EthCC 2: Dr. Seven Waterhouse

we up can you guys hear this for the back okay reminds me of lecturing at university hi everybody welcome to Paris that was loud what's this some more technical difficulties thank you so I'm here to talk to you about what we've been up to at orchid if you guys aren't familiar with as we started orchids almost two years ago one of the earliest companies to do sort of fundraising for VCS in Silicon Valley in the token space okay behind the computer okay thank you the other behind great supposing they talk about little bit of just what a nice killer apps in this space and do we have on your app okay just driving me nuts okay can we just kill this thing fly all this way and you still can't figure things out so are these killer apps anyone in the room got a killer app cuz these things aren't really excited to me I mean like the kind of fun I have a crypto kiddies t-shirt but it's uh yeah I don't know I'm not sure this is gonna get us to markup like mass adoption and there's just not a lot of users like it's good to be honest about where we're at you know if you actually a real decentralized platform with your theory mouse drum roll rather than you know these semi centralized platforms like things that just got recently hacked then this is where we're out it's not great compare this to you know top ten top hundred top thousand apps on Android or the Apple App Store and like we're not even making noise here but we do have some clear apps let's see we're the obvious ones Bitcoin bitcoin is the color up a Bitcoin it's a store of wealth it's something that you can create banking without banks and it routes around centralized control structures and aetherium big reason we're all here the killer app here is really routing around something that I'm actually pretty good at which is VC and Angel fundraising so if you want to go raise money from everybody in the world or a whole bunch of cool people fund a really interesting experiment and hopefully make a business out of it this is an incredible platform to the ICO platform became the killer app on aetherium and there's all the other great things are trying to build but this became the thing that actually took this thing mainstream so when you think about what's the next set of killer apps something that's important to look at is when you're building on top of a new platform what are the characteristics of the platform that are brand new so what are the applications gonna benefit most from decentralization so decentralization allows you to have trust in a trustless way and allows you to route around broken systems of control we saw that with Bitcoin in aetherium so what else benefits from this again a lot of people here now good job we waited and let's take a look at the Internet and this is an example of our really cool new branding Thank You Travis who was just helping me there with all this work here we deliberately even though we could have gone out with a very dark narrative around orchid we've deliberately focusing on appealing to a much broader audience of people so it's a lot more friendly than you might imagine from a company that's focused on what we're doing so the control structure here in what I'm trying to point out is communications Communications is an incredibly controlled system for example in the United States the net neutrality provisions have been repealed in Europe there are many sites you can't get to now in the u.s. because of gdpr and we're really entering this point where we're ending up with a splintered Internet there's no more one internet anymore it's not like the Internet and then the private Internet's it's like there's just actually different internets everywhere you go so what's happening splintering well Russia's been turning the internet on and off the telegram outages or a great example of that in the US we have extreme corporate control the internet and I think the you know Facebook hearings even examples recently with acquisitions in the crypto space that you might have been aware of that are somewhat suspicious with regarding tracking people China's incredibly state controlled and in Europe we've got gdpr and the tendency here is is that as you just keep increasing the amount of surveillance you get to the point where people just behave as if they're being surveilled anyway just like well you know I assumed that everyone's watching me so you know I'll just I'll just try to have nothing to hide and you know just be really good and I believe this is a very dangerous place for us in society and we move from this open platform to a series of war gardens so my point is talking about this killer app idea is the question we've been asking ourselves and how we saw the company is could privacy be this killer app could this be the thing that within decentralization the things we can build on top of it could this be really related closer to privacy so let's take a look VPNs are definitely rising in you search they are heavily used in oppress regimes and if you can see the graphics there but in Indonesia we've got something like 38% usage and such becoming a pretty big market but these things are on the threat too so by its very nature of VPN is a centralized point of control so there's been many cases where even VPNs have said they didn't log traffic have been subpoenaed and it turns out that they did log traffic and there are a number of VPNs that are state controlled either overtly or covertly there are only a handful of VPNs that officially work in China and those actually have state Connections and of course they can be shut down it's like a drumroll well I guess we'll just go without so what we focused on is how to create this essentially permission free market for communication so if you kind of extend the ideas of fundraising and storage of wealth and trustless environments how can we have trustless communication this is our mission we're trying to really open up the internet so you can access it from anywhere and I know this is a tech conference so we're not going to get into the tech okay but I'm not a tech guy so be gentle with the questions later Oh Mabel does have no questions we taught later but okay so we're building as you can see an open marketplace for bandwidth we're building on etherium we'll be launching a VPN client on major operating systems especially on on mobile we've got a really awesome team that we've been building over the last year and we're gonna be entering the marketplace very soon I'll talk about that I got so incredibly dense detailed technical sort of technical side so how does the app work I'm not going to go into all of these pieces here but essentially we're using overlay encryption this is like a series of Onion Routing concepts we use WebRTC to essentially obfuscate traffic and be able to tunnel through firewalls we use aetherium extensively in small contracts and in routing and the whole concept is can we build an application that can actually bust through firewalls like really powerful firewalls like the Great Firewall China that's what we're trying to do there's a couple of different concepts that we brought in there's the tax so when you think about building something at communication scale with aetherium the first person thing someone says is well how's this gonna work like it's not fast enough you know it's gonna be too expensive to set up the channels if you use payment channels then maybe that doesn't work for privacy like how do you make this thing work so the idea that we came up with and it's based on earlier research in the space is this idea of probabilistic micropayments so two ideas here are first of all we can speed up essentially the speed that we can move traffic through the network and pay for it and secondly we can do it at a much lower cost in terms of actually setting up the routes this has significant advantages over existing payment channels which I can explain later but it's definitely a sort of a very interesting technique and we imagine it could be actually variable for other applications that want to take advantage of something like this so does anyone have any questions about this tickle side I want to kind of like keep going but the the basic concept of progress in my payments is that instead of doing a direct connection and transaction with somebody when you want to set up a route and pay for a series of packets that go through the network instead USU a ticket and this ticket is probabilistically so it's kind of like a lottery ticket if you like and can kept you cash in at any point and then over time as long as you pull with the network long enough you'll effectively get the same expected amount of a payment through the network second concept we have is a system called medallions so what this is is essentially a form of civil resistance through proof of stake but the works within the existing in theorem environment we're not waiting for proof of stake to exist in a theorem to do this we have our own version of it some of some differentiations of a conventional proof of stake is that you can stake any amount to create a medallion you don't have to stake a fixed amount but the large of the medallion is the higher the probability that users would choose that node and route through the network that way putting these things together essentially we're forming a bandwidth marketplace where there's essentially an auction running at different points of time and bidding for different routes through the system combining the medallions and the problem micropayments and we believe using these combination of things we can hit communication speeds on a theorem and other interesting aspect we're doing so I've described how we use a theorem and how we do the routing and all the other pieces but the bandwidth smuggling is a concept we it's a little bit like the program will transport layers which is used in tor so essentially we're open sourcing and giving you the ability to roll your own firewall busting VPN we're gonna be using things like WebRTC and even making our traffic look like game traffic in order to be able to have a traverse of different firewalls and the idea is this kind of code will be pluggable so you can imagine someone in a press regime and suddenly the firewall gets upgrade and they can't figure it out and they're essentially ascender by is not just to the idea that they want to get access to the internet again but incentivized by the idea that you know the road the nodes in their network and the exit nodes would be upgraded as they upgrade the firewall busting technology so what's next for us we will be updating our white paper and a couple of weeks and we already have an alpha we'll be starting to open that up to people and additionally started open source a bunch of our code the code will be completely open sourced in May when we do our test map and we'll be launching shortly thereafter and we're hiring we have offices in San Francisco Berlin and Santa Barbara we have a small group in New York as well so if you're interested in this kind of work and the mission that we have give us a shout and looking forward to talk to you a couple questions if if you block WebRTC then a lot of things break yeah I mean WebRTC is one example of something you could use as a as a pluggable protocol yeah sorry No they'll be like series of plug pluggable protocols you could use so you could you could flip them if you wanted to add a band communicate with your counterparty and say I want to communicate this way then you could do that I mean firewall busting is a cat-and-mouse game so you can't like create some kind of panacea especially when you have adaptive firewalls like the Great Firewall China that's actually adapting in real time so yeah the idea is you try and try and push the bar high enough such that in order to you know it is shut down that traffic you'd be shutting down significant portions of it and and some countries like Russia have demonstrated that they're willing to do that but you have to get to push as high as you can on that sorry yeah you're getting into t cell that we should do we want to attack guys or offline so yeah absolutely yeah ish in what country is orchid registered in as an entity legally that's my first question yes I okay so you registered in a country in one of the five countries where the key exposure low is active product where you said that privacy is the killer wrap this is the first mystery accusation of mine the second one is that I don't know I don't understand a word you said in the USA there is the key exposure low active it's one of the five I countries and you can't provide privacy from an entity registered in the US because it there if you say that I don't have the keys I can't do anything it's not an excuse only in those five countries the second ugly accusation of mine is that you are basically relabeling tour but also tokenize it so tour is still only the second biggest peer-to-peer economy in the world and it only has around 1200 full nodes and this is the number where volunteers do it freely where the only sacrifice that you have to make is to edit a config file your model introduces that I should pay into a smart contract pool so someone else could gain some privacy in a undeveloped country how do you see these these numbers compared in the future when you launch your app on it so 100 mm in 10 years for tour for free how much you estimate this number for money for other people within the next 10 years as you noticed I am raised in the United States I can't make forward-looking statements so I think I just had this question offline thank you all right no more questions one more you see one more question no liability for example like as a note if I were to share my bandwidth my ISP could block me or you know traffic coming through my node would might implicates me so how are you gonna deal with these different issues that tor has dealt with with exit nodes and relay nodes within this ecosystem yeah definitely gonna learn from things that tors done so that'll be our first protocol but yeah it's a challenging question within exit nodes we imagine will be marketplace grew up for exit nodes in countries where there's less oversight over the exiting of nodes I mean I think on balance my belief is always that even though there are people who want to do things that I wouldn't approve of on the Internet the the balance of giving people access the Internet in areas where it's heavily oppressed outweighs the other concerns so we're gonna see what happens last question is managing a decentralized team [Applause]