Matthew Hodgson - Matrix.org and Riot.im - Ethereum London

and start off with who knows what matrix is already okay so it's not too bad we've got about sorry 20 people so which is great because otherwise this would be really boring because I'm going to tell you about matrix and lots of people don't know about it already so matrix is a non-profit open-source project and what we build is an open network for secure decentralized real-time communication so this isn't a blockchain but it's and very related to it in many respects technologically and what you can use it for is interoperable VoIP or video where for IP you can use it for chat group messaging slack style use cases you can use it for VR or possibly IOT basically anywhere where you've got some data that you want to get from A to B in real time in an open decentralized secure encrypted manner on the web and we sort of came to this with a mission to really create a communications network a bit like the public switch telephone e network which is critically decentralized so no telcos it's encrypted end-to-end so the people control over there and privacy and their own dates and it effectively provides an open platform very similar to the web that we know today except really nailing for real-time communication use case so the parallels were blocked in Bitcoin is fairly huge accepts rather than trying to disrupt the banks and the conventional sort of financial processes here we're disrupting the telcos effectively and we're also disrupting Facebook or Google or whatsapp or any of these silos slack for that matter telegram that people are using today so what's it look like if you've got a bunch of silos like this and it could literally be flack or telegram good old IRC network could be free nodes could be getter any of these communication silos or it could be an application like something like github matrix sits as off in the middle as a decentralized network and what you have is a full mesh effectively observers with bridges fruits are these other protocols and you can also have clients which are native to matrix and matrix is basically a glue hello it's common denominator pretty smart though it's common denominator glue the links them all together so the whole point of this is to stop any single party earning or conversations if we were having this conversation in a chat room and I was on my personal service sitting under my bed and I know you guys were all on a London server or aetherium sofa or wherever it might happen to be the contents the history of the conversation is being replicated effectively like a distributed decentralized ledger over all of those servers and this is the completely unique thing the matrix birth of a communication protocol really does and that we know at least in that the history is completely democratized so that makes sense if people are familiar with git is a version control system matrix is very heavily modeled after gate so if you think of XMPP or something or IRC being more like subversion or CVS where you have a sub centralized source control system and get everybody has an equal copy of the repository and you keep replicating between it so every time I send a message in matrix it's like I get commit to my repository and then I push it out to everybody else but in real-time so I already said yeah basically used for web RTC signaling is a big one if anybody has had the misfortune to try to use WebRTC as the voice that built into your browser these days you basically find you have to do it through a specific website and it's hilarious because you take an already very fragmented system and you make it even more fragmented I can only call somebody if they also have an account on this website right now so what if there was an open network which allows browsers to basically talk to one another regardless of the site that people were using that's basically matrix likewise on the VRA outside there is no standard way to communicate it's a disaster I mean it's the only thing worse is probably IOT but in VR the best that people have done so far is to fire up a mumble or a teamspeak kind of server as if you're a gamer and you kind of have an out whole conversation with other people in that world but if we were in a open metal open cyberspace surely need to have a way to actually talk to one another will send instant messages and basically there isn't anything there about from matrix also if you got a project called matrix you gotta do something with VR any kind of communication silo obviously needs brooches IOT is even more fragmented than the silos that we saw earlier now if you've got a fitbit trying to talk to an apple piece of kit talking to a Google silo there is no interoperability there at all so wouldn't it be nice if it was a big open data fabric where people can just publish bits of data your heartbeat your telemetry your how-to video call whatever it is and people could just build on top of it as big open global data Lake effectively I'm going the wrong way so terms of the comparison with blockchain first of all our messages are stored in the rooms so not doing a global ledger here instead the ledgers up her room the rooms are replicated across all the participating servers however we don't have any proof of work or proof of stake or proof of anything really because we don't have double spend protection there isn't a transactional guarantee in this as you would need for an actual ledger because it's real-time cons it's like a conversation on snack instead of disaster if the message ordering goes out a bit and if people talk over one another one another doesn't matter at all so we don't have the complexities of needing to do proof of work we do instead have the complexities of proof of semantically important things because in the world where everybody has an equal copy of the room except I and the minute that room on the other people as to why I've kept them and as I have permission to kick them so that's some where some of the more interesting cryptography happens in terms of the overall model it's basically gradually eventually consistent some guarantees on the consistency model so in terms of cap theorem if people know that we're optimizing for the availability and the partitioning rather than the consistency and this is very much a feature because imagine if half of the room you know disappeared often to one of the other lecture theaters and the connection went down there and this was all happening happening over matrix it's kind of nice after half an hour we might get the connection back up and you guys could resynchronize the room with what's been going on in here and there wasn't any need to go and close a block or go and have a sort of transaction instead it just goes and merges together the fork is healed automatically but for instance we know some people who use matrix on submarines which go and pop up for air occasionally go and synchronize all of their internal rooms for the rest of matrix and then disappear for another six months and then come up again if anybody's read the book cyber needs by Neal Stephenson ironically there's an enormous part of the book all about precisely this except there's no matrix so architectural e is basically as I said earlier you have a bunch of service which hosts the history of these conversations you have native clients you have application servers which are like clients on steroids these provide bridges to other things and then we have identity servers which honestly is a mess and I'm really looking forward to the talk later on about a theorem name server stuff and here what's happening in the decentralized identity model there at the moment these guys are effectively centralized but we want to replace them with a completely decentralized way to map from email addresses and phone numbers through two matrixes internal identifiers and semantically it's precisely the same problem as I get from an email address to an aetherium account or a Bitcoin ID or whatever it might be this is probably the interesting diagram for developers the main bit that you get with matrix is here the matrix pack itself which is a big RFC style document you then get reference implementations in Python and in go the go one is almost ready but it's been a long time coming you get lots of different bridges free to other protocols like telegram or IRC etc you have free stats if the JavaScript iOS and Android side and these come in three flavors the API SDK which is basically wrapping the HTTP API which is the core of matrix then you have UI components on top and then on top of that you have actual apps and the green stuff here comes from us matrix dog and the white stuff comes from everybody else because the community are also working on lots of bridges and as rust server core dreamer and then there's lots and lots of client from the community to in pretty much any language you can imagine apart from pole six I'm not sure when but we basically up everything else to go alexia into the mortals so enough for me talking let's actually look at the thing I will attempt to move my HDMI yeah come on and we're up events visible to people I'm wondering if it might look better with that it might seem let me just change the theme over quickly sorry oh I've been told to record it one second I've placed my quick zone and again I clicked on going it's probably gonna keval with my demos because my Mac's a bit old and I bet that it's not going to be able to do both at the same time but let's see okay so hey we are doing your demo and I can change the color scheme is there just mine theme yeah hopefully that's a bit better and so here is a matrix client so this is a typical room in matrix this is actually our internal development room they're only 36 of us in here me warning the team that we're going to be and doing demos in here then you got rooms like matrix H key this one's a bit bigger it's only got ten thousand two hundred and seventy-seven people in it find me a slack that has that many people in it just saying and this is actually bridged into IRC you can see people joining and leaving it from IRC it's also greatest into slack itself and I can say hello world or something and assuming that the amazing cloud connectivity is enough to deliver my message I was working fine Manila went in here but now that everybody is sitting here on the cloud Wi-Fi I dread to think how my dummies are going to actually work but some interesting things to look at is that you've got some read receipts here and so this message has been read by 25 people again something you don't get on snack and today and it's incredibly useful to see this kind tetris effects as people go and read down the page i'm just going to try going to around inside to kick the Wi-Fi yes I've got Wi-Fi I've got typing notification from everything there and I just be getting I've angered the demo gods well well stand this thing tries to wake up it probably also doesn't help that this account is in about two thousand different rooms you can see a huge list of rooms here doing all sorts of things ranging from William Gibson's Twitter feed which is of course Britain's matrix free to lots of one-to-one conversations the Japanese language community people doing all sorts of different things and different projects some of them are originally on IRC and it bean bridge into matrix some of them are on slack you try a different demo and so this is a different matrix client that one was called right this one's and HECO and essentially a native desktop client written in QT or cute depending on how you pronounce it it's been written by the community by this guy called mu Jack's and it's incredibly nice it's not quite finished yet but if if you see how rapidly one switches between rooms here it's a proper proper native client and shows that matrix isn't just about web apps likewise if I go and not my HDMI cable oh come on ah okay nobody breathe and I go and try screen sharing my iPhone onto my phone because obviously to my machine here unless I've got local connectivity it's just the Internet's a disaster so here is some riots and running on iOS this is completely native app and there isn't any web views here at all this is using the entire native iOS stack it's all Apache licensed open-source the whole thing and you can see I'm not exactly the room that I'm in here if I go over to matrix HQ and quickly just search for it like that by the way you can probably say it's internationalized to French because all an open-source project we have a huge international community who have now gone and translated the whole thing into about 40 different languages and hellooo yeah it's gone hello yes I'm wondering whether the Internet is actually Webster's to blame so apparently actually going look at internal I've got ping hmm so predictably I know my luck as this is running off a Python server rather than the next-generation golang one and the things got about 30,000 active users on it at any given point and it runs on a single Python process where it spends its life occasionally getting a little bit overloaded so it's possible that my demo is being undermined by that server just being horrific Lee and busy although given were having some conversation and of course the team is down the pub which is 19 what I'm not in the position to look is euphemism for it sort of gives you an idea let me show you something else which is a new thing that we just added which is called widgets this is the ability to go and add any application into an existing room so this isn't like a crappy chat board like you might find in certain systems but if you wanted to go and add in something like a jitsi videoconference say or a graph on a phone or an ether pant or possibly YouTube or any Google Doc or whatever I'm gonna try and doing the impossible and demonstrating video conference despite it all being a bit unhappy here then you basically get a little amp embedded in the room itself and so jitsi is an open source video conferencing system which is kind of cute and that's Amandine my co-founder who's sitting down in the front row hello Hanna Dean and you can see that basically you could just you know keep people as again anybody in the room is going to be seeing that there's a jitsi happening at the top and they can jump in and if we wanted to go and add another conference in whenever would hit the Anchorage at person and it might be just something simple like an ether pound am i doing on time by the way please tell me to shut up if I start going on then oh look I well lots of people in the room already jumping on it and playing around on the ether pad so real time I mean if people are familiar with Google Wave he remembers Google Wave know about the same number of people who know matrix answer achievement call Google Wave Google Wave was amazing about some of the guys who work on matrix one of them was an SRE on wave back in the day and a little bits of matrix is kind of influenced by what wave could have been and one of the things that wave spent a lot of time doing was to do these real-time piping notifications which was really distracting and crap because you really don't care about how other people are typing unless you really really do want to know and they need for pen style thing so here we're trying to get best of both worlds by going and having a widget when you want it for that sort of and you can any iframe you like in on this and it's about to launch on mobile to anyway and that's right let me show you a different thing which I think Steven alluded to earlier as one of our new random things no it didn't work just for sending messages I've no idea whether this will work but let's try anyway so I talked about VR earlier and we did this demo a couple of months ago where we took web VR which is basically WebGL in your browser with the VR layer on top of it and built a matrix over the offing to demonstrate how you could do video calling over and video conferencing over matrix in a VR environment so here you have a Star Trek The Next Generation series one holodeck which you can look around and the really interesting thing is that if you spun this up on any device including an oculus rift or HTC vive or something like that then you would actually have a proper VR experience on it so you don't need to change anything on your browser sheets in the magic of web view which comes from the nice people at Mozilla it will actually go and give you a proper immersive experience that you can look around I'm going to attempt to demonstrate this on not an oculus but my poor little Samsung Galaxy s5 or whatever here but the really cool thing is that literally just plain old Chrome you get into it and the accelerometers on the device immediately start giving you our ability to look around said holodeck and and irritatingly it's it's aligned it pivots and you're looking at the back of the room there I'm given try to open there we go so that's a front of the room you've got the same visibility there I'm going to go and hit the blue sphere beautiful user interface me and go into the phone box in order to do a video conference and you have this ugly glass table in the middle gonna do the same thing on my PC here on my Mac and so we've actually got a WebRTC video call happening right there on Android and it's only slightly broken up given this all happening over clouds I think this is very cool oh no hadn't broken up I just wasn't in front of the camera which is embarrassing oh hello Andy you take all my demos this is awesome so I mean you can go move around the room here and look around and do the same thing here so you basically have the same experience no installation it's like a four megabyte download and you can go and just have anybody jumping into this room and this is doing 24 frames a second on this two and a half-year-old phone so one of the proper 7 or si is essentially not to be a tool and if we had a lot more time I'll go and take out my Google cardboard style VR headset you're going slap this thing in it after having pressed V gives it for you for free come on wake up I get it oh there we go I think possibly yay and so you get your stereo pair on this the framerate drops a little bit we probably down to about 14 frames a second now but if you go and shove this into that put it on here and then start walking into walls it's amazing so that's simply our stuff what else get some fun thing that I could show you quickly is if I go and join that room how can I help this invite at the same time and so it's a normal matrix room of course and it's called vr vc underscore underscore what was the name of that room sweet koala anybody else is willing to join is welcome to join if you want to heckle that I might oh boo oh I got the wrong server mmm its confidant matrix dog so this is a good example of the Federation that the conferencing surf friends on a completely separate server instance so my now my account a matrix top walk is talking to confidant matrix Tahoe modulo my Ryan having completely had some issues at the scene of all the things to break and I was expecting to be able to explode business as usual clients oh come on oh there we go and I can say hello London and hopefully you can see on the table is magic writing and Dean saying hi I can go let me go and chuck your image into this I'll go and pursue in the prerequisite gone the perk is that xkcd that soon everybody loves this evening of course I had the ability to upload and some things people know this amazing xkcd point out we are not the 15th standard we are instead a meta standard so it doesn't apply to us and sure enough here in VR you've got the attachment starting to come and pop in like that I mean Dean gazing up to xkcd and all so that's probably enough to move oh actually one final quick thing on telegram here's a example of bridging so here's my count on telegram I say something and I go back to Bryant assuming that this is working and this room here so you can see the history the room at least is bridge for it to this cat agrarian thing I can see the push notifications coming in over there we go it was only about six seconds of latency it should be about 60 milliseconds of latency so I think my chrome is probably melting here in fact if you look at my CPU I think my books is just forming opponent basically but soon if I try to send something back probably in about 20 minutes it will eventually come through own team testing again on the telegram so you get the idea that basically abridging these things in two completely separate networks [Applause] there go other than the horrible agency is actually working quite nicely the really nice thing is that we call this a puppeting bridge because it allows you to log into telegram using your actual telegram credentials so on telegram nobody you can see that you're using matrix and our matrix if you don't look you won't notice of people are using telegram so it is a completely invisible decentralization and subversion I mean extension of the telegram is centralized model so that's quickly jump back here how am I on time one minute perfect but I've got about 45 slides it's gonna be amazing what are you getting the spec get decentralized conversation history and end-to-end crypto the intamin crypto is actually really cool it's this had taken up a notch so that it works on rings with 10,000 devices in it and it's also publicly audited and by NCC group so if you like reading your crypto order to go to NCC group trust and read The Odyssey of how amazing it is and the really interesting flaws they found which we then fixed how does it work not enough time for their simple HTTP API you took some Jason to EE or ro you get back an event ID to send a message to get it to guest message you do an HTTP GET WebRTC calls are again a single hit to set up the call and you then send some candidates the user answers you answer it Lenny hang up if anybody has ever done circle jingle or anything this is hopefully making you think oh my god somebody didn't simplify we do MIDI we did MIDI jamming / matrix kind of fun the server server API is again ATP at the moment I should emphasize that all of the API transports so completely extensible we have HTTP they're really thick in stupid bassline but if you wanted to replace the Federation with something more sophisticated like unknown ipfs or whisper or some peer-to-peer style thing go for it welcome please give us peals and likewise on the clients for API if the idea of HTTP puts and gets to send and receive messages makes you feel ill then please break out and tt or captain Pro so or whatever collapse whatever floats your boat WebSockets primeira and use it as long as the HTTP stuff there is a fullback the more the merrier and then I would talk about bridges lot and there was another xkcd with Randall complaining that all of his communities are fractured and we kind of pointed out this is why we make matrix and these actually show the overlaps which for the bridges were built bridging stacks IRC slack Smurfs Facebook and things by the purple IOT this was an awesome demo but I'm not allowed to do it anymore because I crashed my drone and water Cunningham who created the wiki and apparently it's a bit of a faux pas to crash your drones into people conferences Voigt I'm over free squared lots more bridges for talks about VR Oh peer ISM is cool this is a matrix phone company called purism and making a physical smart phone that doesn't talk gsm as its primary citizen it does have a GSM stack but matrix is the native dialer in the native messaging app and this is really censored cool because it's basically what we set out to do to really provide an alternative to the phone network thank you finally yeah we have got two huge obstacles remaining decentralized identity and even more than that decentralized reputation we've got about three million people in the network right now this is as of July be ripe hurt getting on for 1.8 million but it's exploded even more since then that's actually only on the matrix Dogg server so there are another three thousand servers with all sorts of different communities on them the actual daily traffic rate is up to a million messages a day and again it's gone a bit more than that since I generated that graph and we're up over 3,000 servers in the overall Federation what's next we've got communities fixing riots UX so it doesn't suck exiting beter on the crypto which generally works pretty well but sometimes it doesn't lots more bridges threading is going to be a huge amount of work to actually have proper threaded conversations at last you can have message boards and using that style semantics on matrix message tagging for the management decentralized C and finally the reputation piece fixing spam that's going to be the easy bit and thank you very much [Applause] you

Channel: Stephan Tual

Views: 5,509

Rating: 4.8709679 out of 5

Keywords: ethereum, blockchain, riot.im, matrix.org, vr, decentralized chat, technology, privacy

Id: y0-j4Q77KXM

Length: 28min 13sec (1693 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 08 2017