Fireside Chat I Vitalik Buterin and Kartik Talwar | Pragma Waterloo

foreign [Music] so for our very first keynote for fireside chat for today I want to bring on vitalik the co-founder of ethereum and Bitcoin magazine to tell you more and we're gonna have a lot of discussions around how things have changed and some things that have not changed I think so okay good mics often don't work you have to check that is actually true I don't know if people caught that but that happened with me as soon as I started talking on stage it's working all right well there's a lot of things I want to talk to you today about and for for the audience we're going to shape this conversation uh in three parts we're going to reflect on how things kind of started and summarize if things are meeting expectation we're going to talk about what's next which is a lot of how do we actually still solve some hard problems that we have in the space especially around Skilling and then the third category is just various there's a lot of things I'm curious about now I want to not always talk about ethereum and uh we'll kind of go into some of those things too and uh let's get started so I'll keep it easy for the very first question um and uh let's go talk about scaling directly so what even is a roll up okay so Asia rollup is is uh what we call a layer two protocol that sits on top of ethereum and what it does is it basically creates this environment within which you can do all of the same things that you can do inside of ethereum except all of the computation and all of most of the data is put off chain right and but at the same time the roll-up benefits from being protected by the security of ethereum right so you have a system which uses ethereum only a small amount it's just as a space to put proofs and as a space to put a small portion of data that's actually needed to uh to verify the person that's needed to be able to join the roll up but otherwise um all your Beast we have like in ethereum like environments where everything else is being done off chain and the benefit of this is that it can be much cheaper than the what we call the issue or emulator one while uh being a basically just as secure at the same time that was a good intro and let's let's dig in a bit deeper um there's a lot of chatter around technicalities around what defines a roll up uh you said a lot of things are off chain and you kind of keep proofs there so how do you personally Define the Integrity of what is considered valuable data Okay so this is I guess a good time to go into kind of the taxonomy of everything that's not L1 that's um you know claims to be part of ethereum lands whether for marketing reasons or otherwise um the okay so first you have Roll-Ups right the key property of a roll-up is that even if all of the existing actors in these uh roll-up disappear any new actors can come in and join and they can like basically keep going even if all of the all of the existing actors except for you as a as a as a user inside the role of become dishonest you can still do something that basically like possibly with your action or possibly by default like they're not going to be able to win they're not going to be able to steal your money they're not going to be able to freeze your money like basically you can as an individual to enforce the roll-up to still continue acting correctly and continue working the way the way that it's supposed to work and the statement applies for both CK Roll-Ups and optimistic and optimistic optimist requires You Is Us dot one good user to submit a fraud proof in aziki roll-up they're not able to submit invalid stuff in the first place because they can't submit a valid proof so Roll-Ups and in order to do this Roll-Ups have to put not just the proofs but also sub amount of data on chain some of data per transaction and the reason they have to do this is so that if all of the existing actors disappear a new actor who wants to join the roll-up and start participating they can actually kind of you know sync the the state of the robe they can actually understand like what happened before what are the balances that people have so they actually have the information to build things on top and keep going so Roll-Ups are the gold standard now within Roll-Ups there is this uh stage classification um um bits like between stage zero stage one and stage two and I mean actually yeah L2 beat is uh like if you go to ltv.com they like have a classification for this I mean there are like a couple of details that I'm still talking about them with like uh their current like I like I personally say Khadija the threshold for the Asia upgrade Council should be or or for the Emergency Council should be like much higher than it than it currently is but otherwise like it's still a very good resource and it's uh the short definition of the three stages is that stage two is like a fully secured roll-up that has all of the properties that I just said on the other side a stage zero Roll Up is just a thing that is on the path to being a roll-up and that has some like very basic stuff like there is open source software that lets you like follow along the chain and track what's going on there it it call it calls itself referral if it has basic levels of censorship resistance it's like something that's on the path to being a full roll-up but it's um you know there's still a lot of pieces that have not been developed but you know like some pieces that are do side chains fit that definition or side chains do not right so for something to be a stage zero role if it has to have an intense to be a robe and has to already have the data Unchained stage one is like this halfway house where basically you can think of it as the zero knowledge proof for the fraud proof system has half the votes and there is this Security Council that has the other half of the votes and so if there's like a large super majority on the security Council then they can overturn what the uh like what the fraudproof system says and the purpose of this is to like be some training wheels in case the fraud proof system still has some bugs right but otherwise like it's it's basically functioning it is Asia it is a roll-up you just like don't trust the the fraud grouper zero knowledge group system quite enough yet right and so the requirements are Security Council has to have a minimum of eight participants I mean my view is that the active threshold should be at least three quarters but this is like you know one of those things that's being debated like the like 50 the reason why 50 is not enough right is because uh if you have 50 then like basically the majority of discounts someone can just push the outcome whatever way it wants and like there's no value in actually having a proof system right so like we're trying to sort of one super majority and in general like push push this clearly higher on that um and then yeah and like as I mentioned like l2b is doing a good job of a kind of you know like really organizing I mean like making it available you know like which roll up like Roll-Ups have which properties so I personally don't have to like go and yell that out and occasionally that misget make mistakes and occasionally get yelled at people for making mistakes um but yeah and then stage one yeah basically you can have a security Council needs to have some very high thresholds need to include many participants from outside of the uh the organization that's running the thing and it's kind of this intermediate stage that um actually yeah arbitrum is at according to the yes some definitions that we have kind of like clarified a lot over the last month or so and polygon is like almost there or technologically they're there with practically they just have to like flip some switches turn off some uh you know like some censorship but capabilities and like uh yeah override checks yeah right exactly so it's like we're basically you know we have we're already in Asia stage one roll-up world and then stage two basically says like we get rid of this Security Council or the Security Council is allowed to exist but it's only allowed to do things if the code disagrees with itself oh interesting right so it's the actual in case of emergency exactly so you do fully trust the code but if you have like two like two implementations of the code and they disagree each other with each other then like you know that there is a bug and you could have cements in turbine right but uh otherwise like you actually get to you know something that involves fully trusting the code and I think we're going to get to stage two slowly over the next couple of years um the next couple of years so it's yeah is that a check on things being finally safe enough in GA exactly it's like it's a check that where like you're finally safe enough that you're willing to like really throw off throw out the key is something like fully interest the code yeah so it's stage two now that that's Roll-Ups right then there's validiums a validium is a system where you have all you have ZKA you have synarks for validation you have all those properties but the data is off chain the data is somewhere else and the properties that these systems have is that if the people holding the data turn out repeat if the people running the system in general turn out to be evil they cannot steal your money because they cannot prove something a state that did not actually happen because the zika Stark stopped them from but doing that but what they can do is they can freeze everyone's money right because what they can do is they can just make a block and they can stop publishing stuff so they can freeze your money they cannot steal your money so that's this kind of like hybrid model that I'm gonna see if the ZK of Williams provide and I think polygon one or two days ago made this interesting announcement where they said that they want the current polygon chain so they have two chains right they have a polygon ZK uh evm which is a CK rod and then they have the existing polygon where most of the existing applications are on and they made announcement they want to convert that into a validium over time right and as we've seen they do have the uh the technology to do that right so that's exciting and then above of validium you have like you know various kinds of side chains and things that are run by multisigs and all of that stuff and those are definitely much less secure and so I recommend them for you know like a very low valuable applications the only but you know they do exist amazing I think all of this actually ends up setting the stage for some of the scaling related conversations we we're going to have later in this talk um let's kind of zoom out in and go back in time ethereum is nearing actually or maybe just hit 10 years from the initial conception to uh to where we are now it seems uh doesn't seem like 10 years have passed and uh my question kind of to you is uh walk us kind of down memory lane and tell us about the optimism you had back in the day when you kind of thought about this as a project and what you thought the hopes and dreams were the world computer kind of from 10 years ago to where we are now um how did things turn out and and what's kind of some of the reflections you've got yeah I mean I think like 10 years ago we just didn't know a lot about um what ethereum could be useful for um and you know there were definitely some specific applications that I mentioned in the white paper that seemed like a makeup made a lot of sense just tokens exchanging between tokens now um stable coins Dows privacy preserving stuff you know smart contracts for insurance like all of this you know fun stuff and then a lot of people have tried those things and I think over the last 10 years like the thinking has really become a lot less abstract and a lot more concrete like there's a lot more focus on specific categories of applications where we know that there is something interesting and uh like really it's trying to take those and trying to you know remove all of these uh annoyances that make the today that make them not um either not usable or like not actually decentralized or both and like really try to make those applications work in the best way that we can um so and that like just tokens are obviously one of them um you know the whole kind of ens identity reputation ecosystem is another one all of the zero knowledge proof stuff um continuing to fine-tune and optimized hours like hybrid applications that like have some centralized and some decentralized components which I think realistically generally end up using zero knowledge proofs right so like having a much more focused work on getting those kinds of things to a stage where they can actually work where they get like regular people can actually use them like I remember 10 years ago we had a lot of these uh movements and subcultures that were really trying to get cryptocurrency adopted for payments and that there were that was kind of big even in 2013 like I remember visiting this region called the Bitcoin Keats in Berlin it's just uh it's the name that the Asia had like they basically renamed kreuzberg and uh they convinced like about 10 shops there like restaurants and other shops to start accepting Bitcoin for payments and there was this really nice subculture around that I remember yeah yeah but then it died off over time because I think one of the big reasons is uh just the transaction fee has made Bitcoin you know no longer good for payments anymore well the confirmation time the fees and then the abbreviation made him not make it exactly like all you know like all of that stuff and what I think we in this area know that for any of this stuff to be practical it has to be on layer twos um but like there aren't good Layer Two Payment Systems right like I have a um you know a wallet you know you might have a wallet but what if we have coins on different Roll-Ups right like then like one of us has to go fumble around with Hub protocol or some other weird thing and you know we have to figure out this complicated process of bridging stuff and like that's not the way any of this should work right like pointing in line to pay for your coffee yeah like paying people should be a one button experience that you know confirms in you know 12 seconds that's the one thing that we did fix like EAP 1559 and the merge together they massively reduced like the users experienced confirmation times like for me they reduced it from like this weird thing that's between two minutes and an hour to just like reliably being able to get stuff confirmed in 12 seconds right and that's I think super amazing but even still like once you talked about cross roll up then you know you want one click to be able to like do all of the different steps of the operation right and we're not quite at that and it would be really amazing if we do and like I think the nice thing is that like that kind of project is a project that's very hackathon friendly because like it's it really is just combining existing systems that exist right like all you want we need is like a wallet that has where you have an account on multiple Altos and where if I'm on 102 and you're accepting on a different L2 then like the system notices that and the system routes the payments to real one of these um you know payments really like across uh raw relaying protocols instead right and you need to have like some kind of standardized QR Code system so that if uh look basically whatever information the recipient has about like how they want to be paid all of that gets scanned by the sender and then the sender sees not just their address but like where they want to be paid what kind of currencies they want to be paid in and like everything actually yeah you know can binds the different people roots in the ecosystem we can actually resolve that and look this is the sort of thing that's totally implemented it just has to be done and standardized and like put into the wallet set already exist and and on the other side for merchants to actually make them easy for for them to actually accept it without um and it's an interesting thing because 10 years ago or even like seven years ago we could have hypothesized this is how we wanted to be but you didn't have the existing tools but just in the last three years just usdc itself has become so prevalent and so widespread that you can actually have a notion of okay this is a dollar anywhere else but uh but it seems like we're still not there yet in terms of seeing this too to full fruition um so those were the initial thinkings on on kind of what 10 years ago ethereum would have been what kind of is the answer now for what you think ethereum is now on um I mean it's uh I think it's interesting to see kind of you know both ethereum and cryptocurrency in general like it's uh succeeded in some ways and failed it other ways one of the ways in which it succeeded is that like significant portions of the population are already using it in lots of countries right like when I go to Argentina using it or or have it or both okay like when I go to Argentina the uh the rate at which I get noticed on the street is like greater than in San Francisco right and the like lots of people they hold um you know cryptocurrencies there is a lot of places that accept it there's like an entire like actually working economy with it and then um you know in a lot of these other countries like I've been told Nigeria is uh very similar I've been told I mean turkey is very similar and I mean I'll be yeah visiting um actually yeah turkey for a deaf connector later in the year um there's like lots of places where there's lots of like very real need for this kind of stuff but you notice one particular thing which is that when you go there and you see people accepting um you know crypto they take it through binance right like look people just have binance wallets and there's a reason for this right one is that binance has uh minimum zero fees and uh binance accounts are instant right like they just practically solve ux issues that are like prohibitive for a lot of people right and so I remember one like my last experience is using ethereum to pay someone for food at a coffee shop or a prefer coffee Asia which for me means green tea at a coffee shop in uh Buenos Aires and I made a point of using my like proper ethereum wallet and um you know he had a binance account and my experience was that uh like I said the transaction and then it took a couple of minutes for it to confirm uh because even though by this time eap1559 existed the particular wallet that I used had not yet upgraded to support the ab1559 and now it has right so but but in the confirmation took a couple of minutes and then the yeah the other thing was that uh the the fee was like I think somewhere between one to four dollars I forget the exact amounts but it was like how much was the T um well fortunately I was well I was paying for like a group of friends and so I think I yeah oh I think like what actually happened is that we were supposed to pay like somewhere around 15 but then at what when the payments was uh like not working I sent another payments from a different wallet just in case and then eventually both both payments went through and I'm like okay the guy deserves 100 tip that's fine uh but the now did yeah basically you know so the the fees were like I think maybe a quarter of the total uh payments which is like still you know kind of prohibitive right so like I totally understand these people's desire to use uh to use finance and like I'm appreciative of um you know but nobody else and these other wallets for just making crypto available to new people in some form but yeah but at the same time like you know we yeah the space is about decentralization and we have to move forward and we have to make like you know actually decentralized ways of participating in this uh ecosystem usable for people and that's a look to do that we have to you know like actually solve these problems right and there's been a lot of tech work but there has the next step is to like actually do this last mile of um you know like make making l2s a usable making um l2s a defaults for people making payments on all two work making payments across all to his work making ens on L2 with actual Merkel Branch verification the defaults um you know making just all of these different pieces actually yeah work together right absolutely and I think one of the things that I had questions on was actually what's missing here so we'll kind of cover that too but I think one one point that uh you made is kind of how do we actually contrast convenience with decentralization before we go into that I want to I'm actually curious to hear what does decentralization mean to you and and why you why do you think it's important um yeah and I think like basically Building Systems where you can't get rug pulled right like that's kind of and the thing that you just talked about for all those countries like the one common pattern in all three of these places is that trust in the government yeah the currencies is not high yeah I mean there's like many kinds of rug following right you know your currency can get devalued by a 3X um you could get your PayPal accounts could get locked in your money Frozen for 180 days without interest um you know as you could um you know get a deep platformed off Twitter and have no recourse I mean you um you know you could have your email account locked and like basically have no way to get it no way to get it back unless you're like a super privileged person who knows someone who's one hop away from a top level um you know employee at one of these companies like this is actually another one of those weird things like people often I think like make this argument that like oh centralized stuff like has good accounts recovery and is good in practice if you screw up but like it's surprising to what extent that's not true right like I've you know like personally had to go and uh you know like use like you know my contacts and help unlock people's accounts that these weird you know Silicon Valley companies and like it's uh like okay you know it's fine like a few you know thousand people around the world have you know at that level of privilege but like how you know what about everyone else right and that like like I honestly believe that you know like social recovery as I've been chilling for the last five years is like eight better and more reliable form of recovery than like anything that these centralized people offer right and like we but the problem is like you know we actually have to build it and go make it available for people and so that's uh one of these things that's okay so one common uh point that usually comes up when and when at least I'm having some of these conversations like well most people are not getting banned in the platform that only applies to a very small chunk of the population um how do you kind of contrast that as an argument and why is that still not a a good defense for people saying nothing to be decentralized yeah I mean I think one of the things is that like there's definitely like like some communities where that happens very rarely and then there's other communities where that sort of stuff just happens all the time and it's just you know a part of uh I mean if you're in crypto as a company and you're using a platform specifically like MailChimp for emails you know you just get insta the platform and you have another option and that's a very yeah total exact way that sort of stuff um you know I think happens happens to me when you know I think more than once this year it's uh it's totally a thing it's uh and then the other thing is just uh you know even if you personally are not the one getting targeted like just like a lot of the time like you and the values that you care about are you know being protected by other people who are being who are very vulnerable to this sort of thing um so yeah I think I mean like having incredibly neutral infrastructure that can't be like easily I mean or turned against particular people or or particular groups of people is just really important and that applies to non-financial Applications exactly it applies to both you know non-financial applications and financial obligations it it applies across the entire world I think you know even more than it applies to wealthy countries but I think it applies to some extent in uh wealthy countries too um so you talked about social recovery and uh and that you've been talking about every five years well it's 2023 why why haven't we seen that in uh in masses oh so for social recovery while it's in particular there's a lot of ux challenges to getting them properly rolled out right and this is like very subtle right so first the reason why erc4337 needs to exist right basically you get a con abstraction for uh for a pizza so the the type of wallet that most people use today it's called an eoa an externally owned account it's a wallet that is controlled by one private key right so you have one private key one uh mineral 32 uh like uh byte number and Topping your 12 secret words exactly right and this is like one thing one number that if you lose it your accounts goes by by if someone else sees it then they grab your assets and your assets go by buy right and it's like actually not very good security and then you know you keep like I think people for the last five years have been you know like the dog and the meme like basically say like you know men mentioning Hardware wallets and you know saying this is fine but then we hear scandals involving Hardware wallets once every couple of years and like and unanimously everybody's affected with a single point of failure yeah exactly and uh like I basically think you know the only sensible future that makes sense especially when we're talking about something as serious as holding someone's identity in their life savings is some kind of multi-stick solution that that involves stuff that's not just controlled by you right like you know like I personally you know like have most of my money in a multi-sig wallet and I would uh like I would not trust it any other way right like I would literally not trust Asus or where I had all of the keys this is a five dollar wrench attack yeah exactly it's just like all kinds of attacks right and uh the but the okay so the problem with these uh EO uh with uh Smart Control ball sorry I said an eoa is just something that you can use by yourself right if you want to have multiple Keys then you need to have a smart contract to actually Implement those rules now if you have a smart contract implementing those rules then your funds have to be stored in a smart contract but then there's a problem who pays for gas in ethereum everything the with the occurrence ethereum rules a transaction has to start from an eoa and that eoa has to pay gas therefore if you use a Smart contract wallet you need to have your money in your smart culture board you also need to have some amount of money in your eoa to be able to be the guest you have to have logic for constantly refreshing that eoa you have to pay an extra 21 000 gas to um verify the part of the transaction that just is going into the eoa and then separately pay for the logic of verifying the smart contract over here right it just like gets very complicated you need like all this extra weird stuff happening and erc4337 is like trying to basically streamline all of that reduce the gas costs of that as much as possible and make the experience of having a smart contract wallet and what is basically the same as the experience of a of an eoa and like theoretically it works but so there is this thing called ERC 12 uh 1271 right basically a lot of applications that like defy apps a lot of other kinds of apps they depend on users being able to make signatures right and uh be so you sign not just transactions you also sign messages off chain right and citing messages off chain is often valuable um like a lot like Cal swap uses it lots of applications use it but the problem is that just the kind of signing that they use is eoa only right and what EAP 1271 does is it defines a way for smart contract wallets to be able to sign not just like user operations but also or so the the word for again of the the equivalent of transactions but also off-chain messages the problem is lots of dapps don't support ERC 1271 right like actually yeah like I don't know my opinion like a lot of the lots and lots of adapts are just doing a terrible job of being standards compliant it's like lots of dapps are metamaskal in way like de facto you know you try to use them from inside of Brave or the status world or anything else they just break like come on guys like shame right the lots of the apps don't support erac 1271 more shame right some adapts even use like checking that the code of an account is empty so checking the account is an eoa as a like a proof that like this is this is something that's allowed to use it right triple shape you know this like there's just so much stuff that you know within the application ecosystem that is just like totally uh you know not realizing like what the smart contract reality is going to be in this this is one of the reasons why like I've told a lot of other people that the remaining challenges are not technical challenges they're social coordination challenges right they're like zero to which proofs exist smart contract wallets exist formal verification exists right like zkevms exist the main challenge at this point is just like getting all of the pieces fit together in ways so that it actually makes sense for people and it's actually usable by people's so it's not specifically communicating that it's more about actually in this place standard compliance at least so that standards compliance um you know I think you know we need more people somehow you know taking all like the in the butts like all of these uh developers of applications that like don't are not even trying to be standards compliant we uh oh that's uh another hackathon project an equivalent for l2beat but like a web names and shames applications that are not standards can fly it um [Music] yeah well one other kind of question I have is well it seems like we're obviously moving to multi-chain world uh right how do you make this more consistent now when people have well anywhere from multiple wallets to the same address on multiple chains like what's kind of missing or what are the complications there and what are some potential solutions for this right so this is the these are the ideas that I was thinking about when I wrote that post on the three transitions a couple of weeks ago right basically that like it's obvious to everyone that in order to have like these affordable transaction fees we have to make things work on layer twos right it's obvious to I think it's uh increasingly everyone that EOS are not acceptable and you know we need to have Smart contract wallets if we want to have wallet security especially for not super technical users right um who here would trust their Grandma to safely hold three million dollars in a DOA I'm gonna point out that zero hands have been raised for the video yeah okay right um cohere still uses an EOS the thumb right for me fortunately they always hold less than three percent of my money but you know I want to improve on that too um by the way this is another thing right even if you need to like have a like the Coldwell with hot wallet separation is like really like useful right like the money that you that you need to use like fine stick it in any whatever is convenient the money that is your life savings stick it in a safe like a godosa safe wallet right a cohero uses uh you know to save there's a lot of hands that's great perfect this is good um um who here uses a godosa safe wallet that has more than three uh participants in it and that has a threshold of at least three this is good right good yeah see so like this see this is like very much improved compared to a few years ago right so like this is amazing we're making progress right like you know like to me I think like fees and safety are roughly equally important because if you just think about like what is the total amount of money that people have lost if he's being way too high it's like over a billion dollars and then if you look at the amount of money that people have lost to all kinds of hacks it's like also over a billion dollars right so significantly more right exactly so it's uh but both of yeah like both of these things are a big deal right and it's uh I think really yeah really important to solve both of them right but the challenge is like if you try to do both together right so there's this concept called you know a counterfeitual address right so when you receive your eth for the first time but he remembers when they received eth for the first time right but when you received eth for the first time you received it to an e in in ethereum address you were able to get your money into an ethereum address without having already registered that ethereum address on chain right why well because to register an Azure on chain you needed to have already sent a transaction which already paid required paying transaction fees which required already having if right so the first if you receive has to go into an address that is generated off chain without some kind of on-chain registration process right get that okay the so then this is very easy for Eos right because for in any way the address is just a hash of the public key now in a layer 2 world you have many uh many of these like Azure says you have an Azure s on every yeah one of these l2s right so who here has um used polygon zkevm so far okay um some of you have probably received weird airdrop tokens on polygon zkvm without even having access to system right now you are able to retrieve those tokens later if you want to why because the address is the same on every chain and so we can use those same keys so you can go and access them later even if you have not interacted with polygon before now here is a challenge with social recovery wallets let's say you have a social recovery wallet and which are not EOS and in this which are not eoas right which are not Airways they have to be smart contracts and then what says you initialize your social recovery wallet on ethereum mainnet and you also initialize it on zksync right then what happens let's say months go by years go by at some point you lose your key you have to reset your key okay fine you reset it on Main net you reset it on ZK sync now then you realize oh wait you received Asia really a really huge payments but someone sent it to uh to you on optimism you go and see can you access it oh wait you have not yet initialized your account on optimism and you can initialize your account with create two because of the address but oh wait the address depends on the initial key and not the current key and so you don't have the initial key anymore and so you're screwed right so the problem is what basically these kinds of issues or they're intersectional right they only appear when you have scaling and you have someone contract wallets at the same time now in my post like even both of my last osteopors I talk a lot about architectures that can try to solve this problem architectures they can try to let you have your funds across many different l2s without but at the same time like make it practical for upgrading to happen make it practical for key changes to happen and still like solve for this counterfeiture address problem but it's like still you know it requires everybody to opt in exactly this this stuff requires people to actually build the technology right and then if we talk about privacy like when I ask people would you be comfortable um holding most of your wealth on a multi-sig where your keys are owned by your friends right the or family members look when asked so far the biggest ants the answer for why not has a has been privacy right it's like okay maybe you trust your mom not to you know go and go and discover the four other people that you put your uh that you put on your multi-sig and manage to find them without tipping you off and work with them to steal your money but you know do you necessarily trust your mom with um or do you necessarily want your mom to be able to Snoop on all your transactions right like that's some more like that's like a type of trust for your family members that a lot of people don't have right um so these uh it will be it turns out that there are ways to use cryptography to do social recovery in such a way that your mom is guarding your account but your mom does not have to see what all of your addresses are right and like this is uh this is is doable it requires fancy or cryptography but you know it's uh it's a sewage it has to be able that's it right and this is like again it's like intersectional right like this is a an issue that only comes up if you care about having privacy and you care about having social recovery at the same time right and so we have to like really think about all of these things as an ecosystem and think about these things holistically which is why like I think we what we need is not like like isolated teams working on individual parts of the problem is not enough right we need like much higher amounts of coordination between different layers of the ecosystem to like really try to solve all these problems and work together and like really make them work in you know like an actually existing community and she was gonna do a follow-up but I I think we should uh we should change topics I want to talk about some other things that are that have been happening that are not related to scaling um so listen I think one that everybody who applied here we kind of asked uh you a question on what is it that you want to see and why are you excited about this space and a lot of everybody filled out that answer I read through all of them and now there's a really interesting pattern because everybody who was not coming here from the hackathon side uh really kind of wanted to see and be at this event because they wanted to learn what they can use blockchains for and what are the applications and this is an interesting theme because for the last six years we've constantly been talking about these things and we've kind of tell people about this what you can do as a developer all the financial and interesting applications whether it's Dallas nfts who will have you all those things are things that we see but they don't apply to everybody day to day and and one kind of interesting thing that we noticed uh as as like a side effect was that effectively the common theme in all those communities that we've seen whether it's Dows different nft communities youth Global hackathons is that they are effectively bringing a small group of people together that share a certain interest and uh and effectively using web3 and cryptocurrencies to come together and uh and that is an application in my definition I'm not sure if you agree that Community forms around these interest groups and uh that kind of was like oh this is interesting as an observation and then it just occurred to me that you also went away tested this Theory live with with zuzulu um so for those of you who don't know what this is I'd love for you to tell people about what the experiment was and what the initial goals were and how did things turn out yeah so like basically Zuzu was this uh social experiment in trying to like basically see you like what is a kind of like practical actually implementable version of this whole you know crypto city is like you know a network stage you know coordination kind of concept of actually is right over trying to like bring people together in physical space so what is in our state for for the audience right well I mean I think it's all it's almost better to not answer that question because lots of people have different uh you have like a polarizing yeah like it's uh like so when well I think like what the cluster of ideas is is basically this cluster of like can we take existing online communities and bring people together in physical space and create um you know online community or offline communities that are um you know able to be in physical space um you know benefit uh from like just being in environment where people can you know interact with other people who have similar interests and values benefit from some a kind of network effects and ability to collectively organize around like specific things that that Community cares about about collectively but that you know like existing government so I don't even think to provide because it's you know because it's a niche interest right so so it has to be tied into potentially having different rules and laws around how govern yeah yeah or like even like simple like things like if you have a community that cares about um you know healthy food like you try really hard to say and a video collectively work to make healthy food very available and with you know like lots of varieties and a very small radius right if um you know we care about uh like privacy then like actually go and uh like basically make it a norm in the community that like privacy preserving technology is the defaults and like sorry if we catch you using Google Docs three times you're kicked out forever um and uh um you know like really Asia kind of create the network effects to kind of push for the uh the technology and the knowledge around the uh that the Technologies are going to work inside the community right and so the idea here was to basically Asia take uh 200 people bring them into Montenegro and uh basically it's a combination of the ethereum community some longevity researchers people who are just enthusiastic about the concept of communities and governance in general and stay for two months and like basically just you know like be a pop-up city right so the goal of the like the idea here is like people have met like 200 people person events have happened before right but they're called conferences conferences only last a week uh things lasting two months or even years have existed before they're called hacker houses but hacker houses only have college people right but then you know so but something with 200 people and the last two months like that's like a step in a year what kind of fundament like a different direction right and like obviously universities exist in cities and countries exist but like this is like taking Creed put taking something new and like putting it up putting it into that level right and like be it's uh a significant step up enough that like you actually learn things that you would not have learned from smaller formats but it's still like small enough that it's practical and manageable right in some milk we actually did this experiment and there were a lot of these different interesting sub-components to it so uh there was this very strong Health culture there were maybe worked with one of the restaurants and we basically yeah got them to offer this uh healthy like you know vegan breakfast menu that was inspired by the Brian Johnson menu who is this uh you've seen them on news by he's the guy who spends two million a year to keep his health and right like one of these Amino works very deep um you know gurus who basically reorganize this his life around being healthy and like one of the experiments here is like can we create a version of you know him and hezbollice and his ideas that don't require you to spend huge amounts of money and sync your entire life into it right and like basically you know creative you know this uh you know vegan uh breakfast buffet that was inspired by yeah like or basically that was as much of his menu as we could practically Implement on a budget of 15 a day that was compatible with what could be realistic with ships to Montenegro and like it works pretty well when people actually liked it right and then there were other things like there was a lot of hiking and running happening there were these uh you know daily cold plunges that a bunch of people participated in there's uh and like that side of the culture like actually worked and then on the crypto side there was this uh app that God developed it was called a zoo pass um I can actually uh like show it right now um and just let the camera zoom in yeah the walls has loaded up what it says yeah so just switching to a different profile on my graphene OS here um then Okay click zoo pass and then it loads and hopefully then the internet here works so this is a QR code this QR code contains a0 know which proof so like this is literally a snark that proves that I am a member of the Zuzu resident group without revealing which of the members I am right so one of the use cases of this that you can think about are like if you think of gov Tech right like governments are thinking like a lot about how to digitize and one of the challenges with this is about the with this whole digitization process is like it basically be the way that it ends up being developed by default it ends up being like a total disaster in terms of privacy at the same time right like you know you have cbdc's and this like Desire by you know like some basically internet you know International leads to try to push people into a casual Society somehow it always boils down to seeing your face and having a camera recognize you know you have your cameras everywhere you know basically you know move to this cashless approach that just completely removes a type of privacy that has been a basic part of human civilization for thousands of years right if movies you know if you look at like all of these new uses of uh you know needing digital QR code stuck on you know like access things in person and uh there's just like huge amounts of tracking that become enabled by that right and like forms of privacy that have existed for thousands of years are just becoming gone within a decade right and what you can do with this kind of technology is you can give people the kind of Access Control guarantee like guarantees that people are looking for right so like we use this QR code for example just to like date access to some of the events that were happening especially when there were just like too many people and lots of people coming in coming in from the outside and there were limited seats and we did this without like by using these QR codes and so that ended up not actually compromising people's privacy right there are also use cases of this online right so you can users upass to log into things and so there was a system called Zoo poll where you can log in with zoo pass and so you can proof the system that you are as a result of Resident without without proving which resident you are and you could go vote on things right this was like an actual you know security digital voting system that preserved people's identities most voting people preserve the privacy of people's identities and at the same time preserve the property that you know you can track who it is well no you can't strike who it is you can track the facts that each residents only voted once and you can track that the Kremlin did not vote 58 424 times why are the false 140 percent in favor exactly right yeah so I've been yeah unfortunately yeah you know the 146 percents are not welcome in these polls and so like you know basically we use the result as like a testing ground for this kind of technology and like it actually worked right like there were huge amount of view of user experience hiccups but like over the course of a month of like acts of usage within a community we managed to actually solve all of those hiccups made the user experience much more seamless the zero knowledge proving became like five times faster that you look everything became much better and it turned into this technology that like now realistically can be applied in like all kinds of other events and conferences right so like I I absolutely think that like for future each Global events like you know if you need access control you can like literally you know use like you know Zupas QR code Tech instead of uh you know requiring a absolutely things that's much more though it reveals much more about your identity right like you can and then there's this concept called uh within zupol called um stamps um so um I can show this again right so uh if you scroll down you see there's a bunch of these stamps and I can click to uh click on these and uh there's one thing called team cat and see there's a stamp of verifying that I'm on teamcad and like stamps are basically like pokes except the difference is that you can prove that you have a stamp where you can prove like any arbitrary function over those stamps without revealing which specific stamps you have right or or even without revealing who you are right so like if you want to make your own local party that's like only um you know accessible to people from teamcat or you know you're trying to like any sort of Access Control exactly you're you know you want to have your online Forum where um you know only people who um you know like actual Asia participated in um you know events of uh you know having to do with azusulu history um can but it can participate in because uh you know you know you don't want people from uh from the Rival um I don't know what the dog dog lovers what's what's a good what's a good name for a rival tribe um uh I don't know Solana Village whatever you don't want people from Solana Village sneaking in then like you know you can do access control at the same time keep the thing private right so I think the point is that like you can actually try all of these things inside of a kind of community that's like deeply dedicated to particular values and like you can actually you know reinforce the values and reinforce the technology a lot of time like at the same time and just uh you know make a a huge amount of progress and at the same time like the the other thing that I wanted to experiment on is just like just of this facts that like where the network effect is so I just like what physical if a location the network effect is like that's not something that we need to kind of surrender to as a fact of life like that's something that we can choose right like if you know like all of these yeah like all of the stuff is happening in New York but as it turns out you know New York is part of the United States and the United States has an immigration policy that's not accessible to a huge number of people then like well guess what we can like go choose as a community and like we can go make a hub somewhere else and we did that all throughout covet yeah and like I think that's something that like really yeah is good for empowering communities and especially good for empowering you know communities that are Global right and likes that kind of coordination is something that I think itself was a part of the experiment and like it's something that you know I hope that we start seeing more versions of uh you know happening in in the future so you know one experiments of many but generally yeah I'm in Louisiana I hope that we can do you know more cool experience things I mean you know scale this kind of this sort of stuff off and make it you know more valuable in the future absolutely and I think with just how connected everybody is and how we're making it seamless to transact to across borders yeah pop-up cities are going to be a pretty big Norm so uh the last question when I asked before uh we kind of end this is we kind of talked about the reflecting in the last 10 years but in terms of kind of what the next 10 years look like what kind of do you think are some active themes or things you want to see from the culture of this ethereum ecosystem embodies yeah I think one of the import things is I think it's important to just like take culture and values more seriously right um the so one of the stories that I think about is if you think about the the history of Ubuntu like the 1X distribution over the last 20 years right like one other thing like basically the theory there was that you know he had winix and Linux was like this toy that uh well it was very deep and very valuable Tech but it from the outside point of view it was this toy that basically appealed to computer geeks right but then people tried to create Ubuntu and the theory of Ubuntu is okay we're gonna be pragmatic and we're going to make some compromises and but at the same time the upside of this is that will make something that's usable by average people and you know we're gonna try to like push all of these yeah you know open like stuff into the background and just make it be an operating system and then we're going to make the best desktop and we're gonna like actually beat like you know Windows and Mac this ended up not happening and as a result so you know basically they had you know neither the values nor the mouse adoption right and I think there's parts of the crypto space stuff like you went back to being more CLI default because that's when equal to conveniencing took the GUI out right and like I often worry that um you know within the crypto space I mean we end up falling into a similar trap right it's like we mainstream crypto but then crypto was done all done inside of centralized exchanges we mainstream nfts but then nfts are all being run inside of centralized platforms or the Rugby's you know really high like you know reference to the stores and like uh you know there's not that much actual openness happening and uh [Music] yeah like this is I mean like that's not the kind of crypto world that like I actually want to see right and like the kind of crypto world that makes sense is one where you know like we actually take decentralization seriously we take seriously the idea that we're trying to build systems where you can't get rugfold which takes seriously the idea that we're trying to build systems where if the original operators disappear the code is open source like and like you know not even shared Source open source and uh where it can actually be freely copied by other people where those and those other people can go and they can start maintaining a system from there and they can pick up the slack right and so you as a user like even if the original operators of the system disappear you as a user are still fine right and you as a user can still continue uh we're take you know it takes seriously there's the facts that we want to build systems where people do actually uh you know have privacy and this inevitable transition to digitization that Society is going through does not at the same time become a transition where we basically surrender you know all of our rights and control to a very small number of centralized organizations um you know take seriously yeah the fact that we're trying to build any ecosystem that values collaboration and openness that and that values people working together with each other and building tools that work together instead of being building Empires to try to conquer everything and end up standing apart and fighting right and I think like keeping this whole Spirit Alive is something that's like very important for the space to have meaning but I think it's also very important for the space to be successful right like if we don't have you know collaboration and standardization for the three transitions that I talked about then like it's not going to happen and we're going to have like 14 incompatible standards right if we uh you know don't have collaboration on um you know getting privacy systems adopted and figuring out like you know what version of that can be legitimized I mean including by yeah exchanges that have regulatory concerns then um you know we're going to have a system where that technology is going to be much less meaningful right if we have a system where like all you know we keep working on a small number of applications but we don't actually uh like nothing ever actually gets that far because we never actually beat the network effect barrier then like we're not actually successful right and so you know we need to like actually work on making all of those things happen I think that's a wonderful note to end this on which I like thank you so much for for being here today