A 5 Minute Recap of SFBW, 2018
Written by Brennan Fife and Roz Stengle, who both attended SFBW this year.
As much as we learn at school, being knee-deep in industry is a totally different experience. Hear from leaders of Badger Blockchain, Brennan Fife (on ETH SF & Epicenter) and Roz Stengle (on CESC) and their experience at SFBW18.
ETH San Francisco
From October 5th to the 12th, the San Francisco Blockchain Week took place, encompassing ETHSF, Epicenter, and CESC. Through this week of hackathons, conferences, and events, I not only was continually finding myself learning and discussing the future trends of this space, but reminiscing in the energetic beauty of the Bay Area.
Though this 7-days seemed digestible at first, admittingly, it was incredibly overwhelming at times. From the various crypto after-parties to the highly-technical MeetUps, (including a Meetup on EWASM). Nonetheless, I enjoyed the experience and would highly recommend any college student to take the time to involve themselves outside of school and in their field.
Going in, I had two main goals: 1. to walk away from ETH San Francisco with a larger network and 2. beginning to get a decent grasp of the broader developer community and what it looked like at such a large-scale event. Needless to say, the event was a huge success — I learned a lot, made some friends, and took away some key lessons.
Projects Galore
Being only my 3rd hackathon, I managed to walk away better educated than going in, both about myself and those around me. Not only was it inspiring to see the work developers had put into their works (many of who were building on top of multiple protocol combinations, with one project even building on top of 3: Bloom, Dharma, and MakerDAO), but what came out of 2.5 days was something to note. Thus, I wanted to highlight a few…
SayToshi is dApp that allows anyone to monetize their social platforms, specifically, from say a, Twitter account. The SayToshi network would act as a DAO, collectively deciding on what tweets to publish (based on the amount of Tweeth a user holds).
Harberger Ads
Harberger taxes have been a hot topic. Ever since E. Glen Weyl’s Radical Markets (and a recent paper done with Vitalik Buterin and Zoë Hitzig), it has been described as ‘an economic policy that aims to strike a balance between pure private ownership & total commons ownership in order to increase general welfare of society.’ With such, Blockchains provide great testing grounds.
Harberger Ads would act as a way to be an ad serving utility. Through specific and effective prices, online ad space can be purchased and taxed with a paid self assigned ‘property value’. Through the Harberger principle applying here, if the ad price is too low, the space will be bought unexpectedly, and if too high, payments will follow (going to the owner developers likely).
Atomic XShard Transactions
Sharding, as many likely know by now, is a concept that seeks to address scaling, by a sharding a horizontal portion of a database, with each shard storing a separate server instance, and ultimately making blockchains more efficient. Thus, Vlad Zamfir and his team demonstrated a feasible way of implementing a proof-of-concept of protocols (previously only available in theory). Maybe something to expect within the RChain’s ecosystem…?
Epicenter
The two main conference events were SF Blockchain Week’s Epicenter and the Crypto Economics Security Conference (CESC). Through both of events, its becoming clear that 2017’s moments of unclear white papers and presentations have come and gone, and rather, the only people left are those who are there for the love of the technology. As the theme was #ChangeTheNarrative, entrepreneurs, thought leaders, developers, academics, and advocates came together to make this the ongoing reality.
AngelList founder and CEO Naval Ravikant summarized in a fireside conversation that cryptocurrency has become ‘almost’ mainstream with this past year. He imagines it as a laying of infrastructure and push into an eventual innovation phase. Now, top tech talents are commonly finding themselves working for the cryptocurrency world too, and with institutes like Yale investing, maybe it’s a sign. Yet, it’ll be the army of programmers that keep the ecosystem alive, building said permissionless systems.
At the same time, we must realize that the cryptocurrency market is hot, but it does not have revolutionary significance. What is truly transformative is the innovation of science and technology, such as the innovation of the consensus mechanism. Naval reckons that blockchains should only be used for (as of now) in terms of state sponsored resistance, permissioned programmability (building ontop of Twitter, LinkedIn), and as a Schelling Point to coordinate an entire industry. Furthermore, Wall Street will eventually come to realize that, crypto does their work better. And as someone who has always idealized the go-getter attitude, hearing this is extremely promising.
CESC
CESC was a blast! It’s exciting to see such academic rigor in a field where there is so often hand-waviness about real issues. You hear things like “oh we’ll just throw some crypto-economic incentives in there,” but diving into what those problems are in a formal way and looking at lots of exciting proposed solutions is a rare experience.
After an opening keynote from Prof. Dawn Song, the event was kicked off with a panel with a few members of the Ethereum Foundation’s research team.
The three of them discussed their theories about why traditional economics hasn’t engaged as much as the academic communities of distributed systems and cryptography researchers. Karl proposed that the on-boarding process is still pretty complicated, particularly for people who haven’t worked within the context of a computing system before. Joseph Poon thought it might still be too niche.
Glen Weyl, the author of Radical Markets, was on a number of panels with various academics and crypto-fanatics discussing the pitfalls of our current systems and detailing some of his proposals and hopes for the future.
We were extremely lucky to run into a mellow week in San Francisco (with some planes overhead…). With all that had gone on, we are extremely thrilled to see what is to come when returning to the Blockchain Week next year.
Both Epicenter and CESC were a huge success — we loved networking with new people, meeting those deep in the dev and academic community, and those who also help run student orgs. It’s nice to share an interest with others in the space and realize they are there for the same reasons. Thus, we’ll be looking forward to what else this academic year holds.
Til Next Time
