This is epicenter. Episode 465, def con recap,
2022, with guests, Nick Johnson, a trolley cover, David Hoffman.
And Joseph Schweitzer, welcome to epicenter the show
which talks about Technologies projects and people driving
Decentralization. And the blockchain revolution.
I am afraid we can't and I'm here with a whole host of people
live from def con 20, 20 my guests today are Nick Johnson
from ens a net. Raleigh cover from nevermind.
David Hoffman from Bankers and Joseph Schweitzer from the
theorem foundation and we will talk about Defcon 20 22, which
is just finishing up today. But before we do that, let me
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this and without further delay, let's go to the panel.
Hi. This is Peter Baker coming to
you from Bogota on the fourth and final day of Def con Defcon
6 that is I am here with Joseph from the etherium foundation and
match from never mind, Nick from ens.
And David from Bank - cool. Thank you, guys, for joining.
This is been a pleasure, maybe let's talk the big picture
first. How have you been enjoying the
conference Joseph as the person who is, who has been Wearing the
hatch of organizing this I'll give you a dips on the answer.
I would say I'm very glad to see how much the focus has been on
the substance as an organizer. Its first of all, giant shout
out to Skyler, river in the whole Devcon team who thanks to
multiple years of covid, sat through three years of
organizing and trying to improve from one year to the next to the
next to the next. But, Frances, I think tend to
break down on lines of either hyper substance and is something
grows larger, you know, from where it was at 50 people in
2014 to over 6,000. It's hard to hold on to
providing value to an ecosystem at a conference.
So when you see lines outside of every talk Hall and side stage
waiting to get into the next sessions, rather than lines for
the next party. Although, I'm sure those were
there, too. It's, it's always heartening to
see the people are making productive move.
Into a theorem ecosystems growth.
I'm very happy actually that Defcon turned out, very
educational. I was not expecting it to be
like this very much like Builder.
Fuck you of them very much. Like a technical talks,
definitely impressed by all the high level and like, high
educational Talks by like, whether that's like such a so
many talks on like, ZK e VM and Mev, which I really impress.
Like, how did they acknowledge you grow up since like def con I
know Sokka when we've been like the topics liar, like a little
bit less Technical and now is that that is like the halbach
train and the research and all that progress, so much.
So it's very, very cool to see, like, how the talks are being
like different and how much more Technical and even like almost
Academia academic, like dogs, we're on the schedule as well.
And it's very cool that those stilts were even full.
And People enjoy these not even not only the like a low-level or
like the social talks as well. Yeah, I've been having a great
time. There's so many talks that I
haven't made it to because I keep running into people in the
halls and and people haven't mentioned three plus years and
talking to them and catching up, which I kind of view is the
right way to do a conference almost because the talks
recorded the people aren't. And so, you know, it's been
great. I've also been super impressed
with how well organized everything is how there's a
great mix of technical talks and like breakout spaces and
workshops and panels and it's It is opportunities to like go
somewhere and decompress about those opportunities to find
somewhere quiet chat with people.
It's been really good. So this is actually my first
Devcon in the thing that's really sticking out to me.
The most is that if you called Devcon a Tech conference, you're
kind of missing it. And there's a reason why we
Devcon goes to all of these weird cities rather than just
like San Francisco or New York, we're in, we're in Bogota
Colombia, and I think that's a part, because the theorem is one
part technology but also one part culture.
And so we have to find these different communities.
All around the world that you wouldn't otherwise, you know,
find in the, the typical conference city, like New York
and San Francisco. Going because the theorem is a
social technology and so Defcon is a social conference and so
it's just not about the tech, it's all about, just the ways
that etherium and local, cultures all around the world
integrate with each other and just been having a fantastic
time. Connecting with everyone that
hasn't been able to connect in the last few years.
Because Defcon hasn't happened since 2019 and so just seeing
the soul and the spirit kind of emerge out of this conference
has been just a fantastic thing to observe.
I would definitely second that I know the hearing Foundation has
come under a lot of flak for the choice of location.
I know a couple of people who deliberately didn't come because
they had security concerns and so on.
But I think it's been a fantastic choice of location.
In terms of accessibility, I mean, in South America, right.
So, basically, everything is far away from where most people are
in South America, but Bogota is By quite a stretch, one of the
more accessible cities. The vibe is fantastic.
So I think the, the Latin American Community has been
strong from the get-go and usually it's them making the 13
now flights except for Nick's, always on 13 our flights.
But everyone else is sometimes you know, gets to do this on
their home turf and this is never the case for South
American. So I think this has been A
fantastic signal. I am Loki, obsessed with the
venue. I think this is the best venue
yet. I loved the venue.
Basically, you see how many people there are, but it's
still, it's, it doesn't feel crowded because I think the way
they've done this architectural e with like this really high
open space in the middle. Absolutely.
Fantastic. And I love the bathrooms.
I know that this is a really weird thing to compliment, but I
absolutely love the bathrooms. On.
This is the first time that any epicenter listener delivered
bathroom related comments in the four hundred some-odd episode
history of epicenter. So I can lend a little bit of
context to this because there's a question about, you know what,
the theorem ecosystem is what what it, you know, what it
couldn't be, could be should be coming off of.
Also coming off of the last Devcon.
Do these funny things about it. Where it's it's known and almost
revered for the things that go wrong, you know, that's and this
time we tried to go ideology was probably up there, tied at a
number one with making sure that things just work.
So, you know, was there, was there catering was it accessible
from the airport, was it accessible to a downtown into a
city? Could people get around the city
fairly easily but skipping over the venue things for the Part.
The, the ecosystem is big etherium as David Austin says,
is it people all the way down and but who are those people.
So we have this very large community and say, Berlin or in
Denver is an Francisco or New York, and inborn decided, and
what will make it all relatively Unstoppable, unkillable and
whatever else is these communities continuing to grow
in popularity. Pop up and create new super
cells kind of everywhere. And if we only hit where they
have already existed, then we failed to kind of foster that
growth. Now, there's a line, right?
Where in Bogota and that means that there are a lot of people
from Venezuela. They can come over be at the
conference, in a way that they would have never been able to
experience elsewhere, but of course, we can't cross that line
and go over there because of political concern, right?
So where can you get where you might want to?
Where can you go? You might want to create impact
and further growth because regionally it's in an area that
might be a great fit. You know, we've seen there's
eith Medellin next week in Panama the week after and kito's
last week and so you can maybe start to create a supercell in
the northern half of South America, just like there is one
in in 8 hours south by playing in Buenos Aires and six hours
North by playing in New York City.
And and once you kind of have people building Being from
everywhere and for every where it really starts to become a the
worldwide community that we wanted to be.
So I hope that that's something that comes from this.
There's also and then I'll be quiet, but there's something to
be said for bringing all of these people that might have had
misconceptions and preconceptions about South
America and seeing how that's changed in a four-day span.
You referenced people who I'm coming with security, or
something, you know, or not going at all.
And I've been around people who in the first day said, I'm not,
okay? Leaving this hotel.
But by day to there at the street market and buy day for,
they kind of like get to know the neighborhood and it's it's
quite nice and then I think somebody said to me I wouldn't
have ever come to this region, let alone the city.
If the event didn't bring me here and I'm used to it being in
places that I know. So I hope that's something that
we can learn from. Actually, what you just said, I
feel like that's why conferences that are being even organizer
hosted. Like, I feel like that like the
holy theorem Community is like a full of digital Nomads that
basically just travel from a conference to conference.
And it just allows us to explore the world and opens up
possibilities and options to like, where to travel or like
visit the new places get to know new cultures.
And I love the Vibrance of the Latin American Community,
especially as they've been like, getting ready for this for like
three years. Three years and seeing the
progress in the energy of the Latin American community and
like the Spanish people at Defcon.
It's very interesting and especially like the people that
are around or like translating notes or like, you know, even
like talking to your Spanish or like doing bunch of like Spanish
programs. I love that.
Especially Ali is Spanish language in general.
So many people speaking Spanish. So it's kind of cool to see you
theorem itself like transforming into like a more of a bilingual,
bilingual trilingual. Yeah, feeling well like a world
where people don't need to know only English in order to
navigate through the web through Echo System.
But also the Spanish as well, and I'm very grateful.
So for everybody who puts any sort of like work into bringing
this country Latin America and I'm very excited about the
growth and the energy that def con and the whole Community is
special like people traveled to Defcon to Bogota from all around
the world and now seeing all these like energies and
different cultures at one spot, creating like a huge scenery of
like that connects like the technology that he said.
Time itself. Connects us all together and now
we are making something more like a bigger and like
connecting together and like thinking how to like help the
ecosystem and how to like crawl with even more and how to make
it more decentralized and especially its Latin American
countries have troubles with their own like banking systems
and seeing what can help with that.
Is very very useful and very cool and I'm very grateful that
Even if you don't Foundation, whoever else is excited to host
Defcon in Bogota and this is amazing venue.
And I'm very grateful to be a part of Def con as well.
Yeah you said earlier that Nick always has to travel 13 hours
but the sad truth is it's more like 30 and if I have to travel
30 hours to somewhere it's nice that somewhere new and
interesting that I haven't been before where I can experience
new cultures and stuff. At least the time when I'm not
at the conference center. And yeah, it's been a really fun
location to have it in and I've had a great time.
I think the thing that stuck out the most to me about this
conference so far is that not even the etherium a player has
too much Focus here. We're beneath the a player with
a lot of the content in the talks here that's layer 2's.
There's post-merge etherium EIP 4844, dang sharding, staking
infrastructure like and if he's in defy don't really have too
much of an exposure here and I think that's kind of emblematic
of where we are in the etherium world.
And what Defcon really is to etherium is it's this very deep
in the stack conference and I haven't been to any other Dove
counts before. But you know, I've heard stories
like I've listened to the other epicenter post Devcon episodes
just to get the recap. And it seems to be that this
Devcon also seems to be emblematic of where etherium is
a large where early defcons were small and chaotic and you know a
little bit of needed some polishing and so was a theorem
in those early days and now we're at this Devcon where the
city was well there were some concerns about Sure.
I don't really think anything anything is actually happened
and I think if you just put on your common sense hat, you
actually don't really have feel exposure to any danger in the
city. And then it's been the perfect
intersection of the culture of Columbia the culture of Bogota,
but also the very polished and well-crafted Conference Center
and organized event. And so vitalik said that
post-merge aetherium is like 50 to 60 percent done.
But also that we're good at shipping.
Now, we're good at Coordinating the developers of coordinated
and it seems to be that that is also expressed in Defcon as
well. Whoo-hoo, yeah, let's dig into
the content. What has what have you have you?
I mean, I assume most of you haven't gone to that many talks
because there's tons of people here and basically you just kind
of note, which talks you want to catch up with later on YouTube
so what which kind of talks would that be for you?
So for any listeners that have or haven't read some of these
published books on the history of ethereum.
What's interesting about them is they tend to mark their
timelines by going Devcon to Def con.
So, you know, it was Devcon to the DDOS attack is underway, you
know, all the crazy things that kind of happen from one to
another. We're in Prague, it's def con
for all of the core developers, call an emergency meeting on
state rent where they come to believe that, you know,
statelessness is no longer or the state bloat could become
Huge issue in time and what should we do about it?
And there are things that came up here to that are quite
interesting. You've got Carl, did his
presentation on something that I hadn't heard of previously which
was this whole random the ceremony that they're working on
while we were here, one of the major organizations behind a
layer 2 solution obtained, a major client team.
So that was kind of interesting and I guess it's one of those
things where I saw tweet yesterday and it might have been
yours. It might not have it's a
Walking. The Halls of Def con is like
being in crypto Twitter and it's there you know SEC is great at
Denver is great. They're all the events that
Community organizes that are thousands of people are cool,
but it's interesting. How it's this event has some
gravity around it and it's fun to see.
I feel like this stuff come is way more like proof of stake has
been a huge thing especially as marriage happen like a month
ago. So now seeing like all these
like post-merge talks, and like the technical talks like how a
theorem can work in. Like both smooch word are like
how we theorem can around even on like proof of stake.
And what kind of dabs we can like build and proof of stake
and even like improvements unlike in my TVM ecosystems.
More like so the T of improvements or like a bunch of,
like, ZK knowledge. That's like a whole new world
that emerged to recently. I feel like the whole, like, ZK,
ZK in the layer, 2 switch has been like blowing off as well.
Pretty much and also just the fact of like how we are
connecting that with Hall, like the cultural Vibe as well as
downstairs. And like the bottom floor, we
have the community helps with It's kind of cool to see like a
different communities as well, taking apart and bringing like
different vibe to, like the whole like developer nerdy, kind
of Builder issue pipe. It's very cool to see all that
emerging. And like sorta, like even like,
you know, putting like puzzling together and creating this like
whole new exhaust system. Yeah, I think, you know,
Probably the talk. I've seen that, I liked the
most, which is, I guess easy, because only saw one, but it is
an excellent talk. Is your it walls, talk about
social coordination around slashing, censoring validators.
And I think that sort of thing is going to be a really
interesting conversation to have because, you know, we decide our
social norms and the best time to decide the social norms is
before the disaster happens, not while it's happening.
You know, the reason the Dow was contentious is because we hadn't
had that conversation before hand of So what will we do if
something like this happened? And so I think it's amazing that
people are bringing up topics like this at Devcon so that we
can really get that conversation.
Kick-started what I'm looking forward to watching afterwards,
is all of the talks about base layer, evm improvements, and,
you know, components, like ZK snacks and stuff like that.
And how we can evolve the base layer to better support them
because ethereum ultimately survives by being the best
infrastructure for a variety of applications.
Rather than Going to build the applications in and then also
just reading about some of those listening to some of the
projects that are being built on those sort of improvements, you
know. So so dark Forest is near and
dear to my heart. I think it's an amazing game, I
love that it's not you know, pei-pei to earn and we'll play
to you know learn or what not. It's just a game that's fun
legitimately good. It happens to be built an
entirely decentralized fashion and I love seeing those sort of
things evolving like The non-financial cases on top of
ethereum and on top of new improvements, we can build to
the VM and so forth. The talk that's now living
rent-free. My brain is definitely Carl
flourishes. Talk about bedrock in the Opie
stack and Carl floors. First off is a fantastic
presenter. He's just exudes like this
vitality and this energy and this optimism and the, haha,
optimism and Bedrock is all about this.
What is like simply defined as like the ERC, 20 standard, but
for layer twos, and so, as a theory, I'm has become more
modular The layer two teams are also learning that layer 2 is
also need to follow an appearance, forceps, and also
become modular as well. And so the Opie stack and
Bedrock is this infrastructure for plugging in different parts
of what makes a blockchain. So like, what do you want?
You want to optimism fraud proof, or do you want to as EK
prove? Are where do you want your data?
You want to put your data on the theorem?
We want to do one of the validity.
I'm but it's like the skeleton to produce, any layer twos, but
he connected in the way that he presented it.
In the slides that whoever made those slides knows Carl Fogarty.
Rush and a very personal level, because they know how he, like,
presents and talks. And this, this story that he
tells it tells where he talks about the first ideas of
optimism to where we are now and how every single time, like they
all come together, they all realize that they don't know,
they don't know shit about what they were talking about six
months ago and actually had to go back to the drawing board
over and over and over again. And this is something that all
layer two teams are doing and also how a theorem is done.
And and so the the agency the evolution of optimism in the
philosophy, I think of it, I think it's really really strong.
And especially as 2021 was the year of cross train bridge
facts, and what they're really building is a system without
bridges in a single single shared network of many, many
chains. And so that has lived rent-free
in my brain It's not a comment on this and I'll put that past
back to Federica. But this is one of the things
that I think the etherium ecosystem does best especially
when they're all in one place is they're allowed to throw stones
at one another and at rapid speed.
So, whereas in a lot of other ecosystems, you end up with a
bottleneck as there is somebody that is legitimately smart and
doing legitimately good work. But we all wait to see on what
the figure does next in a theorem World.
You'll have you know Carl might disagree with Even might
disagree with Proto and that's just optimism.
And then, you know, the whatever the off chain Labs does and now
Prismatic with them, that's just optimistic.
Roll-Ups and then there's the matter Labs team Stark where
folks, whatever fuel is doing. And you've got the three
different Z, KV M projects going at it with one another the rapid
iteration in constant competition.
Yields the best results in a way that simple competing roadmaps
can't and it's a really cool feature.
Not a bug of Real decentralisation.
Yeah, absolutely. And that's totally also
reflected in the booth space, right?
So, basically, booths often they are just, you know, tables, you
know, it's Swag dealers essentially like, can I get a
t-shirt in size? M, sort of thing, but there were
so many outstanding conversations at the posts.
And I maybe I passed to Nick first, because Nick you had
like, you had one of the most popular boots people queued up
for longer than an hour to actually engage with you.
Right. Yeah, it's been, it's been
exciting. For those who don't know, what
we did is we did this integration where you can come
to the booth, we recommend people pre-register because we
know not everyone brings a while.
I watch you prove your DNS name and you get this card that shows
who you are visually, but you can scan it with any phone and
get a poet that says I met Nick Dottie that Devcon sex or you
know, whoever whoever you are and then we also put together a
leader board showing who has met the most people at Defcon sex
and it's been Lie beyond our expectations popular.
We got 2,000 cards and we were like, well, we'll use 1040 of
Khan, and it will save a thousand for the next event.
No, day one, we went through like 11:00 cards day two, we
used almost all the remaining ones and by beginning of day
three, we were out and I've been blown away by how it's gone.
But I think speaking more generally I really love the div
Concepts approach to booths which is, you know, it most
conferences being a sponsor, buys you a booth and then the
booth is like Chill Zone, Central kind of thing.
You know, whereas here that the two are decoupled and there's
these booths and there's the the other ones upstairs and they are
rotating through the event and it's a mixture of you know,
organizations like ours, you know, public goods of companies
and of like you know Grassroots projects and they're all
bringing people in to talk about their projects.
There's a lot of cross-pollination in some ways
the most valuable conversations we've had it been since we ran
out of cards because then we have more than 20 seconds to
speak to each person before we have to move them.
To get the next card out. It's been.
It's been really amazing. Vitalik, tweeted that at
Vatican. It's two popes per square mile
and that at Defcon sex, it's to Poe apps per square meter.
And I think this was just about, right?
So yeah, congrats on this, super cool way of engaging with the
community and getting them to use stuff.
What about all of yours? Both experience?
So I know that. I mean, usually, I mean, how did
you select sponsors, right? So basically, it seemed
incredibly curated. So you know Dave connects taught
us a lot of lessons. And the question when organizing
that event was what would it look like if you just called
everybody to town to build with one another for a week, because
too often the events are sensory overload and it's harder to be
productive. Also, the wrong groups can
sometimes get featured. So we decided to forgo sponsors
all together this year. There was there were two
separate tracks, one was impact hubs which is what Nick did a
walk through that in a second and the other was supporters,
weather is a swag Zone and I'll explain why we thought about for
going this all together. But the supporter track was
fairly simple. There's no real set of benefits.
You brand the room, you get the VIP stage, you know, after party
for these people. It was more of, we just held a
public goods around. So, people could contribute
toward get coins, CLR fun deeth, Columbia, or Was a good coin
around. There was one other but protocol
guilty. Of course this is Trends project
and those funds go directly toward a lot of the core
developers, but we also wanted to keep the venue clean.
So the folks that were aligned and that participated have a
smaller space upstairs in which they can give away the swag but
it's not the same as the impact booths.
This way at least, you know, we're, we've all been to Able to
kind of, like, pass through without kind of floors and piles
of t-shirts. The impact hubs are.
This is where you specifically go.
This is the big area, meet the layer, two teams, meet the
client teams, meet the ecosystem leaders, meet the solidity team,
aetherium dot-org, the people doing the educating, the grants
folks, and it's meant to be an impact space and not just a
shell space. I like the idea of a dedicated,
you know, chill space on occasion because we all like to
walk away with bags and bags of things but it shouldn't just be
pay for play and we tried to reflect some of Actually it's
none of mine has a both as well. And this is my first time at a
conference where actually I'm better with a company that has a
vote and it's been an amazing experience for me as we are in
the impact Hub as well. Which is amazing to like see all
the projects and all the like, yeah like layers whether that's
like, you know, a theorem it's a I'm Carl protocol layers and all
these like a companies that are key infrastructure projects that
are supporting the, theorem itself to be on like one floor
and where you can, like, you are able to like even a sort of like
a collaborate together or like, you know, as there were two
companies that at some point March 21 and had like one booth
together, sort of and it's funny to like see this Emerging, but
they also just like gray, tulasi, all the builders, and,
like everybody to be focused on the impact hubs and on the core
infrastructure projects rather than just focus on like a defy
or like, you know, order like commercial like projects and
it's great to like see that. Mainly those impact help boots
are like those like infrastructure projects.
Go to the biggest like Like a light or biggest like,
highlights space, where most of the people are hanging out and
it's not only just the grab a swag, but it's usually all these
conversations that we had at the both where we're very impactful
and was very educational and like people coming to us and
asking us or like how to run the like murder Minds client and
like all these kind of technical questions.
Well, which is very great that we are able to support the gun
as well on behalf of another mind.
And Other projects. Actually, I haven't had much
time in the booth so I didn't have much of a booth experience.
If I could just interject one more thing going back to the
whole benefits of being in Colombia and events in different
locations day. One morning of day one, we had a
couple of the security staff the venue approach us and say the
queue in front of your booth is too long.
It's a fire hazard and you know, it's gets in the way and we're
like no problem. We'll can we set a limit here?
We'll put a sign out. Will turn people away.
They're like, great, thank you morning of day three.
They come back. And I'm like, what is it?
And they like, where can we get one of those carbs?
And We given showed them how to set up an etherium wallet like
grid, just a couple of names for them and we printed the cards
off, and now they're walking around the venue with them.
So, you know, local impact that is super sweet.
Let's talk about the future. So obviously this was Defcon 6
and Def con has evolved a lot over the years.
Can you leaked some Alpha about Defcon 7 because I heard
Istanbul is that correct? So interestingly there's always
a favorite couple of cities that are shelled.
Hard online, we learned some lessons.
Most of this is fairly public. Maybe this will also be Alpha.
But in the past we've undergone searches where you pick the city
before we picked a venue and that turned out very poorly.
When we then chose another city that again, this has been
referenced in a book but with some incorrect details that I
won't call. Folks out here.
But essentially, you know, then just before announcing this,
when you find out what a lot of people ended up, criticizing of
the sock, I had to do with distance of time from airport,
to venue, or from venue to City, so, you pivot again, and that's
kind of how we ended up with Prague, but we had two
selections beforehand. So a lot of folks like Istanbul.
A lot of people have started talking about Vietnam, I've been
chilled on places in Greece and in Belgrade.
Usually the way it works is you've got to look at what you
want to accomplish. Shhhh, whether it's impact work,
you know, then there's venue available availability and all
the logistics that go into, you know, can women walk the street
safely? As safely as men can, is the
government friendly and able to help her?
Is it, you know, dictatorial, spacious, something that might
not reflect what we're looking at.
You know, what reflects the values of the etherium
ecosystem, there's just a lot to consider.
So, the truth is TBD, but I think that I really enjoyed the
Shilling, personally, Because it's just great to see.
You got to like, imagine the possibilities of it all.
I mean for a lot of people that might listen, you know, to
podcasts like epicenter may also be in the maker Mafia of what a
scientist. And you know there was also this
was a thing and a lot of people had to go look at cities like
this in Buenos Aires and then talk about why and what should
the event B? So on and so forth.
And by the way, they put on a great athlete.
Tom last month too. But yeah, I think it would start
to shape up fairly quickly but it's not there yet.
So I don't have any spoilers for you but a lot of people here,
you know, you hear that ringing from the Vietnam folks and from
the itu the University Club out of Istanbul as well.
They make a lot of good noise. I hope it's yeah Defcon is for
historical purposes, tended to rotate Eastward but past isn't
necessarily present also, you've got the hold of connecting in
the mix. It will see what happens.
Nick one, one, one day we will all come to New Zealand, like
just just as here and Hassocks. Oh, what, in terms of size?
So, I mean, the these events they've kind of reflecting the
community, they've grown. And I mean, obviously, demand
has been much larger than actual space to accommodate at Indies.
Where do you think we're headed? I would actually pass.
This question along to David knows the community better than
most I would pass it along to Nick who interacts with a lot of
dap users and as well you've been a community person for a
long time. One of the first things that I
said was as an event grows larger and larger and larger, it
makes it a little bit more difficult to maintain its soul
and so I'm on a little bit of a listening tour.
The deaf connect was an experiment but that form factor
could potentially grow to any size.
Because if you had a 50,000 person gathering in a People
could very easily segment to one side of the street for newer
users to another fork or research to another for, you
know, Mev things. And another for defy Focus,
everybody gets a stage, everybody gets to talk of
entually defcons, very research conference.
You in the they said, on the main stage, in the sense that
you might have a fifteen twenty percent approval rate for talks,
you're bound to annoy some people, but then you're bound to
have some, you know, side events around the city to make up for
it. But not, everybody can get to
those things. So my question is, What would
you guys like to see in a future Devcon?
Should there be should be, you know, multiple events should the
community owns? Some could it just keep growing
to be you know, whatever venue size will hold 10,000 or 20,000
because we deserve our Olympic opening opening ceremony or our
Super Bowl or World Cup final and it doesn't have to be
distributed or would you like to see a distributed so on and so
forth, curious about your thoughts.
I think one of the reasons why this particular Defcon is so
magical is a little bit about the timing recently post-merge
etherium. And so now we all feel like
we're turning a page for etherium and so now we all kind
of need to look around is like hey what's what do we focus on
next? What's the new thing to focus
on? So this F Khan is cool because
just we just happened to go post-merge six weeks ago or
however long it was the other Serendipity here is that we're
at the bottom of a bear market and so you don't really see any
of you. Hopefully the bottom And that
means that the right people are here because you don't get any
of the fluff that you get at the top.
I would hate to see Devcon the first Devcon after three years
of covid to be tainted by a bunch of people that are
tourists, that aren't here for the right reasons and are
directing the conversation ways that are unhelpful.
And so, this Defcon is magical because of that.
And so, for future defcons, when it comes to size, you know,
can't really predict what the markets will do.
But I think all defcons that are in Bear markets.
So probably going to be more vibrant than the ones that are
in Bull markets in. Trustingly enough.
However, the whole idea about etherium is to scale out to the
whole entire world, but the way the etherium does this is
through modularity. And so as a theorem gets bigger
and as Devcon gets bigger, I think we do have to lean into a
modular design structure of for the conference with there are
going to the theorem is going to produce ecosystems that people
are going to care about one thing and not care about another
thing. And so there are people like,
Phil Diane, who, he's just going to only talk about Mev.
And eventually, Mev is going to be Entire industry.
And that is also going to be the same for layer 2's, because
every layer 2 is also going to have his own network of chains
on top of it. And that's going to produce
entire Industries and I feel like I can say this on behalf of
the entire theorem ecosystem, but we feel like we're on the
cusp of so many Technologies, really hitting their maturity
and that is going to produce an industry for every single
cohort, every single sector of aetherium.
And so I think the question is like not how do we not have a
monolithic Devcon where we scale up?
Out at to 20,000 people and we lose its soul.
But how do we have compartmentalize defcons?
Where they're all like, they're all the same time.
We're all in the same city but they're more modular and
specialize in different areas. And so we have like the Mev the
layer to the proof of stake and we get to be more precise about
every single part. But we also get to have the
large large conference that aetherium deserves.
Well, we may even see feel that I am house its own death
concern. But no, I mean on behalf of
return, magicians. We hosted the event at the
Kinect, which was very cool. And I feel like that was great.
As there was like, one Central way where everybody could
connect which was the co-working space and then it was like
scattered all around the city. But I feel like even hearing
from people, I feel like they Like, oh, but we are like
confused, but also, it was great on another side.
As there was many venues and many different communities as
for me. They've connected felt like
everybody like every single Community has its own like a hop
in a sir, you know, like a part of the city tell where all the
Volga different communities like Bible together and sort of like
connect together and then like, you know, you can like go to
like one part of the city and have like a public goods.
Then will you can go. Like another part of the city
and have like let's say the Mev tells then go to another city,
have like the modular Block Chain, kind of conference and
like even like you've a space like different blockchain
communities and then you can go to like another part and then
you can have like the car development and then like
everybody connects in the center, the her heart of the
center at the co-working space but for def cons, I mean, it was
great experience experiment with deaf Connick.
That way by the how we are going to scale, the def con itself.
I'm honestly, I am, I don't know, but I enjoyed that Defcon
itself is like a developer for Q's conference and that it's
very neat in a sense that we are trying to like focus on like
impact. Like how like which country we
should bring Defcon 2 where we can like teach people more about
def con or like teach people more about like what trains?
And like about a serum and how it serum can have a real impact
on like the country itself or like the humanity even in the
country itself. And I would personally even love
to see def Con in my country is like, I don't know, like Africa
and like a middle of Africa, why not?
Especially I attended the Estrella call at all about
public goods and there were some people don't remember the name
of the speaker. He was saying that they are
basically bringing blockchain to Farmers and helping like farmers
and studying about the insurance for Farmers itself through defy
as their Banks. Don't allow them like, you know,
issue like any insurance on their like a farming yields or
like the farmers itself. Like the farmer workers.
No black Farmers like in defy ecosystem and I'm very excited
to see like how the fun will scale in that way.
Way, especially significant are bringing together like very
unique community and very unique Vibe and certain like the
centralizing itself. But in a sense it's still being
like centralized. It is one location and I really
love the idea like how we are all decentralized.
Like everybody like working with your room is basically all
around the world but then we like once a year we connect in
like one location which is the Defcon until Yeah, absolutely.
And I would second that basically, it's been a rotation
of Europe Asia and the Americas Africa.
Has been very notably left out as has Oceania.
But I mean basically you guys you're smart, right?
So it's like small n fo way but but I mean yeah I think it's
time to actually have a Defcon somewhere in Africa.
Yeah, Nick find a comment because we kind of have to wrap
up I guess I just say First of all, I find hilarious.
The idea that a prerequisite for to have gone would be like a 50%
drop in the the price. So we're just be waiting
waiting, you know? And but I think it's worth
saying like also Devcon is a Prestige event and as long as
there's one Devcon there's going to be a lot of people who want
to come because they want to be at the Devcon.
And if we do modularize, then we provide evidence for everybody
and everybody can come to the one that suits their not just to
the Devcon because they wanted to say they were active con.
Yeah, I hear that. I do actually like the the
crypto Twitter analogy kind of roaming the halls of Def con
like these like being on life crypto Twitter and I think maybe
we can have it. Maybe maybe like in the in the
mid term future, this will be true, but I think for now we can
still have like these monolithic events with like satellite
events around it. And I hope we see a another
fantastic addition next year, Let's keep Defcon def con for
now. Thank you guys for
participating. It's been a real pleasure.
Thank you for joining us on this week's episode.
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