# Whoa, easy there!: communicating DLT - Blendor Sefaj | Clover Labs

- Channel: [ETH Belgrade Community](https://streameth.org/eth-belgrade-community)
- Date: 2023-10-07
- Duration: 25:03
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-MabXb-b49-s
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MabXb-b49-s

## Transcript

uh Hey everybody uh my name is blendor and uh I was talking to some of you people yesterday and I was uh saying to everybody like how hard it is for uh other cultures you know to pronounce blender so it was always you know a bit problematic to tell to my you know English clients like my name is blendor and they're like excuse me blendor say that again it's like a blender but with an O but the best ones were you know Indians because they're like what and I was like ah blender blender so uh yeah um I'm going to talk to you today about dlts uh I purposely chose uh this um This Acronym because a lot of people talks all the time about blockchains but not a lot of people know about dlts so dlts are digital Ledger Technologies they're like a a base category you know for everything that's underneath so blockchains or like a subset of dlts uh hashgraphs directed acyclic graphs and so on and so on but this is just you know some random stuff I put on there uh today we're actually going to talk about the journey my journey through the whole you know blockchain experience and what are my thoughts and what I've seen about communicating blockchain in general so yeah uh this is going to be a not so quick story but I'll try to make it short uh every story starts at the beginning chapter one young naive and ready to change the world so the year is around 2011 ish somewhere around there maybe 2010 but I have like 2011 in my mind uh do the guys know what happened in 2011 uh I mean Lady Gaga Was Born This Way uh Adele rolled in the deep and uh Silo just said [ __ ] it uh forget you but also in the same time a lot of other things happened in 2011. so in 2011 we also had revolutions natural disasters we had Beginnings we had ends we had beatifications deaths wins losses you name it but 2011 was really eventful for me because this was actually the first time that I got um acquainted with the term you know blockchain first it was through this thing called Bitcoin I don't know if you heard about it um I actually didn't know nothing about Bitcoin but I had this one random dude he was at our school a couple of years uh older than me and he was actually I'm pretty sure we just swapped out the mic so I look you know uh way more interesting on camera that I really am so uh yeah this tall lanky dude talks to me like yo I made some money playing Counter-Strike online uh and I got this internet money called Bitcoin and I'm like so what you're going to do with it he's like you can actually buy you know uh gaming PC parts from Germany so I'm going to build myself a new gaming PC you know so to spend like 350 Bitcoins on a new uh computer uh but yeah uh this is blender in 2011. so this is a young kid he thought he can change the world but he also heard about Bitcoin and started thinking like holy [ __ ] people are making money on the internet I should probably you know do something silkwood was also launched in 2011. I knew that I totally knew that I was just testing your audience if you also knew that historically important date yeah yeah that's true that's one of the first marketplaces I think that the first one was [ __ ] I forgot the name oh sorry can I swear yeah okay okay because if my mom will be watching she'll be like yeah I mean it's embarrassing of course like what kind of brute you know uh speakers you have with Belgrade uh but yeah uh uh this is the face of a guy uh who said that you know Bitcoin is going to change the world but then life happened so uh yeah uh at the same time the world was asking what actually is Bitcoin what is cryptocurrency not a lot of people knew about it and we had like really mixed feelings about digital money nobody was actually talking about you know uh Sovereign individuals and nobody have heard of Ayn Rand you know in Europe especially you know in my parts of Europe and and nobody had you know uh Twitter lists with a bunch of people you know saying that we have to decouple from the state and so on but there was like you know a lot of things about all of the good things that Bitcoin can you know bring uh we started thinking about the Byzantine General problem we started thinking about you know a a gold standard we started to think about all of these different things and in 2011 it was pretty eventful year in that uh aspect uh I think that end of 2011 brought us like an indicator that people are taking notice according to stat news the closing price for BTC in 2011 was four point 25 dollars so Bitcoin was up 1 316.7 percent for that year and this was one step in showing us that this is something that's here to stay and people will actually uh uh use this and people will actually start giving a [ __ ] about you know monetary policies about our relationship to money and so on but we still didn't know what Bitcoin is uh we still don't know what cryptocurrency is if we go back a slide before that the cryptocurrency like our communication in 2011 was very raw very rudimentary um now I'm sorry I'm not like a data analyst I'm not a data scientist I couldn't do like you know extensive data mining of headlines of various you know newspapers to say oh the sentiment of general population towards you know digital Ledger Technologies or Bitcoin in this case or ethereum or is this or that this is something I would like to ask everybody who's watching this uh who will watch this in the future anybody who is interested in these topics you know go and do some research I'm just a guy with too much time you know and internet access so I just like put a slideshow and you know prepared a couple of jokes uh but the sentiment was growing the sentiment was definitely positive and after 2011 we go on to chapter two my life is over and that's because of you so the year is approximately late 2016. uh I get a call from a couple of my friends and they're like hey you want to come and hang at the office and I'm like what kind of office yeah yeah we got some office space like you should just come and chill you know like we'll drink some beers we'll buy some FIFA and I'm like okay and then I come to the office and I see like a lot of monitors and a lot of people you know like with trading view charts and I'm like okay guys what's happening blender we're very happy to announce to you that we have started a brand new chapter in our lives we are now crypto Traders so imagine that a cook a college student and a local weed dealer we're now making some serious money no no three different persons the local video was the college student but he supplied the college students with things necessary to study uh so they got uh they got an office in uh the city center of maribor and Slovenia where I live uh they started making like like some serious cash and I was like okay now I guess that the sentiment of the people is that this is no longer just a fun science experiment this is something that can actually be you know like a utility I need something of utility this can be like an instrument that can derive some monetary value and maybe some other value and I mean if those three guys are making money like they would like I could also probably make some money um also at that time I was working as a project later on product manager at the software development agency according to my LinkedIn uh at that time I was like figuring out stuff about technology and when I was also thinking about the technology I started looking more into like uh cryptocurrencies in general I mean in blockchain on the underlying technology and 2016 was like a very eventful year for especially ethereum if you remember what happened in 2016 we had the dial hack uh after the Dow hack we got uh Etc we got eth uh we had our unintentional uh or accidental hard Fork from the death parity client uh error so a lot of things happened a lot of things were portrayed catastrophically in the media but hey it's 2023 and we're still here ethereum is still thriving they also got like East Belgrade conference you know in Belgrade which is like kind of nuts because if you take a look at like all the headlines and so on in 2016 ethereum was done for like I was going to use ethereum but hey you know we're here in this climated uh venue place and we're just like looking at random charts so that's probably cool uh the technology was getting better we figured out a lot of new stuff but the media coverage was not as positive as we would like uh again I'm so sorry I didn't prepare like some samples of headlines from that time this is maybe for like the version two of this talk where I'll go more deeply into like you know the whole sentiment analysis and so on but if you take a look at like all of the headlines from that time you will see that is ethereum done for is Bitcoin done for it's like are these Forks going to impact I don't know the future of ethereum or cryptocurrencies and so on but one thing that we realized is that the catastrophic headlines were geared towards and primarily for just like one audience that very small audience which was cryptocurrency users in general from those cryptocurrency users there was like still a lot of them that were in it just purely for the money uh the general public didn't have any ideas uh what's uh what's crypto even you know this all changed in the summer 2017. so I get a call again you can guess from who it was so it was the the fancy Trio of the cook a college student who actually passed you know the previous uh year and the local weed dealer who was still a weed dealer at that time um they're they're now making serious bugs like like we're talking you know like serious bucks uh I hear that you know what this Bitcoin thing is going to change my life so I took a loan from my mother and my grandma and I put like three or four k and now I have 78 000 on my account I was like yo no that that is you know like for random dude in Slovenia like this can be a life-changing money you know like at least you can put a down payment for you know like like a house or something with that money you know and uh get additional financing uh summer 2017 was the Catalyst uh summer of 2017 was you know like Kid Rock uh used to sing about no that was Brian Adams Summer of 69 I just [ __ ] up that like oh no I don't know Summer of 69 who sings summer 69 right at us yeah okay my pop culture reference are still on point even though I went to a rave yesterday uh oh sorry uh-huh so if you take a look it was May everything was still cool in may like everything was peachy okay we start picking up some steam around July August September Comes people are like yo we're back to school and we're back to business and then November December came and we were just like holy [ __ ] we've got something on our hands the General Media discourse also changed around you know the second half of 2017. people were now much more interested in cryptocurrencies like random Slovenian local media were portraying Bitcoin as probably the grand Escape you know from the rat race and so on which was really funny because like mainstream media doesn't talk about the rat race they say about you know we're trying to combat inequality with new fiscal reforms or stuff like that you know but nobody used Rat Race in headlines like that uh but all good things come to an end and approximately the 17th of December or 16th of December we reached all-time high for that period things went down and people's belief in the technology also went down so the big problem that I saw which I'm seeing to this day is people are attaching their um what's the right word people are attaching their belief into a concept based on the monetary value on the monetary uh utility uh but instead we should be focusing on the technology this is why it's one of the crucial things that we keep on building and we keep on discovering and trying you know new use cases and we go and develop new things because the monetary value after some point won't be actually the thing that's going to be interesting for us the quality of life and the improvements that discovering new use cases and putting them into production are the things that are going to be of importance you know for us uh now it's January ish 2018 I get my big break in uh crypto at that time as it was called because now it's like web 2 and web 3 and nfts and I don't know what and in 2018 I started working at bitstamp The cryptocurrency Exchange that we all love and care about um it started as a call center agent uh this was like my entry position because I wanted to get into the whole world of crypto yes one of them now works in an animal shelter one of them is like a mechanical engineer you can guess which one the cook is now an animal works as an animal shelter uh caretaker uh we got a mechanical engineer and the local weed guy I think he just like lives somewhere his happy life like he's chilling so uh I kind of envy him right now no no no I think that he was somewhere in Thailand now it's like somewhere in Croatia maybe even maybe it's over near split who knows but uh yeah yeah yeah there's like a lot of in blockchain stories there's like always a lot of people yeah so uh at this time we got this uh set of templates which we use to reply to people and all of the people were asking me constantly same things what is this blockchain thing what is this Bitcoin thing what is this ethereum thing how I'm going to get rich can I get scanned you guys are scammers probably but lack of general education of the technology led to a lot of unfortunate situations where a lot of people were scammed so uh I first-handedly saw like what miscommunication misinformation does to people's livelihood uh I was in situations where I had to tell people that they've lost all of their life savings uh due to like a scam uh and uh due to you know mismanagement or their funds and because of that uh I was always trying to portray the technology with whomever I was you know talking to with whomever I was collaborating uh in a way that it was easily understandable for them if you don't get to people's level if you don't use the analogies and metaphors that they know you cannot bring technology closer to people and this is I cannot stress this enough this is necessary for us to actually have impact in the world and to continue Building Products that people will use I'm on camera right I can say this because I don't give a [ __ ] the blockchain industry should step off his or hers or whatever it's high horse we are not building good enough products we are not building enough products we are not building products with the end users in mind and we should all probably focus on doing more of that because only this yeah feel free to come in no problem no problem it's an interactive talk so I just mean like rambling stuff uh uh we should definitely do more of product building but we should do product building with end users in mind 2018 happened a lot of money went through the roof like if you take a look this is from the guardian Bitcoins January fall wipes off 44 billion dollars in value like like this this was unbelievable I had this phone call with uh elderly lady from Sweden who actually lost her house and approximately 70 or 80k Euros of life savings because she invested in something that she didn't understand now I was the one on the phone telling her that you know what ma'am this money can be recovered please contact the police and you know try to figure out stuff with you know your local authorities what to do and from that point onward I I was so inspired to continue working in this space but I also realized that we have like a really big problem with communicating the technology to the masses to the general audience and we still have and still still not doing enough my personal opinion which is maybe a controversial opinion but actually I don't give a [ __ ] about it is that building another knowledge base on on like one of the biggest crypto websites isn't going to do [ __ ] uh building like like doing interviews you know with people uh and still using the same jargon like still using the same technical terms like people don't know what databases are let's be let's be honest like like people don't know what what distributed means people don't know what lyrics uh censorship uh is you know in like digital terms of it and and we are using two complicated language two complicated words and we are not bringing the technology to the people that should actually you know benefit the most from it so yeah I was a little bit jaded you know from from my time in in in big crypto companies um I later on went on uh working uh on marketing with uh Boba Network which is a multi-chain layer to scaling solution where we Face the same problem like how do you explain Layer Two scaling to like people who aren't technical you know uh and this brings us to chapter three of this really long story which is just like some random rambling you know about like how everything is going to [ __ ] even though it's not going to [ __ ] but we're making like really small progress towards it right back where we started so the year is right here right now if you take a look we are we as a community are slowly drifting apart in communication sense like what are we communicating to our audiences if you do a quick search of like the most known a cryptocurrency related or blockchain related uh scientific articles you will see that like the whole scientific Community is in consensus that blockchains are good digital Ledger Technologies are good they're bringing Improvement to numerous Industries around the world we have seen and we have verified and we have confirmed that there is positive effects in in banking Industries in in agriculture in like all of these different places if you take a look right now open up your phones go and just like search blockchain or Bitcoin or ethereum at any mass media you know mainstream media Outlet you will see that the sentiment of the headlines it's it's not really you know the most positive you will hear about crashes you will hear about scams you will hear about trials hearings you will hear about reforms you will hear about you know all of these things that are actually the opposite of the ethos that the blockchain community or or distributed Ledger technology Community would like to you know convey to other people weird [ __ ] at communicating our technology and we should change that I still don't have the answer how to do that but this is my public appeal to everybody everybody who's talking about blockchains or ledgers or anything technological with their friends family other random people don't use complicated language try get to the gist of it and try you know to make them enthusiasts or you know fans of the technology this is the only way that will help us survive in the long run oh problem Remains the Same I actually told that earlier here is the future I wanted to say something here this is my final thought this is a random dude from Slovenia standing here in Belgrade doing some jokes but the idea is this we can and we must do better for us for everybody thank you very much there's coffee outside I love you guys you are the best crowd does anyone have any questions anything anyone wants to ask speak now or forever hold your trip okay yeah here we go I think you should have put either of the three we should have put it on there on you should have put the number on there oh yeah the questions okay amazing thank you so much one more round of applause [Applause] thank you so much cool