Hey everybody, and welcome back to another episode of JavaScript Jabber. This week
on our panel, we have Steve Edwards. Hello from one of my woman
Raindy Portland called in Raindy Portland. Actually, I'm Charles Maxwood from top End
Dev. So we've got a special guest this week. It's Nick. Is
it Kalayani? That's right? Nick? Do you want to just introduce yourself,
let everybody know who you are and why you're famous. I wouldn't call
myself famous, but hi, I'm Nick Karaliani and I'm coming in from Mountain
View, California, Silicon Valley. I'm the founder and CEO of a company
called Decentology, and what we are doing is we are building something called the
Hyperverse. This is a platform for Web two developers to start building on Web
three. We want to make it super easy for that to happen. And
what we've done is taken the model that JavaScript developers everywhere know NPM, so
NPM installed modules. We are extending that same capability to Web three and blockchains,
so you can easily build applications without having to learn any new languages or
anything. You stick the JavaScript HDM out and build things out. So that's
what I'd like to talk about today, about building applications and about blockchain and
Web three in geno. All right, so there were about eight buzzwords in
there, just with the blockchain and everything else. I'm a little curious because
I've heard a number of things about Web three and I'm not exactly sure.
Like when I try and explain it to people, I'm like, this is
what I kind of understand, but I don't feel like I explain it well
because I don't completely understand it. So like, what is web three?
What's not Web three? You know, regarding the stuff that's out there,
Like, how do we clarify this so people go, oh, that's what
it is, and that's how it relates to what I do you know using
current web technology. Yeah, that's a really good question. So I think
of Web three as two parts. The first part is the technology and the
second part is the culture. So let's talk about the technology first. So
it's basically any technology or set of technologies that are decentralized. And I want
to be clear here that there's distinction between distributed and decentralized. So decentralized literally
means that there isn't a single point or single server or single control authority.
So decentralized systems can be blockchains, they can be storage, they can be
other protocols. Also, for example, there might be an identity protocol that
doesn't rely on blockchains or storage, or might rely on both, you know.
So the idea is more about not having a central control point or a
central entity that controls it. And it also translates to infrastructure where there isn't
a central point where all the infrastructure is. So that's the technology aspect of
it, and the canonical example of decentralized technology is blockchain. The more technical
term for it is distributed ledger technology or DLT, but we commonly know it
as blockchain, and we can purse that out a bit more. So that's
one aspect of Web three, which is the technology, but it's also a
cultural thing. Web three is about not having sort of state actors or centralized
companies, etc. On your data or dictate how decisions are made. It's
also sort of a culture where people are starting to think more about economic equity
throughout the world, where people who are unbanked might have access to financial tools
and financial resources, etc. So it's both the combination of the technology and
the culture and together. The umbrella catch all term for it is web three.
I gotcha. And I think we see a lot of this when people
start talking about kind of the stranglehold that maybe Facebook or some of these other
bigger companies Google have over the flow of information. Right, So a lot
of people get their news off of social sites like Facebook, or the majority
of the world uses Google as their search engine. And so it's like,
well, if Google isn't always a good actor, and I'm not going to
get into that. I don't think that's necessarily I don't want to start a
pissing match, I guess, is what I'm saying. But then if it's
centralized, then it's like, look, then anybody who ought to be a
player can be a player, right, and we don't have to worry about
whether or not Google or anybody else is playing nicely now or in the future
exactly. You know. One of the main tenets of web three technologies in
general is about the ability for you to be in control of your data,
your privacy, and not essentially be marketed be a marketing you know how they
say, like, if you're not paying for it, then you are the
product, right, and so it's that getting away from that and trying to
build a world where you, as an individual have control over your own data
and your own ability to use services without revealing things about yourself that you may
not want revealed. Yeah, I see that as a lot of the reasons
why things like VPNs are starting to become much more in vogue, right,
is because it's not only like the centralized endpoints, but even the centralized internet
providers and things like that kind of make people nervous. Right, It's like,
I don't I don't know who can see it along the line, I
don't know who else is on this wife by I don't so by by opening
things up, it just changes the game a little bit. I think VPNs
are great, but you have to keep in mind that they hide one aspect
of your total digital experience, Right. But there's more the moment you get
into the point where you are unable to give fake information anymore, perhaps it's
a credit card or something like that, that that changes everything at that point.
Right, So it is it about kind of this inherent distrust or is
it about more than that? Is it because you mentioned like owning your own
data? So is it about control? Is it about. I mean,
what what's the overarching concern that people have? Yeah, that's you know,
you use the good phrase, they're distressed. So decentralized technology, blockchain especially
is about trustlessness. You don't need to trust anybody or anything because the data
is immutable and you can trust that the data has been hasn't been tempered with
or manipulated with, etc. I think, you know, you have to
think about Web three when you get down to the bottom layer here. It's
yes, privacy is a concern. Yes, the right to own your data
is a concern. But I don't think we are there quite yet in terms
of being able to have these systems built at scale where we can assure privacy,
where we can assure the ability for people to control data. What we
have started with right now is the very fundamental starting to build the sort of
the building blocks of this technology and experimenting with trustlessness. That's what we are
focused on right now is can the technology be built and deployed in such a
way that the cryptographic proofs that exists, et cetera are adequate to ensure that
any data that you have stored can trustlessness need trustlessness need be verified to be
unmodified or untampered with. So that's really the fundamental level we are working with
right now, and it's going up from there as applications scale up. So
I kind of want to just make sure that Steve or AJ don't have other
things that they want to add to this before we start talking about like how
it's actually how it actually comes together, because I think sort of these fundamental
cultural ideas are important to what Web three is, and if we don't understand
those, then we we don't really understand what we're trying to build. So
I know, you know, as I was listening to you, I'm not
you know, I haven't really studied the blockchain and the little pieces of the
cotton technology that are involved in Web three. But I'm just thinking of times
in the past where I've heard podcasts or red blog post or any other information
out there about people attempting to decentralize the web. You know, there's always
some new not assarily paradigm, but you know, network as somebody's working on
or some other way that people are going to quote unquote decentralize the web and
help get away from all these walled gardens that we find ourselves dealing with,
so I'll have to say that I'll believe it when I see it. I
tend to be pretty skeptical of things like this, so I'm curious to see
how it works and maybe try to understand a little better. But when something
I actually see something functioning, then I'll believe it. I guess, yeah,
you know. I think you have reason to be skeptical because the technology
is not yet available at scale. And while the technology works, the problem
is that we haven't done as a community at large. We haven't done a
good job with a user experience, which is why most people haven't experienced it
the way in a way that they can understand it and the way they can
believe it and they can really take advantage of the technology. I'm a pragmatist.
I don't believe that decentralized technologies are going to replace everything. I think
they are sort of an evolution of where we are, and there are a
very specific set of problems and challenges that they are a great solution for.
But they aren't a solution for everything, and we may or may not evolve
the technology to a point where it is fast enough and scalable enough where it
can potentially replace what we have today, which works very well, but it
has its problems, Like all technologies come with some set of problems, and
so I'm very optimistic though that for the types of problems that Web three is
designed to solve, it is already showing a lot of promise for working very
well. So you express like, you know, the ability to sort of
replace Web two. I don't think that's necessarily really going to happen, but
there is a specific set of people or entities that could benefit from having a
web presence that cannot be shut down by state authorities for example, or dictator
or you know, bad regimes. So decentralized storage like IPFS, which is
an overblown acronym for Interplanetary File system, it's just a decentralized storage system.
There's also one called sky net, and this is called Those are some of
the popular ones. They make it possible for you to essentially have a website
just like you would on Web two, except that you cannot shut it down
because it is basically decentralized on so many different nodes that you can shut one
down, but there's many others still available. So for us who live in
the United States, for example, where we have freedoms, etc. It's
very easy to be complacent about the fact that, oh, yeah, you
know, you have your ISP and you pay them money and you have your
website and they won't mess with it. But in other places it's really hard
to have that kind of capability and hard to get a message out and the
truth about what's really happening without censorship, et cetera. And those are some
important use cases that's we need to provide for. You know, one of
the I guess one of the analogies that comes to mind takes me back to
days of Napster and then Whinmire and some of the other music downloading things,
back when that first coming in, where you had different copies of file all
over the place and you sort of download pieces. In general, is your
own MP three file, which is a time back. Is that similar to
what we're talking about with web three or is that just the same idea just
with totally different implementation. I mean, like yeah, something like that.
Yeah, yeah, there's similarities, but there's also differences. What those protocols
did was essentially allowed streaming from multiple notes simultaneously to address the bandwidth available with
multiple notes, especially with home users who don't have a lot of upstream bandwidth,
right, So by doing that in parallel where you get chunks of data
from many different locations at the same time, it addresses that. So it
was designed to address both the storage problem and also the bandwidth problem. But
decentralization is about a slightly different kind of focus. It's about making sure that
this availability off a certain asset, whether it's media or text or whatever,
and you cannot shut it down. So while the while reading you can take
advantage the protocol might take advantage of multiple nodes being available. The most important
thing is availability and also the ability for the network nodes to validate that data
has not been tempered with. On Mapster, for example, you couldn't tell
if a file named a certain thing actually contained some malicious payload, right,
There's no way for you to tell that. But in decentralized networks, because
of the cryptographic underpinnings of it, you can cryptographically verify that nothing has been
tempered with. That is I think a very very important aspect of the protocols.
So I can you'll hear me. Okay, so I've missed part of
this discussion, but I'm going to put in there because of what's happened with
open c Okay, yeah, given that you actually know a key, which
no one does, then you can verify that something came from a particular key.
However, it's what's happened with open Sea. People go steal other people's
work, they sign it with their key, they collect the money, and
they're selling hashes of pictures that they didn't make, they didn't produce, they
don't own, and there's no legal rescourse for it because they technically didn't actually
sell anything that is copywritten, because they sold a hash which was not the
picture. So I and also we pretend that IPFS just exists out in the
ether among the Interplanetary System network, but it turns out that there's only one
planet with internet. And it also turns out that those hard drives have to
exist somewhere. And if you're not the if you're not paying, then you're
the product. So who are these people that are storing all this data?
What reliability guarantees would I possibly hope to have, and why are they incentivized
to host it? Yeah, so there's quite a few questions, is there.
So let's break it down. We'll start with the open sea issue.
So open c is, first of all, a centralized marketplace. It's not
a decentralized marketplace, and therefore it comes with all the problems that centralized marketplaces
have. In general, it is subject to scammers, It is subject to
all kinds of malicious things. It does not change the fact that the actual
assets on chain, they are subject to the same cryptographic integrity as anywhere else.
Yeah, but what I'm saying is I can upload a virus to IPFS
and you could verify its cryptographic integrity. That doesn't make it not a virus.
Sure, and if I intended to download a virus, then that would
be great. But if I didn't, I will want to make sure that
I knew who the person or the persons were and could verify the on chain
reputation before I downloaded that. So then I agree that's conflating two issues.
Okay, fair, fair, Yeah, I want to derail us back to
the topic at hand, though, because this is like verifying files and things
like that, and when we're talking about is kind of this decentralized web apparatus
that we're going to build apps on. Right, So my question is is
you know you said this is a good thing for some use cases, but
not others. Right, And so I'm curious, like where because we kind
of went to the napster example, you know, and BitTorrent things like that,
but that's not really what we're talking about. So what is a good
use case for this? Like where are we looking at and going, all
right, this makes a lot of sense for Web three and what we're offering
here. Sure, there's quite a few different applications. There's some in the
domain of DeFi decentralized finance, but I think I'd like to use one in
the domain of NFTs non fungible tokens because it's something that most people have heard
about. They may not actually understand it, but it's a good one.
So let's say that you have a digital asset that's actually valuable. And I
don't want to get into what's valuable and what's not, but let's assume that
there is a digital asset that's value like the podcast episode, a podcast episode
fantastic, it's like the the premiere one or some amazing thing, and it
is available as a digital asset and it is extremely valuable. Let's say that
it's a million dollars. Many people want to claim ownership of it and have
like a stake in it, but they can't. So one of the ways
in which you can orchestrate a smart contract with that digital asset is to have
fractional ownership, so multiple people can have a piece of that on chain cryptographically
verified through their private keys. And you could say that, well, I
can just do that by having a webque application with maybe a DocuSign or something
like that, where everyone has signed it, and that's great. Now the
problem there is transfer of ownership and also who controls that particular asset. So
in the case of this fractional ownership, what you could do is set up
a smart contract and you say something like if sixty percent of people vote a
certain way, then the asset will be transferred. Otherwise we'll hold on to
it. As a very simple decison point there, individually, each of those
fractions and maybe you know it's a million dollars and you've made it into a
thousand fractions, each of those could independently sell their stake anytime they wanted to
without consulting the others. It doesn't matter. It's just transferring the ownership of
their asset over. So that's a very simple use case, we're on chain
without relying on any external entities, without having any kind of storage. It
just works because of the cryptographic integrity that smart contracts allow you to have.
So that's one thing. Of course, the canonical example is cryptocurrency, but
I know that that could get political and get into like what's the event of
fiat et cetera. But I think fractional ownership of digital assets is a pretty
good, pretty good example. Other simpler examples are where let's say that there's
a band and they issue an NFT, and that NFT is simply nothing more
than support for the band. But also if you happen to shoe up at
their concert or whatever, just by virtue of having that NFT, maybe you
get some sweat, or you get upgraded, you get backstage passes or something
like that. Where yes, you could have that exact same thing available maybe
why a ticket master or something like that, But this is the challenge there.
You've got a middle person. And one of the big challenges in tickets,
for example, the concerts is fraud. You don't know if it's authentic
or not, if you're transferring or buying it from someone else, and that's
a huge problem. That problem goes away when you have NFTs as access tokens
for digital events. So, as I mentioned earlier, I'm a pragmatist,
and I believe that with Web two technologies you can always build in enough layers
to enforce the kind of security you have natively with blockchain, that is one
hundred percent given. But when the technology exists to simple do this at scale
and in a simple way using open tools, you have to pause and think,
like what is better proprietary solutions every single time or an open solution for
everybody. If you're giving an example of a ticket, though, that is
something that is centralized. It's issued by a ticketing authority, and I don't
see how a smart contract helps that. Well, like I said, like,
let's take the secondary market, right, people go to stub hub and
sell. Stub Hub takes a cut. When you buy from there, you
do not know if it's authentic. You might get a QR code or a
barcode or something like that. You hope that it's authentic. You won't find
out until you go to the turnstile. But with a smart contract, the
central authority that issues those tickets, they would issue them as NFTs and they
are fraud proof, they cannot be tempered with. They are always going to
be authentic. You can know if it's been redeemed or not when you transfer
it. There is no middleman to worry about. You just transfer it and
you're done. You don't need anyone to take a cut off the price,
right, because so the issuance is on the ledger of the ticket, correct,
and then the t answer for the ticket is also on the ledger,
so you can verify it every step of the way. Yeah, exactly,
if sub hub was selling the tickets, they could have a way to do
this as well. As I said, you can always find ways to build
bulletproof things. I guess if it was if there was a standard for it
that did exist and it was cheap to do. Which my understanding is that
smart contracts are you lose value every time you'd take an action because there's a
gas price. And so if the ticket was originally ninety nine dollars, but
then you sell it to someone, then that the smart contract reaps a cut.
And then if they traded to someone else, the smart contract reaps a
cut. So I don't I don't understand that. Yeah, that's actually incorrect.
I'm sorry. Okay, great, I will correct that. But before
that, you know, I want to take a step back. I understand
everyone who was skeptical about decentralized technologies I get. Let me step back a
little bit and put you into that mind frame. When Mango DIB was first
coming into prominence, everyone said, document databasis these are stupid. Why would
anyone want that? You know, SQL works just great, and now you
look and it is pervasive. It is everywhere because people figured out that there
are certain use cases where that technology. Document centric databases work really well.
They work well especially for social media applications, etc. Where you don't have
to do one hundred different sub queries to return a set of data. So
this is exactly how we need to approach decentralized technology. I don't expect everyone
to believe it or even to care about it, but it is a technology,
it is there, and it is going to stick around. So the
question is will you just continue to be skeptical about it, or will you
dive a little bit into it and explore some other use cases. So that's
what I was, show me a use case where it is so the metrics
are more convenient cheaper or more performing. Right for something to take hold traditionally,
now there is the hype cycle, the fads, the fashion type of
things that defy those right. But typically well, people buy health, wealth
and status. That's what people buy. So the status one can just take
all sorts of forms and it doesn't obey the regular rules. But most things,
for a technical advantage to take place, it has to be significantly cheaper,
significantly more convenient, or significantly more performance. So if you look at
you, show me a use case where this is not a Rube Goldberg machine.
Show me a use case where it's significantly something better, where you could
you know, it's clear. It's easy to say, oh no, we
don't just need to tweak stub hub a little and add an extra check.
But that oh man, if we did this, Oh we'd save on costs,
we'd delight customers, etc. Yeah. We speak from a perspective where
we have access to any bank we want, anytime we want. Let's take
a large version of the world that's unbanked. Cross border finance is huge for
them. That is only possible with cryptocurrency. There's the use case that is
in use right now in countries where people are using cryptocurrency as their primary means
of moving and storing their incomes. That's one The collectibles have always been there.
We've had baseball cards, We've had stamps, we've had coins, all
kinds of collectibles. We are moving them to the digital realm now and making
them much more accessible to people at scale, where you can create them easily,
where you can get their value easily, you can know their authenticity easily.
So if baseball cards have been around for a while and people like those
and they have a hobby, and we've made them digital and more secure,
why is that a bad thing? So one area that I'm just going to
derail us again, Yes, that's my thing. So is rerailist check at
forget rerail Us. Well, I mean it's definitely interesting. Kind of the
use cases that we're talking through here. One thing that I'm a little curious
about is, Okay, so we're talking about the use case in the sense
of, you know, I own an asset and I want to use the
asset. I guess my other question, you know, as we kind of
dive into this a little bit, is as a developer, right, how
does this affect me when I'm starting to look at some of these applications and
say, okay, maybe yeah, decentralized banking or decentralized assets of some kind.
Right, maybe it's decentralized. Note you have some way of notarizing ownership
of something, right, that's in the physical world. So what does that
begin to look like for me as a developer building an app where that's something
that you know, I'm working on? Great, great question. I think
I'd like to answer that by first kind of describing the lay of the land
for what code looks like in the world of blockchains, because I'm not sure
that everyone in the red two world yet we might understand that. So when
let me say smart contracts, let's just be clear then neither smart nor contracts.
They're just basically applications. They just have the term smart contracts that has
stuck with it. So many blockchains have the ability to run code. They
do it via a virtual machine. The most popular of them is Ethereum,
and it has the Etherium virtual Machine, So as a name suggests, it
is literally a virtual machine, and it has a programming language called Solidity,
and it's got a couple others also, And what these evms do is essentially
take code that has been created and deployed on the blockchain. It executes that
code, and the result of it might change the state of the block change
and that blockchain rather and that's data, so a couple of things. The
code that you run the application is immutable, so once you've deployed it to
the blockchain, it can never be changed. That's where the contract thing comes
from. It's a contract in code because in typical programs today, you find
a bug, you fix the bug, you push out a new release.
It goes through your CICD. Boom, you've got the fix out, their
new version problem solved. With blockchain applications, you have to be much more
deliberate because any code you put there is immutable, it's there forever. So
that code, when it executes, it manipulates data. That data is in
that same application. So we are used to the concept of application logic and
data being sort of separate. You know, your data is typically in a
database and your application logic is running maybe on your API server or something like
that. In a smart contract, both the code and the data, the
code maniplates that data. It's all together. So that's what we are talking
about when it comes two contracts. So how does that actually work. Well,
there are functions, just like you would have in JavaScript or c sharp
or whatever. There are functions and external entity, meaning a person or a
program can call using RPC the remote procedure call into the blockchain node and it
can be any blockchain notes. So let's say that there's a Ethereum blockchain.
It has five hundred notes. You can pick any notes you want, and
you can access the contract address where it resides and call that particular function with
whatever parameters. And if that contract function executes successfully, and maybe it has
a value of exit quod zero and you want it x to be incremated by
one, then x will now change to one. Now here's the thing about
blockchain programs and smart contracts. The data in them is always free to read.
You can read it as much as you want infinitely. But whenever you
want to change state on the blockchain, regardless of what you're doing, it
doesn't matter if it's with your program or you're just moving funds between two accounts.
Anytime you change the state of the blockchain, you have to pay for
that, and that is commonly called a gas. Now in our world,
wh we live in the current world, we have two that cost is absorbed
by someone else. When you use Gmail, you never think about paying for
it. Why because Google's paying for it. They make their money elsewhere.
Here in the decentralized world, the nodes are all run by independent operators and
so there you have to pay for that computing resource. And that's what gas
boils down to. Now gas is a big issue and it is like,
oh god, everything is very expensive. Yes, it is because the blockchain
technology is going through an evolution. The first sort of way, which Bitcoin
actually was the first one, use a technology called proof of work, where
a computer the people who were essentially adding the blocks to the blockchain. It's
done for a process of mining simplicity, simplistically that required them to solve complex
mathematical problems. That's where the energy usage came from. But people realize very
quickly that that is not a long term solution, so we have since moved
to something called proof of stake, where people actually stack money to have the
right to do that, which now the cost of energy is no different than
you running your computer for browsing or watching a video or whatever it is.
It's no different at all. But because the narrative of proof of work is
just much more exciting because it's about using energy and using depleting the plant's resources
and all that. That's narrative that the media continues to hang on to,
whereas that is first generation technology on its way out. So proof of stake
is where things are now. That brings us to the cost of gas.
So because of the way the protocols work, the early Ethereum protocol, etc.
There was a substantial cost to this that is changing. If you look
at blockchains like I'll just throw out a few as an example, like Solana,
Avalanche, Polygon, et cetera. The cost of these transactions is minuscule,
like one thousandth of a penny at times for a transaction. So even
that is evolving very rapidly to the point where the cost of gas will start
getting low very quickly, and then then the technology can start really being adopted
by mainstream. So I hope, I hope I answered some of your questions
there about applications. I think you did. I'm trying to envision like as
far as like costs and stuff, right, so you know, we yeah,
hopefully we start seeing it get to the point where people are going,
Wow, this is a really viable way for me to get my computing done.
And it's a really simple way of sharing the data. I'm imagining that
because yeah, some of these we're talking about like NFTs or keeping track of
you know, smart contracts where you know, it's like I'm transferring ownership of
this to that or doing things like that. I'm imagining also, you know,
things like you know, maybe social networks or things like that, right
where again, you know, the your past chain of posts is immutable,
or you know, maybe there is some kind of deletion or encryption or something
like that. I guess I don't know how realistic that is, but we'll
set that aside. So so I build this web three application where essentially when
I post, you know it, does that work on the other end,
and then yeah, I can just go read it off of the blockchain and
post it to my site. So it's all decentralized. The issue that I'm
curious about is we've seen other things social media like Twitter and Facebook. I
remember during like Arab Spring and stuff, people were saying, well, anybody
could post to it, and so it helped all these movements and things like
that, and again not passing any value judgments. I know there are political
concerns there, right, but eventually it became much more centralized, right,
and so now we have claims of censorship and things like that. Again I'm
not getting political on this, but within Twitter and Facebook, right, they're
taking down posts they you know, about things they don't agree with, and
they're closing accounts for violating their terms, which some people agree with and some
people don't. And so I imagine that this blockchain kind of solves some of
those issues. But if I own the blockchain, or I'm the one that
is writing those contracts, would it just become another centralized place where I'm just
storing it in a fancy way. Yeah, if no one checks that smart
contract code and sees that you've done that. One of the beauties of public
blockchains and smart contracts is all the code is available for everyone to look at.
And so if you see code that has those characteristics, you would say
like, well, this is ridiculous. I was I'm using it. So
this is related, maybe just tangentially, maybe not as much as think.
But what about though I don't remember what social networks they were, but basically
there were some decentralized social networks, and they just started, I guess,
looking at root nodes and figuring out which clients were coming from a particular sub
network and then blocking people and then blocking anyone that didn't have those networks in
their block list. I want to say it started with a g I don't
remember what it was, but there was that happened last year a quote unquote
decentralized network started sensoring people too. Yeah, I don't know if you're talking.
I know mast it on you confederate between social networks, and I don't
know if you can disallow people from other networks. But they basically just kind
of made a pact of because the way they're interesting the decent and correct me
if I'm wrong in it here. But the way that the blockchain's work is
on a concept of a distributed hash table, and a distributed hash table is
a fancy way of saying you ship the authority with the code. So when
you download the code, the code has the distributed hash table root nodes in
it, and then you contact those root nodes and then it gives you other
nodes, and each node could create a blacklist and just say hey, we're
not going to interest these nodes, so people don't everything has a source of
truth. There is no such thing as truly decentralized because you have to reach
out somewhere to start the conversation, and it has to be a known entity.
And so I'm not clear on the technical details of this, but what
I think was some of the root nodes and the secondary nodes just kind of
made a pact together that they were going to share a blacklist of nodes that
participated in networks that a certain client used. And then they started telling other
people, if you don't adopt our blacklist for your nodes in your your hash
table, then we're going to put you on our blacklist. And so they
started they started central It wasn't really centralization, it was it was group consensus.
It was majority vote, which is what a blockchain is essentially. But
they were able to get so what your Yeah, So one of the core
premises of the security of decentralized networks is to protect against something that we call
the fifty one percent attack, where you cannot have sort of a majority of
the nodes just make a decision and then essentially cause havoc. So the protocol,
I'm not a protocol engineer, and I don't know enough about the you
know, workings of protocols, but that those are the kinds of things that
larger scale, more popular blockchains like Ethereum, Solona, et cetera, have
addressed really well. So if there is some if someone has created a protocol,
you know what we call an l one chain, and it's a standalone
entity whose purpose is to run a social network, et cetera. And if
they have not engineered that protocol well to handle the security and make it susceptable
to fifty percent attacks. And I can certainly see the scenario you describe manifest
itself. But in general, the on the larger public chains, this is
something that is like bread and butter. You have to have protected against it.
You do have the potential for forks to happen. That's when you know
a majority of sort of the the nodes start veering off on a different using
a different blockchain. So but that that has not happened and is not for
seeable to happen for a while on the public larger public chains, but you're
going to have smaller chains with fewer nodes where for all practical purposes they are
no more different than a server farm, you know, in a web two
world. So in that case, yeah, I mean people can do those
kinds of things you're talking about, but I don't want to take that have
those things take the line right away. You know from the fact that a
vast majority of the public protocols have been designed to be secure against those fifty
one percent type attacks. Cool. So I guess one thing that I'm wondering
about is this is a JavaScript show. Right, You're writing this stuff in
solidity. I'm assuming the NPC calls have you know, it's JavaScript or whatever,
right, you just HDP call or something. I mean, why would
I want to get into this? Right? Because most of the web just
it just functions kind of the way that it always has. So why would
I want this? And then the other question I'm asking a minute is how
great question? And so you know, in the world of web development,
you have front end developers, you have back end developers, and you have
full stack kind of developers. This is no different than that. If you
are going to write smart contracts. Can the analogy is you're a back end
developer. You're working with APIs, databases, stuff like that. You're working
in the world of blockchain. Let's say it's Ethereum, you're working with Solidity.
If it's a flow blockchain, you're working with Cadence. If it's Solana,
you're working with Rust. This is a developer with specialized skills and experience
of understanding the new programming paradigm of smart contracts. I'll give you a simple
example. When we program in C Sharp, Java, JavaScript, whatever,
we are rarely thinking of the cost per line of execution of our code twenty
lines fifty lines. Don't think too much about it. In smart contract every
execution, every operation there costs money. So you write really type code and
you use a concept called fail fast. You want to make sure you check
all your inputs and all that not at the point where you're going to use
them in your code. You check them all up front so you can fail
immediately, so that there's no So all of that in a nutshell is highly
specialized. So if you are going to go down that path, it's because
you're choosing to. There is no requirement that everyone who builds decentralized apps be
a smart contract developer. In fact, seventy to eighty percent of developers for
decentralized apps already have all the skills they need JavaScript, HTML, CSS,
know how to use NPM install, and the library associated with the particular blockchain.
So, for example, with Ethereum, the libraries are Web THREEJS or
ethersgs, take your pick either one of those. In fact, there's even
a framework called hard hack you work with all JavaScript, nothing to do with
smart contracts or anything like that. You literally are writing JavaScript functions. That's
it. So for JavaScript developers, Web three represents a green field of opportunity,
like really amazing applications you can build. There's a lot of opportunity,
and there's a lot, a lot of money honestly from a career standpoint,
to be made with just taking your skills and learning one of these libraries.
Not learning a new language at all, but learning how decentralized apps function.
That is, for a competent JavaScript developer, about an hour's worth of work.
Okay, so it sounds like, yeah, I probably have most of
the skills that I'm gonna want or need in order to pick this up right,
so I can pick it up rather quickly. I guess. The other
question I have is is, I mean, most people, if they're looking
for jobs, they're looking for jobs based on some kind of demand curve,
and you're talking like there's a lot of demand out there for this kind of
work. How do I figure that out? And how do I find those
jobs? Yeah? I mean a large number of those jobs right now are
in two domains, creating decentralized finance applications and creating NFT based applications. Those
are super super high in demand. And if you just google you know,
crypto and and developer, I think you should be able to find it on
the usual sites, you know, usual job sites, they are available.
The thing, though, is with decentralized technologies and Web three in particular.
I talked earlier about how it's not just about the technology, it's about culture.
So I think when you talk about jobs, this might be an opportunity
moment to talk about doos decentralized autonomous organizations more than likely as time passes,
Like let's say, you know we are in twenty twenty three, twenty twenty
four, most people who are just entering into the Web three space are going
to work not for a company, but are going to work for a DOW.
So a DOO is really think of a company, but with its governance
model et cetera, built on a smart contract, so instead of having a
board of directors, etc. It is more governance is handled by the members
of the DOW. Closer analogy would be something like a collective or an hoa
or something like that, where it's about the people who are part of a
community. By virtue of having owning tokens in that community, they have votes
in what that community does. So you could, as a member of the
community propose an action or a change in how the community works, the other
members vote on it, and then it becomes how the community functions. So
more and more taos are where people go to do work. So if you're
a designer, you might go work for Dow and do your design work.
If you're a programmer you might do that. So there are special purpose doos
being created for content creators. There's now one of the largest taos is developer
Dow, which is growing very very fast, and in fact, at the
end of February they will have their first conference and a large number of those
developers are JavaScript developers. So that's where I think a lot of the career
growth is going to come. It's not going to come through centralized companies.
Making blockchain applications. Okay, so color me confused and skeptical at the same
time. I'm confused. So if I'm a developer and I'm working for this
dow, how is my day to day different than than working for a company.
I work for a dow, by the way, so you might a
question. Then, So I do work for Dash Dash Incubator, which is
a DOW. I recently learned this because to me, it's, uh,
you know, kind of money and hours out kind of thing. I will
take you recently learned that you're working for a dow or you recently learned about
I recently learned that it is. It is called a doway because so the
way that it works is there are proposals, at least in Dash. I
imagine that different dows can have different ways of organizing things, but there are
proposals, and there are stakeholders and stakeholders. Essentially, it's not it's not
all ethereum smart contracts. There's other stuff as well. Dash has its own
way of doing its quote unquote smart contract slash voting system. But basically,
proposals go up, they get assigned a manager. The manager assigns a bounty
for specific tasks within the proposal, Then developers request to take on the task.
Then when the task gets completed, the manager signs off on it,
and then the bounty is claimed and issued from the voter node pool. I'm
not sure if I'm explaining it right. Ryan will probably kill me once he
listens to the episodes, but my experience with it is Ryan and I have
a conversation. He makes sure that a task gets put up on a list
with a bounty associated with it, and then he makes sure that I get
paid to my Dash address, and then I can cash out and US dollars
or eat it out back steakhouse because they now have a MasterCard and a gift
card system called Dash Direct and all this stuff. So it actually and Dash
is a little bit different from the other ones because Dash is digital cash.
If you go on their website, there's no mention of blockchain or cryptocurrency.
They're very much marketed towards here's a technology that happens to exist. We're trying
to figure out how to make it easier for people to do digital money.
It's not necessarily the blockchain religion. It's just somebody created blockchain stuff. They're
trying to take advantage of it, and a lot of the work is related
to that end. So the things that I've been working on are management tools
and also merchant tools so that it's easier for merchants to transact digital money.
So it is somewhat self serving in the sense of some people have given the
criticism of a company script because you're working for the company that's job is to
produce the ability to transact this money, and you're given this money as payment
for the work that you do. So there's this list of work that has
to be done, and you say, hey, I want to do this
project, and there's a predetermined amount that you get paid for completing such a
task us and then you get paid for it in digital money or monopoly money
or however you determined to get paid. Is that right, Well, it's
certainly not monopoly money. It is real. I know, I'm just thrown
yeah, I know, I'm just that is one, one, one model,
and you actually described it very accurately. I mean, there's bounties.
You can think of it like the gig economy, right like you can take
that on. But then there are dows where which are a little more mature,
which have gone beyond gloves thrown down. Sorry, just saying that there
are dows that are a little more mature. Technically, DASH is the very
first DOW, so it would actually be the most but anyway, going on,
I guess, yeah, yeah, yeah, Well maybe it's not about
the majority of the DOW but the majority of his model where they recognize that
for certain complex tasks, you can't have ad hoc developers do stuff. It
requires continuity, it requires experience, et cetera, in which you might have
a working group or a guild. There are different names where you might have
a full time role and you draw a full time salary, and that might
be typically in either USDC, which is a stable coin theyqualent of one US
dollar for each USDC, or it might be in tokens, or it might
be ethereum, depending on what that the model of that particular DOO is.
But ultimately it comes down to the fact that you are not contractually bound to
only work for one DOW. You can be working concurrently with as many dows
as you want, at your own pace, at your own schedule, at
your own location, however you want. So how's that different than standard freelancing?
The difference is that standard freelancing requires you to be more upfront about sort
of marketing. You need to go and sell yourself and promote yourself and find
your next gig, et cetera. Here, with doos, the gigs are
are available, easier to find, and you don't have to limit yourself to
one particular doubt. You can choose the skills you want to apply and work
on them. So yeah, in a sense, it's similar without the need
to constantly have to market yourself. Also, so how is this tied back
to Web three? Then, I guess is where I'm confusing. I mean,
it's to me, I mean, what you're explaining sounds like a business
model. Sure, it's maybe slightly different from freelancing or standard companies, just
another variation. But I'm curious. I'm trying to understand how this ties back
to web three and blockchain and all the other stuff we've been talking. I
think that's a fantastic question. So the doos have emerged and in order to
address the fact that we live in a world where in companies a very few
people make all the decisions and a very few people benefit from the productivity of
a very large number of people. In that organization, your average person does
not get the same benefit as say the CEO or the board of directors,
etc. Whereas they are doing all the work. Taos are about democratizing the
workforce and making it so that there is shared rewards for shared labor. And
it's also based upon a set of rules and governance where you, as a
person working in an entity, have a say in what that entity does more
than you would. You would say that the parallel is stock ownership, but
stock owners in a public corporation, for example, have very little say.
You can show up at a meeting or whatever, but as individuals your vote
doesn't matter too much. But in DAOs, your individual votes matter. You
can also delegate them to people who you trust, so it's way more flexible.
And it's also governed through smart contracts, so it's all open and transparent.
There are you can do shenanigans. Well, okay, but there's still
there's sorry, check one more thing. There's still you got to have a
manager, right, you're talking to a manager. You've got if somebody puts
the work together and decides what's the work to be done and what's the value
for this and so on? Right, and I would think it's somewhere you
got to have at some point, you got to have an ultimate point of
decision making, just because based on personal experience and what I've watched, whether
you want to go back to the infamous Occupy Wall Street or any of those
type of organizations where everybody tries to go back and census that didn't work.
You need a final authority in some cases. So I'm curious to see where
that fits in these downs. Yeah, within dows, you can have working
groups, you can have gills, etc. Those can have leaders, you
can have a war group of leaders. The key thing to understand, you're
Steve, is that it's open and transparent, so everybody is aware of what's
going on and there isn't some of the closed room decision making, the favoritism,
the nepotism, all of that. It's much much much harder to do
because it's transparent and open. That's the difference. And ultimately this is designed
for a generation of people that are coming out of college, et cetera,
that are really disgruntled with how life in general has been to them. It's
really hard for them to find their career prospects are not super bright. They
want to work, but we value experience more than maybe excitement and passion and
the ability to want to dive into something and just learn. Those kind of
things are not valued in companies today. It's harder to get a break,
and doaos give, especially young people, I think, the opportunity to start
exploring and experimenting with different things while finding their niche and finding their passion and
building experience. So doos won't replace everything, not anytime soon, but they
are an ongoing experiment. They are a new experiment in this laboratory of sort
of business. You know, it's a new way to conduct business, and
I feel like, especially for information centric businesses, dows are a great way
to go. The jury is completely out on what will happen with dows if
you, for example, change choose a more model where the company is manufacturing
or something like that. But you have to look at it as an experiment.
It's a work in progress. Yeah. I think what I'm hearing is
that the tao itself, like Aja explained how the DOAW that he's working for
works. But they, I mean, they can adopt whatever governance model they
want. And then the what I'm understanding is is that any changes to the
government governance model may then necessitate a change to the smart contracts that they use
to govern the DOO. Right, and so then when I vote, or
you vote, or whoever votes, you know, that's all governed by smart
contract at that point. Right, So we change the structure by changing the
contract which we all voted on using the smart contracts in the first place.
And then all of this is saved to the ledger and it's all transparent.
And at the same time, if I buy into the DOO, so if
I buy somebody else's token, right, and so I can vote, or
I buy enough of the tokens so that I can vote so many times.
However, it's structured. Right again, maybe I buy six tokens, but
it still only affords me one vote. That's all just built into how it
runs. Then it's all open and transparent. I can see what's happening.
I can see how the decisions are being made. All of the voting and
everything else happens in an open way where everybody can see what's going on,
and it's all audited publicly. I can see where some companies may want to
make private decisions, like if they want to buy and negotiate on real estate
or something like that. You know, if the down needs to buy an
office. You know, I can see those kinds of things being something that
they have to figure out and negotiate within their structure. But the rest of
it, Yeah, it seems that at the end of the day, the
rest of that stuff all just gets handled on the DOW and then maybe,
yeah, if there is some kind of privileged information that needs to be managed,
you know, you put some kind of smart contract on that where it's
encrypted maybe for a certain amount of time or things like that until yeah,
it becomes open or however you manage that. But it's all you can see
how it all runs because it's it's all managed in that decentralized manner, and
then you set up the smart contracts to facilitate the actual business. Yep.
That's a beautiful and very accurate summation. Yeah, and I could definitely,
I mean, I could come up with things that I think are probably drawbacks
to it. I can also see that there are certain advantages to it,
right where everybody kind of knows what's going on and how and why, and
maybe you issue more so you have a certain level of tokens that are there,
and then maybe you have a cryptocurrency that's also on the same blockchain that
that's how people get paid, or I mean there are lots of It seems
like it opens up a lot of possibilities, which, yeah, I'll tell
you. One of the drawbacks, which doos are working to fix right now,
is this idea that you know you have whales, meaning you know wealthy
people who own a lot of the tokens, Well, they'll have a proportionately
large amount of the vote and they can influence where things go. We don't
want that. That's undesirable. So doos are responding with having business models where
there's for example, quadratic voting. Each subsequent vote based on your tokens requires
more and more tokens, so you get to the point where all your millions
of tokens, etc. Will still not be a sizeable amount of vote.
Another thing they're experimenting with is domain based voting. So, for example,
if the vote is about marketing and you are a marketer, then your vote
carries more weight than someone who's not a marketer. That kind of stuff,
et cetera. So there's lots of these exciting experiments being being run and it's
not perfect, it's not even good yet, but I can tell you it's
very, very exciting because we get to it's like almost seeing a human experiment
at scale in business models in real time. You're participant in it, you
know, it's so much fun. It's kind of like being there in the
early days when maybe the stock exchanges were being formed and things like that.
What are the decisions being made? How did they come up with, you
know, a C corp versus an escorp or whatever, all those kind of
things. Is it's just so exciting to be part of this moment and to
participate and know that, well, some of these ideas are going to just
bomb terribly, they've got to fail, but some of them are going to
be just awesome. And that's what excites me. Well, and tying this
back to web three because we kind of went on dows and NFTs and all
this stuff, right, it's all right, yeah, web is anything that
is related to a blockchain or a cryptocurrency. Yeah. For me, if
I'm going back to just building apps right kind of the thing that we do
on the web right now, that's that's where this gets kind of interesting because
I think there are going to be some applications that eventually blockchain is the way
or Web three is the way that they materialize just won't make sense once we
figure some of this stuff out to do it any other way. And so
if you're getting into it now, if you're interested in it now, it
seems like a terrific direction to go in, just keep in mind that,
yeah, it's still early, so some of it. Yeah, we're still
wading through some of the garbage that we're going to have to wade through on
this stuff. But I think understanding it early is also going to be beneficial
to a lot of people. Yep. And that's what I'm working on with
my company in Distology, we are building the hyperverse for Web two developers,
and our basic thesis is that most Web two developers don't want to learn smart
contract programming, and you want to make it as easy as NPM for them.
So with the hyperverse, what we are doing is we are essentially having
smart contract developers build these blockchain primitives, if you want to call it them.
We call them smart modules. So instead of having like monolithics smart contracts
that do a lot of things, we'll have smart contracts that do one thing,
really well. And what web developers can do is using our React based
front end JavaScript libraries, just wire up all these different smart modules kind of
like lego blocks and orchestrate your decentralized app. And not only that, you
can make hybrid apps. You can have a combination of Web two and Web
three apps. So maybe only one aspect of your app needs to be Web
three. Great, you know, build a Web two app and just add
this Web three. So we are in the process. We are blockchain agnostics.
So we're going to work across all major blockchains eventually, and with the
Hyperverse, it'll be like NPM installed, just like that, it'll be Hyperverse
installed. Pick the module you want like NFT, add that you've got,
and then imported in your React app and you're good to go. So how
could you possibly be blockchain agnostic because they're highly, highly specific algorithmic protocols,
So it seems like you either have to build for each of them individually or
you're not really building something on a blockchain. Yep, you're one hundred percent
right on both counts. So when I say blockchain agnostic, what I mean
is that our specification that we have created. Think of it like the NPM
spec right, it requires you to have a package Chason, it requires you
to have a certain number of fields in there with certain values. Just like
that, we require that Hyperverse smart modules and the libraries, the front libraries
conform to this spec that is still evolving. We are working on it,
but we are then making our hyper verse tooling available for each blockchain that we
support, and for each of those developers will have built the custom smart modules
that would make sense on that. One of the things that's emerging right now
is that blockchains are also becoming special purpose. So there's general purpose blockchains like
Ethereum, but then you're finding we're finding that there are some blockchains which are
so fast that they're great for gaming, for example, or for DeFi,
et cetera. So you are you're right. So each blockchain will have its
own unique set of smart modules, but there's going to have a they're going
to have a common look and feel, and they're going to have a common
furn end where you can go and search and find these modules based on the
blockchain you've picked, and the library for each one is also different. But
because the hyperverse sort of interface is common across them, all of them.
From a programming standpoint, it doesn't matter which blockchain you're programming for. The
extraperiance is the same. The developer experience is the same. So okay,
two things. One, how many different competitors do you have, because it
seems that this is something everybody wants to do, is to abstract all the
blockchains? In which case, how do you get in a leading position to
become the authority on abstracting blockchains so that people so that you actually have real
value rather than just being one of the millions of minnows. That's one and
two. If you abstract away all the blockchains, then how do you get
any of the value of what they specifically offer by their differences? Yep,
So we are not abstracting away the blockchains because what we are doing is making
sure that the hyperverse library for each one is consistent. But the value proposition
that we are providing is not necessarily in sort of the JavaScript part of fit.
Yes, we provide that, but anyone else can also come and provide
that. That's fine. The value we are providing is in the actual modules,
the smart modules that I refer to on chain. What we are building
is an open decentralized marketplace for smart contracts. So what I mean by that
is any developer who knows how to program smart contracts can build a smart module
and they can monetize it. They can choose to say that for each transaction,
I want a penny, or if there's a monetary value to the transaction,
they can say I want two percent or whatever. So smart contract developers
can monetize it that way. But for the JavaScript developers, you don't have
to worry about how that module came into existence. You just need to decide
if you want to use it. If the price of it is reasonable for
you, then you just use it with the Hyperverse library. Now, if
you don't want to use our libraries like the JavaScript libraries, and you want
to like, well, I'm just going to write my own, you can
do that because it's all on chain. So the value we are providing is
not in the abstraction of it. The value we are providing it is in
having a standard way in which smart contracts can be created, built, deployed,
monetized, and more importantly secured. Because one of the things that is
a big challenge with any open source is the code secure. What if it's
malicious. So we are building a community of auditors that they'll all audit those
smart modules and if they trust that the code is secured, they will stake
their tokens as a form of security or for those modules that sort of access
an insurance layer and allowing anyone consuming those modules to trust it. If the
module turns out to have a problem, the stake, the money put up
by those auditors gets slashed, they lose it, and that money then gets
distributed to whoever suffer a loss. So this is an innovative security model that
we are also building on doctors. So one thing that I'm curious about,
because we've talked a whole bunch about this, it seems kind of forward looking
to me to be thinking, Okay, you know, I'm going to go
learn how to build web three apps or Web three organizations or whatever. What
do you see coming next? That's exciting if we're being forward thinking, right,
what's the next innovation going to be or where does it come? I'm
learning I'm seeing every day that gaming Web three based gaming is huge. If
you think about the scenarios today where in game assets are siloed into a certain
game NFTs are completely transforming that because you can have the ability to have a
Web three games where you can take your assets. You know, you want
to sort in this game, go take it over to the other game trading
and having games that have a play to earn model. So during the past
year or so, during COVID, for example, Acci Infinity was a very
popular game in Philippines and it gave people the ability to make a living because
they would essentially play this game generating in game assets which are valued by other
people who didn't want to spend that much time playing to earn them and just
wanted to use them, and they were willing to pay money to buy them.
This is how a lot of people in the Philippines survived the pandemic.
You know, this is Web three at scale solving and bringing to bringing economic
equity. So I think gaming is going to continue to grow and a play
to X whatever that X is, whether it's you know, earned or grow,
et cetera, or even X to earn. You know, different models
like that are being experimented with, and I'm very very excited about those right
now. You see, for example, Deppa Labs has NBA top Shot where
you can collect NBA moments. Right now, they're just collectibles. But there
is a mobile game imminent where you can take your moments and assemble them into
virtual teams and play. So that's going to be exciting. So we do
that right when we do the football games and stuff like that offline, when
we pick our teams, et cetera. But being able to do that with
NFTs that we own on chain, it's really exciting stuff. So I must
say, as the residents skeptic, this is actually something I believe exactly.
I believe that because gaming is a self contained universe. And if you're talking
about indie gamers, so if you're talking about a big studio, they're going
to you know, Nintendo's gonna want the E Shop, Xbox is gonna want
Xbox Live, et cetera. Right, I don't see them switching over to
shaable assets anytime soon. But if you talk about indie gamers, somebody creates
a standard unity. Is it called unity? Is that what's called three D
model? They created NFT for it. You have your character in one game,
you transfer your character over to another game. From the developer's perspective,
there's a financial incentive in it because they can put a smart contract into the
character, and the character being transferred can generate them income. They can build
a business model around that, and then they create a standard protocol to transfer
assets between games with I mean, they still have to come up with a
schema for how to define the characteristics of the avatar or whatever. But I
could definitely see this among indie gamers. It's a universe that exists within the
Internet. It doesn't require any outside interaction, it doesn't require any outside verification,
it doesn't require any outside regulation, no oracles, none of that stuff,
because everything began and ended in the Internet space without any real physical contact
beyond it. So I actually believe that that is a use case that might
not have been solved any other way because the big game big game studios would
have no incentive to let you transfer trademarkable characters between universes. Congratulations, Nick,
you have earned the ajacal of approval WITHFLT to earn Yay, I'm so
excited. Thank you. Yeah, but really, you know, I think
your analysis was spot on. The Big game studios they have no incentive to
get rid of the walled gardens, and yeah, with indies, etc.
This this makes a lot of sense and actually this NFT standard it's called the
RC seven twenty one and another one called ARC twenty five. They've been baked
in, they are there for a while now, and they support all the
standard metadata and all of this kind of stuff already. So we are actually
working with a few game game platforms to build just this kind of thing,
and it's really exciting. I'm not a gamer, but there's a bunch of
people on a team or gamers and they're pretty excited about this thing. So
yeah, I think ultimately what Aja explained kind of solidified in my head what
this is all about. Right, Because the big console makers, right,
they're the ones with all the resources, They're the ones that benefit from essentialized
infrastructure, and so they're the ones that are not going to go for this,
right. And similarly, in a lot of these other places where I'm
providing a process or things like that, where they either need to or I
want them to because I benefit from it. Need to keep them centralized,
right, I need to keep them where in my app where they live,
blah blah blah. Right, I'm not going to go for this, but
if I want to benefit from being part of an ecosystem where I can share,
push, exchange and otherwise keep track of ownership, location on the web
or whatever. And I can make a living by allowing people to participate in
my thing and participate in everyone else's thing. Those are the things that this
opens up, right, And it seems like that's what we're talking about here,
you know, with the different the doos even right, it's okay,
Well, do I want to be part of a centralized control company or do
I want to be part of something that's a little more democratized, like a
DOO. Do I want to be part of a computing ecosystem where I share
resources and other assets among the other parts of that ecosystem, or do I
want people to live in my little area? Right? And there's nothing necessarily
wrong about either approach, and they're going to be pros and cons to every
organization and every application depending on how they do it. Right. Some of
them it's just not going to make sense, and some of them are really
will And so that's where people are going to make that decision. Right,
it's I'm going to benefit more from being part of this open ecosystem than I
will by being behind this wall. And if it's proof of stake, type
stuff. The indie game developers, it might make sense for them to run
right own blockchain for essentially somewhere between twenty and one hundred dollars a month to
run their own node, is what I meant to say, to participate,
because if you want to participate in a blockchain, you're either going to be
running at home and that's going to be unreliable if you're trying to provide a
business service, or you're going to be running it in the cloud. If
you're running in the cloud, your bare minimum is probably looking around twenty dollars
a month. Yeah, I think that's where I would disagree. I don't
think there's any need for game developers to be concerned with the infrastructure. Right
other people handle that. That's one of the beauties of the decentralized web.
Blockchain. It's not decentralized if you only let if the only people who are
participating are a very small, select group of people, it's not the centralized.
If the game developers want to get in on this and they don't participate
in it, you have to pay in at some point. Otherwise there's no
guarantee that the stuff you need will be there when you need it. You
know, if something goes wrong and people get out of this specialized n f
T chain, if you've got two other people that are still running it,
it'll still work. But you know, you have to be able to supply
the demands of your users. Anyway, I cut you off, I should
that's rude to me. I'm sorry. I'll like you to speak. Well.
Now I was going to say, is you should pick a blockchain that
is already secure. And you know, when I say the term secure for
a blockchain, what I mean is it's got enough notes out there where it's
unlikely to fail, unlikely to be shut down, it's reasonably decentlized. So
like five hundred notes, a thousand notes, you pick whatever is a reasonably
good number for you. And some of the popular blockchains these days are hitting
those thousands of notes. So yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, there
is some risk inherent being part of a smaller chain with fewer nodes, but
at the same time, there's right but that on the flip side, if
it grows and you're an early adopter, then there are advantages to that as
well. Maybe maybe not. I mean the advantages would be if you sort
of acquired the native cryptocurrency of that blockchain at an early stage and your holding
a sizeable amount of it then. But otherwise, really what you're benefiting from
is the fact that the platform on which you're building is growing stronger and is
getting more adoption, and that always helps. Cool. We're kind of at
the end of our time. If people want to check out hyperversire building,
where do they find all that stuff? Yeah, so they can go to
decentology dot com. We are going to start our preview here in early February
and all through the month of February, we'll be releasing incremental updates, and
we'll be doing a public sort of launch in March. I come from the
web to world myself. I've been in the Microsoft ecosystem for a long time.
Created was a co founder of DNN, open Source cms C, Sharp
Development, et cetera. So I also initially looked at this with a healthy
amount of skepticism. And what I would encourage people to do is to not
just go by what the media says, because most of those things are old
and outdated. Go check out and download an STK or something now and just
tinker with it for a weekend and see for yourself. What it's like.
Skepticism is warranted and welcome because that actually helps improve things. But I think
skepticism without actually having experienced or pride it, you might end up being skeptical
for the wrong reasons. Be skeptical, but for the right reasons. You
know. So check out this stuff. So let me clarify. Sorry,
you're saying not to believe the media. Am I understanding correctly? Okay?
Here we go. Are a few other things. You guys do A regular
meetup where you talk about the Web three stuff? Right? Where do people
get on that? Yeah, so we have a regular sort of every Thursday
we have I call it a block Chai and chill where people just bring that
chai or their coffee or whatever and chill and we talk about Web three topics.
I also do a lot of Twitter spaces. I'm at at tech Bubble
on Twitter where I generally try and answer web developers questions, much like what
we have been doing today. But you can find all that information from recentology
dot com. Right. And then one last thing I just wanted to bring
up is that I've been wanting to for a while put out sort of a
regular like second episode segment kind of thing about JavaScript topics, and so I
talked to Nick and some of the other folks at Decentology because I wanted to
bring in Web three and so we're going to put out you're going to get
a Web three topic going forward on that as well. So that's going to
start sometime in February. Keep an eye out because yeah, Nick and I
will jump on one every month and just give you something about Web three.
So keep an eye out for that as well. I am really looking forward
to that. That's going to be Yeah. I kind of wanted to set
the stage here right because there is context that will help people understand what we're
talking about there. All right, well, let's go ahead and jump into
picks a j Do you have some picks for us? Well? No,
I didn't know we were doing this today. No problems jumping up, All
right, Steve, do you have some picks for us? Do I have
picks? I'll just stick with the jokes of the week, you know,
Nick, this is always the high point of the podcast. Chuck just gets
tons of contact letters to say we need more Dad jokes so you can hear
the excitement. Sure, So, anyway, my favorite things are eating,
my family and not using commas took me a minute. Sorry, Yeah,
punctuation matters. Punctuation matters. Yes. So the other day I beat a
black belt at karate, and my next challenge is a green sock. And
finally, so I was sitting in church the other day and there I was
sitting next to this elderly couple and I heard the wife stay of her husband.
She goes, I let out one of those silent farts. What do
I do? And he says, change the battery and your hearing aid.
Yeah, don't laugh, it only encourages him. All right, Well,
I'll jump in with my picks here real quick. So I always do a
board game pick. My wife's cousins and her sister and brother in law came
over to play board games on Saturday, and we had a good time.
One of the games that we played that my sister in law brought is called
Wavelength, and it's more of a party game, which really is not my
speed at all. I generally it's like it's like, oh, is this
more or less what everybody else thinks? It's just whatever. Anyway, this
one was kind of funny though, because some of the things we just had
funny conversations off of them, which was fun. So I'm gonna pick it
if that's your speed. You know, it's the well it could because what
you do is you dial. So you have a dial and it's a blind
dial, so you just spin it and then when you're done, whoever's giving
the clue opens it up and you see where the where people will score if
they guess it right. And then you close it back up and you have
a clue card. And so one of the clue cards was like vapes doesn't
vape, right, and so give a clue. You know, it's like
thirty year old men, right, because I was I was aiming for a
little bit more toward vapes, but you know, not all the way there
right where you might pick a different demographic or pick a person that you know
vapes and everybody else know vapes, right, And so anyway, the conversation
quickly turned to my wife's sat and uncle I guess both vape and so then
it turned into jokes about them vaping and whether or not people were embarrassed about
talking about whether they vape. It was really funny and so you know,
it's that kind of a thing, and that's really what For me, I
like the mental stimulation and the challenges that come with board games, but I
also like the social aspect of it. And so if you're looking for the
social aspect, I check that game out. It's called Wavelengths Wavelength or Wavelengths.
I'll put on link in the show notes, but you should be able
to find it. It's got a very colorful box. So could you say
that turned into a very vapid conversation? Oh man. Anyway, a few
other things I'm going to put out there. I am currently hiring some folks
to help us run some meetups on JavaScript and Ruby and Angular at least because
those are our biggest shows right now. And then I'm also getting ready to
put JavaScript Remote Conference another JavaScript Remote conference together, probably in May. So
if you want to speak at it, or if you want to participate in
it, I'm probably I'm thinking about doing more than one track, and so
I may also need somebody to m see one of the tracks. Anyway,
just keep an eye out for it. Usually get some pretty solid heavy hitters
for that, and so if you're interested in being a part of that,
let me know if you know anyone who wants to sponsor it. Also let
me know, but yeah, that'll be at js remote coomf dot com or
you can just go to top end devs and click conferences and it'll it'll show
it. So those are my picks. And then finally, one last thing
that I'm going to shout out because I love them, is I got a
couple new flavors of built bars. Built bars are I always joke that they're
candy bars, but they're protein bars. And since I'm doing low carb,
they have like four net carbs and it's because they coat them in chocolate,
but they it's not like overly sweetened or anything, and so it keeps me
in that range where I want to be for my carb counts and I'm really
really enjoying that. So I'm going to shout out about that. And that's
pretty much what I got. AJ. Did you want to do picks before
Nick does? Or should we turn? I can pull some picks down on
the hat here. Okay, Actually I just discovered this channel. So what
I was doing was I was setting up YouTube live for my church because we
had this broadcast system that was actually really good and really easy to use,
but for some reason they're abandoning it, probably because there was never proper training
and anyway, so we're switching over YouTube Libe and I started doing this thing
and then and then of course YouTube wants to suggest to me all of these
I guess I don't know what YouTube's trying to do, but it brought up
this atheist channel, and I actually really really like it. It's called genetically
Modified Skeptic. I've watched two halves of his videos so far. Maybe I've
watched a video and a half, but this is just I'd have to say,
this is one of the most Christian people I've seen on YouTube, because
his whole thing is about debating with dignity and he points out where some of
these well, the two things I've seen is basically, there's some Christian people
that are not being polite or very Christian, and he picks apart from their
argument in a very non emotional, non an inflammatory way, and and talks
and talks about it. And I just think that he handles it so respectfully.
And I really like this kind of content, the stuff that goes against
things that I believe, but in a in a metered way or not necessarily
goes against what I believe, but that might appear to go against some of
the things I believe or have a different perspective, so genetically modified skeptic,
but I do. There's this, there's this whole thing when you're when you're
a believer of faith, you have to be really open minded about the how
and the what as you hold to the why, because faith is about the
why. It's not about the what and the how. And I've had personal
friends that when they start to learn more about science and reasoning and whatnot,
they they lose their faith, which is really sad to me because the faith
isn't about all of the words verbatim correct about when you follow these principles,
do you reap the good fruit of the good tree. So I'm going to
put that caveat on there because I don't want to steer anybody towards the end
of their faith. And I think that sometimes when people approach things that are
I mean, I don't want to baby anybody and say not ready for it,
but I think that is kind of a thing milk before meat. For
those that are faith we probably know that expression. But anyway, so I
like this channel. I'm going to watch more of this stuff. Hopefully I
like more of it. Love. I love this kind of metered debate style,
and then of course I'll pick the normal things. Actually no. One.
Other thing is if you are interested. I am looking for people to
work with. I've got more work than I can handle, so feel free
to reach out to me. I've got a very simple litmus test which I'm
going to post here. If you can solve this litmus test on your own
in a reasonable amount of time, which I think that an hour would be
reasonable to get most of the way there, and I think that it's certainly
possible many people will get there within fifteen minutes to get most of the way
there. But if you can solve this litmus test, then I could probably
farm out some work to you, so if you're interested in that. And
I consider this to be a mid level problem solving skill. Not I don't
think this is too difficult, but I do think it is above what most
people would consider beginner. So I'm going to post a link to that problem.
And then, yeah, then the normal stuff if you want to follow
me on the YouTube's on the twitches. Beyond code is the more structured content,
and then my live streams and whatnot. Go under school age eighty six
gotcha. What you said reminded me of a meme I saw the other day
on Facebook where basically they were saying, you know, it was a missed
opportunity to not have Neil Young go on the Joe Rogan Show and discuss with
Joe what his issues were, and that kind of assuming they would both be
civil to each other. I think could have been a really interesting thing,
if you've heard the controversy over Spotify, just just that kind of a conversation.
I feel like we lack a lot of times where it's it's, hey,
look, you know, let's let's actually understand each other instead of just
you know, throwing barbs over the fence one way or the other. Anyway,
Nick, do you have some picks? I do, and I apologize
for any background noise. I got construction going on outside and they have just
decided to increase the noise right about now. So yeah, I have two
picks. One. I also like board games, and you probably might have
heard of this one, Settlers of Katan. It's an only a really fun
one. I think that's a great one for the social aspect, especially when
you go about arguing with people and you know, getting into a little fights
with them, et cetera. It's kind of fun. And I want to
also suggest a TV show that I watched on Netflix recently that I really really
like. It's called Halt and Catch Fire. It's the history of sort of
a startup, a tech startup in Silicon Valley. They go through the whole
sort of this is in the early days of computing, so you get a
glimpse into, you know, the like the birth of microcomputing and then software
and all that kind of stuff. It's a brilliantly done show and I really
like that. So yeah, those are a couple of picks for me.
And I also wanted to say thank you so much for having me. I
really enjoyed this conversation. I really like that you had some great questions and
we had a really good debate. So I really love that, So thank
you so much for coming too much, Nick, I don't get offended.
I enjoy these because if we can't if we can't handle skepticism from reason,
from smart people, and we are not able to defend and come up with
good answers for this, then this technology is not very good, right,
I mean, so it's going to improve when there are more people approaching this
with skepticism, etc. I think it's only going to get better and better
and better. It's far from perfect right now. Well I think I think
we've seen that with all kinds of technologies. And that's why I want to
cover it is it's like, Okay, well, as we get a little
further down the rabbit hole on this, yeah, you know what, what
are the possibilities and what opportunities do we miss if we're not willing to even
look at it? So we're gonna go ahead and wrap it up here.
Thanks again for coming Nick. Until next time, Popes max out