[Enterprise Speech] Blockchain for Builders: Removing the barriers to mainstream adoption

[Music] hi everyone first of all I want to thank all of the organizers of this event what you've put together is really really exciting and engaging also one attack thank mr. Chung and the rest of the H stack team you guys have been wonderful partners to us and look forward to niccola's presentation next I've been obsessed with Technology since I was about 10 years old I started programming on an Amiga computer lot if you probably don't know what an Amiga is it was actually a pretty popular operating system in England and you know as a result I became a computer scientist got my masters at Carnegie Mellon and then went to Wall Street for a while but actually have been in the decentralized movement for quite a while I first started in 2002 when I was an open source contributor to the BitTorrent project and you know I've been a open advocate for open source and decentralized technologies what I'm gonna talk about today though is how we remove the barriers to mainstream adoption first I'll lay out some context and then we'll talk a few specifics but I think to start off I'd like to talk about Arthur C Clark's three rules because I think they're very germane to where we are as an industry oh great just wanted to make sure we had the Korean version up as well the first the first law of arthur c clarke is that when a distinguished professor tells you that something is possible he's almost certainly right but when he tells you something is impossible he's almost certainly wrong and this CEG's really well into Clarke's second law which is we only know what the limits of possibility are if we go right up to where the impossible is and I think this is where we are as an industry we've gotten up to the second law where we're trying to touch the impossible where we do need to get though is arthur c clarke s-- third law any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic let me give you an example about how how that might look hands up how many of you saw the initial launch video for the iPhone by Steve Jobs quite a few so one of the most interesting things that happen there was he took out the phone loaded up maps turned it to the side the entire map changed his orientation and then he pinched the screen and the map got bigger and everyone in the audience said Wow because they had never seen anything like that but if you actually think about it you know it seemed like magic but all those technologies have existed for a while you know gyroscopes are wide it was able to measure the rotation multi-touch had existed for a while and all the radio and other mechanics had already existed but a magical experience was created because a few great components were put together and there have been other magical experiences created uber changed everything it connected you to your destination without a taxi Airbnb changed everything it connected you to a room without a hotel Etsy changed everything by connecting producers and customers without a storefront and you know all of these systems created a trusted network of connected people I think blockchain is a potential to do so much more because in addition to transferring information we can now also transfer value bear in mind we're only at the beginning of where this industry is there's about you know twenty five billion dollars worth of value in smart contracting platforms some of you will disagree with this number based on circulating or non circulating supply but I just took this off of coin market cap and why I think this important context is building momentum towards the adoption breakthrough takes time it took Amazon nine years to get a million developer accounts onto AWS it took Apple five years to get a million apps on their App Store and there are examples like this at Microsoft Google etc so with that in mind and knowing it will take time how do you make blockchain feel less like technology and more like magic I think it really comes down to three things first we have to move away from proprietary programming languages and proprietary standards to much more open standards and multiple programming languages too we have to figure out a way to go away from price unpredictability over to you know a pricing system that makes sense for the average business and finally we have to solve the upgrade plot a problem we have within blockchains so let's talk about each one of these but first this is actually fully consistent with what entrepreneurs and enterprises are telling us PwC does an annual poll asking people why they're not adopting blockchain the number one reason really is cost and the unpredictability of those underlying costs the second thing is they don't know where to start because the underlying technologies aren't technologies they've already been exposed to and then the lack of governance and unpredictability of upgrade paths is the third reason and then after that there's all sorts of reasons you know people don't see the value the c-suite executives don't care about it there's you know an uncertain regulatory environment all those things are not under our control we're the top three reasons are completely under our control and as an industry we could fix the top three reasons why block chains are not being adopted let's talk about the first one open programming languages and open standards solidity is the most widely used smart contracting platform on earth it was a massive innovation it's the reason why we're all here but if we put it in context there's probably ten maybe 20,000 solidity developers tops there are 26 to 27 million developers total and if you look at like polls done by Stack Overflow asking people for approval ratings of different programming systems it's pretty clear consistently rust followed closely by Python typescript etc is the most preferred programming language so really we need to create systems that talk to everyone every developer should feel like they're being welcomed to build on a blockchain you know one of the technologies that enables that for example is web assembly you can input in rust Python go pretty much any programming language and this really opens the world up to developers in general and not just blockchain developers it's kind of like what's happening in this room if you think about it I'm talking to you in English I don't speak Korean which is probably obvious but I'm able to converse with those of you who only understand Korean via translation up here on my left as well as the translators in the back this is a beautiful thing we're able to communicate with each other even though we don't know the same programming language and I think blockchains need to adopt those principles as well this would break the first wall so let's talk about the second wall the way pricing works in the blockchain industry is actually a little strange when you think about it AWS which is the most widely used cloud computing service reduced-price 46 or 47 times in the last decade so as the system grew as more people were using it the benefits of that scale passed on to the end users with block chains quite the opposite has happened you know as Bitcoin and aetherium grew as networks it actually started to cost more to use them it's kind of the opposite of what should be happening if you think about it therefore it's really really important to try and fix this problem people need price predictability when people are running their businesses and running contracts on the blockchain is a significant part of that cost bar they need to know how exactly pricing is going to run otherwise it can't really run their business appropriately so how do we do this unfortunately you know this actually brings up more questions than anything else perhaps the best way to do it is to peg gas price to some sort of fiat pair who provides that data well my suggestion would be you know there's a lot of groundbreaking work being done by in the decentralized oracle space sergei just talked about chain-link who I think are have some really great innovations but that that could be a potential data source to ensure that you have a trusted price feed and then other questions come up which currency should it be we use USD sort of as our lingua franca in the industry but Korea's a dominant economy too should it be based off the KRW do we use special drawing rights these are all questions we wrestle with every day on the team and you know we'd love to hear your thoughts but in general we believe this is a problem that needs to be fixed third think about how many times the most widely used platforms out there have been upgraded I've just given three examples here Salesforce Microsoft and Linux and these are full-fledged kernel like upgrades if you include every single feature that's added every single language that supported these actually number in the thousands if you remember when I started this conversation I was talking about how I started programming on an Amiga I think the reason why Amiga as a operating system died is because they didn't really address the upgrade problem thoroughly so history is shown that widely used platforms become widely used because people know that they will be upgraded what enables inherent upgrade ability so we looked at a bunch of technology platforms and it really boils down to three core things there's probably a lot many more things we could list but it comes down to three core things the first one is abstraction abstraction means that one layer of the tech stack doesn't care about what's happening in another layer of the tech stack I'm going to grossly oversimplify right now but the internet sort of works like this the network layer and the application layer are completely abstracted from each other the network layer doesn't need to know what the application works like under the hood it just needs to receive the right messages from it and the application layer doesn't need to know how the network actually runs it just needs to know how to access it and you know CBC Casper as a consensus protocol is highly abstracted which enables upgrade ability over time the second thing is modularity different functionality in different parts of the system should be able to be upgraded separately without affecting one another if you think about how Windows is designed or UNIX is probably an even better example it's highly modular which is why it's we've been able to upgrade UNIX and Linux so many times and finally you need process control think about how your phone is upgraded or your Windows laptop is upgraded you know that you know a notification is gonna come up and you can just hit yes or no and you know the upgrade applies automatically however full decentralization makes this kind of challenging if you think about the systems we just talked about that are upgradable they both have a centralized software writer and centralized instances that they can access on the other hand if you take the Bitcoin and etherium networks the two most decentralized networks ideally you want to decentralize software proposer meaning anyone can propose an upgrade and you also have highly decentralized instances so what do we do in my view the ability to upgrade in protocol via smart contract would be game-changing but it also brings up a litany of concerns first of which is we what do we do about controversial and non-controversial upgrades so let me let me give you a specific example here a non-controversial upgrade would be one that merely increases performance and security and if it doesn't no other changes most people would accept that and say there's a non-controversial upgrade what could be a controversial upgrade an upgrade that changes the mining reward would be a controversial upgrade an upgrade that changes the decentralized nature of a system would likely be a controversial upgrade the ability to delineate between these two and put together the appropriate governance processes would be really really important because what if someone sneaks in a controversial upgrade with a non controversial one you will get better performance but we will slash mining fees down to a tenth that's a that's a situation we don't want what we can do is build the technology that would enable this and hopefully you know make sure that we can eventually come to a place where we solve the governance problem as well but what this would allow you to do is it would allow apps to evolve alongside the businesses that depend on them and I think that would be magical so just a little bit of how we are approaching solving these problems one our our system supports concurrent orchestration which means processes that aren't dependent on each other can execute simultaneously making it much more efficient and then of course in subsequent releases we will have sharding which is proportioning the network as well as heterogeneity of your site chains and then we believe in embracing open architectures you know make sure that every developer is a blockchain developer sorry just experiencing a slight delay with this and then we think every day about how to future-proof our platform for business predictable transaction fees are extremely important to us and how and we've put in a lot of mechanisms to ensure that our blockchain is upgradable ad infinitum so just to close I want to thank you all for listening and I want to say you know we're all in this together we would love to hear your thoughts on all the things we talked about today hopefully this is helpful for all the projects out there I think a rising tide lifts all ships if you want to talk more more to us about this please join our telegram group you can do it right now with your phone if you take a picture of that QR code you know we'd love to know what we're doing right we'd love to know what we're doing wrong we welcome all critique and you know hopefully an engaged discussion will be great for the industry as a whole so you know we all have a lot of work to do so let's start building thank you thank you