Ethereum Devcon3 — an outsider’s perspective
A week ago, I found myself in Cancún, Mexico for the first time in my life. As a lifelong professional geek whose associates could very well have been the original inspiration for The Big Bang Theory, Cancún was pretty far down the list of places I wanted to visit. No, I was there to bear witness to the best and brightest that the cryptocurrency ecosystem has to offer. I was there to attend the third Ethereum developers conference, or Devcon3, an annual gathering of the who’s who of the Ethereum ecosystem, a great pow wow to share what everyone is working on, gather ideas, and gossip.
Why I Went
I believe, as every generation before me did, that we live in the most important time in human history, ever. I am a self-professed futurist who grew up dreaming of a world radically improved by technology, I always knew that we were at a crossroad as a species and the choices we make today will have profound implications, for better or worse. When I first discovered Ethereum more than a year ago, I was enamored by the ambition of its founder’s vision. However, having lived and worked in Silicon Valley for the past few year and seen how much horse shit finds its way into the sausage-making, I was also very skeptical of its reality.
Always in pursue of the truth, I diligently kept up with the news, had a fun time making Ethereum Pixels, a toy decentralized app (DApp as the cool kids call it) on the Ethereum blockchain, and wasted countless hours in dozens of cryptocurrency discussions groups, but it felt like something was missing. While I was impressed by the surprising usability of Solidity and web3.js during my brief foray into Ethereum development, I felt a foreboding sense of dread. There was something off about what the marketing websites claimed and what could be done in reality. There were too many missing pieces, too many unanswered technical questions, and too many cocksure 15-year-olds who made a few hundred thousand dollars betting on nothing more than hopes and aspirations telling me that the answer to all our prayers were buzzwords like “sharding” and “the Tangle”.
At the heart of everything is a very simple question: is there a reasonable confidence that smart contracts and blockchains will become efficient enough to actually power the future decentralized Web 3.0 or is the whole thing just a pipe dream fueled by excess capital and mass delusion? The truth was out there, but it was frustratingly elusive. I knew what the wunderkind investors’ answer to the question was going to be, but I needed to hear it from the people who actually have some technical insights. So, I decided to make the trip to Devcon3 to see for myself once and for all just how much of this is all real.
A week later today, my experiences at the event left me with a string of mixed feelings.
The Event
There is something incongruent about Cancún as a venue for a developer conference. Upon arriving at the heart of the hotel zone where the convention center is located fresh off my red-eye flight from SFO, I got the visceral feeling that the whole place had been invaded by some foreign power. I am not talking about the Hard Rock Cafes, Hooters, or the suntanned American tourists who came all the way to a foreign country to experience their own culture — those are practically native at this point. No, I am referring to the geek squads out in force in their cryptocurrency and Rick and Morty T-shirts. The juxtaposition of the sunny beach party setting that is Cancún with the cypherpunks in sandals looking to undermine the global economic order was so comical in my mind that I imagined William Gibson would give it a second thought if it were a scene in his novel. (To be fair, I spent most of my days there wearing a number of video game apparels, so I cast this rock while retaining full ownership of the glass house I inhabit.)
The conference, to be frank, was not very well organized. The registration and badge pick-up process was a slow pen-and-paper affair that could really use some help from this decentralized trust thing that I hear is all the rage these days. I’ve definitely been to many old boring industry conferences charging way less than $900 per ticket that figured out how to do things better with some simple use of mobile technology. The convention center’s Wi-Fi connection worked intermittently, probably the one cardinal sin for a venue hosting an event for technologists. There was no handy program guide, so everyone relied on the Ethereum Foundation’s official site for the day’s schedule, which of course was promptly taken offline by the traffic. People eventually resorted to taking cellphone pictures of the two TV screens that were cycling through the day’s program.
Perhaps it would be correct to attribute a lot of the problems to the growing pains of more than doubling in size, but I honestly think it is also a sobering reminder that for all the fancy web animations and millions of dollars raised, the Ethereum ecosystem remains a rag-tag group of unprofessional hackers and hustlers who are trying to make something happen.
The external perception of the Ethereum Foundation as a strategic dealmaker confidently charting the course of the global economy is quickly dispelled when you catch a glimpse of the people running the show. Yes, they are mostly good sincere people with a very specific vision of the future and great technical chops, and they are trying their best, but that does not preclude or excuse them from being misguided or incompetent in other important ways that matter. I think the latest Parity wallet snafu (can you say deja vu?) is testament to that inconvenient truth.
The Talks
I must first say that the talks I enjoyed the most throughout the four days of the event were mostly the technical ones. I really enjoyed Patrick McCorry’s talk discussing the challenges of doing cryptographic calculations on the blockchain (tl;dr very expensive function calls), Vitalik Buterin’s thinking aloud on how to scale Ethereum (tl;dr make a whole new blockchain with sharding and figure out how to merge the old one later), and Eli Ben-Sasson’s very accessible introduction to zk-STARK, a proposed quantum-secure zero knowledge proof, one of the few talks that I saw Vitalik sit in for. Dr. Greg Colvin’s talk on improving EVM brought back fond memories of the operating systems class I took in college — he just looks so professorial — and his skepticism for the new hotness eWASM, born do doubt of experience, is the kind of moderating effect that the ecosystem sorely lacks.
Those are talks where real things are happening. Real in the sense that they describe actual technical challenges with solutions that can be evaluated and discussed using facts, but not necessarily real in the sense that they represent real business or product opportunities. Speaking as someone with only a college-level understanding of cryptography, Ben-Sasson’s zk-STARK talk struck me as a very reasonable presentation that one would give at an academic conference: promising results, tantalizing potential, not yet proven to be practical. The only difference is that in this crazy moment that we all live in, an idea like that is presented and immediately the engines of speculation start to flash dollar signs long before facts and evidences are on the table. After all this is the era of Theranos and Donald Trump.
The worst talks were of course the flavor-of-the-month ICOs trying to gain a veneer of credibility by being at Devcon3. One could sometimes sense the incredulity in the room when a presenter made outlandish claims about a proposed feature of their product that is close to being impossible to implement given the current state of the art. Still, that was probably one of the very few interested audiences in the world that could detect the bullshit, so the dumb money will probably keep flowing. In my opinion, these talks should not be part of Devcon because they muddle the water for transparently selfish reasons.
One of the most exciting moment during the course of the convention was when Loredana Cirstea (one of the very, very few female developers in the room) from the Raiden team showed a demo of micro-Raiden involving a 4-wheeled robot being controlled by individual token transfers over a state channel. Understandably, crypto geeks are not prone to great emotional outbursts (for proof, see one of the many awkward occasions when Ming Chan, Executive Director at Ethereum Foundation, tried to corral the crowd a few minutes later into doing something fun), so one must calibrate one’s expectation. Still, people were actually clapping with real enthusiasm, probably because it was one of the few talks in a sea of deep technical jargon and borderline fiction that addressed the heart of the question directly: how will blockchains scale to be actually useful?
The People of Ethereum
Over the course of the conference, I got to meet people from all over the hacker-hustler spectrum. This was probably the most insightful part of the experience.
On one end, there were folks like me who were very curious about the technical questions that Ethereum developers were purporting to answer. I had very pleasant conversations with these people, including a guy named Konstantin who was working on his own Unity-based online game. We had a great time talking about not just the technical challenges of blockchain but also Unity and 3D game engines (I work at a startup building AR content with Unity). There was a mutual understanding that we believe there was something real at the core of cryptocurrencies, but it is tough to get there. Unfortunately, I lost Konstantin’s business card, so if anyone knows a Konstantin from LA working on a Unity game, hit me up!
In a similar vein, there were plenty of people who clearly were passionate about the theoretical side of cryptocurrency and were happy they could now get paid to work on solving math problems that in the past only universities cared to fund. I enjoyed those interactions because they tend to be genuine.
I also got to meet some of the people working on real projects like MetaMask and 0x. These are people who not only believe there is something valuable in the fundamental idea of cryptocurrencies, but that a specific manifestation of it is worth working towards. These are the truth believers, who possess enough technical knowledge to work on the right problems and enough faith to believe solutions exist. They are good people with fairly deep technical understandings of where they want to go. Most people here would be fairly at home at a respectable gathering of startups in Silicon Valley. Still, they are not infallible and can often be faithful to the point that their products and businesses can fail not because they failed to understand the technology but because they failed to understand people. I can often fall into the same trap in my professional life, so I am not the right person to critique this approach.
Past this point is where things started to get real iffy.
I met plenty of guns for hire who offered turnkey ICOs to anyone who paid upfront. They operate teams of developers, often in former Soviet countries, who will write your white paper, build your website, and operate your ICO crowdfunding all in one complete package. It was hard to tell how much they believed in the future of cryptocurrency and how they rationalized their role in the ecosystem. Conceivably, they see it as a profit opportunity during a flash in a pan, or perhaps they truly believe that they play a healthy role in allowing people with all vision and no tech to launch ICOs. There are interesting conversations to be had here though. People at this stage of cynicism are actually building tools and analytics to run their ICOs at scale and are reasonably thoughtful about their business.
I also met ICO operators who fundamentally did not understand the limitations of the blockchain in relation to their proposed business models. There was a very thin line between uninformed optimism and outright fraud. It was not uncommon to hear people express the opinion that if a desired feature could not be accomplished on-chain, they would just have to take it off-chain, destroying the single value proposition of their product over all existing competing products with nary a thought. “We do not care about decentralization, we just want a product that is somehow can use Ethereum so that we can do an ICO.”
At the crypto parties (which are less cool than they sound no matter how uncool you think they sound), I met bright-eyed kids barely out of college who all felt the need to introduce themselves as being involved in one crypto project or another.
“Oh you mentioned that you worked in SoMa (in San Francisco), is that where your project is based?”
“No, man. I work on someone else’s shit. But I’m going to transition to crypto full time soon. No, for real.”
“Ah, I understand. What does your project do?”
“We are trying to solve unemployment with the blockchain. See apparently structural under employment and all the ills of the modern economy can be magically solved if we just moved the paperwork and certifications onto the blockchain.”
“Cool. Good luck with that! Excuse me, I should really get another drink.”
True story with very minor embellishment. At the hustler end of the spectrum, there is almost no enjoyable conversation to be had. I think you are an empty vessel devoid of ideas and you think that I am not going to make you any money. It is best to disengage. For a conference ostensibly focused on development, there were way too many of this.
Final Thoughts
There are essentially two problems with Ethereum and blockchain in general: scalability and usability.
Scalability is the elephant in the room. It is an essential topic to everyone in the ecosystem, but its specifics are so academic that half the eyes glaze over when it is brought up. A real solution remains elusive, and in the meantime, there is a lot of hand-waving and groupthink going on. This was clear to me from talking to people at Devcon3.
However, there are smart, genuine people working on these issues, and I was reasonably impressed by level of discussion I observed in some of the talks. That gives me hope that if a solution exists, perhaps it will be found in our lifetime. The will exists.
What is far less comforting is the environment that these profoundly technical people now find themselves in, a world where people like them or pretending to be like them can make millions of dollars not from delivering on the vision but simply from describing it. If we are true believers of capitalism’s ability to reward useful contributions, then perhaps we ought to be slightly concerned about the moral hazards at play here.
The second question of usability is of course conditional on scalability, but also goes beyond it and is potentially much more salient. Usability is also about being able to build products that are actually meaningful and useful to real people. Technology is just one piece of the puzzle. The other piece is understanding needs. Here, I am not sure that cypherpunks truly understand what society needs. These people, though they come from all over the world, are really casted from the same mold. In some ways, I am one of them. We grew up surrounded by a very specific version of the Internet, reading the same few science fiction authors, and playing the same video games. As I looked across the main hall, I saw a sea of mostly white young men, some of whom were fascinated by the technical challenges, and others who saw this as their generation’s consumer Internet boom. In our fragmented postmodern realities, this is but a small monocultural fragment.
So, like I said at the beginning, I walked away from Devcon3 with mixed feelings about the future of cryptocurrencies. I remain committed to my financial investments because they will probably continue to appreciate (the details of my seemingly contradictory investment thesis is a worthy subject for another day), but I find it hard to believe that we are truly witnessing a second digital revolution just yet. Though there are many aspects of the vision and the technology that align with my intellectual curiosities and professional background, I find myself entirely unmotivated to be an active part of it. It is too much of a cult.
On my second night in Cancún, I stumbled upon a small party in Mandala, one of the main night clubs in town, hosted by a blockchain payments startup from Ireland. The startup had paid for our cover charges and also some drinks, but most of the club consisted of the usual Cancún non-cryptocurrency crowd. There was a huge wall display where the DJ shows music videos for the songs being played. Once in a while, the promotional video for the startup would show up, creating an odd juxtaposition between the cheery brightly colored slogans (“Secured Transactions”) and the dance music and the hyper-sexualized paid dancers.
With the liquor and bass flowing through my body, I am left with a single parting thought: the cryptocurrency world is just like Silicon Valley, except the nerds are nerdier and the slimeballs are much, much slimier.
Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.
