Lightning Talks 2 (Devcon5)

hello everybody konnichi WA watashi wa muhammad us hello de Guiche grim the beerus annum Dom hello everybody Graham de Barros my name I am the CEO of bit cart and I'm also a member of the expert committee on the Nomad Institute my talk today will be on technological sovereignty Bitcoin and human dignity seeing as we're here situated in Osaka in particular the Osaka Bay in the port for what is essentially a human rights convention I thought it was pretty apt that people start talking about the human rights situation here and in Osaka if you don't recognize this statue this was erected in San Francisco in 2017 which represents a Chinese teenage girl a Philippines girl and a Korean girl due to the 200,000 enslaved women that were taken and captive by Japanese during World War Two the Asaka mayor doesn't seem to think that this is a reality but I thought it was necessary to share this with you in the context of presenting here in Japan so what is technological sovereignty just to break it down for you we're talking generally about freedom from outside interference whether this is as a member state or as an individual Bitcoin which we all know and love globally accessible indiscriminate and irrefutable and this can also be synonymous with human dignity or human rights which is universal in a Lea belong conditional so colonialism or pre colonialism kind of looked a little bit like this on the left where generate Great Britain Portugal etc would take land captive to produce products or spices and export them back home well today we've basically gone into a digital colonialism which revolves around economic and media and we know this true you know debt that's essentially what the West are imposing on other countries so it's a form of us Hashana me how do we protect ourselves from this well we use open source technology number one Bitcoin serves as a potentiality for a more humane approach digital rights duties and privileges and there's already countries today that have mandated this in their laws that their public administration will only use open source technology this includes Venezuela Russia and Cuba due to obvious reasons so I come from the Republic of Ireland where we are a very neighbor or neighboring country Great Britain August is tiragon Tonga tiragon annum and that roughly translates to a country without a language as a country without an identity and despise a hundred year revolution where we have an independent free state in Ireland I notice how I am speaking in English Nate in English language which I am actually an Irish native my number one language is Irish and yet ninety percent of my population speak English they watch English movies they listen to English music and they support English Tellez soccer teams every Saturday they go to Manchester or Liverpool or London to support a team where they actually have this in their own country so you can kind of see this as an indirect colonialism which is which is prevalent in many many countries today so how you know how do we serve to protect people with Bitcoin while we're doing this with our product bit carrot and it serves as an alternative economy in countries like Venezuela where people are able to actually trade in gift cards using Bitcoin and Bitcoin lightning and live on these products and this currency as an alternative to the Venezuelan Bulevar for example so someone on my website can earn in Venezuela in an hour five or ten dollars which is the equivalent of 30 days salary for the average person in Venezuela so there's many teenagers and young adults who are actually earning more money with bitcoin a bigger Lightning than their their predecessors and their and their superiors so I would encourage you to maybe check this out it's called Picard Vicario and yeah I guess that's kind of it for me if if anybody wants to obviously look at this website please check it out but also in general I think bitcoin is is a very very powerful tool and that's why we're here to use it so yeah that's all for me I don't really have much time so hopefully you come meet me afterwards and you come chat to me you can notice me in the Irish Jersey so yeah thank you very much and enjoy the rest of your time in the lovely beautiful city of Osaka hello everyone my name is Duchamp cottage and I'm from Rockaway blockchain today I will talk about governance of decentralized protocol I mean as there is certain schizophrenia about the need for the government during its a life cycle so in the early stages the protocol is bootstrap by the founders and basically all the resources including the team the roadmap are allocated and control by the founder however as the protocol becomes more mature and people become dependent on it suddenly the features of being centralized fast flexible becomes unwanted I mean nobody really wants to lock in their future on a platform that is actually controlled by a bunch of guys in a very non transparent fashion so before we go further let's ask ourselves a very important question is decentralization the number one problem to be solved at this moment in the space definitely not however can the protocol succeed in the long run I mean success in a way that it will be used in a business critical systems and I also think it's not possible so I mean looking at the current length landscape of of project and I'm an investor so I see a lot of platforms being created we expect I mean the project expected the transformation from centralization to decentralization will somehow happen however usually it's not really the case so I mean again looking at the history figuring out on the way doesn't really work I mean whatever foundation you can you can put into the slide and it would actually apply so how can it be actually done what can we do to the proper transformation from the central stage to the decentralized one and I think it's really important before we come into the details to understand various actors in the ecosystem and basically start the process as as as it as first of the users get onboard into the platform because before that it's perfectly fine if the protocol is in the central stage being controlled by the founders investor support them core developers have the same incentive to basically make it success however when the users start being on boarded and built prototypes on top of the platform unless it is becoming decentralized it is governance they will not be incentivized to switch to the production state so what are the key takeaways from here I would say take decentralization as a process it's not a state is a process and in implemented into your projects as a severe extreme that can be regularly checked on for a business to switch to a protocol it has to have certain confidence that it will be here tomorrow it will not change so the he can rely on and be confident locking the future with this platform check out aragon check out our stack I really think these tools can be implemented to govern the protocol in the later stage thanks very much and have a good day hi everyone my name is Bobby I'm the co-founder coin gecko topic on presentation today is its market cap an objective measure of crypto assets value so yeah coin gecko for those of you who do not know what we do we are crypto data aggregator we track price market cap trading volume for over five thousand three hundred or generate the exchanges we are on top to top 10 largest crypto websites in the world we have an API that's used by mighty wallet eaters Kamath amassed reso every quarter we publish a crypto report today we just publish a cute report you can check it out on our Twitter at Wayne gecko so based on my topic its market cap an objective measure crypto assessed value what are things that we have learned from running coin gecko in the past five years is that anything that gets measured gets manipulated and everyone's out there trying to manipulate things so don't believe everything that you see or read on the internet and and especially on crypto sighs I guess question are these how do you end up in this situation why is everything that gets measured gets manipulated so I guess the answer is pretty simple I call it a fake it till you make it theory everyone's got an object if you run a coin you have a market cap you wanna be that won't be known as the token that has the largest group the best took the bet to be the best crypto token in order ways that people measure crypto assets at this point in time is using market cap so everybody wants to be known as the token which has the largest market cap and do what I do is they try to do all it can do to manipulate the data and when they have a large market cap token we get some positive media attention and then some people start researching about this crypto assets and then some people start believing that this token is actually reliable and big and all and then some people start putting in orders and then sooner or later perception becomes reality and this becomes a self-fulfilling virtuous cycle so I guess the question that you should take a look is how is market cap calculated so if you take a traditional Mac if you look at traditional market market cap is pretty standardized it's basically price multiplied by shares outstanding and in traditional market shares are only traded on usually one exchange and and the shares outstanding I define it basically all the shares that have been distributed that is attributed to shareholders including shares helped by in restricted shares helped by company insiders now if we use the same concept in cryptocurrencies then token market cap equals token price multiplied by talk and supply which is actually a very questionable metric to be gave me but let's just kind of stretch it and let's see so how do we calculate token market cap so price is basically relatively simple tokens are traded across many exchanges you take the volume multiplied by the average price across our exchanges and the supply now this is becomes hot how do we actually measure the supply everyone uses circulating supply but how do you actually supply so let's see if your crippled asset token team and you want to manipulate your market cap now let's try to keep our X at a very high market cap so based on this formula token price times token supply so there's support things that people do to manipulate the supply and we've seen this happening many times in our work a coin gecko so a lot of these guys try to come up with a token which have a large upfront supply and what I do is they do pre mind the insta mind em and then you include exclude them from the circling supply and it's a debate that a lot of people go through what about tokens they have been issued to company teams investors token do you include them or you exclude them arguably you can say that tokens that are held by the company are restricted tokens and are therefore like treasury shares she should not be included to include it what about tokens have been issued to team the team if it's love or not love you wish talking should be including the supply and all this thing makes a big difference to the market cap and what about airdrop tokens with create talking with a lot of stuff a lot of tokens and just airdrop them like you guys all have et remodelers and you know when you're on either scan you get like random ERC 20 like being distributed to you like all this does do you count them as a circulating supply but nobody really uses them right but from the team you see I've airdrop these tokens to everyone everyone with ATM address have these tokens so it gets populated in the security supply as well what about lost tokens for example like by some measures like Bitcoin has two to three million tokens that have been lost do you include Satoshi's coins for example in the second supply and I guess the biggest one of always are for tokens Bitcoin has Bitcoin cash between sv e theorem has atrium classic it's very easy to form a coin these days but do you include the tokens that have never been claimed at the moment a lot of measures of market cap includes all these tokens they have never been claimed and actually hardest thing is how do you even know which which coins have been claiming which have not been claimed at all so let's remove some of the numbers there are many ways how you can manipulate numbers go out there try to figure out a lot of website claims they have the circulating supply we try to be as transparent as we can we put harder methods so this is an example of 0x we take a total supply - orders tokens they unlock but go out there and try to find and it's really hot to try to reverse-engineer all these numbers from order crypto aggregators out there in the market question is are there any other valuation metrics besides market cap then I guess some things that you should take a little consider is network value to transaction ratio the nvt ratio popularized by Crispin insky so take a market cap and then divide it against number of transactions because you may have a very high market cap but no transactions going around you may want to take a look at developer activity take a look at how many commits how many pull requests how many stars how much activity is going on a development take a look at nap total number of transactions are there any transactions going around any raela's cap and maybe for exchange based okay I want to take a look at any DCF model to take a look at cash flow basis so yeah basically that's all I have today so thank you very much anything that gets measured gets manipulated thank you what's up Def Con how you dude yes thank you honestly uh start off just want to say thank you for choosing my talk to come to realize you guys have a lot of options might not be the most sophisticated talk but hopefully the most entertaining ah quick shout out I'll love you guys all right so I'm not gonna be talking about my divorce unfortunately for one of my co-workers who gave me that little tip but will we do we'll be talking about how in school you know you learn about how going through different types of elements when you're thinking through things are important to you so like separation of church and state and then now with crypto currencies how is possible to separate state and money right so let's go through it real quick so give you an overview of what I'm gonna ramble about start off with little historical context about why was it important to separate church and state and then provide a little perspective and finish with the crypto anthem all right so a quick survey of the room don't be shy who has paper money in their wallets show of hands and nobody not corners full of no corners uh I still love you guys though all right let's be serious now all right so why was there a need to separate church and state right right why was their knees because life is super complex right I'm trying to figure it out all the time people need a good framework there's a lot of purpose in life that you need some guidance on right so it made sense why would you leave something so I guess crucial and important as an individual and give that to kind of essential Authority like to the government to the side for you all right so can we apply that same logic to money right I would think so so just think about it money affects every aspect of your life who you date what kind of food you eat what kind of health care you get I mean pretty much just about every facet of your life so why would you let someone else choose the type of money that you can use when literally anything that happens to you is based on how much money you have and what you can do about that through that money and our current financial system what is it based on faith that's not good right let's go through that all right so uh basically like a person telling you that the faith of your value of the dollar is based on the world the word of Donald Trump it's not a very good word but uh so like each unit of account in our current system represents debt right so that is a promise to pay back someone else down the line in the future right and you have like the US government president Donald Trump saying like listen the dollar will be worth something one day and you'll be able to pay back that debt I don't feel too good about that so ensure aetherium has created a path forward right you guys know this it creates a distributed system where things are immutable it's just a perfect environment for you guys to have self sovereign money separate from any central authority to kind of control that for you and that's basically about it everyone thanks for having me I'm here to talk about defy risk and how we can make participants make better decisions so I'm Jack I'm an engineer at consensus I've been working on d5 before was called defy I love d5 because I've always been interested in computer science and finance and is a longtime dphi user I've got to see how much the industry is growing in maturity over the last two years and when I think about the future of defy I get both excited and worried as we know defy users are chasing the highest rates without asking why are the rate so high there is no such thing as a free lunch for an investor to be rewarded with high rates they have to take on large amounts of risk as dphi grows how do we ensure that users are encouraged to make optimal financial decisions I couldn't find an answer to that question so I try to answer it myself by creating the defy score an open source simple proxy for a platforms risk level that users can easily understand it's based on a model that evaluates several types of risk that are common in d phi d phi platforms are complex and include new types of risk that differ from traditional financial markets to launch we'll consider some of the largest and most easily quantifiable risks the intention of this score is to better educate users on the unique nuances of smart contract enabled financial markets this model can and should grow over time let's dig into some components of the score one component is smart contract risk the ecosystem knows this type of risk all too well we've learned a lot of hard lessons because of it while no smart contract can be guaranteed to be devoid of bugs a thorough code audit and formal verification process from a reputable security firm helps uncover critical high severity bugs that could result in financial harm to users an important aspect of mid mitigating smart contract hacks is ensuring the code is audible auditable by the public smart contract code isn't restless unless the public can read it and verify it it needs to be open sourced security through obscurity offers weak guarantees at best and at worst results in delays and finding critical bugs while bytecode D compilation is possible it's a difficult and time-consuming process and makes it hard to follow the mantra of don't trust verify however code risk is only one aspect of the risks one faces when investing in D Phi products financial risk is another element sorry currently the only method to mitigate unwanted amounts of credit risk in D Phi is to use over collateralization while current D Phi platforms use very conservative collateral factors the highly volatile nature of crypto assets means that these high collateral factors may still be insufficient over collateralization is by no means foolproof liquidity and insolvency crises often go hand-in-hand there are numerous historical examples of these types of crises incentivize liquidity does not mean guaranteed liquidity a user takes on the risk that they will not be able to draw their ass withdraw their assets on demand because all the assets are currently lent out but wait there's more there are other types of risk that defy platforms face users do not have the same safeguards they have with traditional deposit accounts developed countries bank deposit accounts are regulated and insured up to large amounts however there are exciting developments in this area insurance products like Nexus mutual u-men maker developing more occlusion resistant Oracle systems but we still have a long way to go here are some of the possible here's some of the possible future developments for the D Phi score the question I'm here to ask you today is what could an open source financial rating agency look like the future of D Phi is really exciting if you're not involved yet you're missing out the parallel financial system is reaching escape velocity we can hedge away a lot of this risk but we need to be aware of these risks first let's be responsible when creating this new system if you want to help shape the future of risk management please get involved here are some of the ways to get involved we won't feedback if you're a data scientist or a risk management professional please reach out thank you the computation it's for geeks right like when you think about the compact contracts we think oh like what's the use of that for other people than developers who want to see how contracts work but really there is a lot of cool uses and I want to show them to you in five minutes so one thing of course security and I don't know if there are any security people here but quickly anyone can spot a bag here in this contract like some people analyze so IDT contracts try to figure out what's wrong there anyone know okay perhaps it just is quiet audience or perhaps no one sees that there is this small assert at the end it doesn't have the brackets which means that like compiler only shows you know it's like saying assert instead of calling an assert so it doesn't get executed so so this function doesn't work really it doesn't check anything anyone can print any amount of tokens from from that contract and you know it's very hard to spot in solidity but when you work with decompile sources you really see certain patterns very obviously and there is this intermediate form that also is available that that you can work with and write very simple and very easy analyzers for contracts and this is also awesome because well I built a whole database of all the contracts on the main net decompiled I put it in the big query and now anyone can ride in five lines of JavaScript a function that in 20 seconds will show you all the contracts that are messed up so just line by line contract by contract all the hundred contracts that the don't check certain values properly and you can print tokens for yourself so so that's like a fun case like don't worry although those contracts were test contracts aside from five and those five were already exploited and there are some like horror stories but people didn't notice that they could be exploited so so there are no other open vulnerabilities like this but having access to the compiled versions of contracts really allows you to do all kinds of fun security analysis and trying to figure out what's going on on the network another case was oh yeah so that this contract there was a constant in Apple Park and the question was we're changing the virtual machine and there is a potential back in some of the contracts that happens because of the change how do we know which contracts could be affected by the new version and in January when there was this this whole whole fork that was delayed actually this kind of stuff that the company's version was used to figure out how many contracts and the main net would be affected by some changes in the virtual machine so this is so very important for the community but again this is geeky stuff a little bit so there is more and it's more user facing for example a very simple thing that you can do and we did that during one of the hackathons is analyzing who are who has the access rights to a contract so you grab a contract and you can analyze the sources and figure out oh this storage contains the address of the administrator and this administrator can be changed in these dis and dysfunction or this contract has some other like five administrators and they can be accessed by this and that so there is this simple tool that we wrote into open source during one of the hackathons that allows you to see the yeah like all the all the possible actors that are involved with a contract you could also use this to really build better user interfaces and this is where we really get to the users these are part of view because when you can analyze contracts better you can understand them you can build a better user interface there are actually explorers who don't show sources for many contracts just yet and when we have good the compiled version we can show that to the users so that's also quite cool because that kind of levels ground between other blockchains explorers which didn't have sources because they didn't want to get them from either scan and and eater scan and one more more cool thing transactions like many users right now there is no good way to show to the users how transactions work really like this is the state of the art I guess ether scan right now so it shows you only like input data you can see that on the bottom it says transfer function some parameters and that's it but when we have access to the D compiled versions of the contracts for any contract for any transaction we can show it quite nicely how and what every function does so actually there is this version online right now that we built on top of that on top of those sources that shows you not only what was transferred the amount of money that was transferred but what is being used like what are the functions that are called what do they do and it's still not super accessible to the common user but it is quite easy so roughly that's it there are many more use cases but check out check out the compilers in general and looking to the fields more it's quite an awesome stuff thank you [Applause] you