EthCC 2: Ricardo J Mendez

are we ready there are no way ready okay um hi everyone there's gonna be a little bit drier than a wine my name is Ricardo Mendes and technical director at Samsung next for Europe and there we're doing basically techno investments venture investments on technology innovation we're also running the stack 0 grant which is a grant focus on helping projects working on open source and research into the centralization space this is not what the talk is about but I'll be happy to talk about that if you got me after I actually be considered renamed big talk to mistakes that make because it's what this ended up being about there are kind of mistakes that I made during my career as an engineer which lessons learned that if I had learned them earlier they would have made life much easier for myself and the people that was building so therefore and I'm still seeing this popping up so I thought was good bringing them up now let me give you a quick summary of what we're talking about because this is really going to be a talk about basically conceptual accessibility and the first which is relatively obvious is that technology building six solid technology is important but it's not all about the tech access and understanding are going to go beyond usability lack of either access or understanding deepens inequality and finally that I been kind of feeling lately that we're running out of time now before I launch into this whole thing let me give you a quick quote and there's this bit by Max Planck that I think really exemplifies how a lot of discussions that I end up having with people around the decentralisation space end up feeling like and I'm just gonna read you a quote in its entirety I'll turn around because otherwise step neck which he said that a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light but rather because it's opponents eventually die and a new generation goes up that is familiar with it and this is really a great line I think max willing will have completely killed it at social media and I feel that it kind of encompasses how we like to feel about change we like to think that if we're on the right side of history or making the right tech choices who are backing the right platform history will prove us right people had that don't agree people that don't see the light will eventually just go away the only issue with that is that it seems to conflate people who oppose what we're aiming for with people who just don't understand it and these people here they're not proponents of an old system that needs to see the light they're just average users non-technical people there are my parents actually now in their 70s and it feels like I've spent my entire career failing them no I'll explain how I failed them with those mistakes in a bit but first let me give you a little bit of backstory is anybody here from Latin America oh hey we're from oh okay oh sorry too useful view over Latin America you've seen this played out a few times and in fact this might be a bit of a familiar story because it's like playing out all over again in fact just I was working this editorial came out on the New York Times just I was as I was working on my slides and it is a visceral description by carlos hernandez a Venezuelan economy of how bitcoin say help his family just stay slightly upload when things completely went to hell now the case that I'm gonna tell you about is a little bit of a is less of this starting apocalypse that they got in Venezuela it's more for about a creeping doom scenario but I'm getting ahead of myself actually I'm in Costa Rican originally and back in 1978 we got this new president he rose to power by and large the great popular acclaim and this bit here as Morel economy dad means I'll seize power with humility you can almost hear the narrator in the background saying he pick not first two and a half years were pleasant enough and then in September of 1980 everything went to hell basically the coffee was a major export its prices plummeted to a third this combined with an oil crisis where oil prices were soaring effectively by the time the Karaka rosso had left power less than 18 months later the price of the dollar against the chlorine at the against the Quran had keen to boot it won't stop there I mean prices of the the value of the Quran will continue to slide 10 to 15 to 30% a year and it hasn't stopped it has just continued to slide ever since and even in future administrations and it gets worse than that actually imagine that you know it's not just like with what we got in the crypto space where at some point here you may have seen 8090 % of your value of upgrade but imagine that there is no spike right here it's just it just went all the way down continually and it gets worse imagine that this is not happening just to some new form of currency that you actually choose to use that you have a certain control over but the only currency you have regular access to and the salary that you're used to spoiling your family now imagine there is not only the salary imagine that for any reason your house is mortgage isn't daughter's surprise now you owe five times as much and this impact this economic impact will have a massive impact on social equality in the country as well for the resna jority of people who only earning Colonus and who could maybe some of them afford to save a little bit of money they saw their holdings evaporate if on the other hand you were of the few people that actually held dollars and that by any chance your house mortgage was in cologne as well you just got your houses mortgage at a very steep dink discount and the key thing is that holding the right currency before this whole thing happened was important because the first thing that happens in a government playbook when this kind of thing start going wrong is that they control access to foreign currency so you couldn't just after a bit you couldn't just try and convert some of your money into dollars so I wonder now you know what could my parents have done back then with permissionless money I mean they were in their 30s so I'm and I did not ask them for permission to put this so at some point I'm gonna hear about this but they were in their 30s so younger than I am now right but even so I am not sure that they could have figured out our morass of terminology and platforms and options out there I mean they were history and civics professors not top tech non-technical users even nowadays this is the equivalent of somebody who uses what's up on a daily basis maybe goes to into Google Docs but can really figure out the whole security code contact security code change thing right and on top of that they were both working full-time which kind of made things slightly easier for us in the economic side because they were two incomes coming in but that meant that they spent their days teaching lessons talking to students grading tests following up on difficult issues around our own national patrimony and raising two kids in their position I personally don't think I would have had that much mental bandwidth to figure out you know if I'm supposed to go into Bitcoin aetherium C cache or what or that I would actually remember 24 words a year or two after generating a seed and that deep in me quality that I mentioned I think that we risk seeing it again this time between people who understand the tools are being built and have access to them and the people who don't and one of my issues is that having grown up with this background having seen the value of the money vanished I didn't really stop until recently and ask you know what could have made things better for them like how what could have helped when this thing went down growing up in Latin America and having seen this in several countries around I can't just accept it that this thing was too like the water you can't change it right but even with the weather I do think we can help people to be prepared so let me talk about the mistakes I've made as I mentioned this is not your supplicating and getting off my chest I've seen this still happening with other developers so this some of this might be useful and the first two are relatively are straightforward and obvious and the first one is that for a long time I focus on tech not problems I'm sure we've all seen this I mean it's it's easy to decry some cases as a solution looking for a problem the issue is that when you're the one building stuff when you actually enjoy building building things it can be a little bit hard to get perspective some I spent a while convinced that the tech was the thing and as long as the tech was solid enough people would come to it and I only learned my lesson after banging my head against a few walls and what I learned was that I hadn't realized what my job hadn't she learned what my job was even now when somebody comes to me for advice and tell me that you know I'm thinking about leaving my job at this place and setting up my own thing I always ask one question what's going to be your job and the answers are always the same it's always I'm gonna be writing code for X I'm gonna be building why I'm gonna be delivering on set and these are only correct in as much as they describe the activity correctly they miss that whatever it is you're doing your end job is to actually keep the user happy and writing solid code building a stable system delivering stuff is just one of the ways in which you keep the user happy which kind of ties in with the next one which is that I made stability know usability a big aspect of what a building I was building and this is a bit of how you know your background how your background colors your perspective you know in my case when all you have is an obsession in computer science everything looks like an architecture problem and I actually started my career a while ago building like small tools for Windows 3.1 and this use barely documented functions and the rather permissive memory model to integrate full into the operating system which allow me to do some really cool things but disadvantage was that if I screwed anything up then I completely brought down the house and everything that the user was working I've been working on for a while so stability was paramount and from then on I actually went on to build systems for financial institutions which you can only imagine took my mind away further from from usability and into stability now there could have been an obvious thing to do here right which is just keeping somebody around whose only ideas whose only job is to focus on usability but I I don't really think that we even use the word back then but even so even when you're considering usability there are trade-offs to take into account which leads us into the next one and this one here this bit me for a long time for a very long time after this I just started focusing on making systems usable and not necessarily comprehensible and I think this is more and more an issue because more and more the systems that we're building are becoming a central nervous system almost which mediates people access to the world and systems are lenses and a lens that you're using imposes certain perspective so we need users to understand what the perspective of our lens is so that they realize what's being left out of the picture otherwise we risk going back to those days when only a priest wouldn't use two computers and what was actually going on and at very much harder with on I understand the appeal of this we're obsessed with making things making things frictionless because frictionless helps with adoption but what we need to keep in mind is that the fact that something is frictionless doesn't necessarily mean that it is accessible because in our in our efforts to smooth edges we're hiding the core aspects of our systems and for me a system being accessible actually means that users get to approach of the the truth of the thing users need to know what this with the key aspect of this system is about and I think that if we don't actually make our systems conceptually accessible then we're just asking users to trade one set of other laws for another hopefully more trustworthy and open source one because there's a lot of words that we liked rowing around we like to say that we're giving people control of their data or control of their funds but we don't really tell them necessarily what this mean what this means and we need to tell them about the trade-offs we need to tell them what the implications of these new systems are because they're not necessarily the same things that they're used to and I know that I just said that we shouldn't go back to this purpose who know every part about the system but this is not black or white this is more like a gradient so the key question that we need to ask what we tell users is figure out which aspects could cause irretrievable damage to a user if they were not to understand them from a start if we're talking about wallets for instance we should make them understand that if you have access to the key that's all you need we should make them understand that if hey if you lose the key then hey nobody's gonna get it back for you there's no service that you can go on and just request that somebody gets just password again and we shouldn't just pretend that this things are like chat apps that can send money or banks that you control because the mental models that people have for those things don't necessarily apply anymore and finally there's this one after I got out the religion on the ordinance and all the sort of things I started I realized and I just recently realized actually that I had been spending a long time accessing problems in the abstract and luckily I stopped doing this a few years ago but didn't even name it didn't even have a name for it until recently worried so the sensational talk by Bruce Lawson monkey bruh where he speaks about standards accessibility and how they choices that we make on platforms have a direct impact on people I'm not gonna quote his whole thing I really recommend you watch you watch this talk but I'm just gonna quote directly that the key aspect that we need to see is that we need to do is that we need to see people not problems because problems can be extremely general I mean censorship is a problem right frictionless money transfer is a problem a reliance on centralized institution is a problem but this problems manifests differently for everybody and we need to keep in mind who will use be using this software because whether even if you won't like to admit it those of us here are rather privileged if nothing else because we know a lot more about how these systems work than the people who will be using them in the future but also just because of the fact that we are we are able to come in and discuss about all this all these potential options on the other hand people don't sorry just care about censorship and they might care that there are there might be people at risk of their mining hardware being confiscated if the government realizes that they have it those people who are working abroad ooh the only care about frictions in this money transport day you just want to err just tired and want to send money home and there are a lot more concern about for instance the fee that was on Union takes than some degree of the centralization that for them might be completely abstract or people like my parents who are in a tanking economy completely unaware of the truck that's about to hit them or the fact that they should be switching potentially to a different currency because the truth is that this is no longer I think about waiting for people to grow up with digital money or decentralized applications I don't think there's a major contingent Pony opposing this anymore I'm pretty sure that it will happen there are going to be cases like that of Carlos where people have an immediate and pressing need to switch and for these people that's gonna be a really easy sell right but then there are the creeping doom scenarios the situations where people are not yet aware of the magnitude of the decide of the disaster that this is going to be down the road and I think that in those cases the vast majority of people are only going to switch early if we make it easy for them to do so it because they don't necessarily understand that the core of this new system might be the future and yeah what you're working on here chances are is the future and I'm not saying this to pump you are forward to encourage you if anything I'm doing it to put the fear of God into you because if this is the future then whatever decisions that we make here people are going to end up leaving with because more than one concern that we can really wait for crypto and the centralization to go mainstream before we figure out Sachs ability issues because eventually somebody will figure out an order enough of those things and then users are gonna flock in and when they flock in the vast majority of them are going to stick around with the first solution that they find that they actually feel that it solves their problem because a story after story have to have shown that 95% of users never touch their faults and if it is not a more open source in this centralized solution well and it very much rather it is not there so somebody who is very much into personal privacy but there is such a thing and it's inertia and they already have a massive installed base so you're going to need to out execute them because it doesn't matter if the solution that people here have is technologically superior the tech is not the only thing and to out execute them you're going to need to keep your users a lot happier than any of the alternatives keep them and I firmly believe that a key part of this is making users more comfortable with what you're building this mix this means that whatever decision you make you need to make sure that users understand the truth of whatever it is you have built right thank you I don't even know how we're doing on time any questions do you think there is going to be a currency mainstream currency failure sooner do you think that the corporates are going to try and put themselves in that place or provide the the solution I am actually not quite sure I don't think anybody here knows what the heck Facebook is working on right it's perfectly possible that if for instance if they go with a say stable coin and then assuming that this denominated in dollars for instance then for somebody in a random third-world country then it's going to be easier to switch to the stand to just reach to others or anything else but I don't really know if they're too con try to put themselves into a position if anything they have shown a strong willingness of injecting themselves into every part that they can so my question is what other systems around us have this kind of kind of deep understanding and transparency like what are the things that we could look at and say okay these guys got it right versus these guys got it wrong are there are there other examples that you think are good examples of this kind of deeply transmitted models transparency approach like what are the what are the good examples that were the notably bad examples of it outside of crypto good question I think actually that the majority that I can think of are not necessarily end-user and consumer approaches yet for instance we see a lot of this from the cryptography space if your primitives are out there and available people are gonna trust them more than close primitives these are not end-user solutions of course based I suspect that is also because the all open source saying is relatively young by most people's standards the the main issue here is suspect is not the issue that the alternative is closed but that the alternative is what people are used for I used to write the printing money system might be completely opaque to people but they trust that they kind of trust that that thing is going to be there for them until it goes up in flames okay I think we're done thank you [Applause]