Ethereum - Italian Meetup with Mihai Alisie (Co-Founder Ethereum)

Transcript

okay first question in in recent times a lot of cryptocurrencies similar to bitcoin have been born there are currently 500 each of these as promised to improve and or attempt and successfully to compete with bitcoin why should the ethereum project be different from all other cryptocurrencies isn't the system and saturated okay so uh first of all i just checked the github uh page of bitcoin and there are actually over 4500 fours that left just from that project so

four thousand five hundred initiatives that have uh tweaked the parameters of this database so if if we look back the first uh the first fork so now we have over 4500 but the first one was namecoin and what the namecoin tried to do uh it tried to use this uh shared non-editable database for something else than money right and in this case we're talking about a decentralized domain registry removing the need for trusting in a centralized entity like i can now what happened after that we had like an avalanche of different uh initiatives that began to

experiment with this technology and changing or adding a few features right so if again we take a step back blockchains in the end are three things one it's a shared database the blockchain the the all the stuff that's out there and everyone knows second it's the meaning we give actually to the numbers that move inside this database in bitcoin for example the numbers mean unit of fed and third you have a transition function from the current consensus status to the next accepted consensus statements and in bitcoin uh the this uh this looks

kind of like this if enough units of value are in address a then subtract from address a and transfer to x to address b now moving back to ethereum uh with ethereum uh we took a different direction from keeping to stack features and add different kind of functions and instead of a feature best a feature based blockchain we have a program of a programmable blockchain where the features are limited basically to the imagination of the programmers the meaning that they can give to those numbers that shift in this distributed

database right so the the creative freedom that this approach gives is quite unique compared to the to the other uh initiatives out there so uh more than that uh we do not compete with bitcoin bitcoin is a highly specialized financial decentralized application right it's money and uh it uses its own blockchain and all that stuff we all know what bitcoin is but in in a way ethereum is more like a decentralized computer on top of which people can run and build these sort of decentralized applications being something similar like a financial

application similar to bitcoin like a token or whatever or some sort of medical application that uh helps with the storage of the the private medical records of the patient in the patient's uh control so it's a totally different story we're in no way competing this is more like continuing the experiment that bitcoin started in the past and we each have our uh distinct areas of this rich ecosystem decentralized ecosystem that's that's been forming and while we're at this uh also vitalik uh at the end of the year published a very cool article in which he was talking about this

decentralized ecosystem that's being built and uh you know as everywhere you have this sort of uh us versus the mentality for me it's like oh the skaters versus the skateboarders versus the bmxers it's the playstation guys versus the xbox guys all this stuff right yeah but in a way you know this is this is definitely have hasn't been done before and since it hasn't been done before there isn't a right or wrong way we don't know that stuff so encouraging

pluralism and the diversity of approaches exploring this ecosystem is beneficial to everyone and in the end who is the main beneficiary of this technology is humankind because people now having this platform at their hand they even if they just play let's say play writing lines of code and stuff they can write some really powerful and stuff that can change industries so that's a huge shift in like the power that you have at literally at your fingertips and it's something serious okay okay and so this week or the next this week what this week at genesis block

this week the next on the on the end of march so it will uh definitely be towards the end of march we are thinking about maybe syncing it with the total solar eclipse very cool very cool yeah it's like i i also i remind this video in which you have like the sun going and you have the total solar eclipse like a heartbeat when the sun comes like a new town janice's block sorry genesis block like a bible

so have you have you guys seen the update on the blog yeah yeah so in there you have detailed pretty much uh also the release schedule and that how how the faces are going to proceed okay okay in case you guys want more details mm-hmm second question okay some financial institutions and money pools like coinbase and bitpay are trying to centralize cryptocurrency like bitcoin does ether ethereum have the same risk of centralization well let's uh let's think about this

why why in the first day in the first place uh services like coinbase and bpay exist so uh on one hand you uh they exist to provide a bridge between bitcoin and centralized currencies fiat right and those sort of initiatives where you usually touch the the fiat will inherently become centralized because fiat is centralized so on that side i do not i cannot say that it will not become centralized we might see some sort of services that might become more used than others but on the other hand beta and coinbase

exists to provide services which currently bitcoin does not provide for example recording payments and all this sort of stuff making it easier for users and merchants to to interact with this platform but since ethereum is still incomplete in some weak sense nothing cannot be scripted so you can have recurring payments you can say you can have all this sort of stuff that you cannot have on bitcoin and you have centralized service providers that appear to solve this this problem so in our case i think we might see some companies that that will become more used than others but uh it will be definitely more decentralized

since the capabilities of the platforms are superior in in a sense that it provides this customer customizing aspect without having to rely on someone to do it for you okay okay thanks third question okay okay third question ethereum is a real certification and verification ecosystem in fact ethereum promises not only the transfer the transfer a wealth from one user to another but the self-certification and self-compliance of contracts someone defines ethereum ethereum the

2.0 what are the key words to remember so the most important keywords to remember when thinking about ethereum and what it can bring and how it can change the internet is more cats less nsa uh moving on it's uh if there would be a couple of uh keywords it would be uh transparency uh privacy uh incorruptible decentralized computing and a trustworthy foundation on which we can heal and rebuild the

internet you know it's it's actually quite funny how we end up getting some technology that allows us to actually trust it and verify right but we achieve this thing without having to trust anyone okay right that's pretty awesome and it can also be seen as an open source development platform for next generation decentralized applications that you know solve big problems as privacy yeah by design okay okay and um dt routine is trying in every way to prevent that excessive wealth goes into the hands of eerie adopters don't

you think that switch from pub to puss will award then it will be if she first launched this thing he was imagining this global ledger running on people's laptops so uh it's you know distributed on all that stuff the the cool aspects but since the proof-of-work algorithm was shot to 56 and we had this uh these breakthroughs and advancements into in specialization in the way you tried to resolve this algorithm you had uh basically a shift into how the economics worked and simply because a feature like the proof of work has been

that particular case used we have this shift from the original vision in this blockchain running across people's laptops to local watching that has more than half of the total hashing power in the numbers of i know three to five entities so even proof of work isn't that safe for egalitarian to begin with and uh on the other on on top of that proof of work is wasteful so uh running it just to increase it it's a horrible you know inefficient way of trying to make something work with wrong tools so

just to to sum it up uh we'll definitely run intense economic moduling and try to find the optimal solution to democratize as as much as possible the the way the issuance and all this stuff works but proof of work is uh you know wasteful and we should try to focus on how to secure this stuff without uh using the limited supplies that we have at our disposal okay and can you confirm that the mining algorithm will perform better on cpu which have plenty of ram yeah so on this side we're

in the testing and benchmarking benchmarking phase so i do not have uh yet the necessary confirmation to say yes it's one way or the other but uh you should hear definitely updates in the coming uh in the coming weeks okay this week we have fragile uh okay and this week we have all the specs of algo specification um of algo are you there sorry so the the next week's uh we will have

something on the algorithm um i mean uh some specifications about the gpus in the next like how it works and maybe a couple of benchmarks on different gpus and so will be released in the coming weeks okay so the mining aspect will be will be updated but um there will be at the red that uh it's in it's probably that will be um external uh mining uh program exterior to uh uh last week i saw a mining interface

running from inside mist ethereum browser but you also have a compatibility with cg minor and sg minor so it will be compatible with those external programs for mining as well um guys do do you have any questions excuse me can you can you please uh hello can you uh describe what exactly proof of stake is because i personally i have uh the concept of

proof of work that is a voting algorithm based on the computational power of each node but uh is the first time that i hear about uh proof of stake so can you describe with your words just uh i i don't think i will make it justice if i try to to present it but i will link you now to an article okay written by specifically on proof of stake and uh onstage actually let me see so okay i'll give you actually three articles

fast and furious i have this so it's i have to be honest uh the most passionate about this stuff he's the most qualified person to answer that stuff and he's a very good

writer so if you have the patience to go through through that article you'll definitely find the answers you're looking for other questions is ethereum is uh it is ethereum uh bashed by the bitcoin foundation is it what bashed uh you know put it in and put it in a second rate altcoin so this this gets back to what i was saying earlier you know with the xbox versus playstation

so i understand yes indeed there have been some not necessarily the friendliest of uh relations out there um and uh by the way i did not get the chance to be uh to introduce myself by bihar this year and i am the vice president of ethereum and the director of ethereum switzerland so speaking from a foundation point of view we have been friendly we have not engaged too much in collaboration but hopefully the future will you know be better for everyone we are in the same situation because in the same situation xbox versus playstation in italy

many users of bitcoin in italy don't see in a good good way ethereum funds well you know haters gonna hate more than that in a couple of weeks we'll have a network up and running and we'll actually have decentralized apps being built and they will run so even if you hate you must acknowledge that at some point this thing actually works it's here and it's not going anywhere so deal with it it's uh in a way i i understand this uh

i know i it's not necessarily hate but it's more like a defensive uh approach since uh the entire crypto and what they identify with uh when it comes to what blockchains mean and what bitcoin and like this entire thing movement is about and we definitely move the discussion from uh what are blockchains dude this this is like that how you can take down banks you don't need banks anymore governments all that stuff so the discussion has moved a bit towards okay so we have this technology you can build all sorts of applications including the subversive ones but you can also create lots of applications that are

beneficial and helpful and so on so we move the conversation from blockchains being uh monetary instruments to blockchains being some sort of platforms on top of which you can build more so it's uh it's i suppose an ideological uh technology but uh in the end i think people will realize that we are you know in the same space and actually while we are at this let me share with you something really quick uh let me see so this okay stylus so again i have to link an article from italy uh it talks about exactly this topic and i will post

let's see open imaging um so uh i'm gonna send you an image now so if can you click it open it last link okay okay meiji okay uh-huh okay so if you read the article i just linked and uh then you get to the end uh vitalik tries to describe in this how this is like the bigger animal is part of you know and we're each doing our own piece of the puzzle that makes the big picture so it's not like it has to be x or y in the end it will be x is better suited for

a mm-hmm and figuring out where everyone belongs into the bigger picture okay there is a big big work definitely well you know in the end we're sort of creating the foundations for uh private secure trustworthy internet gotta be a lot of work do you have an article also also about how and why should we trust a network uh based on proof of stake is it

included in the article that you link that you linked why you will see the second one i think it should be article it's uh always the trade-off right so in there he talks about the weak subjectivity okay okay okay okay the second one okay one moment okay maybe another question um how the ethereum is uh looked upon by the international commercial

channels so this is an excellent question and uh actually the project itself uh so to start from the beginning i first received an email from vitaly somewhere in late 2013 where he was just beginning to sort of crystallize ethereum as an idea so at that point we didn't even know that we are going to have a litter pre-sale we didn't know how everything is going to unfold so the idea of having the tokenized ethereum preset and all that stuff happened somewhere between december and january and it was then when we also so we've uh explored a number of options

when it came to how to fund and would disrupt these projects since we needed money to get developers and all this stuff to actually build it and uh the tokenized uh so it was definitely the right move so in the meantime at the end of january 2014 i was landing in syria uh in switzerland on the airport of trick and during the following weeks i tested this jurisdiction to see if uh it you know it's the one for for our project that can serve as a as a base so thanks to the community there and so on uh they shared valuable networks of people and uh we manage also

to get to the economic development team uh that's uh in switzerland for the canton of zurg so we explained that pretty much okay so we're building this software platform it's going to be awesome it's going to allow this all this good stuff to be built on and they said wow that sounds pretty cool so then they didn't say you know like they usually say no get away get away from here so that that was an encouraging sign and then uh after what followed after that uh meeting somewhere in march i think uh the irs decided that actually bitcoin is not the currency it's like an investment tool so it was like an entire of stuff that happened

in the meantime while we were figuring out how to actually to pull out two of these uh so in may this is like that was the big story but here we get the part where it actually interacts with authorities in may 20 the digital finance compliance association after months of legal grinding has been set up in switzerland in the continent of true and the purpose of this entity is to provide to its members and the new members also uh an interface with the swiss authorities and hotdog and to engage in a dialogue with them and to propose certain uh regulatory paths that do not suffocate or kill this technology just because

they don't understand what it is you know so even at this point we have uh so it's you gotta understand these guys are like 40 years plus people not necessarily tax levy and uh you have level one mindful bitcoin it's like so it's definitely a hard job but the purpose of this thing is to talk with people educate them and make them understand that blockchains are a database and this database should

not be treated as money it should be a general purpose and the use of the technology should maybe then be regulated so bitcoin okay blockchain technology type financial application okay you can uh see what happens in that then but treating for example other things like we had the first example with the icann and namecoin how would how would that work then you would suffocate all this innovation by putting the the blockchains into one bucket so the dfca the digital finance compliance association the fca.ch if any of you guys is an entrepreneur doing crypto projects or looking relocate or

some friendly jurisdiction get on the website there's a contact info you can get in touch with them easily so in the future this body will also engage in dialogue with other jurisdictions so we tried and why we started also this this effort was to have yet another factor in which we show that we try to interact with the authorities explaining them what this is jumping from the bushes uh yes it is uh pretty new and it can lead in unexpected

directions but in the end it's just technology like it shouldn't be it's we if you if you look at the internet it's like this is quite fun if you look at the internet how it started with the web browser and then it develops and it got more mainstream and more mainstream but before people actually got like what's internet what's internet you had all these sort of publications like in time magazine in the i think they had cyber porn protecting kid from this top and then you so that's sort of the

efforts we're being involved in on the regulatory side and interact with official institutions um francesco francesco simonetti do you have a question i have a question from yes there will be some problems for um for the size of the blockchain uh you know we talked about that uh in depth and uh sort of the conclusion we we reached was that by the time the blockchain will get

to let's say unmanageable sizes we have the ethereum 2.0 effort that's going to come and shut the blockchains and how there are like active efforts into uh tackling the scalability aspect right so there's brain power put into that i don't know exactly how it's going to work or look like but it's looking exciting so yeah you also have square and other stuff that allows you to uh not necessarily store all the stuff on the blockchain and also on this uh decentralized architecture that follows

the the blockchain you know for permissions and all this stuff okay are you talking about this one right uh-huh if you think my first computer was four gigabyte of space and now portugal are like this always more little okay it blew my mind a couple of months ago i i went to the store i was thinking i'm gonna get the usb stick and i like the last one i had was like four or

eight gigs and you know it got to the point where like i needed more space five figure so i went to the store and i checked the stuff in like 8 16 32 64 128 holy this doesn't stop 258 200 what uh 256 just like oh you know like wow i had all these four gigabytes so uh just a tiny thing you know it got to hundreds of kids it's like crazy only from that angle we have the storage uh the storage space expansion that even if you have the quantity of data

increasing you also have the a cheaper rate at which you can store all this info it's okay good maybe lorenzo also wants i want to add something i just want to ask you can you hear me yeah okay because my screen is locked since the beginning of the conversation i was listening to that you cannot see you though okay should be skype or chrome or uh well beautiful i want to ask you i want to ask me hi

i've been talking to me before a few minutes i want to ask to assume italy what do you want to do and what are your purposes i can understand a bit so it's okay i can follow and so lorenzo um could you repeat the the um the question please

i can check it um is born in july july last year and we want to collaborate with the ethereum foundation to spread the word to find a solution with

a hackathon with engineers to solve the the questions of the decentralization of creating a dapp and work all together and i i hope that there will be a meeting with all the meetups of european meet ups global we tap meet ups a big meeting for uh celebrate genesis genesis block

yeah so and that you know it probably won't be the world wide oh everything is here there you go guys it will be gradual so it might be instead of one big party we might have to do like three medium sized parties on the schedule uh release and related to the collaboration learning aspect and doing all this stuff it's funny that you mentioned because before this call i talked to lorenzo briefly and i explained him a bit about the project i mentioned in the beginning that's going to be released in

the coming days so the name of the project is ethereum builders and basically it will uh enable people to use uh google hangouts through an interface like an upvoting reddit style interface and it will allow the community itself to self-organize and if you have for example vitaly having an hour uh he could start initiate or propose on that day i have an hour in which i i will show how to create your first app right and his screen shares for an hour to google hangout and everyone can join everyone can see his uh screen while he goes through the

stuff and more than that this can be used for many many many many many other things like for example asynchronous self-organizing hackathons with people screen sharing their terminals while they're hacking and building stuff and since google hangout has the on-air options the hackathons could also be live streamed on youtube so you have like this awesome infrastructure that's built there and we are now going to actually use it for people to engage interact and learn to develop and to do stuff on interior and how we got to this

uh was one so their education is being regarded as everyone in the project outside that you retain the knowledge and all that stuff and there was an interesting study that was conducted by the bill gates and madin by bill gates foundation and it like studied on a few hundred students at harvard how the online courses work so what they found was pretty interesting even in the beginning even if in the beginning people were signing up to take these courses to gain new skills as they progressed through the through the course their focus shifted towards getting good grades and completing the course so completely

forgetting the point of why they sign up for this thing in the first place and the researchers at the end of their study suggested the following immediate peer interaction and like application of the knowledge that was learned so going for a code academy style stuff requires time requires people to build it requires someone to record the session requires all this stuff like to get started and if we use the current architectures that's out there like google hangouts screen sharing a few people programmers learning teaching others and you can even like

incentivize this behavior think about let's say you are a very good uh and passionate ethereum ethereum uh programmer uh you just figure out how to do a metacoin and you say okay guys i have an hour to do this like just we're having this call uh this could have been a screen share tutorial where you would have uh presented this thing and in the description you would have said okay you need to install this you need to do that etc to set up the the stage but in there you can also have a tipping address so you have all these people that learn stuff from you

the content can also be recorded and used in other forms for tutorials and so on you can make some you know you can feel uh appreciated by those that send you tokens of appreciation and this thing can be so sustainable and encouraging so more than that people could post the bounties for the sessions that they want to see so for example i know some there there is a huge chunk of the community that wants to learn how to build doubts but there is no tutorial there so we just say it we'll just put that i'll put five bucks for this and someone else would okay i'll put 550 bucks and then you have a party that's someone

out there that knows how to do a dollar sale okay i'll do this and he'll also pick the money he'll get rewarded for the time he's put in and the knowledge he has is being shared as wide and as fast as possible towards the edges of this entire community okay it will be very interesting to see how it will evolve very interesting future for all of us yeah so uh thank you for your time by the way guys we haven't introduced yet like

can you tell me your names and so i'm leonardo pedretti you're a hero thank you thank you and the founder of meetup and just his colleague i mean my brother yeah hi i'm diego hey diego hi i'm federico what what's the name federico hello nice to meet you nice to meet you i am i'm seppa hi i'm oliver hey man hi everyone hi i'm philipp hey philip

nice to meet you man nice to meet you thank you for your time for this call i hope to see you soon so you know in the beginning of this project i was thinking uh and talking a lot about holland and collins were designers these hubs physical hubs and you have them in different jurisdictions and different countries different cities and all this stuff so maybe in the future we'll get to the point where the guys you guys will come visit romania will come visit italy yeah visit them together switzerland then hit them to them or something you know like

make this uh an ever flowing network of people meeting each other and doing cool stuff together um are you now in bucharest yes if you guys uh happen to be around here send me a message or something i'll be more than happy to have you around okay nice nice very well next step is probably yeah i i heard the lorenzo saying something about that but i i don't know so yeah we should organize some kind of uh

trip all together to michael to holland zero zero zero or two zero zero one in bucharest and learn understand what is an autumn and maybe think about that after that you guys are welcome by the way in the spring and the summer it's pretty nice here so at the moment the weather is not very friendly rain and all that stuff so if it can be in the spring we can also go see the mountains and stuff so