The Pathway to Ethereum Adoption

Transcript

so the panel topic is the pathway to etherium adoption and it's going to be kind of just a little round table discussion about how these gentlemen think we will achieve the ultimate adoption of everything we've seen really over the last week so seems to be going pretty well so far I think that today how do we achieve adoption theorem well I mean it's gonna come in phases right the you know the first thing that happens is you get small numbers very smart people then you get big institutions then everybody's using it even if they don't know it like you know how did SQL adoption you just wound up using it to run society and we're all

SQL users whether we notice her or not ubiquitous invisible of the present you believe it should be partly corporate driven totally ground bottom-up anything but month achieve scale will wind up as being largely indistinguishable from corporation now if you think about linux foundation to all intents and purposes it's a corporate institution even the linux is very decentralized effort the interfaces to society like the api's are all corpora so until we've gotten so much decentralization that the basic API is that drive society also decentralized I think you're going to wind up with

even decentralized networks having corporate looking api's that they kind of terminus points what all you guys think about the branding of etherium the initial branding which I think was more developer focused does it need to change does it need to adapt to being more end user focused do we need to brand etherium at all or should it just fade become the internet like infrastructure this is the Internet around they have in about nineteen ninety-five but a theorem does

have a brand is a necessary do we need to be selling etherium what is missing anything is missing from the branding that you're thinking about but it's been a topic of discussion recently there are people who feel like we really need to put it out into public consciousness perhaps a world computer maybe a little globe icon was too little etherium eyes and and some keyboards hanging off it a little little beard of keyboards and mouses myself at Christmas it gets a little kind of Santa ha and yeah

trusting computer no I mean there's good case for making that the eclectic at explainer brown right but every time you see something that explains your theorem the world computer comes on it does a little bit in the talking something like that but in the long run I mean think like is HTML a brand it used to be a brown to the 1990s 00 HTML / right but in the brand is going to come from the community the more users there are the more developers there are then the bigger the community is and that's how the brand is going to splash on the market so my focus is to find out do we know how many developers are there that

are knowledgeable on athyrium technologies one way or the other are we talking a few thousand now you would not be more than five hundred thousand two thousand but that's not that's a small number how many should there be I mean that is I think of focus if we have more developers both in corporate environments in startups in all kinds of different of organizations I think that's what's going to drive adoption well I mean at that level I think once you see large-scale adoption by things like banks which i think is happening frankly faster than any of you Julie oriented to i think the the sudden realization from developers that if you want to make an

awful lot of money working for bounce you need to get good at bok choy you're an onus on the who is going to drive getting more developers out there so early on we had an exercise that you led in Toronto where we were trying to figure out branding for a theorem and I think one of our conclusions was that we should target messages to developers not really the end users but let those developers build their business models and find their niches and their customers and let them market to the end user so not really mark not really

ethereal but you know netflix on a theorem or prediction markets on etherium something like that that's certainly one approach we could try to emphasize that it is built on the theorem sort of an theorem inside type branding campaign I don't know I don't know if I guess at this early stage because it's really very early in this niche we kind of have to do everything so we probably should be branding a theorem itself and helping developers brand their projects as well so when we

round I think it's important to understand whether we're branding against what we're branding against so branding allows us to differentiate ourselves so are we branding against like other things in this space re-branding ourselves as you know against sort of the internet which I guess vinay you once said coke doesn't doesn't actually compete against Pepsi it competes against water and our water is just the top down command and control the world probably and our Pepsi is Bitcoin I would guess so therefore at a Bitcoin conference that we tailor the message and for the rest of the time I think your inclination has always been

to not even think about Bitcoin irrelevant I think that's becoming torrent or what do you think is the analogy is it is it like a Linux is it like a Java is it like another bitcoin is it what's there now analogy that athyrium can grow up to I think I think it's the HTTPS padlock so this notion that you've got the HTTPS power block which is this kind of ubiquitous symbol it means security the notion you see the ethereal diamond and you know that the system will be secure and will be well behaved and seems pretty reasonable to

me that you know you look on a browser if it doesn't have the diamond it's not a dark it's not securing you know your money's at rescue normally know why so I think that would be a possible long-term get a model of public consciousness you know the the you know the sigil equals secure icon in a particular place we're kind of undermining the very thing that were actually providing which is an actually secure platform so maybe that having you know the mist browser identify assets that come off untrusted interested origins is kind of delivers the same thing but but but allows the

user the default should be decentralized and a secure use of your secrets we can can probably get there in time when if Darien becomes ubiquitous and everybody just expects this trust minimize computing platform I think that makes sense but for now I think we need to deliver the message for now oh it's a world of human beings and human beings need branding in order to unless they're going to inspect the byte codes themselves which not too many of us will do we need trusted authorities unfortunately to teach us what's right

to teach us what's secure and even even when a theorem does become ubiquitous i would estimate that there that branding will still be really important that they'll be this is one service that provides financial instruments and another service that provides financial instruments and they'll need to differentiate themselves somehow and apparently that's how we do it with branding chief saml keyword how can I a theorem achieve Network effects so that it can be deployed more aggressively and

quicker there's a theory that when there when that when the network effects something starts to kick in then growth happens much more efficiently so what are your thoughts on network effects and etherium infrastructure and applications so with people using so the obviously athyrium itself is difficult to achieve network and effects without yeah there's no intrinsic networking until people have ways of interoperating and so that infrastructure is we will provide the ways of interoperating so things like registries identity all the

things that we chatted about in the standardization panel this needs to be built and built and built and then built upon again and it's that that will allow will bring the rich commons of you know user interaction that will ultimately deliver thee you know these these effects yeah i agree infrastructure and applications and to get there we need money money and more money so bitcoin has received the Bitcoin space has received the benefit of about a billion dollars over the last year of vc investment and from what I've seen I would love to hear your comments but

from what I've seen a lot of VCS are really paying attention certainly a lot of banks and accounting firms and other sorts of business issues are paying a lot of attention to what they can do on a theorem that they can't do on any other system and I would I couldn't imagine very easily seeing a billion or two billion or n billion dollars coming into the ecosystem over the next year or a few years and that will build applications but scalability is the major issue that that this system faces and without taking some of that VC money and driving it down into the

infrastructure into the plumbing that basically looks like every company that's getting funded should probably consider devoting ten twenty percent you helping out at the foundation level building the protocol building a scalable system I think that's an easy sell to VCS do you want our product or service to be accessible to a fairly limited swath of the planet or do you want it to be accessible to 7 billion people ultimately or 12 billion people ultimately when we get there yeah so you mentioned the banks and and this is a

very important point which we kind of are taking for granted but we're discussing last night and if you think about it the banks have not touched the coin but they are embracing etherium and there are numerous banks that are either trying it or doing proof of concepts and and that's a big achievement that is kind of a bit I think understated because half of them don't want anybody to know that they are doing it but some of the other half are saying that they are doing stuff on a theorem and I think that that's a big achievement and hopefully it's going to have a side effect of more growth and more and more adoption as well so it's up to us to

start to tell those stories I think the market wants to hear stories wants to hear different use cases and best practices I mean I think of this a lot of this is because the theorem is seen as being kind of politically safer than Bitcoin you know the etherion community has a pretty kind of straight down the line technology computer science decentralization as an effect but without really naming our enemies and I think that that's been very helpful because the banks have been desperate to do something with Bitcoin but didn't want to get a whole bunch of political rhetoric alongside of it and the sort of economics narrative about decentralization is efficient with the current technology base therefore it's inevitable and doesn't force the

confrontation it just accepts that the most efficient form will be a decentralized firms there'll be a migration over into the forms and I think that that's really the adoption curve that you know we forget the decentralization is something which is our global mega trend because of things like cheaper super solar panels aging grade there are lots of things that are pushing us towards this kind of d centroids were couldn't just availability and networking so we're another part of this global mega trend which means that for example the banks are looking this up you know part of a whole system of operations so it's not that we're selling a single technology it's if you're looking to adapt to this inevitable decentralization of society because of a multi dimensional shift in

the technology base then this is a positive thing that you can do to survive those transitions there's a there's a slow but very inevitable curve here the things are going down and there's no way back up that curve that's just what the technology looks like that this definitely has the feel of inevitability so so if we have two thousand developers more or less now on athyrium let's say next year or whenever the next Def Con is how many do you think we should there be developers on net doing a theorem 5,000 10,000 so I can imagine next Def Con whether it's six months from now or 12 months from

now I would imagine that for every developer here there's a be ten in six months and I don't even want to speculate what it's going to be in in 12 months I think we joked about hiring out Wembley for this event this year but who knows give it maybe we'll have a town in Kazakhstan or something I mean it's not just developer bound right it's also tool bound so I think there are a lot of kind of big web shops you know the kind of 20-30 person Internet companies that could very easily wind up with one or

two athyrium guys on staff and someone's hair tools and support services that would then be in a position to develop and deployed apps without necessarily having massive internal expertise so I think you could see the number of institutions are functionally able to commission or deliver an app could be a hundred times what it is now in a year even if most of the understanding is relatively shallow because most of the DAPs will be called as similar as websites are to each other yeah i think the developer numbers are kind of an interesting one there's a lot of gray area that the way that we've we've made the api's are such that there's a relatively easy on ramp from traditional web stuff into sort of

full-on consensus coding so at the one end you know it's much of it is about sort of classic HTML CSS javascript stuff at the other end is maybe you know some pretty hardcore game theory in solidity and in between there's an entire spectrum of f of ability so what you're saying that summed apps are kind of invisible they're doing their job in the background and well I guess that the point is that the the actual number of developers are very difficult to actually guess because quite a lot of the there could be like already there could be over 10,000 that know that there is such a thing as like this web

three object that has you know allows you to interact with some magic invisible server I think that's reasonable i think there might be 10,000 people who've taken a glance at this technology haven't haven't spent more than an hour or two but you know i do that with lots of different technologies give it a good solid 30 minutes but I think at in two years from now four years from now I think the notion of developer might even change this kind of infrastructure is going to enable us to

build two puzzle pieces or building blocks out of smart contracts or smart clauses that you can compose into smart contracts and so I think lawyers business dev people could end up being quite technical so in one of the things i think it's worth discussing is you know really there's going to be blood on the tiles but one of the things i've been talking about is that etherium is potentially the first really effective tool kit for white collar automation that you can see lots and lots and lots of people whose job it is to do the perform transactions in relatively high trust networks like

interbank trading type stuff that you could see entire departments basically be replaced by you know half a dozen tabs and the notion that one of the huge drivers for a theory of development is going to be you know essentially firing paper pushers and replacing them with technology it's a hell of a thing to think of yourself as being the bleeding edge technological unemployment but I do think that that could be a huge part of what drives adoption in the initial few stages is large organizations are under financial pressure because the markets are so kind of rough and you know taking ten fifteen twenty percent of their head counts you know simply because they could go through and they can just take problems that are currently mad rollick and turn them into consensus problems

just feel kind of like where IBM in the fifties to be Jeff how about the role of a mist and the which is the special browser do you think it has also a role in increasing adoption at the end user level me could it be like I have this vision we're assuming miss gets adopted everywhere it could be like the next kind of sass equivalent in the sense that in big companies when if something is not available now employs we can go on the web and sign up to anything that's not

available and they'll go and they'll bypass IT and be happy with it so could miss provide that kind of promise where anybody can sign up and and conduct trust based services without any any of anybody's authorization yeah the facial mist is gonna be a critical column in the push for adoption of etherium and of the wider api's that are needed to really sort of maximize the value of ethereum and it's I mean you know it's not just missed there's also various other projects out there that are trying to bring these api is into you know user-focused gateway beyond the death

grants or private projects yeah i mean i think the concept behind it is self like having the self ownership and self authority to to get on a service that has a strut that has a trust-based component without asking anybody's authorization without asking the IT department for for something that's the promise i think if you read if you read a i think it was Eric Raymond's book again what how little Linux become so so incredibly popular it was called under the radar and that was it right the Linux was too easy to not use as a as a

sysadmin in a big corporation if you used like if you if you had a niggling problem with your I your IT infrastructure then you could either fill out however many forms pray ET home preity old garden and an MPEG your manager to to sign off an additional operating system license and whatever I don't know hardware that would require or you would just find some all dead box in the corner and install slack wire on it and that's why linux in the enterprise is a thing is because the IT guys didn't have to ask permission maybe we should give away etherium for free switching gears a little bit and really

curious about your thoughts on IOT as a use case as a driver for etherium adoption I been surprised to hear lots of different opinions on that I think it's a no-brainer but many people still think that that more traditional architectures maybe they have vested interests but more traditional architectures would be better for IOT what do you think some of the benefits of etherium would be 4i o different IOT use cases so I mean in a nutshell they're idiots no-brainer I mean you know when when you see you know you see

I don't know Kristoff a sort of you know talking vision of lots and resources in general being controlled in a decentralized fashion and then you see on the other end of the scale IBM saying exactly the same thing then you got to start thinking actually there's probably something in it you know it's the only way to scale you know if you talk to IBM the first thing they say is well you know we don't we don't want to run the server infrastructure there's necessary to drive this amount of stuff we don't want to have the legal department draw up contracts for all the various parties to have to coordinate with each other over things like you know data privacy we just don't want to do that that's not our core competency it's not work that

anyone enjoys there has to be a technological solution and they found it in four years i use induced job by IOT in a computer security complex as the totally insecure internet of totally unsecure things and the notion that kind of smart contracts provide you a meaningful alternative to you know tens of millions or billions of tiny little hackable boxes that could give hackers the ability to turn off entire cities you know it seems like there's just no way of building a security model that isn't smart contracts for IOT I mean I just there seems to be no other path forward and so a bit like canna Linux gets mass adoption through Android devices I think

that might be the parallel to a theorem in IOT IOT is a terrifying future in a in a centralized context where for sure should we open it up to some questions so how much more time do we have what's the time frame I think there's questions there hello um so I'm really excited about the potential for erm to form sort of the bedrock of a new socio-economic paradigm um however I'm also a non developer I am NOT a dude and I don't work for a bank

so I kind of can't help but get the feeling that you're baking a fatal flaw into your system at its inception by focusing so much on such a narrow demographic and so I'm wondering what sort of outreach and engagement activities you have to try to encourage demand rather than focus solely on the supply of this new system that's a very good question this ties back to your question about brand so I think ya mean it is a potion of Paul and I can I don't speak on

behalf of the theorem necessary but I think yeah we can do mean a theorem can do more perhaps or maybe the whole ecosystem can do more in education anybody who is on it athyrium has a responsibility or has a I don't want to say obligation to to be themselves in evangelist and tell others about it I think yeah a tough question but a good question I can address it from a couple of perspectives from the Foundation's perspective focus on making a multi cig wallet really elegant and easy to use focus on making a beautiful very elegant missed ether browser experience I think

and hope that that will make it easy for non-technical people to appreciate some of the early benefits of the ecosystem at consensus were putting together games we're also putting together an accounting system we don't expect people to who are very interested in checking out a theorem we don't expect them to fire up the accounting system in the in the first day so we're trying to build some decentralized applications poker democracy Dow Wars prediction markets or trying to put together a very entertaining skin for one of our prediction market offerings so we are

indeed trying to create applications for normal people and it's just going to take some time it platforms only been out for a short while and people are still developing I think I'd say that I'm by and large demand has always been a major concern for us as architects of the system but perhaps not in quite the same way that that everybody thinks of it we've always considered the end users so to speak from our point of view to be the developers that are going to use this to

make the final sort of applications and infrastructure so from our point of view the the man that were trying to create is having having developers want to come to the platform find it easy to get to grips with find easy to learn and find it easy to develop on so from our point of view it's always about making the API is as transparent as possible making things as making the tools in order to make developers as comfortable as possible to arm to understand what it is that they're doing so I think there's another way of seeing this which is basically it is the parallel case

Bitcoin query you need lots of mass adoption lots of understanding lots of people using it or is it SQL where everybody's using it already because the infrastructure runs on it and it's just an invisible substrate and my gas is the etherium is going to wind up being closer to the SQL end of the spectrum and although if we will bind up being a major brand inside a computer security where you know athyrium saw inside equals doesn't get hacked that it could be the other way around but at this point I think that the people that have the ability to meaningfully deploy adapt that will be then used by other people are relatively small right it's institutions for which people are already customers which is why the banks are so exciting they've already got huge

customer bases or its people that are creating tools for other people to use the big turning point is if we get a big social web type app only theorem or a big game right if you see you know world of warcraft manages its magic swords on etherium or you get a decentralized reddit where people come actually make a living as content finders editors creators you know something like that would suddenly change it imogen heap's fair trade music stuff would be another possibility if you saw systemic transformation around fair trade music something like that but I think that I mean this is one of these things where a lot of it is too early tell like we're gonna wind up following one of those trends as it begins to go you know zoom but until it kind of

achieves that liftoff we're kind of guessing and keeping our options open on that and rather than have an actual fixed strategy because we don't really know what people will make of our work you know that's very much something where we have to follow the public rather than lead them or maybe I have thought wrong I mean yeah I mean in fairness a theorem has only been out in the wild for three and a half months barely for more or less so it's it's still very very new and and as yeah as Jeff azurite kevin was saying before the focus was the end you at the end user was a developer and now as more and more apps get out there then the end user will also be the end user like the user

the non technical user great another question out there yeah give a couple questions and say perhaps Gavin's right and maps in a long-term Bitcoin will be in a relevance in comparison to a theorem and but surely at this at this point in bitcoins evolution and a theorems evolution not only are there so many lessons to learn from what's happening in the Bitcoin ecosystem but also there's a very valuable work it's being carried out funded by those billion dollars of VC money and so I just wonder I I think bitcoins not talking about a theorem but the theorem

is also made the conscious choice not to talk about some of the work that's happening Bitcoin I just like your thoughts on that strategic decision within this conference yeah I mean so in terms of irrelevant let's be clear I didn't mean that Bitcoin was irrelevant in general but rather simply irrelevant from the point of view of what is the etherium platform art you know were not direct competitors etherium is very much a platform for doing distributed applications bitcoin is very much you know its own its own thing it's in terms of a currency sorry for getting into trouble there I agree we are a decentralized application

platform are our token is a crypto fuel first and foremost and if you want to pay people with that crypto fuel it works pretty well for that purpose also next question hi with the abduction of a government smart contact have you ever thought about the social changes needed to order our vision of work because for example a lot of white collar works will simply disappear I think heard you say what did we take the theorem in the

future of work because the white collar work would disappear was that the question um well we know that technological unemployment is going to hit really hard one part of my family are Scottish working class from areas that were completely destroyed when shipbuilding cease to be an industry and you know I would quite like to see you know that kind of stuff happened to large areas where educated people are stuck in completely unproductive rules crucian transactional paperwork between organizations you know I mean we've got a real problem that we've got more human capacity and more intelligence and we have jobs for that's a limitation of the institutions of limitation of the questions you know if we could figure

out how to organize society around something like I don't know building on morrow space and then maybe taking a crack at interstellar travel I think we'd find a place for every intelligent person on earth to work to the limit of their capability so if we have to go through technological unemployment followed by a revolutionary renegotiation of the goals of the human race I think that would be a good thing if we just get the detector logical unemployment without the renegotiation about the long-term goals this would not be so good okay I think we got time for one more question hi I think some of the demand for a serum based applications can come from identity management i dint digital

identity space and that was wondering what do you think how a serum can help to make identity schemes more efficient effective and maybe you can touch on the the terms of privacy and that was happening was transparencies bryson the networking sure so we are talking with lots of groups and working on building an identity persona system integrated with a reputation system so essentially our strategy is to do our best to map what we see in terms of our

interpersonal interactions into that space so we believe that we represent ourselves from different personas and that we interact from different personas whether we're buying or selling or lending borrowing repaying or working together on a project or playing games together and so they're in our you port wallet there is an anchor a cryptographic key pair that serves as an anchor for multiple personas that you can create for yourself you can have one or many you probably want to have one canonical persona to which you attach identifiers like email address

attributes like a state-issued identification certificate and if you can set up other personas that can be unlinked in unlink able to your canonical persona so if you want to not have your gamer persona associated with your canonical and work persona then you can do that and in order to make these things sort of fuzzy and and richly representative of who we are and and more trustful because people can look at them and say oh that person has so many different kinds of interactions they couldn't

possibly be spoofed persona serves as a container for reputational attributes and reputational attestations so attributes are things that you know about yourself control things like financial records health records again that the state issued ID and those are cryptographically encoded and granularly accessible if you make them accessible to whoever you need to see those so if you want to send your certain medical records to your eye doctor you you don't need to send your your full medical

history you can select what's necessary attestations are things that people a test about you but your conduct in different transactions so those transactions can be on blockchain transactions in the different kinds of situations that I described or even physical transaction so there's also the notion of just like having a cell phone broadcasting your presence Vinay has his broadcasting his presence and its opt-in we turn these things on because it's valuable to us to have each other a test to the fact that we were here in this time and space and so you can create a very rich personal profile that's

granularly private yeah I think that's a that's a good start and I can certainly be done on the technology as it stands I think that we're going to need some further sort of developments especially in terms of zero knowledge proofs to guarantee that for example if I have multiple personas it may be that I actually want one persona to sort of vouch for the other one and say actually there is some this isn't maybe a master persona but it's like a slave persona down indeed to increase my privacy in particular ways but I still want to without actually transparently linking them allow one to to state that yeah this is a real person there is some government issued ID but I want to tell

you anything else about it and for that we're going to need a little bit more attack in where all this kinda reaches a terminal point is DNA DNA sequencing IRS scanning and all the rest of that are falling in price extremely rapidly it seems like most future generations of computing devices well at least fingerprint identification possibly facial eyeballs and so at some point there's going to be a settlement or an interconnection of biometrics and block chains and the necessary crypt cryptography to separate those two to the point where you've got some hope of privacy in the future and control of your identity it's kind of this ongoing

technical negotiation so the zero knowledge proofs come in from one side and we have to develop the technology side as fast as the biometrics are adopted because otherwise it's almost inevitably wind up with carob biometric panopticon where somebody's bank gets hacked and they released you know half a million DNA records like there are unthinkable privacy implications as that kind of stuff those onwards so again it's a bit like I OT there's really no other way of doing this you know we have to accept that we're going to have to build these systems but we have to do it with the expectation that they're robust 10 20 30 years out when DNA sequencing is fifteen cents well thank you guys um come around with us