Vinay Gupta / DCxPrague

Transcript

yeah so what I'm going to talk about is the past the present and the future of ethereum and I'll give you a couple of minutes to round people up before we begin um so basically um let's see so a little bit about what I've been up to just while we're waiting for people to come to arrive so I ran the ethereum launch 2015 I was the project manager my official title was release coordinator and um I was based in London uh as part of the kind of coms and marketing team although I had a technical background I didn't want to move to Berlin so I was here rather than Berlin for the launch process uh or in London rather than Berlin for the launch process um what most of what I was doing in those days was making sure that the

number of bugs in the system slly reduced over time so that we had a 100% guarantee that we would eventually actually launch because when you're trying to do this kind of protocal synchronization work it's very easy easy to wind up in a situation where the number of bugs continues to increase over time at which point your product never launches uh so I was there to basically make sure that our consensus converged across all the different platforms and that we would actually get around to releasing something uh and that was a big job okay we're doing all right so I will start properly now once s arriving is arriving um all right so startor again um so what I'm going to talk about is the past the present the

future of ethereum I guess I've got about 20 minutes you want me finish at three uh so this is short it's on it's a little off the CF I wasn't expecting to talk today but we're doing it uh I'm going to start by showing a video from 2015 that will give everybody a sense of what it was the ethereum foundation promised people this is the story that we told about what we were doing and uh I think it's really useful as a kind of historical artifact there we go so remember 2015 it's 90 seconds long and this is what ethereum was going to be this is the thing we said we were going to deliver how will the internet work in the future it will use

ethereum ethereum is a planetary scale computer powered by blockchain technology applications built on ethereum run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime censorship or third- party interference ethereum is the secure backbone for everything from e-commerce to The Internet of Things enabling transparent governance for communities and businesses while keeping user communication secure mix the ethereum IDE makes it easy to develop debug and deploy your applications while building uis is done using your existing web development skills tools and favorite Frameworks ethereum handles user

authentication and secur Ure payments for you as well as messaging and even decentralized storage and there's no need to sign up or pay for servers to host your applications as ethereum is the world's first zero infrastructure platform allowing your users to regain control over the management of their own funds and personal data join the many already developing on ethereum there we go so that was what we told people we were going to build in 2015 that was the great story of what was going to be created and I would say that pretty much

everything that we told people we were going to do in 2015 we actually did right there's been practically no network downtime the network does handle payments it does handle identity um it does you know pretty much everything that you we said it was going to do right the development tools obviously are at this point archaic you know I don't think anyb has ever heard of mix uh there was a fantastically sophisticated piece of technology that the foundation tried to develop called Mist which was going to be a browser like way of interacting with ethereum we could not get Mist secure and as a result Mist was dropped and what happened instead was metamask metamask is much more limited than MX um than Mist rather but the general flavor is

pretty close to what was delivered at a technical level right the weird part however is the stuff right so if you think about what you saw in that video you saw planes you saw power stations you saw a wide variety of big concrete things in the real world you saw shopping carts you saw physical things right and what's actually happened with ethereum is that we have largely failed to get into the physical world right you can't really buy real estate on chain you can't really buy you know much in the way of bonds or stocks there isn't much in the way of e-commerce for anything more complicated than a t-shirt generally speaking what happened was that we kind of washed up

against the real world and then it washed back right the tide kind of got to the wall of the real world and then the tide rolled back and what we got instead of this large scale transformation of the real world is we got the creation of a parallel universe uh has anybody here been to eth Denver no so eth Denver is probably the most parallel University Place that I've yet encountered in the ethereum world and it's a kind of candy colored rainbow Wonderland filled with people dressed as soft toys talking about a universe that really only exists as a set of ethereum smart contracts and their imagination and you can see this a bit

with nfds you can see this a bit with defi you can see a bit with you know all the kind of utopian promises made by projects which say that they are going to transform Society but actually wind up as 300 investors connected to a DA where four people get together over pizza and beer and then do a bunch of transactions on Ledger wallets right and so what we have is this enormous imaginal World containing huge amounts of actual wealth but it's a fairy land right it's a bubble world and the vast majority of the assets inside of the e eum world are in the hands of two groups the people that are basically FX speculators who are trading these currencies as just another thing to

trade or we have this kind of candy colored unicorn Wonderland which is largely made of imaginary financial instruments like nfts and as a result ethereum has stalled right you know we've seen round after round after round of the spinning up of these enormous imaginary parallel worlds filled with imaginary financial instruments but every time one of those those worlds reaches the end of its liquidity it crashes and there are no valuable assets left you know at Peak openc was doing something like was it a billion dollars a month of transactions might have been1 billion a month of transactions they raised hundreds of millions of dollars uh a

valuation of several billion dollars because the Assumption was that what you were seeing was the nft market was the beginning of a phenomena like the general internet the Assumption was the open SE was going to become the Amazon of nfts and nfts were going to be integrated into all forms of media right and what actually happened was the liquidity run out in the system the nft world basically blew up you know s blew up then dried up and blew away and what we were left with at the end of that was basically a pile of magic beans you all know the story of Cinderella where at midnight the coach and horses turns back into a pumpkin and four mice right what happens is we keep going through you know the transformation of the mice and

the pumpkins into the coach and horses and then we keep seeing blockchain midnight and it all evaporates again and we've been through I think seven rounds of this cycle so from my perspective unless ethereum figures out how to break this cycle ethereum is is dead right and I don't just mean ethereum I mean the blockchain as a whole if we don't figure out how to break the cycle eventually what will happen is Regulators will say look if something was going to happen over there it would have happened by now they've had 15 years 20 years of activity it's still mostly fraud and imaginary property we've had enough of this get rid of it right and that is a looming risk right right now what you see in the EU is Micah and Micah

basically says look if you're doing anything with the blockchain that involves money you're a regulated financial institution get a license have a nice day now it's not quite that black and white and there's some room for local variation but the part of the blockchain which is financial products is being turned into it's just a database and you do Finance on it and the part of the blockchain that is not Financial products is either going to wind up heavily licensed shut down or socially and culturally marginalized because what we've failed to deliver is the kind of heavy-hitting real world benefit that was the original promise right the world that we should have created with ethereum and that we still can if we work together and we pull

together and we focus is this every valuable thing in the world has a blockchain identity that's all the institutions it's all the individuals and that's exactly like domain names email addresses social media accounts anybody that is a public figure of any kind has an identity all big corporations anybody that does business with the public anybody that has a uh an Enterprise that produces like music books whatever it is if you do anything in the public sphere you have a social media media account you have a web address right social media account web address ethereum address ethereum identity everything which is real should exist on chain thing one thing two all

the physical stuff should exist on chain the houses the cars the industrial machine tools the video cameras all of that physical stuff should get digital identities this is very much kind of the internet things Vision internet things never really worked because it was still run sort of by the power companies it was still run by the electronics manufacturers they didn't focus on consumers but if you get a breakr like Facebook or Twitter or Amazon for internet things all the things wind up with digital identities when the people the places and the things all have digital identities we can then use artificial intelligence and algorithmic optimization Big Data large St

statistical analysis to do optimization of the global economy in the same way that Airlines do optimization for where they can fly their planes we could do optimization of the global economy in the same way that Engineers engineer compilers to optimize the allocation of registers on a processor we can use artificial intelligence to look at where the stuff is and who wants the stuff and do incredibly efficient matching of things to people and people to places rather than going to something like eBay and having people run auctions you look at the situation globally you pull all of those pieces together in a single integrated way and what you get is a what 2% 3% 5% 8%

10% 20% optimization of economic footprint and Global GDP and that sounds impressive but you know SE containers just the act of parking things into big metal boxes before you ship them out for export SE containers are said to have put 7% on the size of the global economy just by reducing the amount of delay that you got at ports and reducing the delays when you had to move goods from a ship to a truck that was 7% of GDP so imagine all the people all the places and all the things have digital identities those digital identities are capable of receiving payments they can sign legal contracts every significant asset in the world has such a digital identity on

ethereum or something similar then you can use Smart contracts to bind those things together and you have to move value between them you can use algorithms running in let's say the cloud maybe it's AI maybe it's statistical analysis maybe it's some other model you can do optimization to figure out what the disposition of the world's physical stuff ought to be and that as a model from my perspective is what ethereum always promised that was the 2015 model if you'd ask me if ethereum becomes successful what will we build I would have said real estate on chain Transportation on chain liquid markets for ticketing liquid markets for accommodation large scale industrial

supply chain adoption so that if you need to buy 20 tons of steel in a hurry you can buy it from the people around you rather than having it have it shipped from the other side of the world um uh factoring of invoices and I would have said it was a fundamental economic accelerator producing Global liquidity it also would have allowed us to convert Finance into really important ways rather than having an economy where you borrow money based on your credit worthiness you could have an economy where you would borrow money based on your assets so if you're a factory and you've got $200,000 worth of metal sitting in you know shelving you want to be able to borrow money against that metal um you also ought to be able to do things like take Equity investment much

more easily you want to buy a house rather than borrowing $70,000 from your relatives to do the down payment and then owing your relative 70 grand you take 30% of the value of the house you split it up among your relatives they each own a little bit of the equity in your house and at that point you don't have a loan to pay back you simply have a partnership agreement with your relatives and that same kind of principle applies in business so the world is drowning in bad debt it's drowning in bad Consumer Debt if we convert that debt into Equity we wound up in a position where we can rebuild communities around shared ownership of physical things and that to me is what ethereum

was and it's what ethereum is in tiny little corners and it's what the future of ethereum should be we should be building a world where the people the places and the things all have digital identities those digital identities should allow for algorithmic optimization so that we don't do things like auction stuff on eBay we can actually find the people that really want it and need it you get the best possible price for your goods Goods we can take stat use statistical analysis to pull all of the needless waste out of the global economy that could be worth a huge amount of money it could also cut our environmental footprint by 10 or 20% and then when we start talking about the financial structures secured landing

at low interest rates against physical assets should be easy and it should be easy to liberate equity in physical assets particularly real estate as a way of taking some of this enormous unsustainable debt and converting into equity and that is what the blockchain should be doing right now that's what we should be focusing on not the creation of imaginary forms of property like virtual real estate and nfts nfts have a role in the world they represent physical ownership of assets they can also operate as things like patent licenses or intellectual property licenses there is a role for nfts there is also a role for tokens all those tokens that were kind of pioneered back in the 2018 period if those things were correctly legally bound to equity in

buildings you could go buy tokens that represented ownership of the stuff in your community and if your community does well economically your tokens become worth a lot of money and it allows people to invest in their communities because you've got the ability to put money directly into the community around you because the real estate is tokenized so you know we really are a position where like they say like Amazon says every day is day zero right every day is the first day every day is the beginning right I've put basically at this point a certain materium in 2017 so I've put six years of my life into solving the legal problems so that we can finally get ethereum to the physical world as

promised that company is called materium and we always viewed it as being kind of like a device driver you know here is ethereum it's the software layer there's a physical device driver that lets you talk to the physical world and kind of like you know oracles you to read from the physical world it was like an oracle that let you write to the physical world so I've been working on the infrastructure to solve this problem for six years we've been doing live client transactions for two and a half years it actually works but what you know I want to see now and what I think we need now is the cultural change to say okay we've had since 2015 ethereum has largely been inward facing mostly it's been what can we do with this technology and most of the

people using those goods and services are people that are also working in the field now what we need to do is turn to face outwards um there is a community called refi the regenerative Finance people they are beginning to face outwards in a pretty disciplined way they're looking at climate change they're looking at real estate there's a community there there are people working on transport there's a long string of companies that are doing things that look like uber but they use the blockchain I think that stuff is excellent but what does it take for us to turn around and go from inward facing where we're looking at our blockchain and our technology and our smart contract to go to be outward facing and say look here's the real world here are all the obstacles to the real world we finally have enough regulatory stuff around things like mic in the you EU to

get a 500 million person integrated market for blockchain services that should be enough to build real companies let's go and turn towards the real world embrace the real world and fix the real world because that was the original ethereum promise uh thank you all very much [Applause] thank you I was actually just about to kill the sound on that one because my calendar will will go off then uh well we still have couple minutes if I'm not wrong there are there any any questions any like points for discussion anyone wants to yeah there's a mic coming from the back okay thanks yeah I think I've heard

of um things like intent casting before for where you can like customers can accurately project what they want um but when it comes to smaller and smaller things it probably hits a fuzzy area of uh trying to manage someone not getting what they meant um or or is this just meant for like large scale things first so I think it's an AI problem you know if you could get the legals to work for an apartment $200,000 getting it to work for a bike at $200 is basically a case of making the legal processes a thousand times cheaper and I think if we went and talked to the AI folks we would find a thousand startups that say they're going to make legal processes cheap using AI so you know where I'm working right now

is mostly big chunky objects because you know like I a company big chunky object is kind of where you go first but I have with me I don't have it with me today but I'll bring it tomorrow I have a camera demo which is a 10-year-old camera which is worth about $150 with an ethereum digital signature generating physical tag so you scan the tag on your phone it does an ethereum digital signature using a private key which is buried in the tag it validates the uh the thing and then it loads you up an nft and if you buy the nft you become the legal owner of the camera now that was a hand constructed prototype but you know it's only an accident of history that we don't have a thousand

very high-end outdoor jackets designed by a boutique firm with those chips in them right now you know they just there was a couple of things that didn't quite connect when we needed them to the project got shelved but we can do physical stuff right and those tags are manufactured by company called arcs ARX they're part behind a lot of the T-shirt projects but they've got a good enough security guarantee that you could do things that were worth $10,000 on those tags and it' probably be okay um so combination of digital tagging to identify the stuff and then automated or semi-automated legals because the AI people are putting I know what hundred billion dollars a year into AI research and law is a great Target

area I think in three years it won't even look like a problem I think it'll I think it'll just work and the Synergy between blockchains and AI is enormous because a blockchain is a place where an AI can do a transaction in a way that it can't because Visa will not let an AI have a credit card but nobody can stop an AI an AI having a private key on time one of the slots but uh thank you so much V again