Can’t Someone Else Do It!? Shifting Behaviors in Ethereum Network Participation by Aqeel Mohammad

foreign [Music] [Music] after such a tumultuous time over the past few years a lot of us have gone through a lot of personal and societal issues and to come together to celebrate and to look at all the changes that have happened over the past few years in the ecosystem and the things that didn't really change over the past few years as well so Defcon is actually a perfect example of us trying to expose the community and the culture to the needs in different regions of the world and it's quite clear by the different feedback that we've been getting that their reactions that people are really not truly close to empathizing or understanding the needs of others when it comes to really benefiting the individuals that would be able to make the use of the technology to the most of their benefit so I believe the many of you that are sitting in this room have truly made this your life's works for the past few years and will be the individuals that kind of look at how we can look at ethereum as an ecosystem and what needs to be done to maintain the decentralization so I wanted to kind of take this opportunity to step back and really examine from a pragmatic approach maybe somewhat of a therapy session with these individuals in the room and look at like what has been really exact what has been happening in the ecosystem and how can we look at uh what's been going wrong and why are we really here and where do we need to focus our energies and what are we hoping to create as an impact from a Global Perspective for participants that come from very disparate and unique backgrounds and lived experiences so let's face it we have a problem all of us have this notion and mental model of can someone else do it when it comes to maintaining and running Services uh when we have to participate included in this network and in the Rondo about way we've kind of just adopted this same mentality that we had coming into web 3 from the web ecosystem as a whole so I wasn't kidding when I said this would be somewhat of a therapy session and we'd look at what is happening as far as Behavior change inch so in order to do that I wanted to look at the trans theoretical model of behavior change so there are five stages of change that have been conceptualized for a variety of problems and behaviors so the first stage is basically pre-contemplation so these are individuals that are not really ready to make any change they might be unaware or under aware of the issues that are happening so maybe there's a few individuals in this room that don't really that aren't really aware of the issues that we are facing when it comes to decentralization in the ecosystem then there's individuals that are kind of in this contemplation stage where they're aware of the problems but they're not really mindful or seriously thinking about overcoming them in any meaningful Manner and then there's no commitment to take any action so I think that's kind of the space a lot of us kind of occupy at this point is we're aware of the problems but we really haven't done any preparation or are ready to do any action to change those things so the next stage is basically preparation and that combines like the intention of wanting to create some change and then looking at some of the behavioral criteria to make that change in the first place and then intending to take some action in the first place so from there we go to the action stage and this is I think where the biggest issue happens within the ecosystem is that we get prepared but we just don't have the tools or the resources to take any action to create that change so this is the stage where individuals actually have to modify the behavior they have to change their experiences environment and have in order to overcome their problems and this requires uh quite the overt behavioral changes and considerable considerable amount of commitment and energy and resources then from that we go to the maintenance so basically people work to prevent relapse and the work that had been done in the action phase um and then obviously there's relapse and I think this is the point of uh place where we are in the ecosystem where we've kind of reverted to making decisions in the hopes of mass adoption that kind of compromise the decisions when it comes to decentralization and we'll kind of get into that a little bit so we postulate quite a bit on Twitter and other social media channels around like what are the issues but there's really no action or Force put behind them so my objective today or is to kind of like help some of the individuals that are in the room to move from this pre-contemplation phase to something that is a little bit more actionable or at least prepared for them to do so so decentralization has kind of been touted as this core to the ethereum of web3 ecosystem yet we continue to operate in a world where the end users have been trained and programmed to not think about any of the infrastructure that they need to run to utilize some of the services or the technologies that we utilize um so it means that they're not really aware of how these things operate how secure they are how they're managed and what are the trade-offs when you actually get to um making those trade us when you actually start to rely on these intermediaries to come and facilitate some of this technology and the community just continues to operate with the same Mantra of can someone else do it that we have been programmed to do so within the web 2 ecosystem but it's kind of interesting to also look at the different cohorts of people that come into the ecosystem so throughout the years these individuals hold very different values and their mode of operation is quite distinct as well so if you really wanted to examine the people that are giving talks at Defcon you'll be able to kind of guesstimate where and when in the ecosystem they kind of entered so from like 2010 to 2012 onwards these were individuals that were kind of Cypher punks they were crypto punks and they were crypto anarchists they wanted to take control back from the state as you go towards the 2014s 2016s these are individuals that are more game theorists these are system design thinkers these are individuals that are thinking about more mechanism designs and so forth and then as you go into the later years these are individuals that are more aligned with business cases and user adoption so the place that I kind of came into the ecosystem was around 2016 where I was sold this vision of web3 being my portal into anything that I wanted to do with privacy user interactions and so forth so the first thing that I as a PC user wanting to interact with ethereum was there's no Ico boom there's no rise in token prices at this point so all I could do was to interact with ethereum was try to run a node and the first thing I tried to do was look at the Miss browser and I was able to get it running but the issue was it wasn't able to sync so the next option was the parody UI ranit was able to get it to sync but there was no features or anything functional that would kind of keep me utilizing that service and kind of interact with the ethereum network in any meaningful manner so then at the same time status and Jared were kind of like evangelizing this ethereum for mobile Vision where you could have no infrastructure on a mobile device you can interact with these Technologies to whisper Etc and this was around 2016 and we're in 2022 and I want to interact with ethereum what do I have command line interfaces it's unfortunate but there's a lot of infrastructure work that needs to be done a lot of resources and issues that have come up that has still led us to a position where normal users that want to interact with the network State can do that in a meaningful manner they can't run nodes they can't run infrastructure because there's just no easy way for them to do so so one thing that we come to realize time and time again is that users will always give up their Liberties for convenience and this happens within social media networks where the users give up their data privacy just for the sake of quick access and the ability to interact with certain use cases that are not available and that doesn't require them to actually run any infrastructure or node Services Etc and they really don't have that bandwidth or the time or the allocation to actually worry about some of this stuff when it comes to running infrastructure so we get into this situation where we're kind of like the the citizens of Springfield and we just want someone else to take care of all our problems and we just kind of operate within that mental framework um and I think it's it's really a disservice to the ecosystem and the the intended purpose of why we are here in the first place uh because we want control over our data we want control over our uh privacy and that we're in just a position where we're relying on intermediate areas and putting a lot of trust in them to give us what we should be optimizing for so when we look at who is there to blame it it is the the ecosystem as a whole and the key decisions that we have made when it comes to trying to optimize for whether it's adoption or other consequences of Technology limitations that have been there so what does decentralization currently look like in the ethereum ecosystem it's it's it's you have to be kind of mindful and kind of step back and actually evaluate that most of the key ownership or individuals that actually invest in crypto tokens Etc hold their keys on centralized exchanges so there's there's a centralized party taking control of this stuff in the first place when it comes to no infrastructure majority of nodes are actually running on Amazon AWS and cloud services so you're kind of back at Ground Zero again similarly when it comes to data availability or getting access to the transactions and so forth you're relying on inferior when it comes to staking a lot of the staking is actually Consolidated on staking pools or centralized exchanges at this point which is a huge problem uh when you do get into censorship and those organizations having to kind of function within certain jurisdictions and laws that they must abide by additionally when it comes to network security we have issues with client diversity so like the major execution client is get which occupies close to 80 which is a huge issue when it comes to network security additionally we did have issues with prism being a majority client but the community did a lot of energy and focus on that we're at a good position there but still there is a lot of work that needs to be done there and when it comes to dapps or other resources um you know you're basically reliant on things like open C which are not very decentralized in any manner as well so unless you really run an ethereum nodes you're not you're like trusting third parties to provide you access to the blockchain and which is not really the the core value of what we were trying to achieve so you're not really truly participating in this P2P network uh you're not properly propagating your own transactions to the network you're dependent on things like metamatch to connect to inferior and then you're looking at etherscan and just giving this inherent trust to these organizations and these services to provide you the information that you're looking for and for it to be accurate in the first place so when you look at like the the participation of the current POS validator nodes within the context of the world you can see that majority of individuals that are participating are within the North America and Europe regions and this is a concern as far as diversity is concerned as well you can see there's a bit of action within the East Asian communities but that is still very limited and it's quite interesting to kind of like map this to the participation from ethereum Global online hackers it kind of maps quite nicely aside from the fact that there's a lot of developer activity happening in India but there isn't too much staking happening there so I think it's good to know that there is a lot of work that needs to be done as far as making sure that we've created the ecosystem and the resources for these Network participants to come in from these locations that might not have the resources to do so so 32 ether is a lot of money for individuals in Latin America or Africa or Asia so how do we get resources and technologies that kind of help them participate in the network and staking is not the only way for them to participate in the network so they can run nodes they can learn run like clients they can run other services and really think about how they can get some sort of participation within the network that doesn't rely them investing money and perhaps we can even look at how can incentivize those individuals and monetize or compensate those individuals to be participants in the first place as well which we can talk about a little bit later so it's clear that this these things don't seem like an issue until they become an issue and that at that point it's just too late for you to do anything so we've seen a little bit of a glimpse of this um when it comes to web 2 hacks Etc but most recently when it comes to tornado cash so I said one of the biggest issues or the blames was on us but there's other factors and other forces kind of functioning towards making some of this a little bit more difficult for us to decentralize and not be functioning within the current systems that do exist and that's one of those things is like advice adversarial State actors so as we saw with tornado cash I'm not a legal expert or anything but uh so I won't speak too heavily on this and I think there's probably other talks within that conduct kind of go into this route but they were basically put on the ofax action list and then the developers were added to this sdn list which doesn't doesn't make sense from uh perspective of the law at that point and then on top of that crypto projects are abandoned countries like China and India where there's a lot of developer activity but they just don't have the opportunity to work on these Technologies in the first place in addition the third forcing factor is that there's individuals which are kind of classifies mad adoption vultures these are individuals that come in take the narrative that you've been working on for the past x amount of years and then co-opted for their own benefit so these are the Elon musks these are the uh Jack dorsey's these are the mark zuckerbergs who are just waiting by the side that once they see their opportunity they're going to jump on the narrative and take it for their own benefits so when you see Elon Musk tweeting these dot coins and making people those coins kind of jump up in value a lot of people invest in them kind of Follow That Trend and when they lose money that reflects adversely on the ecosystem as a whole so all the work that you've done now gets marred by this rug pull that was kind of like facilitated by this individual that this was having fun creating memes on the internet similarly we've seen what these social media companies do when it comes to feature releases one social media company releases a feature two weeks later everyone has the same features within their applications similarly these individuals are just waiting for their opportunity to kind of co-opt what you're doing and then utilize their fit for their benefit you've seen this with Zuckerberg kind of reframing this his whole organization around meta worse and whatnot similarly with Jack Dorsey he's always pushing for Bitcoin and decentralization but we haven't seen too much come out of that so one thing that I wanted to kind of get into was addressing users needs so if you were thinking about what needs to be done moving forward is that we need to meet the users halfway or where they are that means that if people or majority of the world is using PCS and we want individuals to stake or participate in managing nodes or creating validators Etc maybe we create interfaces or documentation that's a little bit easier for those individuals to understand so this is the ease of access and then as I was mentioning earlier there's this part about incentive alignment so what does it look like for people to participate in the ethereum network we kind of confuse it with just staking at this point but there's other opportunities for individuals to actually a communicate and get participation participation within the network uh through running nodes running like clients and other services that can be of a meaningful manner but like how do you incentivize them how do you create resources or infrastructure for them to even do that in the first place uh Additionally you have to kind of like take them through this Progressive disclosure phase where you can't just check them in the deep end of uh decentralization as they start to make those uh movements towards action you kind of help them and guide them towards that just movement as far as decentralization in the first place and that kind of leads into the guided education encouragement of those individuals so as you start moving up the the use cases you should make sure that those individuals are provided that sufficient guidance and the encouragement to continue and maintain the changes and behaviors that they have implemented additionally we need to make sure that there's relevant context and narrative framing for the individuals that we're speaking to so the framing that you have around web 3 and the challenges that you face with financial uh restrictions or censorship Etc is not the same that the individuals in Bogota face or the people that in Africa face or the people that face in India and this this is the context that we need to be aware of to make sure that the framing is uh maneuvered in a way that they understand why they should be decentralizing in the first place and what does that mean for them and how does that benefit them in their long run so I think one thing that I would encourage for everyone to start doing on their own to if they really value privacy or security and want to like reduce Reliance on third-party servers and improve sensitive resistance or improve health and do your centralization of the network is to take ownership and participate in the network themselves and this means running a node or whatever it may be ethereum.org has been doing a great job of creating these resources that easily that are easy to understand and that have a lot of translations for different regions and I would encourage everyone to kind of start digging into some of these more resources online and try to understand where we kind of started as an ecosystem and where we have kind of ended up in the past few years additionally if there's individuals in this room that are quite passionate about creating this change for the ecosystem I would encourage them to come to adoption day it's the uxn conference where we have uh quite a few interesting lightning talks from individuals from optimism um from status from uh different Clan teams to kind of really dig into these different issues and think about what we need to be thinking about in the short term and to the long term when it comes to the ux challenges when it comes to adoption and make sure that decentralizes at the core decentralization is at the core of any of the issues that we focus towards so please be sure to add this to your schedule so we know how to plan for the room accordingly and make sure that we set it up since it is a small Workshop room additionally we'll have working groups focus on ux challenges between 1 pm and 6 pm and then after that we'll go to the chiva Lounge hopefully where Tomo will do a DJ sets uh looking forward to that myself uh additionally at Defcon this year we really made a point to highlight teams and projects that are working on some of this stuff so be sure to go to the client team uh impact boots I know for a fact that Nimbus is working on user interfaces to make some of this stuff easier um Lighthouse is working on some of this stuff I know prism and lodestar have done some research and development in this regard as well do check out ethereum on arm which is a small device that you can actually start running a node on an ARM device that nodes provide services or along this this regard as well same ethereum so they're all in the impact boot area so be sure to go check them out as well additionally I think we just need to kind of go back to this diagram around why we were looking at the transtheor article model of change and what we need to be mindful of so it's always an upward spiral and we're always going to relapse and I think over the past few years we've unfortunately relapsed to a point where we just don't want to take ownership of the managing our services or infrastructure at all and we're going to have to start looking at what infrastructure what resources which education needs to be put in place where people can now start actually preparing and putting things into action so hopefully there's individuals in this room that can guide us that can lead us move into more action-oriented mind frame rather than where we just contemplate and think about the issues that we are facing but once we actually get to the point that it's too late there's nothing that we can do so I would like to thank everyone for coming today and hopefully you get an opportunity to engage with the thousands of individuals that are coming to Defcon from disparate backgrounds and communicate with them and really learn about the challenges that they face when it comes to some of this stuff why are they here why did they want to participate in the ethereum whether it was creating resources whether it's developing protocols what really drives them and how do you take that context into the work that you're doing I think it's quite imperative and Community efforts like Defcon are amazing to see the the consequence of what happens at these events so you might see an idea spark at one of these talks that leads to a huge impact not only monetarily but just from an ecosystem-wide perspective uh in the next few years so be mindful of those conversations take the opportunity to really dig deep and think about the the reason why we were here in the first place and how we can kind of continue moving towards that decentralized ecosystem thank you very much [Applause]