Paving the Path for the Future of Ethereum - Raul Jordan

awesome so I know we said the numbers are maybe like 25% or 21% of people or new to etherium or a kind of relatively beginner but can we get a quick show of hands just curious who is pretty new to aetherium did you say don't be shy awesome great awesome great to have you all here and it's a pleasure being here fantastic talk Albert those really awesome points I would love to just go into a little bit more in-depth as to kind of where we've come you know how crypto can win and if crypto wins why did it win if it loses why did it lose and where we're headed how we're gonna get there concretely and efficiently so yeah so I'm gonna three on protocol developer co-founder prismatic laughs we're working on an etherium 2.0 implementation that basically is gonna be a radical upgrade that's going to increase the scalability of the platform make it more massively you know accessible to the public have it you know have a better more robust security model cope of stake as well so this is our team so most of us are here and please come find us after and we'd love to chat love to tell you about some of the challenges we've encountered and where we're headed so yeah when I actually first started learning and had that magic moment with computers was actually the first week of September around six years ago just across the street at a little place called Sanders Theatre in a class called cs50 here at Harvard where they showed us this really cool diagram of what the internet is gonna look like in the future you know they had this they had this really really awesome kind of perspective of having all these different packets of data coming all across the world and it just really felt like something that you know was just truly decentralized truly accessible to people who wanted to interface with this network you know coming to the conclusion that over the next few years I would encounter the Internet is very far off from that initial promise that was given to us and have been since trying to find something that could get us closer to that goal as such I discovered aetherium and why should we care about a theorem today why is this something that we should build on at the moment you know to give a little bit quick back and I want to talk a little bit about kind of where we are today with respect to surveillance states and kind of how this comes into relevance I remember in high school is checking out 1984 from library you know having it recommended having it been like this cool little sci-fi thing it felt really really you know really far off from reality I'm originally from Honduras in the country that has very little access to technology and imagining this sort of you know Big Brother is always watching you sort of thing imagining the concept of doublethink having the own citizens really you know question the nature of the reality and kind of accept the doctrine and the dogma of this of this world felt super alien to me in a sense main questions going through my head are how can the people that live in this society ever have allowed this to happen how did these governments even you know coalesce into this shape and form and what led them to be in this current state and really the answer to me was extremely unclear you know humans are super multifaceted you know organisms we have so many different incentives and oftentimes irrational perspectives on life and really I think one of the oldest and most important human emotions is fear and really fear of safety maintaining people safe you know perhaps sacrificing something in the name of the common good and why that matters so you know we've all been familiar with the concept of like things like Amazon go I mean it's you know we've all used venmo to some extent and it's funny to browse through and see what some of the funny things our friends are spending on but really you know what cost does it come but is this really just a small gesture you know is it is it just something that we should trivially care about or does this have a deeper perhaps a more sinister tone than it seems you know say you know the most common argument is hey I'm a law-abiding citizen why should I care or why does it really even matter to me it's you know is is is kind of like the serious tone of it more like a slippery slope well you know today we see so many stores completely going cashless in fact people say that if cash were invented today it would probably be illegal right in the future we're actually going to go cardless and in the future you might have your transaction being rejected because you are really authorised to purchase a book and you know this is the sort of reality that kind of gets us closer to that sci-fi perspective right and the thing is that you know at the end of the day the people in charge are really doing this to fit some sort of narrative of protecting the common good protecting the daily you know the daily average life of a law-abiding citizen you know why should they matter this is fitting into a common narrative problem with this is when institutions decide to sacrifice individual freedoms for a common common narrative and for the common good their definition of this is what truly makes a difference and can be extremely extremely dangerous for the first time and I want to really echo this is we have the capability of creating how Albert said these anonymous yet credible systems that don't depend on human trust as a primitive in reality every piece of technology that you know we built we build with assumptions assumptions technical assumptions societal assumptions philosophical assumptions one of the biggest ones that we create every time we write a piece of software is that there is some sort of aspect of trust some sort of anchor that prevents this technology from being kind of misused and has some sort of built-in protections that protects both the end users and the party that created such technology right by default this sort of property and this assumption is something we can throw out when we build something like aetherium and you know so actually this this this slogan was actually not coming by block stack it was actually originally from an old post on a Chris Dixon Twitter Twitter thread where he's essentially echoing the same point you know like instead of just reinforcing the assumption that we should not just push forward that that's that narrative that you know that we should just not abuse our power we want to build systems that just cannot have participants abusing their power by default and I think that's a very powerful concept so theorems early experiments you know when etherium was first conceived it really had no plans of what you can build on it if some of you recall the old website for a theorem it had some really cool examples like hey you know make a dowel or like hey like you know like make an escrow contract like settle a sports bet with your friend right but at the end of the day like one of the things that really resounded upon me from reading the old aetherium website as well is that they mentioned hey we have no features you know like aetherium is an open network like we don't care what you built even if it is a literal pyramid scheme like foam or 3d right and you know I think that's that's powerful right so of course technology is a tool it will be used for good and for evil but one of the most important things is that it gives us option an option is something that you know is being seen as more of a luxury as time goes on and as your society becomes more and more devolved into the surveillance sci-fi nation-state so you know we've come a pretty long way to say the least the oldest etherium wallets would completely sacrifice a lot of UX in the sense of having a very strong sense of security you would basically be running of a fully validating node just to be able to like access your accounts we go to transact with each other at this is super cool but in reality not really what most users needed you know essentially now we have applications where you don't even know that you're using a blockchain so if you look at things like godson chain which is a fully collectible card game kind of like hearthstone it's you know these these cars or your FC Twente tokens on ethereal we now have things like meta mass mobile where you can actually open a CDP just from your phone and you know I want to give a shout out also to Fortis which isn't also also a really cool platform where you can go on a website you know without even knowing you know without even having to access or download an extension and immediately log in and be able to start using it additionally today is probably the most interesting times because we've had so much progress and things like tornado Mixer so these are tools that allow you to actually mix your coins with other participants and further decouple your financial sovereignty from your identity so from that we have a stack protocol which is doing some really awesome stuff on zero knowledge proof so you can essentially send fully private transactions just further you know pushing this notion that like hey you're in control here of your funds and you know this is what aetherium allows you to do and these things are actually live on maintenance so yeah please go check them out we actually now have an incredible set of financial building blocks that we couldn't even have dreamed of a few years ago right we have things like you know like the highest spend like so so incredible this whole journey we have things like Dharma that allow you to just like lever instead app is a single - where that allows you to control and see access to all the things that you control in this and this Financial Inc ecosystem aside from that you know we do have the tools to arm for the next hundred thousand developers like there right there you know and the technical challenges are real and the and there are awesome peers to work with and learn from on this journey however you know let's take a look about how we can tip the scales a little bit further right so if krypter wins like how did we get there and likewise if it goes the wrong way then what happened what led it to be that way truly believe that for a theorem to succeed we must build applications that really enrich and improve the daily users life through ways that abstract away the blockchain itself we must provide an essential product and I really want to highlight essential that you know provide something that cannot be done by centralized services and we want to write a paradigm that this is an unstoppable borderless trustless technology that is a public good for the world when we say public good you know it's it's it's open to everyone right whether you what do you want to use it for good and evil that's what matters like there are options out there and it is you know I think it's one of the most critical aspects that we must retain in this society so it's it is pretty easy to imagine a world in which aetherium wins if that world is crypto native and that's extremely not the case today a lot of the things that you can immediately come up with as use cases for blockchain depend on kind of this assumption that everyone is kind of participating in this open Network right how do you get them all this network how do you even bootstrap and kickstart this on-ramp still has a massive roadblock and a massive way to go for adoption and a massive privacy hurdle to overcome as well on the flip side you know if we lose then what happened right it's a few things so if we consider the hypothetical scenario in which surveillance states a kind of draconian laws kind of rapidly outpace the rate of innovation and privacy technologies that we see in blocking such as aetherium we can see that as a massive detrimental factor towards a lot of new developers for people coming into the space right an interesting thought experiment is to think like you know can total criminalization of ownership go Krypto although this might be going a little bit too far at that point you're basically forbidding citizens from owning a bunch of numbers which are your private keys you know can this really you know basically destroys kind of this this this grassroots community right and I would argue not it might have actually the counter the counterintuitive effect but another thing is if tribalism overtakes crypto you know as in any community there are disagreements there are own agendas there are different ideas that people push forward if we fail to acknowledge our similarities and focus more on our differences I think this is one thing that can hamper collaboration and prevents us from getting up to speed and kind of going past that hockey stick curve that we see on the previous slides so where is etherium itself headed and what is a theorem 2.0 what does that look like and you know this winding road is very much on purpose right I mean we're navigating this idea a maze of what's to come it's you know there's a lot more questions that come up as you ask a question ten more pop up right so you have obviously big challenges ahead right you know a lot of great folks here have solved a lot of different scalability challenges around a theorem using things like later too but at the you know at the end of day layer one still has a fundamental problem of capacity we burn a lot of extremely unnecessary energy just to power these networks that could be done in other ways and additionally like you know we still didn't have very satisfactory solutions that make the proper compromises at the layer1 scale so to quote my co-founder scale or Die so it basically idea behind this quote is that you know we want to get to the point where a theorem wins but in reality if we're not true to ourselves if this technology is not scale to where it needs to be then it dies and I think we have a very strong responsibility to get it there you know we have a few ideas here for those a little bit unfamiliar with kind of like the scaling strategies towards eath and eath one the basic idea of the most naive solution I guess is just to imagine oh let's just like increase the block cast limit you know let's pack more transactions into blocks right this means that each node will require a lot more computational power and obviously we just make it's like it's one of those things where you're just pushing the problem a little bit further down you're not really addressing the root cause makes it obviously less decentralized another one is you can reduce the time between blocks all right I mean that's that sounds great you know a faster confirmation times you have all this all these cool benefits that come along with that the very big problem is obviously this makes a block seem more vulnerable to forks and attacks blocks have to propagate across the network and when you have a network like a theorem that is permissionless so anyone across the world you know there could be somebody in Australia running a node there can be somebody from here from this room running a node you have to understand that these things have to propagate you know in real time through the network understand how that's going to affect the system and the integrity if you do such a strategy so that's obviously a less secure strategy but thing we're pursuing in the theorem is actually this idea called charting which is idea when you take when you take a kind of a data set and you partition that into different pieces and you can achieve a higher computational throughput by paralyzing this so you know in a theorem today we maintain the state every single node kind of is a fully validating node so they maintain the entire state of the chain from Genesis and basically validate every transaction to make sure that they're caught up with the rest of the network and participate in a consensus protocol in a theorem 2.0 in particular nodes are not going to be fully validating nodes instead we're going to be partitioning the state across the network and making it so that the consensus algorithm is clever enough that it's able to reconcile this and be able to securely and efficiently determine the state of the world with a new capacity typically we call you know this this gives you some special type of scaling and there's a different type of you know even crazier scaling called super quadratic sharding which which is a little bit far off kind of sci-fi stuff so you know scalability really like what does it mean at the end of the day it's the ability for software to kind of respond in the way it's intended to no matter at what scale and without fail and I think that's something that we really need to really need to keep in mind next generation block chains as you may have heard of you've probably heard about things like Definity eos and there are a few other ideas out there kind of that you know fundamentally redefine a lot of the key aspects of what layer 1 it does and what its responsibilities are in a blockchain ecosystem in particular you know a lot of these sacrifice things such as decentralization for higher throughput they provide kind of a you know a stronger kind of cryptographic assumption towards consensus and you know I think what aetherium is trying to do what a theorem 2.0 really is doing is it's trying to find really the most sensible and the most honest approach to solving this problem at theorem 2.

0 is trying to maintain a high degree of decentralization a high degree of security and also a high degree of speed by being able to just find the compromises between those things take the best of all different worlds and really learn from each other put aside the differences between the different chains and really understand how we can push this forward so in a theorem 2.0 we have this thing called proof of sake and that's gonna be a radical change it's actually going to change the consensus algorithm instead of having to run these really expensive machines that kind of burn a lot of electricity and power just to be able to verify transactions across the network you're going to be you're going to be able to just lock up some of your money some of your ether or an interest on that and essentially you know basically get penalized if you do something that's provably malicious against the network this is a fundamentally different security model that's based around penalties rather than rewards and makes the system a lot more robust against a lot of scenarios so a theorem has actually always been you know keeping Peru stick in the back of its mind since the beginning and an attempt to point oh we're actually making us a reality aside from that one of the major things that gets talked about a lot is webassembly so many of you have been coding in the solidity programming language which is you know particular to theorem and how it started and let's do some really cool stuff it's a very nice kind of domain-specific language that's evolved over the years with web assembly you know we're taking a lot of cool technologies that allow us to use a lot of different programming languages that were more familiar with such as things like rust and C++ and be able to use them in watching programming environments you know granted you know not everyone might want to be programming smart contract in C++ but this gives us a very strong kind of primitive in which we can bring different you know different different kind of development communities to really build on this technology and a transformational way so from that one thing in theorem 2.0 is going to bring is we're going to have actually the ability to create unbiased able distributed randomness for those of you that are quite unfamiliar creating randomness in a blockchain environment is near impossible it's extremely difficult to do so today you can do things like you know you use the block hashes as like the randomness as a random seed in your application but really that's not that's not random you know for something to be random you want it to be unbiased scible you want it to kind of exist independently of manipulation of actors in the system so you know just we do some really cool stuff around verifiable delay functions and you know using using this information to create an unbiased able blockchain so if you're curious about this please come talk to me afterwards yeah so with my team we're building an etherium client called prism just like today when you're running the theorem node you run a go aetherium node or a parity no to sync up with the chain when you run the next iteration of etherium we meant people will be using prism as their go-to client this is the way you can actually doubt you know sync up to the chain verify blocks participate as a validator and kind of do everything you would need to do to interact with the environment of the blockchain there are currently eight teams or more implementing a theorem 2.0 related features or clients and you know this is arguably one of the best times for each 2.0 and kind of its future next week the teams are gathering in Toronto for an interoperability meeting that means that they're actually you know getting the clients together communicating via via network and putting together a multi-client test net and that's a major milestone akin to some of the first eath 1.

0 test nets that came out there since the beginning in next month we're all going to osaka japan to go to the DEFCON 5 conference which is from the biggest aetherium earlier conferences in the world and really just really crank out more multi client interoperability features there and main at early 2020 so we're gonna be pretty busy out there but I believe the work will be really worth it so you know if there's any words of advice for those of you that are kind of new to have it on it's like you know just really pay little attention to the hype I think you know coming through so many if global events like seeing just how much depth of information and how many motivated people are to build on these things is what's really exciting and at the end of the day like all of you here are you know and like when we look at new technologies what we should do is that we should always find those people that are tinkering on the fringes that are always working on things keeping their heads down independently thinking about why this matters over you know following something like a hype train and I think we're at a fantastic moment in aetherium where you know everyone kind of lets in this room truly cares about what this can bring for the world and I think it's our responsibility to get it there so yeah so please check this out prismatic labs and thank you so much [Applause]