Unchained Index: A Purposefully Designed Schelling Point: A native Web3 API | Devcon SEA

um my name is Thomas rush I think was I introduced as Thomas Rush sorry about that yeah so um that is the correct slide I don't have the clicker um thanks for coming um my name is Thomas rush I'm with a project called true blocks I've been in the space for a while I only have five minutes so I'm going to try to go fairly quickly I want to start with an experiment I was going to ask you all to come forward so you could hear me but I'm not going to do that I'm going to raise my hand and when I lower it I want you to sing the first line of happy birthday in your own native language I want to make a point so help me out with this all right and that's because today is my birthday ready stop stop stop stop stop wait in your own in a non-english language if you know if you only know English hum don't speak English [Music] okay that's good it's good it's good it's good all right um so I think coordination is every single place you look in the world it's all over the place that song I I thought it would be much more uh combined the same uh the same music but it wasn't really but anyway let's just pretend like it was all the same music the point I was trying trying to make was someone wrote that song in 1850 and within 20 years it had percolated through the entire planet and because it's a good way to wish someone the happy birthday and I think that coordination is everywhere you look does anyone know what this thing is just say the word what is this English it's a bulletin board and I think every person on the planet understands this protocol this is a protocol this is a standard and they're everywhere you look so that's a bulletin board what's this this is a cave painting from 65,000 years ago I think it's actually a bulletin board people think it's a religious object I think it's a bulletin board this guy here he's saying my cow has too much milk please take the take the milk this guy says camel races next Friday at the at the Rock this guy says I need a ride to um Mesopotamia or something like that so I think bulletin boards are uh another example of people coordinating and there's a very simple protocol there's two participants a producer and a consumer and the producer's job is literally to pin an announcement to the board that's the entire job of the producer the consumers is to read the announcement and everybody knows how this works and it's super effective as is indicated by that there's thousand hundreds of people in my town put up new things every week in your town too probably so I watch people build smart contracts and talk about coordinating with a blockchain and I think to myself why is it so complicated it's not complicated you can build the simplest possible smart contract that lets you do bulletin board by at the producer produces the data the consumer consumes the data so this is an example of one of the things that I'm pinning on my bulletin board and I use the word pin on purpose because I'm pinning it on ipfs and ipfs to me is a bulletin board this contains enough information that that hash at the very top is a hash of the specification of the data that I'm publishing it has enough information for you to parse the data and read it and these hashes are the location on ipfs where we're storing pieces of the data that we want to share with people in the world and I published this to a Smart contract called the Unchained index and it's it's on the ethereum mainnet at a known address anyone can read it anyone can download the entire index for the entire main net ethereum chain and they can find a history of any address on that chain and we do this for five different chains and we're doing it because I want to publish this data because I want my users to be able to access it and you want to read it because it it's valuable information to you because you can build software that knows where to look for the history of addresses on the chain and it's a simple simple idea and I think that um my goal here today is to try to get us to look around a little bit and say these things don't have to be anywhere near as complicated as the as they seem to be so this is the um interface for the contract it has one function and one event it's the function is called publish and the event is called something was published and people can listen for us publishing this this um piece of data the thing about blockchain data that's really interesting is that it's reproducible and this is obviously true because everyone could just start up a blockchain and they can reproduce the entire history of the chain and this indexing data because it's built directly from the um block data is equally reproducible so anyone can choose to Simply download this data and use it same way as a blockchain or you can download it and reproduce it yourself if you don't believe that it's true so we don't have any need to create a mechanism to prove this data and that's one of the examples where I think people over complicate things as long as the data is reproducible uh you don't really need to prove it because it's their responsibility to prove it to themselves if they want so I think coordination is really easy I think it and the other thing about this is It's it costs $1,000 a year for me to publish an index every day for the entire year and it's basically free which is exactly like a bulletin board which is free um it's also a shelling point it's where if people have something to say in a community they they put it on a bulletin board and people read it from a bullet board if you think about apis for a minute there also bulletin boards someone saying I have information I want to give it to you the the thing about that that's different than what I'm talking about is that they can refuse to give it to you for free they can rate limit you they can charge you for Access they can spy on you as you're using their API none of that is true if you're reading directly from a smart contract and I purposefully built this as simple as poss as possibly could be so that people could get the idea that smart contract s do not have to be things that need to be audited for millions of dollars they can literally just be simple things at work I'm going to talk more about this on uh Friday uh 2 o'clock in the uh in the uh eth Staker Hub and I welcome anyone to come there and I just wanted to say one final thing um there's supposed to be a clock there but I don't know how much time I have left but as I said it's my birthday and I'm 65 years old 65 years old today and um another um another thing that the entire world has agreed to is that the older you get it's directly proportional to how wise you are so I want to just say I'm very wise and you should listen to what I'm trying to tell you so thank you all right thank you uh Thomas for the for the for the talk um yes so let's you can you can move a little bit to the so uh we can take questions from the audience or would you like to no no it's okay okay okay let's let's take questions from the from the audience then no okay all right oh here we have one question oh no oh no hello I I have the question for H you store in on chain you store the has of the um Index right the but in EFS what is the cost that has for you to store all the information because someone has to pin the thing right in EFS we store a manifest it's called a manifest and it uh contains records of each additional new piece of data so the first piece is the first piece of data and the it just adds new pieces of yeah so does this have a for you or you have a server running all the time p in EFS the information um the one nice thing about this type of way of doing things is that because people are downloading these pieces of data to their own machine presumably they can also pin the data on their own bulletin board and they can also be part of the solution to how do we share this data because they will also be serving it to other people and that's the way ipfs works works so we kind of did that on purpose as well so there is enough people serving the it's it's unfortunately the case that you need enough people it's a chicken and egg problem but what I'm trying to say is it's so simple they figured out birth