Jerod Santo: BAT… So you have a cryptocurrency, and one of the gifts and the curses of cryptos is the price goes up and down a bunch. No doubt that probably had some implications on your runway, on your ability to pay yourselves. I know you’ve raised initially from China, you had a big ICO, and that 36 million I think you said that you sold in 20 seconds probably looked like maybe 360 million for a while there back in December, and now it might not look so hot. Is the volatility of the BAT price something that has come into play at a practical level for Brave Inc. or for the browser, or is it really something that doesn’t matter all that much, and you just kind of assume eventually is gonna hold some sort of value?

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.

Liz Rice: [58:13] Yeah. And then on the security side - so Falco was probably the first security project, certainly in the CNCF, that was using eBPF. This project from my former colleagues at Aqua called Tracy… And then in Cilium we have a sort of Cilian family, we have a sub project called Tetragon, which is allowing you to create low-level security primitives almost in Yaml form, and apply them to your Kubernetes cluster. And you can do really cool things with Tetragon. I get a bit overexcited about this, because if your kernel is modern enough, you can not just detect that something is potentially malicious behavior, a process is opening the wrong file, or connecting to a cryptocurrency miner, or whatever malicious thing that you’ve detected - you can kill that process synchronously from within the kernel. And what that means is the process gets killed - to me it’s not like you have to go and tell somebody and then eventually your process gets killed… It’s happening right there and then, and it stops the attack before it happens… Which is super-fun to demo. I love it.

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.

Jerod Santo: In a piece titled, “Quantum Computing’s Hard, Cold Reality Check”, IEEE Spectrum lays out the bear case for near-term quantum computing applications, some of which has been hype-driven. Surprised?

Some of the more ambitious timelines proposed by quantum computing companies have suggested these machines could be impacting real-world problems in just a handful of years. But there’s growing pushback against what many see as unrealistic expectations for the technology.

The article also quotes folks are more optimistic about it. I guess we can add QC to the list (alongside cryptocurrency, autonomous vehicles, generative AI) of computing endeavors with smart people on either side debating their validity, timeliness & long-term effects on the human race. Me? I’m not holding my breath or my qubits.

Kris Brandow: Yeah, I’m curious as to like – because you know, it’s easy to be hyper-fixated on what the hype cycle is currently occupied by… I’m interested of “Well, what happens when the hype cycle inevitably moves on?” Which I think everybody right now - because we’re in the hype cycle - is just like “The hype cycle is not going to move on.” But I don’t know, I’ve said this before; it’s been an unpopular opinion before. It’s just like, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency was also the huge hype cycle that everybody was talking about, and it’s now been replaced with AI. And before that – there’s always a hype cycle, and there’s always something.

[01:17:56.10] I think there’s a lot of interesting things that come out of the – like, once the hype cycle has moved on, you’re left with these technologies, of like “Well, what can you actually do with these technologies? What are interesting applications of them?” I think that’s happening now with blockchain and how people are thinking about blockchain in kind of new and novel ways. Or even the components or the concepts of a blockchain, irrespective of the implementation of it. And I think that AI as a space has the same sort of potential, where it’s like once we can actually really kind of get into the nuance of it… So I feel like that’s kind of what follows those big hype cycles, is the hype cycle is the lack of nuance, and that lack of nuance allows us to imagine literally anything. And people doomerize it, people are super-excited about it, but everybody is just like – there’s a whole lack of nuance around most of it. And then you start getting a lot of that nuance, and the hype comes down, and you start being like “Oh, these are the interesting places where this technology can actually go.”

And I think that Go as a language, it’s positioned in a special place, and I think it is – I mean, as the language of the cloud, I feel like it’s gonna play a role in all of this, but a different role, a complementary role. So I don’t think it’s gonna be the language you use to necessarily write large language models, or do the things that other languages are currently good for. But I think it’s going to be somewhere in there, probably playing a very foundational part. Kind of like with the cloud. Go is certainly not – you don’t have to write all of your services in Go. In fact, you might not even write Go in general, but most definitely, it’s all over the place in the cloud world, and in that whole thing. So I think there’s space.

But yeah, it’d be super-interesting to explore that on the podcast, and have people in… I think it was – I don’t remember who brought it up, but someone brought up the idea of not necessarily debate, but different viewpoint episodes, where you bring in people that have not necessarily opposing views, but differing views, and you have a conversation. I think that would also be interesting in this space, but also just in general for us as a Go podcast, because there’s a lot of things in Go where it’s like “I don’t know, the answer is it depends.” There’s two episodes basically of this on Changelog & Friends. There’s the “It dependencies”, and then there’s an “It depends” with me. So listeners, if you like that kind of “I don’t know, the answer is It Depends”, go over to Changelog & Friends and listen to that.