense, because libertarians tend to value Bitcoin more than the general population, so that’s not a very scientific poll. Of course, it’s just a Twitter poll. So that potentially could be the case here. What we don’t know - there’s not printed how they went about reaching these people beyond what we can assume that they reached outside of their influence zone or friend zone.

Anna Derbakova: So that essentially allows you to store that data in a way that you’re explicitly pointing to the previous block. So if any of the previous blocks have been modified, that link in the chain is now broken because you’re pointing to a block who’s hash has changed, so it no longer exists, essentially. Just removing a transaction from a block breaks your chain.

That’s a cool, new idea that came from the way Bitcoin was implemented, because that’s the idea that they used. Then other parts of the blockchain also involve existing technologies like peer-to-peer communication, consensus for the nodes to basically agree how to commit the transactions, the ordering of the transactions… That idea of having them work together in this way - that’s certainly new.

What does it replace? It depends on the specific field. For example, supply chains work today. If you wanna argue “Are they effective?” Well, yeah, you get your meat at the store, you get your goods on the shelves…

Jerod Santo: Very cool. So you can actually post those on Gitcoin as… Let’s just say there’s a Log token, and it’s just for us; it’s only for us, and we have our issues, and you can say “This is five Log”, and then people will get paid in log, and then that would be fungible with Ether, or do you have to convert to Ether before you actually post it?

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…

Jack Dorsey: And then we started a new business, a new ecosystem called TBD, which intends to be a developer platform for people to build Bitcoin exchanges all around the world.

So when we got to those four, we’re like – you know, sellers know Square as Square. They don’t consider Cash App to be part of that. Cash App doesn’t consider Square at all. In fact, most of the Cash App customers don’t even know that Square exists. So we needed a new name, we needed to give the Square name to Square, to the seller business, and therefore we needed a new name. We went through a lot of names, some terrible, some amazing, and we ended up at Block, because there’s a reference to the Square shape. It’s just as boring as the name Square; we wanted a boring name originally, because we didn’t wanna be in front of our customers; we wanted to be invisible, we wanted to be behind them, we wanted to be under them.

It’s a reference to a block, like a neighborhood block, where we find our sellers. Block party for Tidal, blockchain for all the Bitcoin stuff we’re doing… So the name just works. It’s simple, and boring, and we can work to make it cool. But it’s never meant to be a consumer-facing brand. It’s only for our recruiting efforts, our investors, and a way to reference this thing that contains all these companies inside of it.

Jack Dorsey: And then we started a new business, a new ecosystem called TBD, which in terms of developer platform for people to build Bitcoin exchanges all around the world.

So when we got to those four, we're like – you know, sellers know Square as Square. They don't consider Cash App to be part of that. Cash App doesn't consider Square at all. In fact, most of the Cash App customers don't even know that Square exists. So we needed a new name, we needed to give the Square name to Square, to the seller business, and therefore we needed a new name. We went through a lot of names, some terrible, some amazing, and we ended up at Block, because there's a reference to the Square shape. It's just as boring as the name Square; we wanted a boring name originally, because we didn't wanna be in front of our customers; we wanted to be invisible, we wanted to be behind them, we wanted to be under them.

It's a reference to a block, like a neighborhood block, where we find our sellers. Block party for Tidal, blockchain for all the Bitcoin stuff we're doing… So the name just works. It's simple, and boring, and we can work to make it cool. But it's never meant to be a consumer-facing brand. It's only for our recruiting efforts, our investors, and a way to reference this thing that contains all these companies inside of it.

Nader Dabit: Yeah, no magic feeling… And again, how fortunate was I to even be able to say something like that, right? So I recognized all that stuff. But I was looking for something, the next thing to excite me. I’d been speculating as an investor in crypto since like 2015, so buying and selling Bitcoin back in the day, and then other things more recently… And one of the ones that I looked into was something called the Graph Protocol. And it was the first time I kind of looked past the token as an investment and tried to understand why it was there and why people were buying it and using it… And when I started kind of looking into that project, the first thing I realized was that they were using GraphQL, and that was kind of like a big part of it… And that was really the first big eye-opening moment for me as a developer, when I started realizing that these tokens and these crypto-economic protocols were actually there for something other than speculation… Because honestly, at that point, even 6-7 months ago, I didn’t understand how smart contracts work. I didn’t understand anything past just buying and selling.

[08:12] So I started diving into why they use GraphQL, and that kind of took me down what a lot of people call this rabbit hole of the entire ecosystem, and Web3, and all of the people, all of the communities, all of the projects and all of the stuff happening. Conferences, all types of stuff. And I became really, really fascinated, and I became really excited, and I wanted to continue doing research. I started reading and I started buying books, and really getting – I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was one of those things, like “Oh, this is freaking cool.” The reason that these things have become popular isn’t just because it’s like another currency, but there’s actually other stuff… And when you start peeling back the layers and seeing all this stuff, it really spoke to me as an engineer, because the problems that they were solving and the stuff that they were doing seemed so much more fun and interesting than anything I’d worked on really in my career, ever.

So yeah, at that point I did start considering “What if I wanted to make a move in this industry?”, but it wasn’t really anything I took too seriously, because of a bunch of different reasons… One of those being it just seemed so risky to me to turn down a half a million dollar type of opportunity that I had on the table to maybe join an industry that I knew nothing about; and I had zero experience… Like, why would anyone hire me anyway? And if I did, would I be successful? That’s kind of where I was maybe a couple of weeks before I ultimately tried to get into the role I’m in now. So that’s hopefully an overview of how I decided to even consider this area.

Feross Aboukhadijeh: I wanna quote Dominic Tarr here… He’s the guy who maintained EventStream. That was the package that was in the news a little while ago; I think we talked about it on JS Party… The one where somebody came along and said “Hey, you haven’t been maintaining this. I’ll take care of it for you”, and then Dominic gave the package over to this person who was a complete stranger, and that person ended up putting a backdoor into the package to steal Bitcoin…

[56:07] One of the things that happened in the aftermath of that was he wrote this little post where he talked about what it’s like to be a maintainer… And he said “If it’s not fun anymore, you get literally nothing from maintaining a popular package.” And then he gave this really funny anecdote about how he used to be a dish washer in a restaurant, and he did his job a little bit too well, so they promoted him to cook… And they only gave him 50 cents an hour more for that, but it was massively more responsibility… And he didn’t feel like it was worth it, so I think he asked to be put back as a dishwasher. But he said that writing a popular module is like that, but times a million, and the pay increase that you get is zero. You just get infinite responsibility, no pay increase, and if you’re not using the package anymore, then he feels like “What’s the point?”

That’s something that I think maybe Tidelift or something along these lines can change. Instead of popular packages being something that is a drain on you, especially if it’s not fun anymore, if you’re not using it anymore - what if instead it was an asset? Something like “Oh, if I take care of this package, Tidelift is gonna pay me however much per month”, or some other kind of model.

Just imagine how different open source would be if that was the case. I think it’d be so different.

Now suddenly somebody who normally wouldn’t be able to participate in open source because they need to get a job, or they don’t have the free time, they could adopt a package, especially one that nobody wants to take care of, that someone’s trying to literally give away at the first person who asks - they could adopt a package like that and even get paid to work on it. That would be so cool.

I really think that open source would just be in much better shape. People would say “I wanna maintain more packages, because I’m gonna make more money.” That would be such a different world than what we live in today.

Jerod Santo: Very cool. Well, if you are not like Suz and lucky enough to get in on the beta yet, I know there’s lots of people still awaiting… Well, while you wait, you can hear from Kyle Daigle all about it. We had him on the Changelog a few backs; I’ll link that up - “GitHub Actions is the next big thing.” We go deep into that, and he even answers my question about Bitcoin mining… So they have a response to the leeches out there who want to have the free compute power. So listen to that in the meantime, and hopefully we’ll all get in that beta soon. Or hopefully it’ll come out of beta and we can all start using it.

I’m excited for the community-shared workflows to start flowing towards my repo, so I don’t have to write very much code, and I can get all the benefit. That’s just kind of the lazy, selfish guy that I am.

Alright, thanks, Suz. Chris, you’re up. How about some shout-outs from you?

Jerod Santo: One major topic when it comes to Brave that we’ve touched on but we haven’t focused on and we’ll focus on now is the Basic Attention Token. You’ve got a cryptocurrency inside the browser, and potentially – maybe not THE first, but one of the only real-world use cases so far for cryptocurrencies, aside from the straight-up value transfer of Bitcoin, and everybody else that can just transfer a value is this token that’s all about attention, and using it inside Brave. It’s very cool to see a cryptocurrency actually being used for a real-world use case and providing value. Tell us all about it, and we’ll ask our questions once you give us the lay of the land of the way BAT works, how it works in Brave, and what you guys are doing with it.

Ives van Hoorne: Yeah, because the initial version of CodeSandbox - all the code was executed in the browser. And this was really nice, because it allowed us to bootstrap CodeSandbox kind of with low server costs; for the first year we did everything on a $30/month server, because all the code was executed by the users. We were sort of – I don’t know if you can call it Bitcoin mining, but we let the user execute the code, and we don’t do anything the code; we were just a data server. This has many advantages. You can run code offline, it’s very responsive, and we can do some custom functionality… But it’s also quite hacky. For example, for our Create React App template we don’t use the real Create React App to run the code; we kind of simulate the Webpack configuration in our own bundler to run the code. This can cause some confusion sometimes.

It also doesn’t support everything, because for example if a framework needs to use the shell, or if they need to use, for example, a Node utility, then that’s not possible. So we were working on something called CodeSandbox Containers, where for some templates we execute the code on the server, in a Docker container, and we kind of then send the contents of what is generated by the dev server back to CodeSandbox. That’s like a two-way communication.

This functionality, the whole infrastructure of this is entirely built by Bogdan. That’s really cool, he’s been a huge help for CodeSandbox. He also did the latest infrastructure of CodeSandbox with Kubernetes. We’ve released it very recently, I think a month ago, and we already see so many interesting things built on CodeSandbox, like Reason sandboxes, also React Native has been built on CodeSandbox now… We also see lots of Nuxt, Gatsby templates… We can now run everything that works locally.

[36:11] Another cool thing is that the computation is not done in the browser anymore for those templates. When you have not a very beefy computer, then that doesn’t really matter, because the Yarn install, the transpilation, the bundling all happens on an external server, so that makes it a bit easier, as well.

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

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

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

Brendan Eich: You know, you can still get, as I say, search revenue. We actually have search partners already. DuckDuckGo is a search partner, and we’re making lunch money from them… Which is good. And we help build that up, because people who skew toward Brave do like DuckDuckGO. That’s an up-and-coming search engine that emphasizes privacy, so it’s in many ways aligned with us. It’s just not our default search engine because Google’s still the people’s choice, as far as we can tell. And as they say, on the long tail of multiple keyword queries, it’s still the best.

[30:02] If we didn’t make Google the default, we suspect a lot of our users would reset from our default DuckDuckGo to Google, and then we would be stuck, because ethically and in the market we wouldn’t wanna override their choice. We could never get them back on a default that might be a better search engine down the road.

This actually happened to Firefox - it’s public information, people studied this identity-solving search engine log. If you look at what happened with the Yahoo! search deal, in December 2014 they made Yahoo! the default search for Firefox, and we’d had Google since Phoenix, since forever. We had a good commercial deal since 2004. That Yahoo! default didn’t stick. A lot of users rest to Google over time. Yahoo! was probably paying - I don’t know, but I’m guessing they were paying a lot, possibly even a guarantee payment, for a declining traffic.

We don’t wanna do that in Brave, but we will make some search revenue from people who choose DuckDuckGo. And as the game theories would suggest, all the non-Google search engines generally are willing to pay for non-default traffic; that is for those users who choose to switch to DuckDuckGo or Bing. They’ll pay better if you make them the default, and Bing is still trying to grow, so they’ll do deals like I mentioned, Vivaldi, as far as I know they’re still using Bing as the default, but… We can get some money out of search, it’s just not gonna be huge and we don’t wanna count on it exclusively.

Another idea we have is the microdonations we’re already supporting with the Brave payments beta. If you use Brave right now, since 0.12 one or two, you can actually get money into your user wallet and have it sort of deterministically anonymously and with low transaction costs distributed among your top sites. You can turn off the sites you don’t wanna support. You have 30 days of ongoing personal chartbeat in your own browser - this is on-device only, no tracking. And at the end of that 30-day period, which is a personal period, there’s reconciliation. Anything you excluded or decided at the last minute you didn’t wanna fund gets left out. The other sites get what are essentially votes in sort of a zero knowledge proof voting system based on some cool academic work called Anonize and that gets sent through a VPN connection to our infrastructure, so we don’t even see your IP address. Then we mix it all together and we count the votes and we count the funds - a lot of people are putting $5/month in this system - and we distribute it to publishers; we’re starting to do that now, just this week. I think our publishers pays will be up very soon.

[32:47] That means we get some small fee-based revenue off of that, but we have to cover our infrastructure costs. I’m not sure that will make us a lot of money either, but that’s another way we’ll make some money. I think if everybody who used Brave donated $5/month, they’d be essentially replacing their average cost or median cost in terms of lost ad revenue. That would be cool. I don’t think everyone’s gonna do it. Also, we need to get a million users, ten million users, a hundred million users. But if all those ifs came true, everybody did $5/month, and we have a hundred million users, we’d be making $3/user/year - that’s $300 million. That’s enough to run a browser like Firefox. That’s what Firefox often ran on in the old days.

I think it would be nice for that to happen, but I don’t think that will happen. I think the donor cohort will decline as a fraction of our user base. NPR gets like 30% listeners donating, but they do pledge drives, they’re a nonprofit. We are getting early adopters skewing toward donating. We have like 11,000 wallets and we’re only in beta; the average balance in the wallet is over $5, so people are doing this, but it’s voluntary, so we can’t count on it either. But we’d like to build it up and see how big it can get.

We think it’s a good deal for publishers too, because they don’t have to worry about the lost ad revenue if they’re getting these donations trickled back to them through the Brave payments.

I mentioned Brave payments as an auto micro-donation system, but there’s general ecommerce we could do with Brave payments. If it’s just on the Bitcoin blockchain, it could not involve us, there’s no need for an intermediary (that’s one of the beauties of Bitcoin) and we wouldn’t make anything. But we’d like to enable that. We think that there’s upside there.

Generally, there’s too much friction buying things on the web, still. Obviously, if you have an iTunes or Amazon credit card relationship, it’s one click and away you go. But you don’t wanna do that with every ecommerce site you might wanna buy something from. It’s kind of scary to give over your credit card to another site, with all the breaches. People sometimes use Paypal, but Paypal has its issues and it’s not universal.

We’d like to make frictionless small payments a thing, a web standard, if you will. And there’s nothing proprietary about it, we’d like to have Brave just be a pioneer, just like pop-up blocking or tab browsing was known before Firefox or Phoenix, but we popularized it. We’d like to make future payments that are frictionless - no intermediary, no interchange charge… We’d like to make that a thing.

Tess Rinearson: Yeah, I think that’s less of a problem that we are solving right now. Obviously, when you’re looking at things like validating UTXOs, you have to make sure that transaction history hasn’t been tampered with, and things like that. There are so many cool things that you can do with a blockchain…

[12:04] If you look at something like the Bitcoin blockchain, which is this public distributed ledger where everyone has a grade on the history of it, you can do crazy things like prove that you have copyright – or, I shouldn’t say “prove that you have copyright”, because that’s probably technically-legally something, but prove that you had a piece of IP at a certain time.

If I wanted to prove that I wrote a paper, I can hash that paper and stick that in the metadata of a Bitcoin transaction and then put that on the Bitcoin blockchain. And if anyone’s like, “Oh, did you actually have this paper at this time?”, I could just point them to that transaction and give them the hash function and give them my original paper, and be like “Hey, validate this for yourself.

And because in Chain’s case we’re not talking about public networks, we’re talking about private networks, you lose that ability. But there’s other benefits to having a private network.

Nick Fitzgerald: That’s it, right? So what compilers do is within the memory they’ll lay out where structures are, the same way they would lay it out in native memory. But if I’m a Rust program and I wanna talk to a C program, C doesn’t really understand Rust data structures. Rust can kind of talk at the C level, but it’s a little bit painful… And now we’re talking about interacting with JavaScript, but [unintelligible 00:30:22.15] but JavaScript running inside SpiderMonkey, a JavaScript engine that’s on WASM… So the structures are just totally foreign, and communicating is really difficult. But this is where another WebAssembly proposal comes in called Interface Types. Interface types are basically a type grammar, sort of similar to Web IDL, where Web IDL defines “Here’s records, here’s different string types etc.” Interface types defines a similar type grammar, and then the idea is you’ll be able to communicate like this.

Interface Types isn’t quite an IDL, in that the plan is eventually you’ll be able to kind of have dynamic adapter functions that allow you – say you’re receiving a string over this Interfaces Types boundary that lets modules communicate… And Rust’s strings are represented as UTF-8; so it’ll wanna just lower that into a flat UTF-8 array. But JavaScript strings are much more complicated. In SpiderMonkey I think there are – I forget if it’s 7, 9 or 13, but it was one of those odd numbers like that. Different representations of a string. Maybe the coolest one is called a rope. A rope is basically a tree of little strings. The idea is if you concatenate two strings and your string representation is just a buffer, you kind of have to potentially grow a new buffer that’s the size of both of them, and then you have to copy the strings in, and it’s really expensive. That’s [unintelligible 00:31:57.27] operation.

[32:01] But if you have a rope, what you can do is you can just say – you know, it’s kind of a tree, so you have a node that’s just “I am the concatenation of this one string and this other string, and creating that is order one.” So it’s very cool, but it’s very complicated. But interface types kind of will eventually allow you to define your own ways to kind of lower the platonic ideal of a string down into a rope, or something like that. Kind of like arbitrary computation for translating these types on either side.

So that’s kind of like the furthest vision. But right now we are defining just what’s called a canonical ABI, which fixes the representation; you have to use a string buffer, or something like that. There’s one representation for each type.

So with just a canonical ABI it is kind of just like an IDL, but this it’s open to that next step once we ship the first phase… So this is gonna allow all of these modules to talk to each other. And each of these modules - what’s really key about interface types is that they’re kind of [unintelligible 00:33:04.14] So if you think about npm modules, when you use an npm module, it gets all the same permissions and capabilities that your application has. And this is a problem; we’ve seen these supply chain attacks, where some generic markdown library or something - I don’t think it’s actually happened with a markdown library, but… You know, I just do something very innocent, and then actually I’m reading your SSH keys from disk, and I’m sending them off to some server, or I’m mining Bitcoins, or whatever… And so it’s not great. We talked a bit earlier in the podcast about capabilities and how a WebAssembly module can’t do anything unless you explicitly give it something to do. So Interface Types kind of preserves that ability between different WebAssembly modules. It says “Just because I can read to the disk and I’m talking with you and I’m using your markdown library doesn’t mean you can talk to the disk. All you can do is take this markdown [unintelligible 00:34:06.00]

Jerod Santo: So we first talked Ethereum on the Changelog in 2016 with Gavin Wood. We then talked in 2018 about Gitcoin with Kevin Owocki, we then had Tim Coulter from the Truffle framework on the show, also in 2018… And we’ve done a show on Brave and BAT. And it seems like every time Ethereum and deWeb and Web3 comes up, I always end up asking “Well, what’s the killer app?” or killer apps, plural, as we’re gonna find out today… Because [unintelligible 00:03:08.29] what’s gonna make people get into this, besides the money-grab aspect? And nobody really had answers. I mean, Brave and BAT is cool, but is it necessary? Is it gonna drive people in? And it seems like maybe this is a moment here, with NFTs. Mikeal Rogers, you’re here… Thanks for coming on. Tell us about NFTs. What’s the skinny?

Eric Berry: Right, right. So Code Fund is this weird thing that just showed up in this ConsenSys mesh, that has absolutely nothing to do with blockchain. I’ve often asked myself “Why am I here? What are we doing here?”, because it doesn’t make any sense as far as promoting blockchain or building that economy or ecosystem. However, as time goes on, I’m finding that Code Fund actually fits in really well with it, because it’s a built-in tool for promoting and advertising others spokes within ConsenSys… But also, it will open up opportunities for developers who don’t know anything about blockchain development to start getting involved. Some of our ads that we’re running right now are introducing people very slightly into like “Hey, are you interested in blockchain development? Are you interested in learning this? Come here, they’re wanting help, they’re wanting to get people involved.” So there is some mix there… But yeah, it is a little bit of a weird thing. We’re hopefully gonna have an answer for that question later this year.

Right now, to really TL;DR it, Code Fund is literally just a product of Gitcoin, and Gitcoin has a bounties product, and that’s what Gitcoin is known for, their bounties product, and Code Fund is the ads/revenue arm of Gitcoin.