Finding Meaning through Use at ETH Berlin
Meaning happens between users of a concept, between #buidlers testing a protocol or application. Meaning is a social event. Here are some of the issues, ideas, and applications animating the Ethereum developer community.
The 50,700 square foot Factory Berlin in Gorlitzer Park rises like a ship from the overgrown banks of the Landwehr canal. A neat Helvetica Nue typeface sign, “Factory,” is the only giveaway that this is a startup hub. Otherwise, it is an unassignable red brick edifice covered in graffiti, like any industrial building you might see in Baltimore or Liverpool. Inspired by Andy Warhol’s famed Factory in New York, it was an ideal location for 200 hackers to congregate for ETH Berlin. Perhaps auspicious, Andy Warhol’s painting, 14 Small Electric Chairs, sold for $1.7 million the day I arrived. Well, 31.5% of the painting did. It was tokenized and auctioned using the Ethereum network.
Four years ago during Devcon0 in Berlin, the idea that a Warhol would be tokenized and auctioned using the trustless peer-to-peer network might have been met with amusement. Hudson Jameson described the first developer conference as a “classroom-sized gathering” for core devs and project founders. By many measures, the Ethereum project has grown significantly, drawing an eclectic community of developers committed to building a shared computing network. The principles of transparency, security, openness, and decentralization have brought in hundreds of projects, tens of thousands of repositories on GitHub, and millions of unique Ethereum addresses. Yet its growth has also brought attention from investors and institutions, and with it, an impatience to see the network meet its scaling demands.
I went to ETHBerlin to distinguish the media perceptions of the Ethereum community from the actual people and projects contributing most to its potential. I wanted to test live dApps, and to learn how different components are beginning to talk to one another. What testing is needed for wider adoption? How are project founders and researchers describing decentralization, privacy, self-sovereign digital identity? And how can we get consumers to care about these important principles too? As a non-developer I finally got a sense of what connects this eclectic developer community: It is not only the immense technical challenge of creating an entirely new decentralized network of value and communication from the ground up, but attention to the ideals and communities of users that will continue to author its story. Though I will not describe the details of every significant project and talk, I encourage you to check out the presentations and the view all the submissions on DevPost.
Drinking our own Club Mate
The Factory was stocked with glass bottles of water, and a Berlin staple, Club Mate. It has the Internet-era startup vibe, replete with ball pits, ping pong tables, and cubby holes to hide in and hack. The ETH Berlin organizers encouraged a noble goal: let’s use the decentralized applications that are being built. As María Paula wrote, “If we have a working dApp, then why do we keep using the old centralized closed-source apps?” For sending messages, we would use Status. For fulfilling fun tasks or tipping people for wearing your swag, the Bounties Network created the Berlin coin. The event’s talks were streamed using Livepeer.
The first thing I did was start an account on Status, a messaging app cum mobile operating system for Ethereum — more WeChat than WhatsApp. You can send payments to friends and browse other dApps like Aragon, Ujo, Crypto Cribs, Bounties Network, and CryptoKitties. Yet most importantly, unlike centralized and censored WeChat, Status is truly a peer-to-peer network. I joined the #ethberlin channel and scanned QR codes to add new friends throughout the weekend, many still sporting usernames given to them like, “Sweaty Elegant Anemoneshrimp.” My moniker became “Simulacra and Simulacrum.”
When Status first loads, a greyed out message says “connecting to peers.” As an Ethereum evangelist, this is a charged and significant moment. You realize you are indeed browsing Web3. Using Status’ dApp browser, I visited the Bounties Network to earn some Berlin Coin. After I uploaded a picture of myself wearing a Status t-shirt to earn 20 BRLN coin, I was hooked, fulfilling four more bounties that day. Just after the hackathon, I also tested Gnosis’ prediction markets, and voted for my favorite submission using Olympia.
Days after the events wrapped up, Status announced that they would no longer be using Slack to communicate because it violates their principles of, “privacy, security, transparency, decentralization, inclusivity, openness,” and would instead switch full-time to Status…to build Status. As Gnosis’ founder Martin Koppleman said,
“Things are getting real…they are live. And this is only a fraction of what is live on Ethereum and only a fraction of what is being developed.”
Meaning is a social event
Wittgenstein’s “use theory of meaning” is an appropriate metaphor for the point of a hackathon. Ideas are not defined by what they represent, so much as by how they are used. Meaning is a social event. Meaning happens between users of a concept, and in this sense, between #buidlers testing a protocol or application. It is one thing to read about scaling, liquidity, infrastructure, homomorphic encryption, and another to test it in the wild, alongside fellow devs who know the language you speak.
Hackathons are sanctuaries to share project updates, research, and write code. This is even more important in the Web3 space. If you were to build something now on Web2, repositories for blocks of code are mostly out there already on GitHub. HTTP has been around for decades, and it doesn’t require extensive effort to build on top of it. It just works. But for Ethereum, every new building block is being written from its very roots.
Most basic crypto-economic primitives, like the theories behind token curated registries and curved bonding, are also still being tested in the wild. They also rely on different system constraints and assumptions of user behavior. As Raul Jordan of Prysmatic Labs, a team of engineers implementing a sharding layer for Ethereum, put it, “You have to ask the hard questions: How is gas going to work? How will dApps migrate to Ethereum 2.0? What role will Proof-of-Work have? What about cross-shard tx’s?” In order to seek these answers, you need to build, test, rinse and repeat.
At an event hosted by the smart contract auditing team: Diligence, I met Dr. Zac Williamson, the CTO of Creditmint. He is a quick-speaking polymath with a particle physics doctorate from Oxford University, and is now focused on creating a Ethereum mainnet platform for decentralized corporate lending. But over the last half year he has been hung up on the problem of how to write less gas-guzzling versions of zero knowledge proofs. “In five years, people will have the tooling to do in an hour what it is taking me to do in six months. What is being done hasn’t been done before, so there is no reference. We are all building from scratch.”
Even written instructions can’t replace learning face-to-face from the very people that have written the documentation.
Documentation, libraries, and tools can be be sparse — a problem that the team at Kauri is attempting to solve with its curated knowledge base. Yet even written instructions can’t replace learning face-to-face from the very people that have written the documentation. Hackathons help people realize when parts of the problems they are working on have already been solved by other teams, and helps resist the duplication of efforts, whether protocols for decentralized exchanges, liquidity, and wallet solutions.
Trent McConaghy, speaking on a token engineering panel during day one of ETH Berlin, stressed the importance of building off the work of others.
“It is tempting to innovate across the board, everywhere. Choose one or two places. Reuse. Reuse.” — Trent McConaghy
His team is building the Ocean Protocol, which aims to to incentivize a global data commons by compensating people to create data, yet making it free to download. It’s a brilliant concept that would flip the current models for storing, acquiring, and selling data. On a podcast with Rhys Lindmark, Trent reiterated that developers are still forming the substrate underlying all these systems so that people can build applications on top. “We are looking all around, and taking lessons from everyone.”
To test applications and crypto-economic assumptions you need a place to experiment before deploying them with real value. There are currently three testnets, but sometimes they face consensus-related issues syncing between clients. Bootnodes may be down. One of the more impressive contributions at ETH Berlin was the Görli Testnet, one that could be “used widely across all client implementations, and robust enough to guarantee consistent availability and high reliability.” In a mere 36 hours, a team formed from Chainsafe Systems and Afri Schoedon from Parity created a cross-chain Proof of Authority testnet and a faucet. Secure, interoperable testing environments are necessary for the continued testing of dApps.
E.G. Galano of Infura, who runs a cloud client for Ethereum to make it easier for dApps to run on the network said, “We all want to get to something where Ethereum and dApps are widely adopted. But working your way back, how do we get there? We need more dApps — more successful dApps. For your dApp to become widely successful you need to convert users, and they first need need to connect to Ethereum.”
Before the ecosystem will see reduction, interoperability and consolidation, there will be many more primitives introduced to make it easier for people to design consumer applications. And as that happens, people will no longer need to be experts in cryptography to be able to read specifications and create consumer applications. Based on the diversity of submissions and commitment to improving infrastructure, the shared computing network is coming faster than I initially assumed.
How will we know if it is dAppening?
Will users know when they are using a truly decentralized application? Do communities even care if their web experience is more private and secure, or whether the companies they support return power to their community of users?
Back when the internet was in its infancy, it took browsers like Netscape for people to begin accessing simple web pages and chat rooms. While UX is quickly improving in the Web3 space, there is still a lot of friction in on-boarding people onto MetaMask to begin performing basic actions, like fulfilling a bounty or using a decentralized exchange. I often paid too much in gas to make sure my transactions were confirmed quickly, but also felt appreciable awe when I realized that I was authoring a new state of the entire Ethereum blockchain through this process. This likely won’t be the same experience for first time users who aren’t taken by the idea of a trustless truth machine. As such, user experience is already set to be an major theme for Devcon IV at the end of October.
One promising submission to solve the issue of getting novice users onto Web3 platforms came from the team behind the All Aboard. They proposed that in order to get new users who know nothing of wallets or exchanges, you need to give people a wallet with some ETH so that they can start using the blockchain without first having to convert our government-issued currency into crypto. With this system, new users won’t need to manage private keys, understand gas payments, or install browser plugins. “It’s the Web3 version of the ‘customer acquisition cost’ and we propose that it should be shared among the dApps of the space: we need to onboard the users onto the blockchain before onboarding them on a dApp.”
In a triumphant moment during the closing ceremony, Remco Blemoe and Logvinov Leon reverse-engineered an Estonian eResidency card so that he could sign Ethereum transactions with it. Their submission successfully tied an Ethereum wallet contract to Remco’s citizen ID. To fully appreciate the sheer masochism it took to build this, they scrolled and scrolled through the dense lines of code necessary to implement the Secp384r1 elliptic curve in Solidity (even taking a shot at Vitalik’s trick to use EIP198 for multiplication as much slower than their Chinese remainder-based technique. Though, Remcoe did study math under Stephen Hawking at Cambridge, so maybe this hubris comes with the territory).
“As far as we know, we are the first in the world to transact on the blockchain using a government issued ID. We fucking did it! And the best part, if we lose our ID — our wallet — then we could get the Estonian government to issue me a new one!”
The ETH Berlin hackathon showed just how many different approaches you could take to onboard more people onto the Ethereum stack. Right now we are at an interesting in-between phase, where using dApps does require you to have a baseline education about what happens on Ethereum when a transaction is signed. But soon many imagine that the peer-to-peer web will look just like the web you use now, yet with the trustless assurance that there are no centralized servers or authorities managing the flow of information. As Matt Condon said recently, “For now, dApps occupy a ‘they’re different from apps’ mindset in our developer-focused #buidl ecosystem. But for consumers, dApps should just be apps. The word ‘dApp’ shouldn’t exist. Consumers don’t care about decentralization or privacy or self-sovereignty.”
“On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone”
While it may take a cultural shift to get average people to start appreciating dApps, I actually think that many people around the globe are very interested decentralizing the power of large Internet companies and ensuring more privacy while browsing the web. There is a proliferating social distrust of the ways in which companies like Google and Facebook hoover up our data, subsequently sell it, and curate the information that we then consume. In North America, executives like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey have been forced to testify about how the social networks monitor and moderate content, and in Europe, GDPR has been one response to the loss of privacy and control of our data online. It makes sense that in Berlin, a city particularly antagonistic to large and opaque power structures, the Ethereum ecosystem is thriving.
On the Thursday before the ETH Berlin hackathon began, there was a small but spirited “Fuck Off Google” protest in front of Factory Berlin. Factory Berlin received €1 million in funding from Google For Entrepreneurs, and Eric Schmidt gave a keynote at its opening ceremony in 2014. Not only the physical spaces, but much of the financial rails and infrastructure supporting Ethereum is still dependent on legacy companies and infrastructure. The current ways of managing and governing the flows of information are not sufficient to solve the increasing problems society faces digitally. As Gavin Wood said, “Our present digital architecture will magnify society’s maladies, not limit them.”
Interestingly, the solutions the Fuck off Google movement desires are the same solutions that animate the protocols being written by the Ethereum community.
“We want a world where our communications and data is in our own hands, where technology can be trusted and under our control, to enable us to organize a fairer future for everyone. We want to build, organize and share the practice of such technology based on the principles of decentralized services, free/libre software and end-to-end encryption.” — Fuck off Google messaging
To locals, the hundreds of developers that gathered in Kreuzberg for ETH Berlin might be indistinguishable from the Googlers that have been vying for a spot in the trendy neighborhood (rent prices rose 70% between 2004 and 2016, according to a report last year). If this movement is to grow in scale, not only will we need improved protocols and primitives, but we’ll have to learn to appeal to the tech discontents. If dApps are to grow in popularity, we need to continue to test new crypto-economic systems that pay people helping grow the platform, not just the ones serving our data. It will also increasingly be important to get the human governance aspects of Ethereum right so that the ideals of Web 3 can survive.
From Bucharest to Bangalore to Brussels the language of Ethereum is still being written, in a way that values openness and and consensus. In this sense, an Ethereum hackathon is more than just a gathering of like-minded people building a shared global computing network. It is a political achievement.
Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author above do not necessarily represent the views of Consensys AG. ConsenSys is a decentralized community with ConsenSys Media being a platform for members to freely express their diverse ideas and perspectives. To learn more about ConsenSys and Ethereum, please visit our website.
