# Status Changelog by Jarrad Hope (Devcon4)

- Speakers: [Jarrad Hope](https://streameth.org/speakers/jarrad-hope)
- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2019-10-09
- Duration: 29:26
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-cSiuddKWoCQ
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSiuddKWoCQ

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/4/status-changelog

Jarrad Hope from Status gives an update on their Changelog.

Speaker(s): Jarrad Hope
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: Developer Infrastructure
Keywords: security, rights, communication, money, law, privacy, culture, whisper

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Learn more about devcon: https://www.devcon.org/
Learn more about ethereum: https://ethereum.org/ 

Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon 4 was held in Prague, Czech Republic on Oct 30 - Nov 2, 2018.
Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation, with the support of our sponsors. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/

## Transcript

[Applause] cool well thanks for making it out early this morning it's been a crazy week full of in intense activities a lot of crazy parties and fantastic conversations yeah I'm Jarrod I'm co-founder of status it's but really I'm really you're just a representative of like a hundred plus core contributors that are all participating in this project trying to will it into existence and I'm pretty much just a cat herder these days I wanted to start off this talk with with the quotes from Marshall McLuhan we shape our tools and therefore our tools shape us I've kind of known about this for a while and certainly heard of it but I don't think I really understood it until kind of recently when I started working with sort of larger scale human systems a lot of the time we talk about like changes that we do to software and things that were updating but we don't really think about how we actually change ourselves and doing these things and we're an industry that has is primed and can potentially impact millions of people if not the whole globe so the design decisions we make today could have everlasting consequences and it's really important to keep this stuff in mind and status really starts off with a question that we're trying to answer and is could we actually build a secure communication tool that upholds human rights while enabling community money community law and through privacy help preserve culture and we're in answering these things you can't help to start feeling more principled you can't help to think about public prog-rock chains and connecting directly to them to avoid intermediaries because immediately if you allow that into it you you create an environment where there can be corruption and these sort of adversarial attacks so we initially started embedding go ethereum in in directly on your phone we still do today but we also started thinking about what actually means to create a generalized interface to aetherium I think the ideal version of that we're still a little bit shorter from ideally would look like a window manager or a desktop environment or directly integrated into the operating system but while we're in this mobile form factor it's currently expressed as essentially three apps all rolled into one we have this def browser which is essentially like your window manager it allows you to access all these crazy cooled apps that are coming out on top of ethereum you have your wallet or your transaction management this allows you to sign transactions manage your assets blah blah blah oh and get your collectibles of course and the other part that is sometimes a little perplexing to people is chat but if you think of the term smart contracts and I know there's some opinions against that but it's really really interesting to think about the implications of what we're doing if we are signing smart contracts as people you can never really sign a contract in the legal sense without first a meeting of the minds and so we need to create an environment in where we can actually provide secure private access to coordinating before we create transaction artifacts of our human relationships we're also targeting Android and iOS and we've been working on that for some time now and that's pretty much where thing people think that we stopped them that's what we work on quite frankly our scope has expanded since then and yeah this is just a bunch of crazy stuff that we're going through and I'd love to walk you through some of it now I mentioned this idea of like how our tools shape us and if you remember about a year and a half ago ish most of the crypto communities were doing a lot of the community building over a tool called slack unfortunately slack was essentially designed without the public in mind it wasn't exactly like IRC it didn't have really any moderation tools and it's basically for internal teams and this internal Nisour this castle mentality is something that really shook us a community grew to over 16,000 people we had 50 to 100 active people chatting about different things in different chat channels at any given moment of the day and it was a fantastic time for a community driven project the issue with that of course is that we had the bunch of scammers and fishes were quite right at the time they came in and we didn't really have any tools to help combat or defend that almost every project was forced to essentially split their communities some moved in to ride and matrix some into rocket chat and others into telegram etc etc which would be fine but unfortunately for us we had set up a bunch of bots and different processes that were integrated directly within chat so it made it very difficult for us to extricate X extricate ourselves from that and move into a different environment because the amount of effort to get back to our productivity was was too high and what that really did is we started hiring he started growing the team and with that people were coming into this and they were they're already divorced from the community this castle mentality starts to infect us the terms internal versus external became a thing and it was incredibly depressing actually because we will no longer connect it with our community the people that were actually building within for and it's kind of strange because at the end of the day our application is all about connectedness so last year at Def Con we announced status desktop to solve this problem essentially we act we're adding three new Plutarco platforms which is Mac Linux and Windows last year it kind of looked like the that picture there the janky of the janky one and we didn't want just like an electron applique a lot of we wanted to share our react native code base amongst all of our platforms so we picked we dusted off an old project that canonical started and spruced it up a little bit optimized it and I've been have been implementing different rendering components the react native has and today we finally got to an alpha which is actually somewhat usable it has the same code base as the mobile application but not all the same features are created so as part of this today we want like to deactivate our slack entirely as a signal that we are moving our organization into status desktop thanks so so our boiler bill is going to make this happen now [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] it was that that's our CFO by the way you know anyway so on a more serious note so that that's done which is great so you're welcome to join the conversation you'll notice that there's hashtag topics these are whisper topics and you're welcome to join her on the mobile application or in desktop although you know be warned the desktop thing is like really janky it's more janky than the mobile location mobile application anyway so we have the other issue that we've had is we had a bunch of different stories about how much assets people are actually carrying around in their mobile wallets like on public transportation and it's a little scary sometimes when you hear these things especially when you hear about some of these news over the past year how perhaps we can't really trust our Hardware devices as much as we would like to think and certainly a mobile phone is not somewhere you want restoring your keys so we've been last year we we mentioned this idea of doing a hardware wallets the code base is now completely done and it's been audited and we now move it we found a great card platform and we're moving into production that's some prototype packaging there and essentially what this allows you to do is put your HD keys on a credit card form factor and just tap on your phone to log in it it allows you to have pins it allows you to export your whisper identity and we have an extra feature if you're feeling especially dangerous for tap and pay which is essentially pinless so you can imagine later on that it's you could add a point of sales terminal it's kind of like you just tap the amount of cash that you're willing to risk for ease of transactions but this is also really fascinating from an onboarding standpoint you can imagine these things wrapped in foil preloaded with an amount of tokens in a convenience store and the person would have everything they needed to get going in in ethereum they would tap their the the card against their phone it would automatically load up the installation for status at the same time it'll allow you to retrieve the preloaded tokens from it and then you'd be able to initialize it correctly with with the hardware lot so that's going really well we also started working on the next version of this where we want to essentially create the same credit card form factor but have things like Bluetooth and all that involved but we want the hardware to be actually open so it's very hard to find these kinds of platforms and asking them to open-source their PCP designs another major thing that we do is user user research we have a team that actually travels globally in meeting with people who are not involved in the blockchain space whatsoever and we do a lot of testing with them and essentially this is allowing the public all the people to help amoled our tools and make it a lot easier to use one of the most interesting things for UX is that some of the some of the security features all the ways you have to do things in in aetherium are a little unorthodox and for example if you sign a transaction in status you will see this thing called a signing phrase and it's essentially anti-phishing measure and it's the first time that you that users are actually required to have the application prove its identity to you it's usually the other way around but of course the signing phrase it's at the moment is such a jumble of three words and that's a little bit confusing especially when you have your passphrase already we found through our testing is that the use of emojis is been incredibly powerful I it gives you a sense of like warmness when you when you assign and it makes you feel a lot better and you're much more inclined to sign actions which is kind of interesting we've also done many iterations over our onboarding apart from like the password stuff which will like replace with fingerprints very soon it's pretty smooth everyone's pretty happy with getting through and there's a very little attrition and what we're doing at the moment however once you get in it's like it's basically you might as well see a little hay-bale kind of rolling along whatever it's called and that's because we're not connecting you with the community we need to find ways that we can actually bring you to other people so you can start participating in a wonderful community online and we have some interesting ideas about that you could imagine subscribing to new user notifications and when a new user comes on you get a notification to go chat with them and you all come into a group chat and give them the rundown help them help them out and get them started within within the descriptive space we've also done a lot of surveying in terms of like what our requirements are for actually getting adoption of status and ubiquity is the main thing so we we need to be everywhere for every reason so and of course security is paramount another thing we've reintroduced is extensions this is something that we had a while back but it was a pretty janky implementation it's a lot better now and it's incredibly powerful essentially you will want to get to other people to kind of build on top of status and build within the chat UI and we'll have other hooks for other parts of the application and in the future some of the in-house extension ideas we've been looking at is doing multi-sig transactions within the chat context we're thinking about doing stenographic messages so you can actually send hidden messages even though they're already encrypted and then decrypt them on your side as well as things like self-destructing messages we've also released our ENS names so you no longer have to have a ridiculous long address you can just be referenced by by your name for example you could you could register potatoes and then people can just find you buy potato and yeah it's really cool it's but I'm a little bit concerned about this actually because there's some potentially some issues depending on how this technology goes we might be creating a problem where people can be identified depending on like some of the virtual asset regulation stuff that's coming out so yeah keep an eye on own another thing we've integrated is a voting adapt its users quadratic voting and of course it's non-binding but essentially we're trying you can think of it as trying to get community feedback and help us influence the direction of it even if you don't really want to contribute in any other way in fact the reason why I mentioned potatoes is because their community voted for me saying potatoes which is great we also have this thing called a wall ashame which I'll talk a bit later or it's called book of shame and opportunities now I think and we basically together during our off-site earlier this week we came up with a list of all our priorities and we all voted on what we think is going to be the best way forward this is not null Knightley's and not now released but we are currently reintroducing private group chats we've tore it all down and that's predominantly because we use whispers identity based encryption only and that's something like PGP but we want to include another layer of encryption by default which is perfect forward secrecy and yeah so that's what we're doing that's some slides of what group chat looks like in the moments and PFS is is something we were doing but the important thing with this is that we're actually making this by default and adding it into your contact requests pretty much every other messenger out there does not make this by default and if they do then they include your phone like you have to register your phone number which is problematic and for a different reason so we do a lot of work on the the UI and the app and how we can actually interface humans with blockchain technology but we're getting to the point now where we've pretty much kind to come to the limits in terms of what the lie client protocol is a capable of doing and what Whistler is capable of doing in fact this whole event has been a really good life test run for us to see how well whisper scales we've implemented some of the bloom filter stuff and we've managed to kind of bring down a network topology quite a bit so on a daily usage it's not using a one gigabyte worth of pen width is using roughly twelve to twenty megabytes however when there's concurrent users and there's a lot of network and network activity it does become problematic so we need to start thinking beyond this and how we can actually start moving down into that space and help working with researchers to make better protocols and the same with little I client protocol I think when we move off proof-of-work and move into a proof of stake scheme this would be quite interesting but for now we need to start thinking about ultralight clients ways that the client can get a level of security and pull down states but not necessarily have to verify the blocks themselves in running with that theme we've also started working on a theorem 2.0 a sharding clients called Nimbus basically taking a lot of our engineering ideas in terms of getting this stuff running on resource restricted devices such as mobile phones raspberry PI's routers that sort of thing and we really want to create like a really good solution for for that and hopefully expand that out to include some layer two stuff as well we're also trying to do our best to support the community in terms of Education and development one thing that we've had to do is bring lots of skills from outside the space that we haven't been able to source and there is just this disparity so we need to create these training systems to be able to help people understand this technology and build apps and that sort of thing and of course development is something that we've been involved in for a while we've been contributing to Viper for for eons now it feels like and we are now building out the embark team and they've been doing some amazing stuff I hope you checked out URIs talk it was it was really good and their web ID is absolutely insane their block checks and all kinds of crazy stuff but we're also taking embark further and making a status studio this will essentially be at least in its current form a series of Visual Studio code plugins as well as an education portal and hope we'll be going beyond just app development we'll be talking about libertarian principles and how to design these things etc etc so I basically just rattled off like a bunch of like stuff that we're doing but they're pretty much all how I view software is they're essentially cultural artifacts they're material items that have taken our mental models and we've put them into things and now we've gotten to this point where we can actually stop for a moment look up and really think about the future and when we start thinking about the future we start thinking about how do we actually want to go about doing this do we really want to live in this castle that was slack and who are we actually designing this stuff for so we got together in Basel and Switzerland to really understand like what we're actually about and what we actually believe what are our values and these principles in terms of software design is really where it came down to I think we're talking about Liberty censorship resistance security privacy transparency openness decentralization inclusivity continuous and resourcefulness keep in mind the inclusivity and continuance stuff because I'll talk about it in a moment but the rest of the other principles made us really understand that there's a bunch of work that we have to do I mentioned this idea of this book of shaming and opportunity and it made us really understand the the threat model that exists out there in terms of protecting people's assets and that basically is livelihood and I mean this quote is pretty extreme but it has been said in our shirts and even though I'm not one to judge on whether that's justified or not I think the the means of what basically the the technology that's been create to be able to do that sort of thing has other implications or ability to be misused so for example phone numbers which is pretty much in every messenger when you sign up is leaking your metadata we avoid it now we started like doing a sort of phone verification stripped it all out Mixpanel is quite interesting this isn't really important for product managers to really understand how people are navigating through an application and and try and refine the user experience but the problem is is that's leaking a lot of data and it's sending a suit to a centralized server that we no longer control so we have no idea how that data is being used so we had to rip it out of course that made a lot of people unhappy because they could no longer do their job effectively in the same way that they could we're trying to combat this with two things basically we want to go and talk directly with users of the software within the software and we also want to do a thing called adversarial analytics basically we are attacking our own platform to see what data we can get out of it so we're trying to identify users by their transactions we're trying to ID we've got a cluster of whisper of course so we see what messages we can find from that what we can't see messages but we can find how they're flowing throughout the network and trying identify sort of network topologies and seeing if we can find correlations between relationships we're also thinking we also recently removed a thing called test flight test flight is basically used by banks and a whole bunch of other applications out there for testers to get you know accurate logs and like video screens and stuff like that now they have a feature right where you can hide password screens and you can hide certain screens so like the idea was that we could use this and like hide certain elements this is only included on our Knightley's by the way not in any releases but the problem with this is they had a bug twice now where those features stopped working and it was too much so we pulled that out as well now the how is quite interesting and how we want to do this like I've mentioned we've been kind of living in a castle the past year or so and it's not really conducive to like what this projects really about and it certainly has become less community driven than it has been in the before so now we're thinking about how can we actually move on to the space how can we get help encourage more people to get involved and what kind of structure does that look like and it's quite interesting because there's like there's two different kinds of modes of thinking about this and a really good example is this spaghetti and marshmallow challenge shell hands was actually heard of that challenge by the way cool so basically the idea is in the study is they they have a bunch of kindergarteners on one side and they have a bunch of CEOs or lawyers or any other skilled profession on the other side and they're given 20 sticks of spaghetti basically raw spaghetti and they're given a stack of marshmallows and then you need to make the marshmallow get as high as possible now you would think that the the CEOs and all these five skilled people would actually start building and getting it as high as possible but more often than not the kindergarteners do and it's essentially theorized that the kindergarteners don't really need to worry about so histories or so like social pecking orders and that sort of thing they're just all equal and they all just just try stuff you know they just mash things together talk awkwardly and just brute force the problem which is quite interesting when you start thinking about collective action so I'm also quite influenced by a political scientist named Mark bevor he has a dissented theory of governance basically we're so obsessed with formalisms or at least we focus on formalisms because they are incredibly important but they are essentially institutions his position is essentially that before you even get to that point these institutions rise out of a narrative out of our social norms our traditions our rituals and our which give rise to our belief systems and so if you're creating essentially a dowel or a model where anyone can fund anything and create proposals and get funded like how do you actually Corral that how do you create direction how do you create sense of purpose and his ideas are essentially revolving around cultivating that shared narrative and treating it like a cultural practice so you need to find anchor points within this space which could be our principles they become talking discussions you can treat people as like nodes in a social network except for the color the software they're run is their culture and the discussions we have is like semi updating or loosely updating each other when we start talking about this and as soon as we had status running almost immediately a pseudo anonymous group or faction arose within status they have a channel called newts and they all use the same key we don't know who they are but they've basically voicing their opinions on how things should be done that they wouldn't normally do it's really fascinating called cultural experience to be part of when but people are voicing their concerns or bringing up ideas and moving a completely away from biases of individual you can really treat ideas in a merit meritocratic way anyway so who are we building forth essentially ourselves to start off with and when we're talking about that we're talking about internal motivation we all come from different life walks of life some of us have more crypto an acoustic side of things some people are actually living in these conditions and other people's just want to help others and those others are the dispossessed and eventually we want to do almost everybody and so we're like also working on cultivating culture like I mentioned and one of the best ways to do that is through symbology and through memes essentially so we're coming up with a framework in terms of our branding that allows people to individualize it so it no longer becomes this one static symbol but it comes a living object that we can all change and transform you can imagine in a decade's time what status looks like in terms of a symbology in Indonesia will be contrasted lead if er Anor thammaracha and here's some examples of some artists that are already doing that I were also questioning what is mass adoption because that can mean really different things and for different reasons you can imagine that in the developed country there's not really a real need for a lot of this stuff because we already have existing legal frameworks in fact they're already bleeding into this this technology already but there's another side another mega trend that's happening is this idea of mass urbanization there's going to be over 2 billion people forecasted living in slums by 2030 according to UN habitat they live in informal economies and perhaps we can start reaching them anyway the point is is status as an organization is changing we'll be moving into a dau I hope you would join us on the on the journey and be part of the conversation thank you very much [Applause] you