Jarrad Hope & Carl Bennetts: Status - The Mobile Ethereum Client (Episode 181)

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter has rectified the ledger nano s the hardware wallet which sets the new standard security and usability get it today at leisure wall comm use the offer code epicenter to get 10% of the order hi welcome to epicenter show a stock silicon technologies project arab sorry decentralization and the global blockchain revolution my name is Tibet secure time address today we are talking to the cofounders of status status is

one of the applications mobile applications that is pushing the boundaries of how the user interface to the DAP word should ought to look like so let's get going and have an intro from Carl and Jared starting with Jared Jared tell us a bit about yourself and how you got to be into the crypto space sure okay yeah I'm Jared being kind of falling bit like the crypto space for a long time I got into Bitcoin around sort of 2011 and ultimately ethereum how I got into it is kind of a long story but there's there's many parts the kind

of all connects one of them is particularly around sort of virtual reality and this idea of these sort of companies owning like owning these head-mounted displays which will ultimately turn into mixed reality devices and so I view that our smartphones will eventually turn into these sort of wearable headsets what's kind of scary is about that to me is that company is essentially going to own your eyes and your ears and ultimately what you see here think and men believe what's really interesting about sort of blockchains is this whole idea of being able to organize socially and unique and interesting ways and have users being able to not only own the software to

have a stage within the the direction of the software that can be created and that hasn't been able to be done pot like in the possible way without trust before of some kind of intermediary so that's what really excites me okay cool and guard something audio background yeah I guess I I kind of took a fascination to Bitcoin very early on as well around the same time is Jared and I've always been very fascinated with organizational structures and when we first created the theory and white paper I think that's one aspect that really piqued my interest and that coupled with sort of being exposed to a lot of Jared's

thinking not just because we've known each other for such a long time is kind of what I sent me we get down the rabbit hole and so what led you to want to build a messaging app essentially on on top of a theory or more I should say a wallet as a messaging app sure so I guess it's really about how can we kind of begin to onboard non-technical people into using decentralized applications and we spend a lot of time thinking about what the UX should look like and how that's actually going to play out so like accessible it just makes sense to put some bottle in my opinion that's where most of the users are today and in

terms of interface if you actually look at how people are using their phones right now it's very very social most of that was training towards messengers so I think it's just if you want trying to task sort the widest net and begin onboarding people into the blockchain and still have those very flexible and sort of use interface I think miss doing makes sense if you can trust that with just a bullet I think just opening up your wallet many times a day it doesn't make a lot of sense um whereas I might open something like facebook messenger over and over again and I mean getting to that point was actually like a whole journey behind that I mean first of say this isn't

really a wallet on its own it does like account management but like a wallet is like adapt within status we originally had the idea for an unreleased product back in 2013 it was the sort of side project were focusing on our main project it was going to be called Queen hero and it was going to be essentially a Bitcoin base browser for mobile but a lot of things we wanted to do wasn't also possible like I was looking at things like master coin and counterparty a little bit later on and the color coins were true how interesting but you couldn't really do them in SPV way on the device itself and then like later in it there in came along I was just like wouldn't this be

so awesome to have smart contracts on your phone and so we got a small grant from the foundation to support the Java version to Android since that coding in Java is the sort of default there and at a time we were syncing the full blockchain which is kind of crazy we even got a running on a SmartWatch at one point but ultimately wasn't super practical until the white client protocol came along cool lobby I agree with you Carla you know that there's a tendency right now for a lot of applications and sort of user interfaces to be built on top of chat it's sort of like when you think about it so the

progression of user interfaces it seems so counterintuitive but then again it's just so natural to want to use a chatter interface because you know you you're so used to having a textual dialogue with people I mean we text all day long why not have that same sort of interface for dialogue with you know and applications such as such as adapt or a wallet or something of that nature and and also you know I think your point it's it's much more pleasurable to be looking at this type of application than a wallet I mean I personally got to you know try to stay away from my banking applications as sort of stuff because it's just so

unpleasant so yeah I I think that it's a very unique approach that is that sort of speaks to people right people are people that use of these interfaces I think there's a interesting example of this as as we chat it's basically already done this in a centralized fashion across China the release is really fascinating report a couple days ago it's basically just looking at some different trends of users with inside the application and you can see something like a for example the number of people that stand above two hours a day inside of WeChat has doubled since last year the number of people spending two hours a day in

several to four hours is like just the sheer number of people that are spending all of the time inside of this application is really fascinating now it would reach out it's very like tightly sort of integrated with all these local services around China so you can do things like book value of public transport in book taxis you can pay at a restaurant you can order your food on your phone while at a restaurant I think this is a sort of direction that we eventually like to see status head that one so now we need to focus on I'm getting the basics right no absolutely I mean you know with the advent of AI as well like I friends of mine who are working on on chat and AI and that it seems that it's going in that direction

many many years ago there was another project that did something similar to what you're doing which was gems of course that project was built on totally different network was built on counterparty and I think the you know the objectives of the project's work of the project were much different they were building a chat application in which you had a wallet have you pulled inspiration from other projects such as gems or perhaps they would like WeChat oh yeah definitely WeChat Oh once like once I started using it and so the potential of a tous definitely or inspiring we didn't become aware of gems until much later on I think it's kind of

interesting but maybe the the sort of incentivization structures around that don't necessarily line up maybe it's kind of hard to unfold users into a new sort of token not too many people are invested in the first place yeah I guess I'm not I'm not so familiar with gems but I think what's the real value for additional status is providing really access to decentralized application I'm not sure what what James is doing exactly but I don't think it was really aiming to provide a window into what sort of a person yeah I think they were doing something completely different let me like I said they were building a more of a chat application in which you had a wallet where you could easily send funds from from people in with people in your

contact list and am now years later they've sort of haven't really delivered on what the initial vision was but I think it was an interesting perhaps precursor to you know what we're seeing now in terms of interfaces and to what you guys are doing which is obviously much more of a broader vision into how decentralized applications can live in chat interfaces last year when I was deaf corner I saw talk from Jared and he mentioned that status started off trying to port or mist to mobile right right we did old a browser concept and then it ended up changing to a chat chat based

interface so I think like you're one of the things that are you that have analyzed what would happen if you would have like a normal dad browser like mist or mobile versus chat based app interface so what's what's the what's the key difference between these two and what are these strengths and disadvantages of each I think what's important to note that stateís still tries to be this sort of misfit mobile right now like we have like a browser within status and we actually treat the even though we have a primarily chat interface each chat can also be considered like a tab in a browser so

the idea is that you have this sort of browser interface but you can pull it down and in the chat history you'll be able to see these sort of transactions that back together that has been performing on your behalf you know and maybe later on that can be expanded to have like customer support for the particular job that sort of thing so so yeah like we definitely still striving to be mr. mobile we couldn't port like Miss directly to to mobile because it's primarily developed in an electron sort of environments electron itself is kind of a sort of basically a

chromium wrapper around some HTML and JavaScript and when you're on a resource constricted environment that becomes very very difficult to get a high performance high performance or high performance user experience is sort of smooth and running really well and we're already running like we run go ethereum directly on the device and it's syncing directly with the ethereum network which is already quite taxing in of itself with proof of work when we get to prove a state that changes but we basically had to opt for a better sort of library for doing user interface which is react native it's working out really well and to your question of sort of a browser this messenger I think it really just

comes down to the way that people use their different devices I must have some really really incredible 12 on desktop and I think or at least in my opinion for mobile just the way we use our phones is a little bit different so we're taking most of the fiber hybrid approach yeah absolutely like when you look at how the app breakdowns are in terms of monthly active users it's just that messengers dual mobile browser usage but almost like a factor of three it's just people are literally spending their lives communicating on their smartphones within some kind of messenger environment and if you want to maximize the surface area of ethereum to

use this really you need to kind of bring this familiarity to them and then kind of slowly all slowly kind of unboard them into the sort of world of blockchain without that being too intimidating and - for school or even necessary to just use the application itself so coming back to the other chat application space I want to ask you one one question I mean there are just a a ton of chat applications so you've got obviously like facebook Messenger what's up like WeChat and their signal and telegram and a lot of these are off often then geographically sort of you know specific based on your country or

region personally an SMS obviously and the different SMS protocol so you've got like you know Apple messenger protocol like just it's just a massive protocol and applications that are not interoperable for the most part I just found out recently actually that whatsapp is using the single protocol which I guess is a thing and the promotion is not compatible with the signal application but so in a person I use like at least three or four maybe five different applications to chat with different people you know where where do you see this evolving do you see this space is to just burgeoning with other applications that people are using like 10 different messaging applications

based on specific use cases or the types of people they have on their list or do these converge some into some you know the major platforms where you know you don't have to use all these apps but just one ecosystem for messengers is quite interesting we actually looked into that originally because it's a similar question that comes up is well why don't you just integrate with some other kind of messenger and there's a couple of reasons for that one a lot of them just essentially close platforms basically if you develop for that particular platform one you have to start acquiring users for your your

plugin to that but it's at that point it's centralized to start off with because they have two users how to have permission to go through your particular service to be able to use the cryptocurrency and one that can just be kind of taken away from you very quickly which is kind of a problematic the other part of that is with status we think that the messenger's protocols can be now peer to peer I think really Skype was the only people who are doing that a long time ago this company's another interesting ones like you talks that are kind of doing this on peer-to-peer sort of stuff but apart from that a lot of them are still using so the sort of client-server

methodology and maybe that's not necessary anymore and so we'd like to experiment and see how far we can push that with Bispo which is really fascinating sort of protocol in terms of answering the question of where the sort of ecosystem is going I think that the the idea of messengers and chat interface is going to like on a much broader timeline like did five or ten years out where we're going to see more socially aware computing and contextually aware computing and right now we're just being bombarded with information like if I open up my emails filled with tons of emails if I could open up like I mean if I don't read it it's just a whole bunch of stuff that's

kind of not relevant to me if I open up slack this whole bunch of messages it just we're just getting bombarded with information and I think the way that we're going to have to start curving that is by making our computing very contextually aware and that becomes really fascinating how you kind of do that and then you start having to think about things like attention to be able to solve that and attention is going to become like a real kind of valuable asset that we have where our time and then what we think and what we think about it has a value because it's bound to time we only have a certain amount of hours per day and it's kind of being bombarded with advertisements and that sort of thing

that that gets more and more problematic in our current web 2.0 kind of world so I mean ultimately I think messengers will continue to branch out I had mentioned sort of mixed reality devices I think ultimately messengers will kind of emerge shall converge with the sort of desktop environments of our these augmented reality devices and they will be contextually aware of their environment we're in and they will be displaying things that are relevant to us to help us navigate our our new worlds do we even have messengers then we have like augmented reality or I guess like augmented reality will have its own kind

of messengers like yeah I think so I think the the kind of key parallel there is that when you're in a chat like you to context is the context and Carl alluded to how we chat is kind of used if you think about how it's used in China like you can order sort of an uber equivalents or cars to go to a restaurant you can be in a group chat and I organized that place than the location you can both see your progress on getting to that location but then when you're in the restaurant then you can also order like within that group chat you can order at the restaurant and share the menu with your friends who can also order even though he may be running ten minutes late so this is like a whole

sort of social context that you're in and if you can imagine where that social context is going to go into that's going to start blurring this line between our digital lives and reality a lot more and so I think there's going to be a very natural progression between the messages we see on our smart phones today and these sort of mixed reality devices where that then becomes part of your essentially your awareness and this sort of like the sort of context that's around around your field of vision at the time so let's let's move on to kind of understanding what the technology behind status is now so you mentioned that you use the visible protocol in order to facilitate your chat the tell us what whisper is wisp is a really cool

sort of communication protocol it's originally invented by Gavin woods and the early days it's it's something between like UDP and sort of distributed hash table in the sense that it has some interesting properties on how you try to get messages from one place to another it has essentially dark browsing and it doesn't reveal endpoints so easily so for example if I want to send a message to you I was I would have your public key which is a reference I encrypt the message with your public key and then I'll send it out into the network

now this message will essentially bounce bounce around the nodes for a specific TTL or time to live and then all die now basically there's no guarantee of message delivery in this so even though you may receive your message you still pass it on and if you don't receive it well then tuff biscuits right but there's other ideas of doing the dark routing and so it's not implemented today but it will be this idea of bloom filters where you kind of create this sort of bloom filter that you can share with the nodes that you connect to and

basically letting them know what kind of information you're interested in and so basically these messages will bounce there's no receiver and see if it matches that rule and filter and if it does it will send it your way or maybe or maybe not it's all probabilistic and another part of that is the the network is supposed to learn what kind of nodes are servicing your messages better so over time the network topology should change to be able to service your messages faster given your your length of time within the network and understanding what kind of know it's good for you and to combat the this sort of no guarantees on the message

essentially we've implemented an application protocol in status which allows you to send an acknowledgment or an ACK and so basically you Yuri intransigence oh you have gotten our receipt back from the peer that you're talking to and in this and other ism in whisper version five which is now being kind of rolled out there's some other interesting things like offline in boxing but they're all quite experimental and of course we're experimenting with them in fact we're using it to do push notifications later on down the line so I'm not I'm not super familiar with whisper but what so what type of latency could we expect then so if I send you a message and then

you presumably receive it and then you send me back the ACK are we looking at the same type of latency is with like a traditional centralized client-server type of scenario or would it be some longer that's a really good question I guess it kind of really depends on the network topology that you enter in at the time the idea is that'll be like a couple of seconds but it could be more it could be less in terms of scalability and it's kind of like the biggest concern with whisper at the moment and we have a couple other tracks that still keep it decentralized we're talking with sort of swamp ting and they're very running the network stack at the moment

and they're doing another protocol called PSS which essentially has is they're doing it to service sort of swung message transmission it will also have a whisper like API so with Inter status if you're finding that these are sort of privacy features of whisper are servicing you well it's becoming too lag you can choose between privacy and convenience and switch of hopefully in the future you'll be able to switch over to PSS which will give you unicast and multicast and it should be blistering fast so so this was big advantages like normally like I think in lots of messaging protocols and you generally

have some form of like messaging broker that is going to aggregate the messages that come and then deliver them to the devices that they need to go to yet and this is like a central party so from your description this purse strength seems to be that there is no central Broker of messages at all it's it p2p network yeah and then because it's a p2p network there has to be public key crypto in it exactly so there's there's not really a centralization points which is fantastic that way to the metadata collection is somewhat mitigated or it's non-trivial to do dragnet surveillance on it as easily and yeah it is asynchronous commit an encryption which

is the sort of public key stuff but there's also this sorry asymmetric encryption to do this the public key stuff there's also asymmetric encryption as well first of all is secrecy and that sort of thing but whisper doesn't specify that you have to do you have to roll it yourself will do it yourself and will be essentially implementing parts of the what's called the noise protocol to do for secrecy which is a variant of the diffie-hellman encryption scheme I think last generally or something I did I actually downloaded status and I was surprised to find that status was actually thinking the whole blockchain

and it was super fast and I was wondering how like how do you actually interface with the blockchain and how do you make all of these mobile devices sync with it sure I mean so when you're running status you're actually running in a therian node it is literally go with areum on your device what's really great about it is you're not thinking the full blockchain you're thinking just the blockchain headers and that's because of the light client frolic protocol that's being developed short is short for l es so so that what's really cool about that is that it's you you're essentially doing all the same sort of cryptographically

verifiable stuff just in a very light way and you're not running all the smart contracts and you're not doing all the heavy lifting but it's still quite secure because of the data structure so yeah like you basically you connect to a couple of bootstrap nodes then you connect appears just like you would running get on or like a normal sort of node on the network we've now implemented this sort of with every release we now update what's called the CHT or the chemical hash tree and that allows us to essentially put in a check point in the blockchain so you're only have to sync like like a week's worth or a month's worth of blocks to be able to catch up so you don't have to go and

sink the entire blockchain is that saves on that bandwidth and that saves on disk space and it's still quite secure and the Elliott what like even though we're doing that with every release there's a hole that there's a research topic around doing a dynamics DHT pearl like why and you know so hopefully that will be dynamic in the future and when we switch the purpose state like the story changes as well but the better so are you then so the first application that is set to go live that is implementing in a real world production scenario this dislike client and like implementation yeah I mean so far we're the only ones that are

actually treating decentralization seriously on mobile and we were using the like client before there was even an API to get on Java or Objective C so if you look at it like if you look at our library status go which consumes go ethereum we have our own sort of set of API is to connect to connect them the network it's quite interesting so quite recently coinbase released this mobile app called token and as soon as it was released on our North latitude and there was a conversation that token is very similar to the stay there so could you give us a like a rundown of how token differs from status in the in the same

in delivering that similar-looking capabilities sure I mean so I think what's really cool about token is it's great for the ecosystem the ethereum ecosystem I think the technology stacks differs somewhat they do use the signal protocol and that's somewhat centralized I don't believe they support web 3 at the moment and to interact with the network you essentially go through a trusted server of theirs so so you're synched on on on this side is because you use visible um you don't have that central point of messaging trust at all unless unless the user opsin for convenience or privacy

yeah and I mean that doesn't even exist yet we're still waiting for the song guys to catch up and work that so that probably won't even happen this year okay so in general tell us tell us about your approach to privacy and like what kinds of data on your users do you collect we take a hard stance and soar towards decentralization we essentially don't want to see any of your data at the moment nothing is shared with our servers except for the phones if you if you choose to it's completely optional you can opt to have sort of contact synchronization and the reason why that has to go through a

server is because we have to send you an SMS to verify that your phone number is actually yours I think to do that in a decentralized way it becomes awfully complex I actually had some lengthy discussions about this the end of creating these crazy markets then you're sharing this sort of private information on the network which is just like your phone number which you probably don't want to do the good news is in terms of contact sharing itself is we've got like a we basically a plan or proposal to essentially do this in a trustless and missouri knowledge way well somewhat not a basically zero-knowledge way with the exception of creating some hash

collisions but the idea is that you'll be able to share contacts but not be able to you'll be able to like upload that sort of data on to swarm and it won't matter because it's almost meaningless to anybody else except for you and your friends and yes it's very interesting but we're still ultimately have to send you some kind of SMS yeah let's take a break to talk about the ledger nan OS the new flagship hardware wallet buy ledger I'll let ledger CEO and cash avec tell you all about how simple the nano s makes it to securely store all your private keys the ledger on an OS is our latest generation Hardware wallet this

is a multi currency Hardware wallet it has a screen and buttons to manage every and screen you can generate a new seed restore seed or set up your PIN on the device your seed will never be exposed to the host computer on the nano edge you have different apps you have the Bitcoin app you have the ATM app and you have the Fido utility app for strong authentication for instance with Google Dropbox or github we can manage your crypto currencies with the ledger wallet Bitcoin Chrome App or the little wallet is serum chrome app with the Nano s all your Bitcoin and ischium addresses are derived from one unique seed with one

theme you can have in the same time bitcoin is here on film classic balances and also if your restore your seed you will also recover all the keys associated to other apps such as fiber u2f ssh GD g so it's very simple just one seed and multiple applications the Nano app sets the new standard in hardware wallet security and usability you can get yours today at legible calm and when you do be sure to use the offer code epicenter to get 10% off your first story we'd like to thank ledger for their support of epicenter so moving on then to status itself and sort of the user interface so I I tried to get

status on my phone I was I wouldn't send it for the beta so I couldn't I couldn't install it or sorry the Alpha yeah I couldn't solve but I did look at the screen the screen grabs on the website and sort of got an idea for what the interface was going to look like in one of the types of things that you could do with it and and mayor I know the mayor's been using it so maybe he can give some more insights as to what types of functionalities are in there but it looks like you guys spent a lot of time on design and user experience and just getting that really polished so that when somebody on boards this like he's not thinking this is an aetherium client

or something that like this is an actual application that serves purpose serves a purpose and that purpose is being able to interact with other members of the community sending ether and then using applications right so using applications like you port and so walk us through what you know what is the experience on status what types of things can you do once you've downloaded and installed the application sure so I mean like once you download install the application you go straight into onboarding session which is essentially a chat session with your first contact just called console it's called console because it tries to

emulate the JavaScript environments of go ethereum so you can actually type in JavaScript commands into there if you want to you have full access to web 3 so you like if you're a developer you can kind of just muck around in that but what's great about it for just the average user is that it essentially tries to teach you the basics of interacting the status so you learn how to touch our messages to type in your password set up your first accounts that sort of thing once you're done with that then you kind of move into the rest of the application and you can go over to your contacts and you will find a whole bunch of daps that are ready to go so like I mean you can access all go you can access be chat you can access atlantes gnosis flight delay suck first

flight auction house blah blah blah blah so these are all HTML sort of webbed apps that you can literally just tap on and automatically start using on your mobile phone wherever you are and of course if you've done these sort of phone contacts in synchronization you can chat with your friends and you can send and receive effort you have like a wallet that you can use as well that's pretty much it start off with the other feature that we've been working on is the one called discover and discover is the sort of this idea of actually it's where the name status is kind of coming from but we haven't really kind of publicized it too much but the idea is that we want a the ethereum community or anyone using status to be able to find

each other quite quite easily but we want to do it through your friend network so if you decide you want to add like a good good or service you can essentially change your status to have these sort of hashtags in it and these hashtags will publicize your status amongst your friends and then will propagate out from your friends to your friends of friends etc etc and everyone will start sharing their they're basically atop lists of 100 public spaces with their friends themselves ultimately what this means is you'll see this sort of live feed of different hashtag based sort of statuses pop up within discover and you'll be able to find cool new people to chat with offering different services nearby you

and this sort of thing and we're actually going to be evolving this to turn it into more of like a Maps base layer system so other third-party apps can start adding more information into into this particular discover feature as well yeah that sounds really cool so then the discover feature would basically be sort of like a trending topics list of hashtags in the people have less in their status in their circle of friends yep and it's kind of its like weighted by like how recently it was done how I got if you're online or not if that user has actually interacted with that person that sort of

thing okay so come back to the applications so you mentioned you mentioned augur as one of the applications that is currently compatible with status so first I want to ask you what what does onboarding so I'm an application developer I've got the cool new DAP you know that just raised 50 million in ether and you know I I want to I want to integrate into the status what what do I need to do is I've developed a platform there or how do I on board there sure I mean so status tries to be a browser so in terms of

integrations it's just a matter just like browsing to a website that's that's it we do have plans for adapt directory but we want to do we want to do it right because there's a lot sort of subtleties to that app stores themselves actually are riddled with a whole bunch of problems and that sort of initial screen real estate is very highly valuable and so there's a very strong incentive to be gained on that and so we're looking at things like community curation and things like attention to be able to solve that but ultimately you'll essentially be able to kind of just deploy your your your tap as on swarm or ipfs that sort of thing

or it's done on a normal server and if it works in missed or meta mask it should work on status if you want to do some more interesting things like decentralize cat ports or whatever then you will have to go through a username system which we haven't which is not yet implemented but it's on some our to-do list of a very long to-do list and then so that how you essentially access these sort of chat BOTS and all the users so you said if it is compatible with mr. Mehta mask it it should be compatible with status so so then I presume that so if I launch into augur I'm I'm being served an interface which is sort of an

application interface and not necessarily like a native chat like I'm not chatting with sort of augur bot and say like I want to predict you know I want to enter this prediction market and I want to bet this much on this prediction by sending text messages or text messages basically you're saying it's more of an application interface that's more sub classic - or native to that application yeah exactly so so I mean if you can think of like this sort of chat interface as being like a hybrid between a chat and a browser tab that's probably the best way to start like wrapping your head around this idea so and the reason for that is because you you as a as a user you want to make sure that you can kind of see the

transactions that a particular staff is doing within that context so basically like if you look at the I don't know if you can see it here but you can see that this sort of note at the terrible example but there's a nurse's website actually on the screen but if you can kind of pull this down then there's a sort of chat context behind it which will showing a bunch of transactions it doesn't right now but it will in the future okay so you're you interact with sort of native application interface and as an application developer you may want to tweak that a little bit so it works you know it's it's easy to use an in a mobile phone but then you're it's coupled with a chat beat that is sending

you some transacted likes or basic confirmations for transactions yeah pretty much so any sort of like transactions of that Zak will make will end up in that in that sort of chat history so it's kind of like a third that transaction history that's how we intend to intend to have that ultimately doesn't exist like that exactly today but that's the sort of direction we're going okay there might be certain instances where it's just a chap on so the idea is that there's a lot of flexibility so we can have both four deaths and chatbots and then nobody use cases that kind of combine the two yes exactly and it'll be like hybrids so for example our next iteration of the bullets which is adapt

make loads up in the web page it also has a whole bunch of commands that you can use within the chat context itself so it's kind of like this combination between the between the street so another example of that would be just shown notice perhaps at some point when they have a chat bot on the platform I could be getting a Jared and I could put at Knossos and then I could place some kind of social bit with Jared so there's going to be these really interesting ways that these different steps sort of operate on the platform within social context as well I mean like that's like what's really interesting about all these apps being on top of like the single blockchain is you get all these

different synergies so later on maybe in the distant future you can have compositions of depths sort of kind of chatting amongst themselves within chat history within the chat context making very complex interactions which would be really fascinating to see yeah and these kinds of interactions are just not there in most of the other message because I think the most that that's there is like you can pay using a chat app but prediction market using Chad and I guess I guess at some level like any technology advances a lot for you integrating the next step is just going to be very easy and so basically like in some senses dislike yes status from the

outside looks like a messenger app but behind status there's this aetherium network that keeps improving as more and more deaths develop and status basically inherits all of those capabilities like free of cost so ultimately ultimately like is that your application is just getting capability of the capability of the capability while you personally don't incur much cost in developing all these and because your sense of chaos capabilities are rising much faster than the other Chad based apps that kind of triggers an option of some kind yeah much like a webpage like I could be using Firefox

for many years and just on reaping the benefits of other instruments evolving cool so that is really cool recently I was at your reddit and I came across this I this one of these posts where somebody was mentioning that you will launch a network of your own the status network can you tell us what this network is toward what the plans for it would be it's still only if they're in public for change it's very clear it's in ERC 20 token and it's going to be modular but perfect I'll have some more details like stop that sure so we're

just kind of thinking about these new sort of economic models that we can create through this token issuance so there are very simple examples of how you could use a token within the context of status so the one just registering your username for instance could be done with the state of network token but these other problems that we're trying to solve was wrong so one of which and we've been in conversation with Mikey from user feeds about there's this idea of continent ranking and if you look at taunting ranking in wave 2 there's some some player problems exist so one of which is is that there is a monopoly on the way in which your content is organized so if I don't like

the way that Twitter is ranking the information that I see there's not really much I can do about it and so we think that's sort of monopoly isn't really in the spirit of decentralization and if I don't like the algorithms that it's being used to sort the information that I see I should be able to switch it very easily so that's one component what's a what's a running theme within within status is repeat open source from the beginning we've always like everything's open source we've also built out this other other application called commit S which acts as a sort of bounty bot for github repositories and any sort of github user can use it but

the idea is that if the issue is created you can assign a bounty to that and community will come along and leave a comment with a QR code and a particular bounty address then anyone can kind of contribute to that the idea is to incentivize open source development and that develop can be paid out once a pull request satisfies that particular issue has been merged into the develop branch by the project maintainer or whatever the the situation is and really what's behind that is this idea of doing decentralized governance now decentralized governance is like a really hard problem we had don't believe that anyone's really sold that perfectly well but what we can do is we can make

steps to go towards that so you can do things like carbon boat style voting schemes on particular proposals or particular issues and the idea is to that when you look at sort of social networks today like things like Facebook they're they're essentially social like these some huge networks of users but they have an owner and it's not them like that it's it's some entity and they act as a sort of gatekeeper and they control this sort of walled garden and what's really interesting to us is like like you can have these users essentially operate a network and

literally guide how that how the software they use is developed if they can't even contribute it to directly themselves and that's sort of the path we're looking to go down and I think that's going to be really fascinating the the network of users to essentially operate themselves and Kyle touched upon this idea of using a token to essentially hold a user name within status and that's kind of fascinating when you look at how other sort of social networks have these sort of BOTS and standing problems you like I thought I believe it was some like I remember to figure out what's up in my head but it's a very large amount of Twitter users are

essentially BOTS and they they don't really have any sort of financial state against them it's quite cheap to generate all these different accounts and so in a way you can kind of think about this is like Twitter verified accounts but there's some kind of value attached to that and so the more value you have to that the more than the more stake they have in the network the more influential they are in the network and therefore the more the more valuable that particular users in the network and the more reputable they are you know in a sense a reputation itself is also quite subjective in quite hard but this is like a sort of small step towards that kind of kind of thing and then you

can imagine later on like there's going to be public chat groups which may be governed that only allow people of a certain sort of value amount to to be able to enter and there's this idea of doing this sort of tributes to towards other people instead of blocking people within status you can essentially require some kind of deposit to even chat with you so someone can deposit a certain amount and then if you message to them that was it's released and so you can if you want to block somebody you can just set that value limit to be like a 999 or something some values ridiculously high I one part of those I go to add is if you think it's a sort of incentive

alignment of a lot of these business models and we're - we have the owners of the network you have the users on the network and then more often than not you have advertisers and each of these different groups has very different interests and then the results often isn't the best user experience and if you can have more unified sort of stakeholders hopefully the outcome would be much better yeah as if it would would appear at least on paper these incentives become a lot more aligned so basically like what what owning the status token could allow me to do is it would give me access to some features right like being able to register my

name or being able to chat with another user by making a deposit or things like that so these are like feature base right so you have a token and you will link the ownership of this token to unlocking some features in your application right that's that's one use and the other uses that I could participate in some form of governance of the application itself yep and so we kind of touched upon this idea of attention and community curation as well so being a token holder you essentially be able to curate the sort of content that is displayed in status as well okay so I can I can also curate content

discredit that's the that is that variant and that is where this idea of merging with user feeds come in right like a mama I'm a Content I'm I'm a token owner I can curate content and based on how all the tokens curate this content status is going to display a feed of some form or something like that yep some things like add app directory can be committed curated as opposed to essentially being purely this gaming of an algorithm necessarily I that happens very often in google play for example if another part of that is if if a particular algorithm

is not be no longer serving your user you can then fall back to a market of algorithms so you can then swap them out and becomes very Darwinian so it keeps hopefully we'll keep these sort of algorithms honest and competitive as well derivative a unique application right like even in the chat that isn't a central server that is collecting the data or and you won't make things that are totally decentralized so what is your business model assuming that it is not the coin itself sure so status like once we get the foundation right the status we will end up start working on these default doubts basically things

that we think are required for the best user experience that on board into and so one of those is a ps2 crypto exchange which is kind of tackling remittances in a way the idea is that you it's essentially a listing of buyers and sellers who are nearby so you can exchange your cash for crypto and meet up at a cafe or or find some kind of booth to do to this to do this for there's the there's going to be a sticker market as well later on which sounds got somewhat trivial but if you look at the line messenger it made up a quarter of their entire revenues for the

last year so once you start looking at users outside of the sort of crypto space that becomes very very interesting as well I think like a lot of the sort of financial instruments are going to be very interesting but for now it's important that we just have a very very solid base platform so we don't want to spread ourselves too thin so we just want to live developer tools really nice messaging experience ability to send social payments and wallet then we can begin focusing on this these other models later so before we wrap up this is so this is your your your moment where you can rally the

community and get them to join the project and do it and ask them Utley whatever you want so what are you looking for today in terms of community outreach I mean you're looking for developers are you looking for you know testers whatever are you looking for application developers yeah I mean like we're always looking for developers if you're interesting like closure scripts and react native of course ethereum and cryptocurrencies definitely hit us up all like we we need to expand our team quite aggressively soon the we definitely need testers I mean we've kind of maxed out our tests like invites because I don't know knows

you've got to 2,000 but if you're on Android it's a lot easier to get a tryout the Alpha you just need to go to test status that I am and give us your feedback getting the feedback is really easy if you just see a bug where you have some kind of feature suggestion just shake your phone and send it in and yeah I think yeah although that's that is yeah we're just we're actively hiring um the way we hired just because we're open source is we really value contribution to the project um we also have this really lovely community of people having to support us and if you go to slack status today and you know someone else like and I'm so high yeah I was impressed by just the

size of your community just like sixteen hundred people in your in your slack Channel or more I guess I mean this how long have you what do you how you do this how did you get all these people to to have such interest in your project women if you can give any advice to other open source projects out there oh that's a good question it's kind of a mystery to me I think we we do sometimes do these interviews with different apps that were interested in integrating ones and maybe people discover us um perhaps just a vision for what we're trying to build a society for people and then they jump on a flight through that one what's their sure yeah I think I make an effort as much as possible to

chat to almost everyone at least once this is in the community just say hi and thank thank us for supporting us and we're very is there in community focus I think it's every one of the best spaces like I've ever been in in my adult life well that says a lot oh cool well guys thank you so much for coming on the show and telling us about stays so we were looking forward to hearing you know the developments and looking forward to the official release thank you very much very much for having us and thank you once again to our listeners for tuning in at the center as part of the let's talk a core network you can find this show and lots of other great shows with like stock to a coin

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