Ethereum Explained | Kent Barton

so today I have the pleasure of introducing the etherium explain talk we have a great trainer today he fell down the Crypt arrived at Hall in 2012 after learning about Bitcoin two years later he founded the etherium Denver Meetup he's an eighth Denver steward and the head of R&D at shape-shift so please help me welcome Kent Barton Thank You Shannon Chuck can you guys hear me okay cool thanks Shannon for the intro and thank you got you guys for being here it's a it's a real honor and privilege to present to you guys I've been at a lot of conferences and this one seems unique in the sense that it's all about education so thanks to c4 and all the volunteers this has been so much fun just to get ready for so yeah I've had quite a fun and eventful journey and crypto so far currently I met shape-shift doing R&D we have some foxes over there hello it's and a lot of that work focuses on some of the current challenges and blockchains when I got into crypto in 2012 I thought man I feel like I'm getting in ahead of the game Bitcoin was already out three years I felt behind the curve and so much has changed since then so one thing I want to stress if you're just learning about this technology now we're still very early in the game you know in in 20 years once this this sort of thing is is well adopted in mainstream society then okay maybe that's not ahead of the curve but you learning now it's still very early so originally I conceptualized this is kind of like a 30,000 foot view of etherion but it occurred to me that a thorium is global in nature so let's pull back to the the altitude of the International Space Station which is 250 miles a theory really is kind of a decentralized in global thing much like Bitcoin it doesn't it doesn't have borders doesn't have a central point of authority and it kind of just speaks to kind of the the nature of it we're also going to do a high high architectural overview we're gonna cover some some general concepts my goal is just to position you to to start your own journey and move down your own rabbit hole we won't be getting overly technical there's some other talks after this at the conference that pertained to that but you will have a good sense of some of the key things that make a thorium tick before I continue last night I was talking to Taylor from my crypto and it reminded me that I had not added any memes in my presentation yet and that's perhaps the most important thing so okay there's business CAD and I I'm a fan of this one lately like thank you I'll be here all night so okay that said memes out of the way in order to get a sense for what aetherium does and why it exists it's helpful to jump in a time machine and go back to the year 2012 or 2013 so back then Bitcoin had been around for a few years and it was clearly becoming a thing it was it had survived big ups and downs and some early early drama and it was becoming apparent okay it's not a scam it's not easy hat easily hackable it's it's it's very good at actually protecting value in transmitting value so what about that time people are thinking well given all this technology what if we could do more than just you secure Bitcoin what if we could assign value or have tokens that represent a whole variety of assets maybe you could have a digital gold on the Bitcoin blockchain or maybe you could even represent a share of IBM so this this was talked about for a while the original concept was called colored coins where you could kind of build on the Bitcoin network and have assets represented as tokens this eventually led to the concept called master coin which still exists in the form of Omni Network Omni is the base layer for for the Bitcoin version of tether so that actually is still around around that time in 2013 guy named Vitalik boo Turin who was the editor in chief of Bitcoin magazine was was working with master coin he also saw the limitations of Bitcoin wanted to expand on that I remember looking at a Google Doc once around then and looking at the master coin so if it vitalik was in there like doing live comments I thought this is pretty cool you know this is gonna work in this work out to be something but a little bit later kind of mid to late 2013 Vitalik came to the realization that these limitations inherent with building on Bitcoin where maybe to ownerís and maybe the better approach would be to borrow from some of the key concepts that Bitcoin has and then crucially have a departure where where you could do something else and that's namely arbitrary smart contracts that execute code on the blockchain so this is a whole different blockchain a whole different pivot he described this in the white paper that was released in late 2013 it doesn't look super yellow on the right but that's the yellow paper by Gavin wood and he actually gave computer science muscle to metallics concepts he described how the etherion box chain would be actually put into into operation how it would work so these two pieces really formed the basis of etherion kind of at the onset and this holds true today aetherium has a really one one or two central unique value propositions but the key thing to understand is it's building on the shoulders of giants it's building on Bitcoin which itself was a remarkable revolution in evolution in technology building on cryptography and other things so it shares much with Bitcoin and these are the fundamental properties that you really want with any fully decentralized or maximally decentralized technology censorship resistance no third party can shut it down whether it's a government or a company immutability you can't go back in time and say well actually that was I sent to ether to you and not one ether it's immutable trust lessness you don't actually have to trust a third party because you can trust this this decentralized distributed network of nodes and miners permissionless you don't actually have to ask permission to do anything on it all you need is in this case ether to interact and power smart with smart contracts you don't actually have to be beholden to anybody to do anything and finally transparency as much as you hear about oh people are using crypto for drugs and to fund terrorism and these you know various awful sounding things the fact is almost all crypto currencies by default are transparent everything that happens on the blockchain is visible it doesn't necessarily mean that your your address is tied to your identity but it's it's increasingly you know easier for authorities to figure that out the transparency has some big benefits in terms of you can know exactly what's happening what's going to happen with a smart contract and all sorts of other good stuff so onto this onto this wonderful thing that Bitcoin had had created etherium adds a turing-complete global platform turing-complete is a fancy computer science term relate to means kind of like you can build a lot of arbitrary things on it you aren't you aren't limited to just a few you're not you aren't locked in to a few things that enables smart contracts the definite definition of which we'll cover shortly and also decentralized applications who here has played with like at least one gap before okay cool not too many people I would hope and I suspect that maybe in five years everybody will raise their hand almost like as if you're at asking if I do you have you ever played with the app on your phone everybody has but there's some challenges and we'll cover that as well so okay that sounds cool but so what what why is this actually interesting and why is it revolutionary aetherium empowers users with abilities that did not previously exist so this includes tokenized crowdfunding this was the original use case of aetherium in fact when aetherium launched this was on the site is something you could do they even provided the code this this turned out to be wildly successful and fueled the ICO bubble that everybody's so familiar with of course that got very hyper driven it had its own sort of economic issues but technologic we speaking the ability to create tokens and then have people pay for them and and then use those tokens in an application turn out to be revolutionary decentralized exchanges many many countless centralized exchanges have been hacked it'll happen again I absolutely guarantee it when you have these honey pots of a lot of money decentralized exchanges instead rely on smart contracts to protect wealth they're not holding your funds it exists in these open smart contracts the house you may hear the term Dow it's decentralized governance a little bit beyond the scope of this talk but it's a kind of a new way to achieve governance for for organizations tokenizing real world assets i just saw the other day that a company is tokenizing actual real estate on the ethereum blockchain so why bother with that you could have increased fungibility you could also have fractional shares of assets that you normally couldn't have in other words imagine if you wanted to get exposure to real estate but you didn't want to buy like an entire house maybe you want to buy a tenth of a house in in denver or somewhere that you thought the market was going to go up suddenly with tokenize real-world assets this becomes possible this is an emerging thing it's not calm yet but I think that's where things are headed and then staple coins staple coins are really interesting and useful thing not limited to aetherium the the Bitcoin version of tether lives on Omni that we talked about earlier but um they really lend themselves well to aetherium and there's a whole host of staple coins on etherion and what these do is they provide you the ability or all the benefits of of a token on the blockchain but without the insane volatility that we're all used to in in crypto if there's one thing you can count on in crypto it's high volatility so let's stick into three really important concepts like and again this is kind of just this is a high-level overview there's much more complexity but in my humble opinion if you want if you need to know really three things about a theory in bits the following three things one is consensus and and this is where aetherium shares a whole lot with with Bitcoin the this concept of a distributed system where you have a variety of like thousands of nodes each running a copy of the software and processing all the transactions are running all the codes additionally you have miners who are incentivized to secure the network and publish new blocks this is a proof-of-work net mechanism it works great with Bitcoin and it's worked great with etherion although there are plans to change it in the future we'll touch it on that in a little bit so the design decision to do this was pretty smart because it was a proven proven sort of thing and it's actually worked out quite well the idea with having thousands of nodes running the software is if somebody if a miner gets clever and tries to slip a transaction through and say actually I'm gonna send myself this money instead of this person or you know otherwise change the code it's effectively impossible because all it takes is for one of these nodes to reject that transaction everybody's running this the same the same software in the same code this also presents some scaling challenges but there is there's upcoming solutions to that so here is where we have a fork in the road and we have a departure from from Bitcoin this is a very notable departure Bitcoin has what's called op codes and I may be a little bit off here but I believe it's probably a few dozen that are commonly used and these are instructions that you can use to do things with Bitcoin like maybe lock up money for a certain period of time and a few other things but it's very limited and this is one of Bitcoin strengths because its simplicity helps it be more secure that's what's why you know you haven't heard of Bitcoin just getting hacked or or some major consensus failure however it's one of its notable limitations because you really can't easily do a lot with it people have tried it's very clunky so etherion the the number one first actor the no the shining golden first first actor is citizen in aetherium is the smart contract as a smart contract does not have any sort of legal connotations some people get a little bit confused and say what wait contracts it doesn't refer to any sort of legal thing but more so to this idea of a snippet or a piece of code that will execute a certain way it lives on the blockchain and by virtue of its transparency you can be sure it's going to execute how it says it will you can analyze the code before you use it and say yes in fact this decentralized exchange will swap this for this and everything looks good third parties can audit it and it triggers on the blockchain the if if you have your your own ether typically that's held in just a regular account so that's a second type of account in in aetherium and then the other one is the smart contracts so you could send ether from a your own account and also a smart contracts can trigger each other and then the this this code happens and hopefully everything goes well and as intended which there have been incidents where there are some issues and we'll cover that as well just to dig in a little bit further a lot of you on the developer side may have heard of solidity or experimented with it there is a variety of languages you can program in with etherion solidity is by far the most common because it was it was built on sort of like a JavaScript variant I think this was another really good design decision they made in the early days is given the fact that javascript is so popular let's build this this aetherium type language around it so it turned out to be a wise move because it's engendered a lot of developer participation and it's easier to get your head around of course you still have to understand some of these blockchain concepts as well and there's some some differences but in general it's not bad it's people people enjoy programming in it and it's been successful there's also other variants like built around rust and in Python if you want to branch out into other things but uh solidity the most common so what happens then you see on the Left you know it kind of looks like your typical code on the right you see basically low-level assembly code and this is the very bare-bones instructions it's getting fed into what's called the EVM or a thorough and virtual machine the EVM is really where the action happens this is this is behind the open the hood and when actual you know data is being sent around and things are happening it's all about the EVM that our that's making these instructions happen you can see no this is not human readable code but that's okay because it just compiles down to that code so let's let's visualize that a little bit more and again this is this is simplified it's pretty high-level but this is essentially what's going on when you're using a theory in so imagine you have a solidity solidity code representing say a smart contract when when that's activated it's it's compiled down into EVM bytecode these are the the instructions and then that in turn has the the 3m virtual machine do something and then if if you've actually done everything right and you've paid for the smart contract via gas which we'll cover next it will execute and then be whatever actions have have transpired will be codified in the next block and and that's that and due to its it's immutability at that point the the outcome of the smart smart contract is effectively set in stone if it's not if something got reverted then something has gone dramatically wrong with consensus this has happened with other smaller block chains to date it has not happened with a theorem or Bitcoin but at that point you have the deployed contract and things are you know humming along nicely so we come to this this concept of gasps so there's a site called ether scan where you again you know everything is transparent on aetherium so you can see exactly what's happening in this case a smart contract was was called however it ran out of gas much like your your car might unless you have a Tesla and the reason is the the user for whatever reason I did not play apply sufficient gas to the the transaction so gas is the fuel that powers aetherium smart contracts why is fuel even necessary like when you're playing a video game or running a database locally you don't need any fuel the reason is every every computational instruction on aetherium is is priced in gas if there wasn't gas then you would have crazy situations like infinite loops contracts running all the time and this would this would basically the network and make it effectively unusable as an extra thing it incentivizes minors to protect the network because they they get the fees as well so the it's preventing infinite loops and other kind of disasters it can happen with code that doesn't require fuel and there's the incentive a cinema's ation aspect as well so one other important thing you know with gas is it is not actually ether however it's priced and ether and this can take a while to get your head around when you're let's say you send a transaction to maybe you want to trigger a smart contract and you send it into one one ether into the smart contract and maybe the gas is totals up to like point zero one eath so you're certainly paying an extra point zero one eighth but what's happening behind the scenes is it turns that into gas and you're not actually powering the contract like gas is not it's not tradable in the free market it just happens behind the scenes it kind of feels like an extra layer of abstraction like why did they bother with this and the reason is to decouple the fluctuations in the in the real-world value of ether which can gyrate create in a crazy way with the actual you know need to prefer gas and i otherwise then it would get more onerous to use a 3m as the price of ether went up instead miners themselves can can decide like you know what what's an okay gas amount it's kind of a market that miners set themselves and it does fluctuate heavily with supply and demand for the network and we've seen this many times when when the network got overloaded did anybody hear about the crypto kiddies debacle so that was crypto kitties right there the the network got way too popular way too fast and it got very expensive to use because gas prices went up when all is running well the gas prices are stable and pretty negligible but this is that decoupling is a smart I think move by the dev team to to kind of deal with the volatility issues and by the way if you have questions as we won't run through this I'm gonna probably talk until maybe about another 15 minutes and then we'll have time for Q&A so given all this we kind of talked about some of the the theoretical stuff but let's talk about what's happening now because in my opinion there's a lot of interesting things going on and I just want to highlight a few interesting decentralized applications and a decentralized application is sort of a combination of smart contracts that live on on the blockchain plus a interface a front-end interface where users can can interact with the death kind of like a you know your your regular phone app but on the blockchain so maker they are the guys that do the die stable coin maker has been around for quite a while die is a decentralized algorithmically reinforced stable coin that's become very popular just the ability to have to insulate yourself from volatility risk is wonderful if you're if you're interacting in crypto or holding crypto for maybe commerce purposes or other things interestingly enough it's also powered this this really cool thing called defy or decentralized finance defy has become a little bit buzzword II lately because it's just like it's the new hot thing but I think there's really some substance behind it and a lot of it is based on the fact that people now have the ability to earn interest and do cool things in it that's denominated in a stable value so as an example compound it allows you to lend out tokens and then get interest that's denominated in various tokens including die and this is spawned if you just Google like defy apps you'll see all sorts of cool examples of things that are happening it's gotten very far out some people call it money Legos some more cautious people say well look at what happened with derivatives in 2008 we don't want to like recreate that it's how it like down the rabbit hole we're getting with with this stuff but something to keep an eye on it's very cool Gazza Unchained is a I mentioned crypto kitties but this is more recent example of gaming on the blockchain gods and chain is kind of like a Magic the Gathering collectible card game the key distinction here is you own all your cards in a provably fair way in other words you you know you have this private key that's associated with a token that token represents a specific card so that allows you to you know create markets for these cards and trade them with friends and actually have self sovereign ownership of these assets Gaming is increasingly huge market you know billions and billions a year and in game economies even without the blockchain or a thing so it block Tunes you can imagine well maybe I have this really cool sword and I want to use it in another game and this allows for more cross cross game assets potentially and crypto also lends itself well the micro payments which are common in in-game economies basic attention token is is definitely one of my favorites just because it addresses I think one of the biggest failings of web 1.0 and 2.0 and that's the fact that the ads experience it is awful it's a horrible experience you know it if you're a fan of you know reading sites online news sites or whatever sort of content you're probably sick of paywalls you know you don't want to sign up for these things however publishers are also losing money it's it's a it's kind of a lose-lose situation for everybody involved we've seen a lot of news online newspapers shut down maybe they were formerly real newspapers it's just an ugly situation bat or basic attention token it's it's integrated with a brave browser which has some cool non blockchain privacy aspects but what this allows you to do is incentivize and reward your favorite publisher is with this micropayments of this token it's it's a cool concept and again this was not possible prior to the blockchain sending micropayments in the this this unique token in response to different things that is a so she met it wicked pedia a lot of other big organizations keep an eye on them they're pretty cool finally augur is a decentralized prediction market they were the very first I see Oh back then it wasn't even called ICO but they were the first crowd sale on etherion after ether itself it's a decentralized prediction market where you can bet on on Elections you can bet on I'm just about anything sports and here we see the value of censorship resistance prediction markets are not new they've been around there used to be a site called in trade but it's easy for for them to be shut down maybe in the local jurisdiction you know that it's seen as gambling or and this is very crucial it would be easy for a prediction market - maybe skew the results or abscond with your funds and it properly implemented prediction market on the blockchain that this is not really possible there's no censorship and there's no the transparency means you can kind of understand exactly what's going to happen Agra has had some UX challenges and you know that they had they have yet to really take off but that could but I think that will come in time they have a really good team and it's a cool project to check out okay so this is all very exciting but what could go wrong it turns out quite a lot can go wrong when you have an experimental blockchain that's only been around for like four or five years and you have these crazy smart contracts this is how people that invested in the Dow felt in 2016 the the Dow you may have heard about this hack it was an ambitious cool project where people were gonna tap into this this way to have decentralized governance to fund things have really ambitious and fun people just poured their money into it millions and millions it was really cool then one day we woke up to see that the contract had been drained of millions of value so somebody was actively draining it you could see it before your eyes it turns out the smart contract code had flaws it was not written very well and it's kind of understandable like this hadn't happened before it was a hell of a stress test and millions of dollars of value were lost to this unknown hacker so this actually led to a very confrontational controversial split in the etherium community some of you have heard of the theory equate is resolved is the community said well okay this is sort of a mulligan we're gonna just revert those transactions that led to the hack because it it was viewed as two it was two handicapping to the ecosystem aetherium classic said you know what kotas law what the heck happened and then that kind of split off so that's sort of what led to that but more to the point of this topic is just the dangers that come with holding value in smart contracts this happened again a few years ago when there is a multi signature contract like a wallet contract which ostensibly a multi-state should be much more much more prone or hacking proof because you need to have multiple ad signatures to release the funds group called parity had a multi sig wallet with millions of value and it got hacked in a way that all the funds in there were frozen I believe this happened twice so in this case there was no bail out the community was very firm about okay there's not gonna be another sort of doubt here and I'm it sucks but anybody that had their money in that multi-state contract that they lost funds so this is this does not exist in you know other sort of implementations or this doesn't happen like if you if you bank online at Chase you don't have to worry about well they screwed up and they sent my money somewhere else necessarily and if they they do you know they can always revert the transaction this is a weakness and and something that needs to be addressed with etherion there are solutions underway namely formal verification which is a way to really ensure mathematically the code will execute as it says it will there's also languages like Haskell that lend themselves better to to secure contracts but it's something that that's evolving I think it's definitely gotten better people have smart contracts audited but there's always that risk if if you're holding a lot of money in a smart contract and that that applies to just about anything let's see here there's this guy again I couldn't resist so yeah it's more contract risk it could be considered a longtail risk or maybe it's even more of a prominent risk based on you know how well the smart contract is vetted but something to keep in mind something even something more there we go something much more important I think because the security aspect will be solved over time but scaling is the big one the S word this this to me this is the most fascinating topic of our of our time at least in this space how can we scale these decentralized systems in a way that we maintain all their wonderful properties like immutability and censorship resistance but scale it to the masses bitcoin does like three transactions per second on average ether does maybe seven to ten the visa network does three or five dollars in a second we need to hit visa levels if this is ever going to go mainstream crypto Kitty's got very popular in late 2017 and it was kind of a fun little game had cute little cats it turns out though they clogged the network and they made it very expensive to use so what happened is you had this huge queue of pending transactions and it was it was a mess its shape shift we dealt with this firsthand we had a really cool DAP called prism that was like decentralized wealth management and it was it was a nice application however it became essentially unusable when these gas prices got so high and that's one thing that we work on now is like you know if we're gonna release a new DAP it better be scalable and a bit better it better we better mitigate these type of threats so that's a whole other interesting thing the technology around scaling is is evolving at a breakneck pace every single day there's something new in it every week there's like a new kind of landmark learning or white paper and it's almost hard to keep track of what might actually work out over time and what might not it's just evolving quickly scaling is beyond the scope of this talk but to break it down very briefly it comes in two flavors layer two is is imagine you have your garden-variety etherion blockchain let's say it's not changing at all it's just the current blockchain on top of that you could add a layer to system where maybe you're doing something else off chain and the central idea here is you don't actually have to be on chain to do everything so take some things off chain but then when it's time to maybe settle your balance or make a payment you post it to chain there's all sorts of ways to do this state channels raid in lightning example on Bitcoin is an example of layer two I think that one of the prior talks was about that plasma zero knowledge proof and there's all sorts of things all sorts of ways to solve this at the second layer nothing is really caught on yet because the technology is so novel but I I personally I've talked to a lot of these teams and they're all like super freaking smart they have interesting ideas I think the key lies in like can they balance security with UX and and you know like speed I think that will look vastly different in about a year and then at the first layer or layer one this refers to actually making changes on the blockchain itself some of you may have heard of eath 2.0 this is an effort to make aetherium itself more scalable via a switch to a proof of state consensus mechanism which has some scaling benefits but more it more importantly it's it's a data based concept where you shard the blockchain shardene is a database this is this is nothing new it's been around for for a long time in computer science but in the blockchain context it means that not every node has to process every transaction so currently one of the big limitations with aetherium is like okay we have like 9,000 nodes and they all process all the code this is very good for security but it limits scaling what if there were a hundred kind of sharded or split up block chains that we're all connected somehow but they didn't have to process every transaction all things considered equal you would get like a hundred x scaling benefit as a result of that so this is super promising and I think it's the it's where the future is headed but it's also really cutting edge nobody's ever done anything like this it's fraught with unknowns and it's going to be implemented in like a three-phase process so keep an eye on that my gut tells me that there's probably even though you hear estimates of one to two years like there's always something that crops up this is where layer two scaling is so crucial it'll help us scale that bridge between layer 1 and layer 2 so it's it's a big nasty challenge but it's also just very interesting incidentally there's other block chains that are trying to solve for this like cosmos II OS has decided to be more centralized in order to scale so you see different different ways to accomplish this but in the context of ether there's a lot going on real quick I just wanted to cover the etherium ecosystem this is a picture of the etherium Denver meetup I I think this represents to me the most important element of the etherium ecosystem is the developers and entrepreneurs and participants who were involved in the ecosystem it's uh it's just a really it's a very organic loosely organized but passionate global sort of thing people in the space don't take themselves too seriously there's you know people are focused on just new ideas and it's generally a judgment-free zone everybody recognizes we're doing something new so in my opinion that that's the most important element is like the users and people you know just getting into the ecosystem we also have the etherium foundation or the EF so a13 is decentralized there's no aetherium company but we have the etherium foundation which is kind of similar to maybe let the linux foundation or certain more loosely control groups they're the ones that set up a 3m initially and conducted the crowd sale these days their most important role is to hand out grants namely around like some of these problems like scaling and security they have a lot of eath from the crowd sale still and their funding plays a crucial role in pushing the ecosystem forward they also host the annual conference around aetherium which is called DEFCON this year will be in osaka if you ever want to just really geek out for like five days go to DEFCON and it's it's a remarkable experience ton of fun and surrounded by interesting and smart people learning tons of presentations and it's usually an interesting locale - finally we have consensus consensus were founded by an aetherium co-founder named joel Lubin they're out in Brooklyn and what's interesting about consensus and this is consensus with the sys not a s us their approach is just to throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks they've worked on a lot of projects and it's proven to be an interesting approach but they actually have some projects that have have really become a very core part of the etherium space one is called in fira it allows DAP users to adapt developers to simplify the process of creating nodes and tapping into etherium it sounds like super boring it's definitely not an exciting thing but it provides a much needed service there's also meta masks some of you may have used that it's just a little browser app you use it's like an in-browser wallet and this law allows you to easily interact with decentralized applications whether you're doing like defy or augur or any of these things and that that's been a big leap forward in terms of the user experience they're always doing interesting things they had to downsize in earlier this year in response to to the the bear market much like a lot of crypto companies did but they're still doing doing very interesting things and then the related project spearheaded by consensus is the etherium Enterprise Alliance or EE a if any of you are in enterprise you might touch on these guys you might know about them the mission of the EEA is really to get you know fortune 500 companies on board whether it's like Intel JPM you know big banks Microsoft and get their head around using the technology currently aetherium is in Oran really pretty much any blockchain is not very well suited to scaling but the idea is let's give these companies a sense of what it's like to build on aetherium let's get them used to the language and the concepts and presumably once public blockchains can provide the necessary privacy and scalability then hey okay these big companies will be in a good position to use it so it's almost time for Q&A just a few parting thoughts it's like I can't stress enough how fun and exciting it is to learn about this stuff and and and if any of you are considering working in crypto I also can't recommend that enough it's just it's very exciting really this technology has given us the ability to to rethink things from the ground up you know right the wrongs of web 2.0 do you move beyond kind of what we have now and the status quo we're definitely making up the rules as we go along which can be intense but also very exciting one thing to keep in mind is is I as cool as it is decentralization is not a panacea contrary to what you might have heard in the the bull market like not everything needs to be on it on the blockchain you saw a lot of this with the ICO height book we're gonna take this AI and then combine it with like VR goggles and please buy our token and put on the blockchain but it's like why the hell would you want to put that on the blockchain it doesn't make any sense so bear that in mind like many things work better in a centralized fashion and there's a relatively small number of things that work better as decentralized systems again let's learn from history whether it's like the ads market and that experience or this this massive privacy issue that we've we've come to become so familiar with with Equifax quite Cambridge analytical you know we're giving up our data voluntarily but in my opinion it's a Faustian bargain there is there's going to be consequences of this blockchains give us the ability to have self sovereign data and do things our own way on a more political note decentralize platforms are a great tool for resisting potentially authoritarian regimes authoritarianism has crept across the globe since they're really over the past ten years it's gotten markedly worse are you believing in our own country the censorship resistant aspect of decentralized applications really is a good fit with things that might seek to preserve privacy or provide tools against authoritarianism and lastly just to reiterate you know this is this is a brand new field five years is nothing Ethan's been around five years Bitcoin has been around ten years in the scheme of things like say compared to the Internet or other well-known technologies it's it's definitely still the first quarter we're really early on so things could change vastly um we could scarcely imagine MySpace in 2000 let alone Facebook or apps sent on a similar note like you know who knows what things will look like in three to five years so some the resources here as we wrap up if you want to learn more there's other etherium sessions there's one going on right now he has a site called chain Tut's check that out chain tutorials check out a local meetup wherever you are if you're here in Denver check out a 3m Denver we have meetup coming up in late September I believe there was meetups all over the place and they're great way to tap into what's going on or attend one of the eath global hackathons or conferences there's Denver San Francisco Berlin Waterloo Canada all over the place and they're they're really fun ways to to jump in there and and really go off the deep end did anybody go to each Denver awesome yeah so you guys know how it is it's intense and fun don't forget to turn on your detector and be wary of thought-leaders telling you what to think you see a lot of this on Twitter you know so-and-so has been around for you know since Bitcoin got started or whatever and they they're very opinionated and they tell it tell you how it is and the thing is even if these people knew at all which they don't their knowledge would be outdated in three to six months because things change so quickly so don't let anybody tell you like you know really shape your opinion or don't don't become a slave to somebody's idea of like well this this blockchain is better than this blockchain it's all new technology we're just trying to create a better and more prosperous and freer world so do your own research always question authority and of course I have fun and be yourself thank you you [Applause] you

Channel: CryptoCurrency Certification Consortium

Views: 887

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Bitcoin, Bitcoin education, Bitcoin certification, Learn bitcoin, Cryptocurrency certification, Cryptocurrency certification consortium, Certified bitcoin professional, Cryptocurrency education, Bitcoin specialist, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Crypto, ethereum ecosystem, ethereum blockchain, ethereum, what is ethereum, differences between ethereum and bitcoin, kent barton, understanding ethereum, ethereum technology, blockchain technology, blockchain ethereum

Id: Q6wA0GOUric

Length: 42min 58sec (2578 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/rational_faultline]

Good explainer here, straightforward but just technical enough.

[u/seven7hwave]

The Blockchain Training Conference (BTC) was kind enough to have me talk last year. This presentation is designed as a high-level intro to Ethereum, assuming a bit of pre-existing basic crypto knowledge for the viewer.

[u/etherbie]

But do you answer the most important technical question.... Wen Moon?