AKASHA: Unveiling The Next Experiment

ah cancun what an epic def con this was can we agree let's give it up for a Tyrian foundation and everyone making this happen yeah thank you so let me play this technology okay so before we begin I would like to ask how many of you have heard of Akasha before can we see a show of okay that's that is impressive and I'm just curious how many of you have actually tried the Alpha Wow okay so we have quite a few alpha veterans thank you for taking the time to play with the app for those of you who haven't heard of Akasha before as a word it comes from Sanskrit and it means eater but it also stands as an acronym for advanced knowledge architecture for social human advocacy and what we are trying to build is a peer-to-peer alternative in a world where the social media networks are modeled after the Napster architecture where the user depends on a server or a server operator or an entity and we want to tackle this problem from a different perspective using different technologies so in a word we want to showcase the potential of etherium combined with ipfs to solve all problems using new technologies and the thing we want to achieve is a shared and persistent information Commons that can help people put the key that can help people regain their collective memory and freedom of expression back from the clause of corporations that monetize each click and really everything it's really bad so to put it visually the Napster web apps are Napster like web apps rely on the server admin or the server itself and if for some reason the user does not comply or respect whatever the server operator once they lose access to the service in the Alpha we took the hardest challenge we could find which was to build a fully decentralized desktop app meaning that each user when they downloaded and installed the Akasha application they were actually installing bundled and etherium node and an IP FS node so in the beta thanks to hard work of the team we will also introduce a fully functional web version which will remove the need to sync with with a chain and the users will then rely on meta mask or any other way tree service provider like status or or missed and when we say that free speech is embedded in software what we mean is that whereas the user can be kicked for whatever reason from the Napster like web apps on Akasha the users are in full control over their identity and the content they are posting so our story began on May 6th mater 2016 on World Press Freedom Day and this is when we basically announced that we've been working for quite some time on the Akasha alpha it was a total shot in the dark for us we weren't sure exactly what we expect so it was kind of a test to see how it will be received among ourselves before we release the website we we talked and we say ok man what we consider a success you know just to have some some numbers and Mario's here said like 30 people in the first 24 hours would be cool roxanna here more optimistic 50 people and I was secretly 24 hours later we surpassed 200 I now switch was like whoa and then in less than a month we surpassed 2,000 people so it became clear that we weren't crazy or that we weren't the only ones so Disney these numbers might not seem much at first but it's worth mentioning that every single person that sign up for the Alpha reached organically our website so we just published blog post linked them on reddit or tweeted them so what we wanted was to measure the real interest in the application and we felt that paid advertising would taint those results we would end up measuring the efficiency of targeted ads rather than the real interest in in the application and idea so fast forwarding until early 2017 one year after it helium we launched the first public version of the Alpha and it was called into the ether it was received very well by the community and I suppose you guys also tried it hope you had a pleasant experience when when you when you tried it and basically in the Alpha we tried to have a basic functionality you find in a social network which was to publish something to comment on something to read something to vote and to follow people combined also with things like since we are using aetherium one of the side effects is that each identity is also a wallet so people can also send resources to each other and so forth and after the release one of this is actually a screen from the Akasha application a comment and on the first row you can see that someone it was like excited that there's a tab that normal people can use and for us I was like exactly what we were aiming for but I think the big point here was that with all these people you and the others that might be watching this this conference we proved that it is possible it is possible to have an application that does not rely on servers for people to communicate among themselves and thanks to your playfulness in your time put into testing the application we identified some bugs and we also identified what can be done better and Mario's now is going to explain one of the lessons we learn in alpha and that be applied in the beta Marius thank you yeah so what is this yeah I think all the Alpha users got stuck at a given time in this loading loading screen this was happening because of the way we used to load the resources we were trying to get all of them at once so if given time one of the resources would would be unavailable the other resources would have to wait for that one to become online before fetching them to the user so in the beta version this was one of the biggest challenge we we had to solve we've done this by loading every single resource individually as you can see in this demo yeah so it comes with a great improvement on the UX side so enough with this so another highlight of the of the beta is the first token experiment in the alpha we had a ETH which served as a placeholder token and I just want to make something clear this is there is just one token which is this currently in nicknamed n-eth we are open to suggestions regarding the name we want to avoid confusion with other projects like idiom if any and this is just an experiment to get the power running right so we fully assume that we are we don't have all the answers but we invite everyone to collaborate on finding them so to give you an overview of how these token works on the surface a ETH is in an ear C 20 compatible token it works pretty much as you would expect from an ear seatback token you can send and receive but there is a twist you can lock it for a predefined amount of time and this will give you some something we call mana which acts like a regional creep that can be burned inside the application Maurice will cover this in more detail afterwards and essence is basically mana that is burned and if the quality of the content is deemed as good the authors and the persons interacting can consume this essence to mint new tokens in existence and not Leslie karma is our experiment on the proto reputation layer and Mario's now we'll give you a presentation of the token flow of the states and how everything ties in together so so starting from the better version every user we have to burn a small amount of mana to interact with the application so how do we how do we get mana the user can get some mana by locking his Akasha tokens for a period of time during which he gets periodically the mana replenished the man I used for the mana burned for doing actions in a cursor can be collected afterwards into two specific resources called instance and karma karma will serve in Akasha like some sort of proto reputation which will unlock specific features like creating communities and so on which will require to be above level of karma the other one the essence it's interesting because this is the first idea which came to us to incentivize the users to create content on Akasha because it can be consumed to mint new years to 20 Akasha tokens and we spent afterwards also at any given time the user can unlocked the magnified tokens and afterwards it will go to the Year c20 state by passing to a delay time which we call it a cycle yeah so let's see and basic flow so we have the publisher which post an entry on Akasha the readers afterwards can express their general feeling about the quality of the content by voting after a voting period the entry will generate a small amount of essence which afterwards can be claimed by both publisher and the reader by specific when we were starting to feel good about ourselves like Yemen I think we're onto something here Vitalik did it again so then just a few days ago Vitalik published this this entry so he basically pointed out that there are more than just so a good talk and economic system requires more than just a way to insert units of that particular currency into circulation and you know this is quite interesting because following a couple of days the media started to digest this information and started calling the tokens invented until this point as tokens 1.0 and you know if you think about it it's pretty accurate since we are still barely scratching the surface of what can be done and we're still trying to understand the basic pieces of the puzzle that make a good token work and then things kept snowballing and by by the end of the day we had like this sort of stuff is like everything you need to know about cryptocurrencies so you know 90% of startups in general fall so maybe it would have been more accurate to say that with a poorly designed token 99% of the token startups will fall but to focus on the positive the question of how do we get to talk in 2.0 started to take shape and since Vitalik thanks started this I figure that it's best to just show a short video of a short segment of a recent video done by VTEC so without further ado the nice thing about cryptocurrency I think is that it just makes it so bloody easy to create one of these economic mechanisms you just write it up in code then it just makes it really easy to just service an economic experimentation ground for doing these kinds of things and so you know that's sort of the whole point of economic experimentation is sort of coming up with these sort of clever clever little tricks that sort of combine together incentives and sort of put some little put things together in this nice way that gives people the incentive to do the right thing and you know the skin there's probably quite a lot to be done it's just really we're all getting started I like to focus on that right it's still just ear - after each area and our approach this thing - maybe answering this question is that just as a theorem had during its frontier the etherium Olympics where we're developers from around the world were invited to identify bugs attack vectors and basically if you can break it go ahead and we'll learn for it from it will become stronger we invite everyone here and that's watching the presentation to join us in breaking and reinventing and replaying the token proposal and basically with the I ETH proposal and what we showcase today we want to just get the prototype in the world and then in a sort of cyberpunk inception like fashion to iterate co-create in the open on Akasha itself so we will use tags to coordinate and later on if we still have time we will show you an actual demo of how this this will work but basically what we want or hope is that if we approach things from this perspective maybe people and and startups can think of of tokens as this dynamic adaptive systems which involve multiple pieces that you have to carefully put together rather than a graph going from zero to the moon right so I think together if we will tackle this this question we might reach some emergent shared understanding because no one has like the full idea of what is talking 2.0 but a thousand little half-baked ideas can come together in something completely new and the cool thing about this is that this is a quote I really like is that the mind once stretched by an idea never return to its original dimensions and if you want an example just remember that in 2014 a theorem had eater presale which led to around eighteen point five million dollars being raised to fund the development of the platform and it was number one as in the most successful crowdfunding campaign in the history of the internet and now a couple of years later over three billion dollars have been raised by companies using icos as a form of raising funds for their projects so just one idea huge impact so now the big picture of what we're trying to accomplish is like we're not trying to compete with the big boys I mean they have billions of users would be nice but let's get real we want to have a real alternative in in place to keep them in check and this is not like paper or plastic bag choice we want to offer people a fundamentally different choice when it comes to each person's digital sovereignty as human netizens and I think we can all agree after this beautiful Def Con that watching history in the making is cool but we think that writing the future ourself is even cooler so on this note we invite everyone to be able to join us in building together in this decade a pattern ology architecture for the next century and we actually have all the tools and we have like a pretty good idea of where things can go and the future is not the place we get to visit the future is a place we get to create and I would like to announce that the beta signups are open for everyone that wants to part paid and subscribe just go to Akasha dot world insert your email in and in a matter of weeks we will send you the invite and we will start released the beta and since I see we still have two minutes I will now show you a demo of what the data looks like and this is basically the dashboard view in which we have like different streams and different columns which can be customized by the users and here we had a column which is a tag and in this case is crypto Olympics so people can coordinate on the ideas brainstorm these are proposals they can use the entries and the comment section as counterproposals or to discuss various ideas and this is like an example in which is all a con or a Def Con how it works to publish a comment as you can see the UI has changed quite a bit also in the backend we basically are now looking at a completely rewritten decentralized application from dub so it would be more correct to call it like version 2 but since we started with the Alpha we will name it better and here on the left side these are what we call boards for now and basically offers like different windows into specific topics so if we take the example of Def Con one of the car of the boards could have been like events presentations workshops and people could have coordinated better rather than checking on ready 10 discord rooms one slack you get idea to jeeter's and and so on so I would like to thank you all for your attention and it's great being here hope to see you on arkasha soon [Applause] [Music]