The Book of Swarm Online Event - Intro talk by Elad Verbin

hi hi everyone it's a big honor uh to be speaking especially first so let me tell you a bit about me and uh what i do so i'm not actually a part of the uh swamp team i'm rather a big supporter and believer in the cause and collaborator when possible so um i will speak about a what happens in a storm-enabled world so what happens in the future after swamp gets built completely after a rich ecosystem gets built around it housewarm will incredibly change the internet as as we know it so a little bit about me um i'm a computer scientist by training i have a vc fund i started roughly at the same time as i started working with the swarm team here in the bottom left you can see us at the after day i think it was after the first swam summit in berlin in 2016 or 17 and that's me speaking um and i've been kind of a collaborator and a supporter for a long time i work mostly on the database side and on the coding theory side of swamp in my day job i am an investor investing in precedent startups in syd southampton europe anything that has to do with the hardcore computer science algorithms to change the world uh machine learning blockchain cryptography that kind of stuff if you have anything if you're working with something interesting come talk to me and i'm very very pleased to be able to kind of tell give the kind of the vici view of uh um of of swarm so let's talk a little bit about the internet so the internet is uh not what it was supposed to be i'd say i mean it was supposed to be better and we kind of failed i mean it's almost my generation maybe with people a bit older than me kind of failed to build it in the way that it was supposed to happen so it was supposed to help us uh share information in a better way and to collaborate better but we ended up with this weird siloed vision and um a lot of people talk about facebook and twitter but i i want to start with actually uh the way we walk because we spend like eight hours plus a day on on on our jobs and the way we do our jobs is vastly um stunted by the way that software works right now and i'll explain exactly why it's like that and what's broken what's inherently broken about it so my girlfriend uses the microsoft suite in a job and she's locked in if you see the top right of the slides you use the microsoft office and the tasks and the themes and everything and the outlook it's very hard to get out of it because all of these tools interact with each other and they're all a siloed source of walking right and all of uh all of the collaborators use this and in their business they all use this in my business we use the g docs right and when i try to collaborate with my lawyers who use uh who use world then we need to start sending files around and export them and stuff like this now if you look at this it's not it this you see this trend appears all over the place so uh slack for example you're stuck in the slack ecosystem you can't leave if you started using slack you need to pay ten dollars per client uh a per per month and that's where you are and that's where all your history is the google street the same and if you look at facebook this is most apparent you're stuck with the news feed you're stuck with the way the with the friend relationships with your social network on facebook you can't leave it right what you can do is you can migrate right if you want a facebook for intellectuals you get twitter if you want a facebook for uh sexy people you get instagram if you wanna you do have a right-wing facebook right and if you want a facebook for old people you have facebook but um inside of each of these ecosystems you're locked you can't migrate and you're stuck even with the most mundane things like why is the news feed not changeable because facebook really likes to control what you see to influence you and so on now you can say well this is what you know evernote and notion the same thing you're stuck in evernote why is this it's because software locks you in and that's what the profit model works as like uh i'm a vc and if i say um if you know a founder comes and says i will compete with notion or with evernote i say where's or 10 million dollars right because you need to serve all these users you're going to have you need you need a marketing team you need a sales team you need like to create this fossilized uh organization and it's going to be moving very very slowly because these are really still moving big systems um now so before i tell you i claim that swan fixes this and before i tell you how uh what is swarm so you know you'll hear a lot but for the purpose of this discussion it's you know we can say it's decentralized hosting system you can say it's a bittorrent with incentives but for the purpose of this discussion it's a system that stores and serves data on demand right well any data is accessible from any device it's a fast robust and auto scaling right and the trick for this whole thing is that it's um is um the economic incentives right so for the purpose of this discussion for the rest of this talk think of swarm as decentralized aws right it's a system a cloud type system that serves files very quickly very robustly because of its smart economic incentives now if you take one thing from this talk take the following thing the key insight of why swarm will fix the world of software as we know it is because it is um it's because it shifts the cost of using or running an application uh from the host to the user so under swarm the cost of an application is paid by the user of the application and not by the host of this application this means that it's much cheaper to develop software and uh therefore things will move much faster and the result will be a complete evolution in the way we've been software so it's really important to note this because it's a simple sounding change okay someone else pays right but i'm claiming that this simple change will have a very large outcome and in this talk i will show you how um so um one more note about this suppose you go back to 1990 and i tell you you know there's this new thing it's called the web it's going to change the world as we know it and the way it's going to change the world is uh there will be social networks everything will be ecommerce it could be distributed it will work on one protocol stack you say what are you talking about right the world doesn't change by just changing the the the way you move data around but in fact what the internet did is it caused uh all data to be uh deemed equal right uh the internet doesn't care if you use the phone if you use it for for a phone call or for watching something or for collaborating on open source or on anything and the change to the economy makes a very big change in the outcome and that's what i'm going to claim that swarm does okay so it's really hard to imagine how a future change will look so let's pretend we go into a time machine and we emerge in the year 2030 and let me show you the lives of two people dana a developer a typical developer and joe a simple user so meet dana a simple developer so how is dana's life different from what it is today from developers today so today developers work in software companies they develop features they have a marketing department they have a sales department or some developers work on open source or something like this and make you know it's not a standard way to do things and then it's it serves only a very small subset of typical users um so how does dana work he she builds software herself not as part of the company she makes her salary through revenue sharing so she builds applications that run on top as well and she makes a salary because the users pay network fees to get the service these are like you know uh five cents a month like these are very small network fees if dana had to pay those network fees for hundreds of millions of users this would be very expensive should be the economical back behind them but because the users pay those very small fees uh she can just get a revenue share of these fees uh dana creates features because she doesn't have crazy marketing developments and a fossilized um system around her she can do super fast iterations and she can work on and open um an open ecosystem for collaboration just like in open source software and finally um her software interfaces with standard data formats it's like any browser reads html right so um any browser is able to read the standard format that we designed in the beginning of the internet and uh to uh pulse it on the screen right it's the same thing with dana the software she builds interfaces with very standard types and therefore she's working on a standardized data system that is open and she iterates on features right so that's the view from dana's side dana will probably be much happier than developers today but the software will be developing much quicker and answering many needs of users of particular user groups um now let's look at a joe who is an end user so joe's entire digital life happens on top of the swarm stack so you know he walks on top of it he does all of his socializing on top of it gaming voting taxes but it's much more than just taking what we have today the digital life or the stuff we do today and digitalizing them because think of kind of predicting facebook in in the year 1995 it was very hard to predict this very complex um texture of a social network this is what it will look like it will be like um like wechat like the big widget ecosystem but much more powerful because it moves much faster this would be a modular experience just like choosing um a plugins for a browser and these will be very smart apps that evolve very rapidly so because the the point is because of the small change to the economic model of developing software because dana doesn't have to pay for the software you'll get very very large outcomes of how the of how the software ecosystem evolves now so i'm claiming that swarm will rewrite the last 20 years of the cloud because of this particular insight that the fees are going to be paid by the user not by the developer and therefore the developer will incur very low cost she'll get the web 2 capabilities but with the freedom that comes from web one and that's going to be the power of swarm and let me tell you how this changes the world this is the last slide uh how this changes the world in a very dramatic way um so the most powerful thing we do today is social collaboration i i gave a talk about this let me plug it in there you just google the title on the bottom right um so let me just shortly say the most powerful force we have is is to collaborate together and to build stuff together but right now we don't have digital infrastructure to do this because the current social uh the current ways to collaborate are fossilized and changeable because of the economic model it requires a lot of money upon to change now the swarm ecosystem because of uh it shifts the economic building it empowers possibly hundreds of thousands of developers to create a rich ecosystem to enable us to break these data silos and collaborate make you know new collaborative software that is modular that is powerful standardized interoperable and this will change the world in very deep in the world in a very deep way that it's very hard to predict but it's kind of easy to get a sort of grasp on thank you very much