EthCC 2: Evan Van Ness

all right which Carlos Matos joke should I make all right yeah I'm told that nobody heard my joke about making Carlos Manto's joke but let's see here all right so this this talk is entitled what I want to see at the app liar my name is Evan van ness I'm part of consensus I have a newsletter called week in aetherium which you can subscribe to it we can aetherium news I've never actually had anybody subscribed based on me saying something and a talk but I don't know there's always a chance of there being a first time right so like disclaimer views are my own this is probably a little bit left over from when I had this this presentation be a little bit more controversial but I will say so just starting at the very beginning like I titled my talk like what I want to see at the app later like I could also think of it as like you know what I would be doing if I was trying to tinker and be an entrepreneur and web 3 instead of doing a newsletter like when we look at the a player today we see I mean we still haven't really seen anything really take off aside from crypto kitties outside of like our relative bubble we see people building on maker and auger which is really cool some of the early protocols are starting to get you know people building on top of them but like a lot of the things that VCS are funding right now is you know it's kind of in the same layer of things right it's like base chains like you know does the world need another like you know two thousand twelve two hundred and thirty second if you're in killer quote-unquote like a lot of base chains it's a lot of like you know wallets and and exchanges and custody and I don't know I mean I personally don't find it that exciting so like you know just going back to like the very basics of like you know the Internet was the quote information superhighway and you know I don't like and it really was about democratizing information right and that what really web 3 is about is democratizing value it's a native value transfer so you know I don't know the value superhighway if you will so like what do people do on the Internet in the early days and like this is I guess probably a little bit not really an exhaustive list it's you know me thinking about like what I was doing on the internet in the early 90s and mid 90s and you know like there was more information and people started to form communities on the on the internet I think was like one of the very basic early things you know news groups and then before that bulletin boards you know email list was obviously a really big thing it was like a social interaction that you know I think or early internet nerds like everybody had like their own email lists and their favorite email list and but I mean I certainly spent a lot of time on them I of course you know this space sort of grew out of one from the cypherpunks and then like people had their ridiculous personal homepage and I think a big big thing for for me it was like band fan sites so if you were a fan of like obscure indie rock like I was back then like there was no other way to get information about those stuff like I couldn't even find like the magazines because I lived in the suburbs and like stuff didn't make it to me right so and you know people started sharing bootlegs which happened you know tapes and CDs happen before the internet but then really took off with the internet and then no led to Napster and then you know peer-to-peer file-sharing and all that you know of course chat like age sex location which led to the famous like don't go meet strangers on the internet and now you know of course we summon strangers to go get in their car and you know stand there their apartments for Airbnb and of course like speculation was a big thing like in the early days of the internet I you know Michael Lewis had the book the new nude thing but he also had a book of there was a compilation of his his articles at the time and one of them was about like a kid and like unlike the Yahoo message board in like 1995 who made like a couple million dollars like pumping and dumping like Internet stocks which is I I don't know I can I can imagine that there's some parallels there and of course like business models were unclear you know like we like I remember the day that Netscape IPO and like you really wasn't clear how they were gonna make money but they had a crazy crazy valuation eyeballs was the big valuation metric for a while so certainly there's parallels with with our space as well and then the first banner ad was was in October of 1994 and then in between there like you know Amazon started and AdWords was October of 2000 I never went to the next slide that's anyway how do you make money on the internet like the old old saw was the free pays like porn pills in poker and like why is that like why were those the things that you know people could make money on and to me I think it really goes back to like you have to look for the people that are marginalized in the current system so marginalized behaviors or communities are the people that will always adopt a new technology like a quote unquote burning aid or in Peter Thiel's terminology 10 X 10 times better and people really only change behavior if they have a real quote earning need and then so and I think we've seen some of this in crypto right like the the things that the things that we've I've really seen adoption on like dark markets obviously was the early one in Bitcoin gambling like Satoshi dice and then like speculation is certainly a big one as well and of course we've seen less stuff like games as well like from crypto kitties but we really haven't seen anything take off yet so aside from like the standard things that we say like public goods and look for areas where people you know don't trust each other but could be convinced to like come together I'm gonna talk about two things which is like look to the tools and jurisdictional arbitrage so jurisdictional arbitrage everything is illegal somewhere like there's this this this twitter account called crime a day which tweets out a link of what is illegal in in the US federal law and it basically makes the point that like everybody is like committing a felony in the US and some way like everyday and they don't even know it because there's just a million laws right and personally I try to pay the law but like I also think like being immoral is more important than necessarily being legal I think that like when you look for things that have burning needs where people are willing to you know surpass the barrier of of UX in the space which of course is getting better but it's still a still a problem because there's behaviors that need to be learned you like each look for things that like might be illegal somewhere but the people want to do and I'm definitely not suggesting that you break the law and your jurisdiction like you know locate yourself carefully I talk to a lawyer but like you know think about things that are you know might be illegal somewhere else and so a couple of things that like come up to me are things that are very regulated like one is frankly gambling or insurance and I actually tend to think of the two is kind of the same anyway since insurance is really just gambling but risk-averse instead of risk on occupational licensing there's a lot of laws about you know who can do what in in certain way you know what education you need or whatever which you know some of that certainly makes sense and then I think there's probably places where it doesn't make sense and the ability to transfer payments is is a big one and can be a big part of a tap so potential strategies I'm not necessarily advocating any of them I think I haven't exactly architected how this would work but like I think it decks run by it down like with an actual incentivization both on like you get stuff for trading but also for providing liquidity and deep order books that that's certainly something that we haven't really seen and like liquidity is everything to an exchange right and the problem we have right now with so many decks is is that really none of them have liquidity Jorge is geardo had a had a great a great tweet which I just nabbed and put up here which is like fork out tokens and have them be run by Dallas which i think is is very fascinating and i yeah i mean i don't i think we're gonna see some of that for sure and he actually mentioned something that i think is really interesting that tweet which is like anonymous founders like i I I would imagine that we will start seeing something like this and I've I kind of thought we would and some of the early days of its here and we kind of talked about this and we thought that there would be anonymous founders and then you know like the token boom there was so much shadiness that why would you give your you know your eath to somebody if there was anonymous but i think the space is maturing some and i think that we will probably see people do anonymous founding people will you know maybe create a reputation on github and like build a reputation through their code and then you know since it's open source and they can verify the source code and throw it down they can pay for auditors like i I think it's you know an actual possibility and I think you know people will potentially really we could relocate to areas that are more friendly jurisdictionally and so my my last slide here because I am the last talk before lunch so I am cognizant of that is like look to the tools and right now the things that we have coming are really state channels which is like very close to being here and privacy is obviously a huge problem right now I mean I if you want to do something without letting everybody know your entire financial history then you usually have to like you know send it to an exchange and then send it from the exchange to a new a new address meaning that the exchange knows everything about you you can see sort of like mixers and tumblers happening on state channels and I think you know hopefully we'll see that quit as quickly as possible because privacy is a real issue obviously Internet of Things is something that like machines talking to each other and and paying each other and doing it in a trust Lusa way and maybe even not always having would be payments I was talking to Liam Horne last night and his his his his his phrase was prepaid computer prepaid computer Act prepaid computer actions I can spit that out it's it's actually afternoon now so I don't even have the excuse that it's the morning so you could even just see like payments happening on on layer two that are really just access right like his example to me last night was that I added in was like like you know sort of a toy example but like a car comes to the and and pays the garage door opener and the like the garage sends payment to the garage door the garage door opens and then like it closes and sends the payment back and so it ends up being just an access an access system I think payments and games is also like an obvious one it it also like blurs the line like as I was saying with with like between games and gambling like Jezz had a had a comment once upon a time on reddit about like an early game idea that he had that was you know something like you know if you kill somebody in the game you get to like take their like all of their possessions and actually have it and you know with aetherium that's actually a thing like you can exchange NF TS on these exchanges and it really like changes the nature of what is possible in games and it also changed like blood splurt blur the lines between what is like quote-unquote gambling and what is a game and i think that will be sort of an interesting thing that um regulars might have to deal with it might be a reason why you might want to be anonymous as well right like just because if your jurisdiction is unclear then you might not want to take that risk and exchange is of course like it's an obvious one but they are quite regulated and channels in plasma are you know making better changes possible like with privacy and yeah so I tried to hurry since I am right before lunch so that is that is it thank you for coming and [Applause] there was one thing that