Adam Wiggins: [01:21:49.13] Because your kids are all grown up and out in the world doesn’t mean you don’t still love them and have emotional reactions to things transpiring in their lives, right? Yeah, for sure, that that one was tough for me to see, because it was part of our original vision, or somewhere in that early vision, that it’s quick to get started. And it’s not about it being free exactly. It’s that you don’t need to make too many decisions to start a new project, and get it on the internet. And that’s something that – actually, I think open source was the thing that really kind of opened my mind to that originally, which is… I remember years ago when you wanted to - or at least my early experience with SQL databases was things like Informix, where you needed to go get a license before you could even use the software. So if you have an idea for a project late at night, you’re not just going to like spin it up out of nowhere. There’s this whole ritual that is involved. Now there’s the money, of course, and then that leads you into “Okay, is this project really important enough to spend the money?” and like needing to frontload that decision. So for sure, being able to like just get something up and running quickly and frictionlessly, and the free is part of that… So yeah, I was quite sad to see that.

I have a lot of sympathy for the business decision, because having been on the inside of that machine, even all those years ago - I’m sure it’s changed a lot since then, but it is a huge amount of… “Work” doesn’t even capture it. “Responsibility”, “stress”, I’m not quite sure. But being responsible, or a steward in some way for all these applications is just this huge job, and there’s really a lot of clutter with the free apps. And I probably, looking back, would have done it a little differently. Actually, we did make some big changes… This was kind of right around the time I left… Actually, I’ll give a shout-out to my colleague, Peter van Hardenberg, who’s now running the Ink & Switch research lab… But he was one of the ones that helped lead the project of setting up these hobby dynos, and something where there was like a little bit more restrictions on the free stuff… So if you’re like “Okay, yes, you get started with a quick side project, but if you really are going to make it be a longer-term thing, and you’re getting value from it, you should pay some amount. It doesn’t have to be a lot; just a little bit.” And that’s a way – it’s less about the money in the sense of like paying for the runtime or whatever, and it’s more about just sorting out what’s really important to people and what’s not. And that sorting is important, because you end up with all these junk apps that were like one-off experiments, or someone just kicking the tires, or whatever, but you can’t tell those apart from the ones that are important to people. And so it makes just the running and the maintenance of the platform a lot harder.

And then, you throw in the whole like spam and abuse side of things, which we always knew in the beginning would be a challenge… But of course, this is long before there was such a thing as cryptocurrency mining. So in today’s internet - I mean, I don’t know what the trust and safety team or whoever it is there that needs to deal with this, but I can only just can’t even begin to fathom how much work it is to kind of filter and manage just this totally free, open-ended runtime.

So I wish there had been a different solution; I’m sure they’ve thought about it and came up with what made the most sense, because I can see something there being a big problem for the business, and that problem impacting other users and customers, right? Badly-behaved apps in some ways sucking up all the time and attention of the team that’s running the thing, and then they have less time to support the people who are really getting value from the platform. So I see why the free apps would be a problem. But at the same time, it was a core part of the vision, which is that it’s completely frictionless to get started, and this takes that away.

Feross Aboukhadijeh: Yeah. I mean, take what we’re doing with Wormhole - we were looking for this; we had Dependabot installed, and Dependabot will go ahead and send us a pull request if we have a vulnerability in our project, and we would update that and get that out as quickly as we could… And that’s a great thing to do. But the thing we were specifically worried about was the kind of attack that would target Wormhole specifically, or one of these supply chain attacks that would just start doing random things on our server, like mining cryptocurrency, or talking to random servers.

You know, there was that eslint-scope bug - that was another attack that happened, where the malware actually stole your npmrc file, and it could publish packages as you… The list goes on. The things that can go wrong… It’s like, you have this small probability of a really bad thing happening, because when you run npm install, you’re basically just trusting that the code is gonna do what it says. And running this on your laptop, with all your personal files, your photos, all your documents, your social security number - all that stuff is on there. And then you’re running it on your product server with all your user data; now, in the case of Wormhole we didn’t store any user data, but our app needed to be secure, to not serve compromised JavaScript code down to our visitors. So that was our concern, that was what we were worried about. And once Wormhole got popular and we started getting over 100,000 people using it every month, and we started looking at the really basic statistics that we gather about the users, we saw a third of our visitors come from China, and they’re using it to send files there securely…

So then I started to get pretty worried. I was like – you know, we’re not the biggest fish in the pond, but there is a chance that we could be the target of state-sponsored attackers who wanna know what’s going on in those files… So it seemed like a thing that we should at least have a plan for how we’re gonna deal with our dependencies, and how we’re gonna vet these things… And when we looked around for tools for this, basically I didn’t find anything. One option is I guess you could check in your dependencies into your repo… But then you’re still not gonna be vetting them. I think basically what everybody does is they just kind of hope for the best, and they don’t look at their code.

Raul Jordan: Indeed. So as it stands today, Ethereum actually runs on what we call proof of work. People have probably hear about cryptocurrency mining - bad for the environment, killing trees, all sorts of things. Basically, the way that Ethereum and Bitcoin work today is they require people around the world to basically run these machines that are specialized computation circuits that use an extreme amount of electricity to basically solve this brute force math problem, and participate in the consensus of the blockchain.

The paradigm is that you’re putting in a lot of real-world electrical power into this system such that it becomes almost impossible that anyone can collectively try to revert that. You cannot revert the Bitcoin or the Ethereum blockchain without having more electrical power than all these people combined that put their effort into it.

So Ethereum is actually migrating to what we call proof of stake; so instead of expanding a lot of electricity, what you’re doing is that you’re instead locking up a lot of Ether, you’re locking up a lot of this cryptocurrency called ETH, and to participate in consensus, you need to put that up for stake. If you do anything malicious, you can start losing that stake. It changes the paradigm. You don’t need this crazy computational thing; it’s just basically anyone can run it on a home server. You can run it on a consumer laptop.

[58:49] Since Ethereum was already proof of work, the transition into proof of stake is very solid, because we can leverage all the security that Ethereum has already over the years into this new paradigm. So we are one of the teams that’s building proof of stake for Ethereum. Ethereum proof of work - the mining, basically - is planned to go away in less than a year, so basically no more shortage of GPUs on the market. You’ll be seeing a lot of really cool stuff happening, estimated I believe to be like 99.98% more computationally effective, and better for the environment. That’s something that we’re excited about, and just keep an eye out on that.

Kevin Ball: So cryptocurrency mining and GraphQL. Let’s throw this one over to Nick.

Tim Coulter: Yeah, sure. The short version of it is when the Bitcoin boom hit in 2013 when it went from $5,000 to $1,000, I got into cryptocurrency after that, and got really excited about what it is and what it could do. In early 2014 I started mining, I mined on a bunch of different altcoins at the time now worth nothing… It was a fun experience for me, and I did it mostly on the side. I was working for startups and have worked for startups my whole career coming out of college, and the startup I was working at I eventually got laid off, and by that time I had been doing other work in cryptocurrency, I had built an application on my own time to track all of the price data for a bunch of different trading pairs; basically, every trading pair on ever exchange available at the time. I was trying to aggregate all those and eventually sell that data…

In any case, that whole thing got me in interested in the blockchain world itself, so when I got laid off from this company, I told myself “You know what, I’m gonna go work in blockchain.” So I searched around, I eventually found a post on angel.co, and that led me to consensus. That was around April of 2015. The post was actually for a web designer job. Excuse me, not web design, a graphic designer job… And I can’t actually do graphic design, but I sent them a message anyway and said “Hey look, I could try this. I’m really excited to work in the blockchain world, I’d love to work with you”, and they responded the next day.

[04:13] The rest from there is kind of history, but as far as Truffle is concerned, my past history in software development is actually in the software testing world. In college – I have a software engineering degree, but I worked a lot with a professor in software testing, and that was big in the software testing community… So when I came out of college, I used that network to find jobs in the software testing world.

What that means is that for most of my career, effectively 8 years leading up to coming into the Ethereum world, I was doing developer support. This is everything from performing manual testing, to writing software testing frameworks around new technologies. When I came to Ethereum, it was very clear that there were no tools at all; you had a compiler and a JavaScript library for interacting with the Ethereum blockchain, and that was about it. From there, it seemed very easy to fall back into this developer support role, and I ended up building tools through the Ethereum ecosystem.

Anthony Eden: Cryptocurrency has become normalized now, right? Crypto is normal.

Jerod Santo: Exploring a stablecoin bank

Bridget Harris goes deep on the potential of crypto stablecoins to disrupt Visa and Mastercard’s duopoly:

Right now, Visa and Mastercard charge merchants egregious 2-3% swipe fees — which is typically their second highest cost after payroll. Sadly, smaller merchants are disproportionately hit by these swipe fees…. This is partly why Visa and Mastercard’s profit margins are each higher than 50%: small businesses have no choice but to accept Visa and Mastercard since they control 80% of the credit card market.

A stablecoin network could drop those swipe fees to essentially zero. Merchants hate swipe fees — rightfully so — and if they could opt for a lower-fee network that wouldn’t limit their TAM, they’d switch in a heartbeat.

I’ve long asked cryptocurrency bulls to point me to the killer apps. First it was ICOs, which didn’t really pan out (too many scammy founders). Then it was NFTs, which were a lot like the pogs of my youth (fun for a day or two). More recently, it’s been ~~prediction markets~~ gambling, which I admit is a legit app, just not one I’m interested in.

But, “knocking 3% off every transaction in the world”… That dog could hunt! Unfortunately, it’s also going to require government intervention, of which I’m a perma-bear.

Max Howell: Well, the main purpose of T, at least what I wanted to accomplish when I came up with the idea, was to use cryptocurrency to fix what we call the Nebraska problem after that famous XKCD comic. You know, the [unintelligible 00:55:46.21] representing all of open source, as it’s stacked on top of each other… And those little projects near the bottom that are fragile, because the people who maintain them don’t have the time or the incentive to do so, and yet it’s holding up so much critical infrastructure.

[00:56:04.06] So yeah, it’s a cryptocurrency project that uses a unique tokenomics model in order to give open source developers token rewards on a 24-hour basis. And a lot of the other pieces of it are designed to attract the interest of typical crypto investors, or just like normal developers who want to show real support for their open source projects. A key differentiator between us and most ways of supporting open source is that there is no donations in our system. You can buy a token and then stake it against projects, so both you and the project is gaining from this. There’s no gift. It’s more like an investment.

Steven Pyle: I mean, part of it, I guess, is - yeah, the models have never been perfect; we know that. That’s part of it. The other part is the environmental aspect of it. You’ve got all these servers… It’s a reminder of cryptocurrency, where it’s using all…

Justin Garrison: I stopped using Bitcoin when I saw the energy usage of the Bitcoin networks. And just cryptocurrency in general. And then AI came along and was like “Hold my beer.”

Rich Burroughs: That would have still been when I was at the ISP, because even there we were dealing with – it’s kind of funny, when the whole cryptocurrency stuff happened… Because in like probably like ‘97 or something we were dealing with this thing called cyber cash, that was like one of the early encrypted currencies… And I was big on – there was this email list called The Cypherpunks email list, that was like the crypto nerds, and I was very big into that stuff. I would go to like PGP key signing parties, and stuff… And so it was funny when the cryptocurrencies stuff came up, and everybody was like “This is brand new.” And I was like, “No, it isn’t.”

Kent Quirk: This won’t surprise any of you here, but my unpopular opinion is that cryptocurrency is worthless. Having spent two years doing it, I came away convinced – and trying to create what I was thinking of was going to be the ethical cryptocurrency, I came away with the conclusion that pretty much everyone in cryptocurrency is either a crook, or an opportunist who wants to take advantage of the crooks, or hopelessly naive and not paying attention to what’s actually going on. There is no useful use case for cryptocurrency still, all these years later. Web 3 is a disaster, and blockchains are not useful tech. And so yeah.