Status: Socially Challenged - Corey Petty

all right uh welcome to my talk my name is cory petty uh i am with status and my name is in the talk is status socially challenged um for those of you for those of you who know who status is uh we've been a social app since the beginning of all of ethereum and i'm gonna walk you through a little bit of the history of what social crypto means and uh why i think we may be messing it up and what we're trying to do about it so who am i that's strange let's try that again there we go who am i uh i my ens username corepaddy.eth you can google my name i've been around the ecosystem since 2012. that's my buffer corn seems appropriate for being in f denver my day job i've been doing security at status for about four years or so trying to make sure that what we build doesn't break uh you can't take our money from us without us knowing it and you can't shoot yourself in the foot at the same time now i've recently switched to infrastructure which is something uh i'll be talking about a lot more later on in this year but for all intents and purposes for what you see today when you think about what runs this stuff i'm in charge of trying to make that happen but today i'm going to talk about client-side stuff uh what you're going to be interacting with and more broadly what the concept of social crypto is which you all have an idea of whether you know it or not i'm going to try and elucidate it for you and then tell you some more i also do some podcasting which i've been doing since early maybe 2015. the bitcoin podcast and hashing it out the bitcoin podcast that's more infotainment fun whatever it's it's entertaining and it covers the swath of things hashing it out way more technical i dive into why this stuff is supposed to work why people think they are going to do something about it and i try and poke holes in things so tickles so what is status um if you've heard of us or you have downloaded our application in the past you've probably seen this this is the front page of status.im this is our crypto wallet and inside of our crypto wallet which you can download on both android and f droid and and apple and whatever uh it comes not only as your ability to manage your crypto assets with ethereum and some layer twos but it also gives you a secure messaging app it gives you the most secure messaging app such that uh you have strong confidence that no one can intercept your messages and we're not taking metadata from you in my opinion it's the most secure messaging app on the planet we also have a dat browser so you can view web 3d apps and your wallet that's integrated into the application can interact with it so this is the interface you've seen this is probably what you know but in reality we do a lot more and for those who i tweeted out a bunch of stuff i've hand written all my slides i don't know why i feel like doing it this is what i did sorry about it if you don't like it so we work on all levels of the stack for those of you who only know the interface the mobile application i'm going to tell you a little bit more about we do in everything else we started out as a way to try and be an interface to web3 we quickly learned that in order to provide that we needed a bunch of infrastructure that no one was building so we set out to try and build that stuff too and that involves vac which is the conglomerate or the group that manages the decentralized messaging platform which took over whisper for those of you who know the ethereum white paper if whisper was the original holy trinity decentralized messaging application we've uh absorbed that made it better more scalable and more minimal to chat applications and machine machine applications nimbus is our ethereum to production client which runs the beacon chain node currently and a few other things in the process of building that we also re-implemented lib p2p in a programming language called nem which nimbus uses we have a key card which is our hard wallet application which is a java card free and open source for anyone to use we use it within our application for better managing your keys i'm not sitting on mobile applications and now we have a beta application which is our desktop which i've released some slides and i'll show you later but on the application layer more in terms of what you're interacting with or what you can react with is symbol enos username we've done a myriad of things right from the top to bottom just to let you know that not only we're not just a messaging app we do a bunch of stuff and if you go back to the original white paper you'll see that we had an idea of what social crypto was back in 2017 and i'll read this out loud i'll read my slide as you read it what if we could flatten these roles what if wood users could users of social networks possess the real stake in the networks they participate in what if we can align incentives for all parties to create a network that naturally promotes behaviors that benefit all participants and for those of you who use social applications today that's probably not the feeling you have so what is social crypto what am i what is this concept i'm trying to get get across and in the news you'll see a tremendous amount of things that allude to this concept of social crypto ave just recently released the lens protocol they're here they've talked about it uh myriad celebrities of interests are talking about i crypto but when they reference it they when they ask when you know other people ask them why they care they usually reiterate that it's the network and the community right bellagio's been talking about social crypto or decentralized twitter forever friends with benefits why would you buy these why would you buy access to these things you think about the void 8.

club social crypto is you know decentralized social networks assange dao is a group of people that came together to try and uh raise money for a given cause around a given asset and so we have smattering of ideas around this what this is but we all kind of know so if i ask you simple questions like what's the standard characteristic of a btc holder hodler you all have ideas right and what what binds them together bitcoin it's this decentralized scarcity that somewhat encapsulates a an idea a group of ideas and that's what binds them together the value of all of these networks is community period it's the only reason why any of these things have value is that you convince people to rally around a certain set of ideas and these crypto tokens encapsulate them and give them value another one apparently another one is dao how many times have you heard or seen the word dao today uncountable what does it mean is there one type of organization do that organization all work the same and do they all care about the same things is there a set type of autonomous to an organization or the preferred level of decentralization like all of these things are muddled but the concept of a dao is a group of people coming together for some cause and then some asset that allows them to influence decisions in some way or have reputation or gain value or whatever and so like we get it social crypto is a thing people have social tokens so that you can they can maybe convince you that you can buy their time or whatever we all kind of get the idea and in my opinion what i'm trying to tell you is that this has been around for a long time bitcoin is a social crypto ethereum is a social crypto it's only social so are we building that is this the type of stuff that we're moving towards is this when we talk about creating new things or influencing new people or on-ramping new people in the ecosystem we give them tools that push them in the right direction and so i'm going to go through somewhat of a comically and complete history of uh digital scarcity real quick which will then lead into the next slide which illustrates why i think we're doing it wrong so from left to right you see time and this is somewhat of a incredibly incomplete things of uh like list of things that have happened along that time frame we have bitcoin and doge and litecoin start in the beginning they're all kind of clones of the same thing but you get the idea right there's some scarcity people liked it they came together they ran the client they then tried to trade on a terrible exchange called cripsy in the past whatever i've been around for a long time ethereum happened but nothing really happened in between there that i really care about ethereum happened and then it's explosion we have the v dao happen soon after that and those who've been around time uh really have a strong idea of how that changed the idea right that was the first encapsulation of let's let's really programmatically list why people are coming together and what they can do with these assets to make changes right now i'd say the dow made a pretty flawed decision and not letting humans be in the loop of those things and we have the community manager in the room he can tell you all about it right and but it was this first encapsulation of like let's come together and then try and be a community around making change around these assets and then we had the icos right we encapsulated the standard of erc20 and then boom we have us status aragon gnosis maker dow all these things happen all in once right we're like we can make tokens we can convince people that with things we care about they can give us money for the tokens and then we have this community of people if we try to make this thing reality right a new way of raising money for a given set of ideals and then dals weren't really a thing for a while then mo lochdale came along and said we're doing dow again we're gonna and then that blew up and you know things are happening and i missed a bunch of stuff but whatever nfts happened then chains and now dao right and we're at a point in today where it's it's kind of like this right if anybody's watched rick and morty it's would you like to build out with me it's how can i convince all of you to join me around the set of ideals and then make money off of it make change i don't know but it's it's kind of what you hear when you walk around today right so here's a less incomplete history of how we coordinate around these things right so here's a backdrop of the exact same slide but here's the tooling we use to talk about it in the early days it was a email newsletter read it certainly bitcointalk.org if you heard about a new project it was on bitcointalk.org then you have twitter and then blade army moves on to discourse and slack became a huge thing until it was awful to use and it was scammy uh people wanted to get off their message so then it was medium gnosis came along as we were making a multisig cool something on chain great nothing happened for a while and now we're all on discord and telegram and these things have bots that we subscribe to or bring on as an administrator to then try and bring in this concept of crypto to then gate who's involved who gets to join what permissions they have etcetera gnosis safe came along and said we made a wallet because we got to build infrastructure and the rest of the ecosystem was like sweet we have a wallet now for multi-signature transactions great on-chain stuff then on substack medium wasn't very good anymore they they canceled a couple people whatever etc and then we kind of made snapshot which is this idea of like voting on chains too expensive let's find a way to do it off chain that still has some of the ideals of crypto so the idea here and at the very bottom it's all aws we host everything on centralized infrastructure that we don't have any control over or whatever the point here is that we care a lot about community and the assets that represent those communities but for some reason we don't give a crap about what we're using to coordinate around it we use whatever's available to us now it's useful it's convenient but i think we're making a lot of trade-offs here and it kind of looks like this we have our assets in web3 assets kind of ride the line smart contracts give us an option to like gate a little bit of who gets to change things on smart contracts and we try to use those as best we can but it's cumbersome and it's expensive and so on and so forth and the rest is just whatever we use that's available to us and it brings me back to this concept that i've it's been reiterated over and over and over again as i've been in this ecosystem is the medium is the message and it's this concept that we can try to say something we can try to do something but the underlying technology that moves it around to the people we're trying to communicate to actually shapes what this message is more it's more so in some form in some ways than the message we're originally intending we have to shape our relationships to the technology we're using instead of the opposite and i'd like to change that so there's a small tangent that is a separate but uh reasonable thing to talk about here's a smattering of wallet software that we have today now this is not representative of the entire thing but i mean and for those who may be critics status is the top middle so i'm not bringing ourselves out of this what's the unifying theme here when you look at all these interfaces of when you look at your wallet what are you focused on price we bring new people on here and we try to tell them about the community aspects and all the cool things that we care about and the ideals of crypto and web 3 and so on and so forth and they download a wallet they see price that's all they see that's all they care about and that's the modify that's the underlying motivator of what you do when you interact with these things does that jive with what we're trying to get people to do when we talk about community or dolls or social i don't think so so now that you have an idea about this concept of social crypto how we're currently building things and why i think it's kind of broken or moving in the wrong direction i'm going to show you a little bit about what we at status are trying to do about it and why and what we want you to help us do and that is move it all over to web3 as much as we possibly can such that it's native when you look at your wallet you should be able to find the people who you're trying to connect with the communications that you're connecting these people with should be using the same technology using private keys and not your phone number or email so i want to try we at status want to try and bring these things together and it's very open we want you to help us because it means this technology moves in the right direction not we capture this and you have to use this so we're announcing a feature that we call communities and i did a talk a while ago which disclosed some new designs around our desktop application and mind you here's a level check these are designs if you download the application now it will not look like what i'm about to show you but it is certainly a direction we're motivated to go to so here is the redesign of our desktop application which you can consider a better discord for crypto right it's where your friends are are in the communities you care about based on the assets you have in your wallet if you look at that if you look at the bottom it may not be very easy to see on the screen here but it says in order to chat you need to hold point one ether have 10 snt and 15 mana in order to post otherwise you're just reading on the right you see a myriad of people who are online you see kind of a bunch of indicators of who they are and who they say they are and what you think about them on the left you see a series of channels that have maybe different token things on the left you see kind of your standard scrolling list of the communities you belong to because you're trying to find alpha right on the back end as an administrator for communities you have the ability to set permissions based on a myriad of things right you can set permissions for channels for communities for individual users you can send these people tokens so that they can have the things you're setting permissions on all within the application itself and not some cli which most people oh here a lot of people most people can't handle right and so it gives you it gives you and your community a lot of tools to interact with each other and the way we think about when we think about web3 communities and social crypto now that's the end of the slides and my spiel on social crypto and what i the direction i'd like it to go and what we're currently doing to get there now what i'd like to do is uh show you a reskin and reveal of our mobile application on the direction we're going and all of the ridiculous amount of features and work that's going into that we'll release this to twitter so that you can play with it because it happens kind of fast and then like i said previously this is all client-side stuff my job is infrastructure so if you'd like to know how all the stuff is supposed to run stay tuned or come talk to me so without further ado here is a reveal of the reskin of the status mobile app and its application to communities [Music] do wow [Music] thank you [Applause] if we have any questions from the audience it looks really great i just had a question about uh censorship perhaps on the platform so nobody wants to be censored but everybody struggles with you can't just have everything uh and i see that you're you're putting in some things like holding tokens and things like that how do you answer the question of there are things that possibly people would like to have censored but on a platform that you can't do that on how do you deal with that it's a great question so currently in status using waku uh if any of you are on status you'll know the group chats today are rough it's rough to have any kind of conversation in a public chat because we can't censor anything um we're answering that especially with communities by giving administrators the tooling they need to met to set the censorship level that they that they need right that meaning of a given community can have it completely open and it feels much like a public chat today no gating whatsoever or it's quite censored and then you have the option to either leave start a new one choose that we as a platform status have no power to do anything about that we can't stop a community from existing we can't change their permissions can't do anything so you as a user in a community have the power to stay influence or leave and start a new one if you want to we as a platform can't do anything about it and we're not forcing you to use our particular token so the value of the community stays in the community or it forks much like many of the things we've seen in the past but like like as far as the infrastructure goes i'll it'll you can be damn sure we're not gonna stop it because we have no power to do it any other questions for corey i'm really new to your app um where do the messages live so that you cannot uh censor them oh good question are the communities running servers themselves the apps itself is appear to be a protocol yes so the messaging stack so we we if you are you familiar with the early ethereum days and when the ethereum wiper came out and it was about um messaging storage and blockchain and messaging part of that was called whisper we took whisper no one else we we we started ico into the guys that these things would be developed but the main development process for ethereum was the blockchain a very good reason that's a hard problem to solve right so whisper didn't get a lot of love we took that and because it couldn't scale we adopted it changed it and now it's called waku the underlying messaging across the entire ecosystem is done through this which is a peer-to-peer messaging stack that is run by the members of the community and our vision members of the community are running the associated infrastructure for their community and contributing to it and hopefully earning from it right the value of a community stays in the community that's the problem i have with the earlier part of the talk we're like we have all the tokens we're rallying around them but we're giving all the value of the communication around those tokens to someone else and allowing them to attract us we want to bring that back so that even the coordination around moving these assets around stays in the community and that comes with a messaging stack hopefully a storage tax something that allows you and the community you're a part of to keep all the value there so yes the community members run this stuff and that'll be a part of the ui hopefully in an easy way where you can turn it on and say i got extra bandwidth all relay messages and hopefully learn from that any final questions for corey thank you hi corey i don't think um i get it completely when you show the wallet are you thinking about integrating with other existing wallet are you guys going to create a wallet as part of the feature wallet is built into status now our goal is to expand that as much as we can such that the assets you have live wherever you want them to in order to be a part of a community that doesn't mean you need to take your assets from where they live and bring them to something else that we control right uh the wallet needs to be able to validate a myriad of different chains such that if we can prove that you have assets somewhere and participate in a community uh and that's going to take a tremendous amount of work and we're willing to work with as many wallet providers as we can to come up with standards such that it's very easy to understand what a given address or its keys or set of keys has control of across a myriad of different chains so they have a single interface to navigate all that stuff without having to worry about it's connecting to the right rpc or understanding which asset lives on which chain and so on and so forth and that's going to take quite a bit of work for anyone who develops wallets here the multi-chain world which we're all moving to is is complicated and users are not going to be able to manage it so like yeah the wallet will grow and we need help doing that with other wallet providers well thank you so much corey please a warm round of applause for our speaker you