# Closing Ceremonies: Devcon Decade 0 | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 1:29:56
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-r5HBiNMh3Kc
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5HBiNMh3Kc

## Description

In the closing panel of Devcon 7 SEA, Nicholas Paul from The Long Now Foundation, Aya Miyaguchi, Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, and Justin Glibert and Gubsheep (Brian Gu) from 0xPARC discussed the philosophy of “subtraction” in organizational design, emphasizing how creating space by letting go fosters innovation and long-term thinking, the interplay between technology and culture within Ethereum.

Speaker(s): Skylar Weaver, Aya Miyaguchi, Justin Glibert, gubsheep, Nicholas Paul
Track: 

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Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
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## Transcript

[Music] good afternoon good afternoon Dev guys wow what a four days what a 4 days it has been it's great to see everyone here we're going to begin our closing ceremony with a very interesting panel uh with a few distinguished guests and distinguished people here I would i' like to invite to the stage uh four individuals a migui from the ethereum foundation uh Nick of long now Foundation uh gub sheep uh from zerox Park co-founder of zerox Park and Justin glibert also of zerox park for our closing panel before we get on with the rest [Music] all right good afternoon and welcome to what I suspect will be a very special closing CER Cy conversation with three people I have known and worked with now for many years and about whom I could say a lot of very nice things however we all know that showing beats telling nine times out of 10 so instead of telling you how brilliant Brian is how encyclopedic Justin is or how thoughtful ya is I'm just going to try to moderate a panel conversation at a deep enough level that you get to see these qualities directly for yourself I should probably tell you who we are though um and why we're up here and what we plan to talk about for the next 38 minutes or so where's our time there it is 44 minutes okay uh I should also just say what an honor it was to be asked to moderate this closing conversation with all of you today uh thank you a I really appreciate that and of course uh a miuchi needs no introduction to this crowd really um I is the executive director and The Eclectic dreamer of the ethereum foundation ya and I met ages ago before she was working for the ethereum foundation even uh and we met thanks to our shared appreciation for long-term thinking about which I'll say some more in just a minute there's a very good chance you saw Ya's talk on mandalas at the opening ceremony on Tuesday and if we're lucky I think we'll get to dive into that topic some more this afternoon so please join me in giving a warm Round of Applause to a amaguchi [Applause] sitting over to her left is gub sheep AKA Brian and sitting to my right is luden's AKA Justin and these two founded a programmable cryptography research group called ZX Park if at some point this week you have seen a frog hat a frog Beret a frog shirt a frog game a frog necklace or a frog made out of a printed circuit board that generates digital and collectible and proof carrying frogs complete with complex backstories well the new have encountered one way that their work on programmable cryptography seems to have manifested itself here at the qsncc this week can we get a big round of applause for Justin and Brian and all of the [Applause] frogs and so last and probably least informed about next Generation cryptographic Primitives is me your moderator for this panel my name is Nicholas Paul uh though you can call me Nick and for most of the last decade I have been helping run a storyed nonprofit in San Francisco California called the long now Foundation long now was founded in 1996 to Foster long-term thinking on the time scale of 10,000 years so not the short now of this conference but the long now of human civilization itself more recently I've started working on a new independent an initiative that focuses on the thinking part of long-term thinking and here at the outset of that initiative there's a lot of what I call thinking about thinking in other words thinking about what it means to think especially in an era of quote unquote thinking machines and so I've had a lot of conversations about this stuff with Brian and Justin and ya over the years and I've been coming to Devcon since Devcon 4 in Prague in 2018 uh mostly because I find it always invites me to think deeply and differently about that thing we call technology because we don't know what else to call it put concisely I think Frontier technology provides excellent food for thought philosophic and poetic and aesthetic food for philosophic and poetic and aesthetic thought my first Devcon Devcon 4 in Prague in 2018 uh the panel conversation for that closing ceremony featured a thinker named Stuart brand I've got a clicker here and I think there's a picture of him if I do this there we go great um yeah that's Stuart brand Stuart if you don't already know who I'm talking about is a living legend full stop there are a few books and films about his life and they're good and I recommend checking them out Stuart seems to have been involved in most of the most significant cultural scenes from the last 20th century from the hippies to the hackers to the very first online communities and the very first uses of genomic technology for ecological conservation he is also one of the founders of the long now foundation so I've been working with him for years now and as a mild biographical note he just so happens to also be my nextdoor neighbor so Stuart is something of a hero to this quartet up here and I mention length because at least part of tonight's conversation I hope is going to be about what it means to find yourself inspired by someone uh or something we catch glimpses of this meaning in the phrase spiritual predecessor which of course means not a literal predecessor like a parent or a grandparent or perhaps someone who once held the job title that you yourself now hold but rather Someone Who provided some of the fuel from which you've lit your own torch in life you can even see this in the emology of the words spiritual predecessor and inspiration they both come from the Latin inspirare which means to breathe into a spiritual predecessor breathes into us and so we'll probably talk about that phenomenon a bit tonight as well as the philosophical concept of subtraction that inspires the work of the ethereum foundation as well as my own and perhaps even that of zerox park though I'll let Brian and Justin kind of unpack and chime in on that a little bit later but the very first question I want to open our discussion with this afternoon is a lot simpler and a lot more immediate it has to do with the act of noticing you'll notice that it's impossible to notice everything and so what you notice is worth noticing and I wonder how many people here at Devcon 7 notice that the year 2024 marks one full decade for Devcon Devcon zero a decade of thinking differently about all kinds of things let's see where does this go next there there we go all right a decade of thinking differently about all kinds of things and I'm curious what else people might have noticed here at the conference this week I sincerely wish I could ask that question of all of you out there in the audience but I think I'm actually going to start with a so ya what if anything did you notice this year um first of all um is it possible to turn down the light turn down the light request to Turn Down the Lights is it possible to turn down the light sorry I'm being annoying again um I just with my respect to Stuart and thank you Nick for joining to this conversation because he is not just a moderator as you probably already have noticed um noticing noticing what do I notice at this this step gone um this I do I do notice the people's mindset in um the top on the topics that are discussed and conversations happening at this ston is or it used to be more about what do we need to do now you know what do we need to do now um or what what's next level but now I think I hear more conversation about what can happen or could happen in the future so that that difference is bigger this time I think and and then part of it is because all the contributions um well the design of the event but also mainly all the different contribution by all different players and it it's very um important that we are looking at this as a as a decade but it's it's just a decade zero right so I think it's amazing that we are having this conversation with this group also um it looks like a random collection of people but we we talk about this type of conversation like um topics a lot and then um you saw the photo of Stuart and this was this was the the devcom plag was very special for me um that was my first Devone after I joined EF it wasn't my first Devone but it was the first de gone after I joined the Y but also this was the steward's talk at the closing was really symbolized the time like we started to show we're thinking everything differently and and that was the first step G with invited people like sart Bland Brewster kale um and and then I think people started to recognize that this is something bigger than just technology so so that is that was very important but also that was the first time I introduced the con the the concept of subtraction for the first time I I don't know how much people really understood it I don't think I explain it in the best way like then but also it was meant to be just introduction and when I when I reintroduced that in Decon at Deon Bata last time that was a time I was finally able to explain from the actions that EF has made what do you think makes it so hard to explain um so subtraction is always hard it's actually um it's too natural for me so I say in the way like we red we we resist the tendency to add the natural tendency is we accumulate the power keep adding uh keep making things bigger but it's actually to me um it is more natural to it's I I grew up in the culture um where you know subtraction is not really rare and and because of that I wasn't really I I wasn't really aware what I was doing was something very different and it it was um from the conversation um with Albert Albert NE um he was the one who pointed out hey what we are doing is withdrawing with withdrawing like withdrawal and then I said oh yeah like that's actually there's a this aesthetic of subtraction which I wrote in Japanese in in plug that's we have that in Japan so let's call it subtraction that's how we started so it took another non Japanese person to to let me notice that was something actually natural so like we actually need to remind we we have to let people notice that I love this idea of bringing in Aesthetics to the idea of subtraction uh because there's another thing that I want to talk about at subtraction with you guys around dimensionality and the dimensional affordances of subtraction as an approach to things um but Aesthetics is also something that I think about a lot in dimensional terms you know a lot of discussion especially around technology these days is flattened into a discussion about good technology and bad technology and some smearing in the middle and that's helpful sometimes it's it can be clarifying because like it's nice to have whatever Dimensions you do have um but if you're looking for higher dimensional considerations the aesthetic Paradigm is just a lot more useful there's so much more going on in there and so I'm kind of curious um you this is how I think about it but Brian um when I think about the dimensionality and the dimensional affordances of something like action um why why is something like addition um a flattening move whereas subtraction is an expansive move do you have some thoughts on that yeah so it's really interesting for me also to to come to this Devcon and reflect on how different this experience has been for me compared with my first Devcon was also Devcon 4 back in Prague and I remember the thing that I was just really struck by at that Devcon was how much space open there was for me as a newcomer um I was sort of hanging around the ethereum foundation orbit helping out with various things um some things related to education some things related to communication eventually started getting interested in things related to to zero knowledge um and it was never really the case that there was never one directive or one narrative or one message that either the ethereum space as a whole or the ethereum foundation I felt was pushing on me and that really forced a certain kind of agency a kind of critical thinking a kind of empowerment that I don't think I've seen in basically any other community that I'd ever entered into um and what I realized was that if I really wanted to engage meaningfully with the ethereum community I would have to uh sort of think bigger than one One Direction one narrative um and you know one thing that uh me and Justin have talked about before is this idea that for example in maybe a traditional uh in various kinds of more traditional organizations you might be playing a game of Monopoly right in the game of Monopoly there's one objective which is basically you're trying to accumulate more Monopoly dollars but this might be something closer more akin to a game of Civ so civilization is a game where there's multiple different kinds of objectives and resources and wi conditions maybe it's not even clear what it means for there to be a wind condition um and that's something that I think you know the effects of subtraction were felt by me at that time even if I didn't quite know that that was what it was called or that's how people were thinking about it I just noticed the space well the space is a cool affordance too because the name ethereum and ather right which is kind of you're thinking about air and so when you think about how much more space there is between the atoms and Air versus like a solid brick you know there's just so much more spaciousness in air and so that breathing room we talked about inspiration right uh like inspiring to to breathe into or conspiring to breathe with other people there's something there's something in even just like the the naming essence of it do you have some thoughts about that about the dimensionality stuff I have some thought about the space the thing that's kind of interesting is even in what was your example like bricks or rock or something like that yeah yeah like even then there's a ton of space totally like it's just massive space everywhere and so I think that there's also another thing going on there where like you you can of like get the space you are looking for most of the time um I think it is true that you can have an environment that is more spacious but I think we're like kind of like constantly being surprised by how much there is spaces everywhere in many you're looking for it and I don't know if everyone really is turns out it's one of those things that if you look for it you could find it you know that's extremely cool um this yeah this idea of looking for spaciousness and um High dimensionality I'm kind of I'm kind of curious if you could unpack what this spacious subtraction affordance is how this relates to like worlding and how it supports the idea of worlding you've done a lot of stuff around worlding here that people might be familiar with um and why addition is more of like a theme Parky kind of thing which I think you've talked about before yeah so about two years ago um Nick and and and and and Brian actually came to London I don't know if you guys remember um and it's right around the time when I got really inspired by this this artist called Yan Chang and Yan's work is centered around simulation he basically builds these worlds with rules Etc generative stories and lets them unfolds and he makes kind of like stories and movies about them and he wrote a book called ms's guide to worlding and the core idea uh of yan is that you kind of there's like a bunch of roles that are very legible like the role of the director the role of the cartoonist he also has this role that he calls the role of the hacker there is like one very important role that you need when you work on worlds which is the role of the Emissary essentially the role of the Emissary is to take the world seriously for what it is and recognize that there's a fundamental equation at play which is it's almost like a fraction like the aliveness of a world the the the numerator the top part of the fraction is how much drama and generativist happens in the world and the and the bottom of the fraction is how much input there is from the Creator and there are systems out there that are like very interesting for people but they require like constant influx of even greater work from a bunch of people in a very organized ways right and that's like what we were referring to in this conversation as theme parks and a lot of the time people sit down and decide to to try to build the world and they just like build a theme park where like they just add you know like the world is already there but you have to add the popcorn stand and the rides because otherwise the people are going to get bored and then you're like oh you know we need a security system because people steal the popcorn and you just like keep adding and adding and adding and you end up with this thing which can be interesting but it never outgrows the original Creator in some ways and so yeah Yan um kind of like made popular this this this term of whirling which is the active effort of putting a world together which is actually a lot about not doing versus doing because if you do too much the world is completely dependent on you for remaining alive in some ways yeah and and in the same way that inspiring somebody isn't controlling them but it does have some influence on them um I think yeah birthing worlds would definitely be the kind of thing you wouldn't want to totally lock in and control when we talk about worlds I mean the aesthetic part of my brain is also lighting up and thinking about like we talk about things like the world of jazz or the world of you know uh heavy metal music or the world of rap music and we know these are distinct worlds um but then we also know there's like places between these worlds and there's the possibility of new worlds and so I think aesthetically people are really sensitive to just how high-dimensional aesthetic Explorations can be but again I think when we think of Technology it's like how often are the Aesthetics really front and center um you know there's something really important there that I think and and for me it also brings me back to a to your opening ceremony talk on mandelas and you had that image of all the just overlapping centers of gravity there and when I think I don't know I might be kind of weird this way but when I think about music and genres um or when I think about genres of discourse the way people engage at a conference or something or even when I think about all what's happening in all these different rooms all week um I think about an image in my brain that looks a lot like those overlapping spheres so do do you have some thoughts on like the Mandela concept that you had worked out earlier this week that maybe I'm I'm sure a lot of these people saw it but maybe some people missed it and how that relates to worlding and subtraction kind of pulling on this thread yeah um it was actually another image that I well I you know it clicked to me that this is another way to explain the same view that I had uh when I uh learned about mandalas another meaning of mandala in South St a year uh if if I if if there any anyone who were not who was not there at the opening um it it it was um the older system of governance in South Stager where there are circles of spheres of Kingdoms that um didn't have clear boundaries but they existed as as spheres and then at the edges um The power was very blurry right um so it is it is well connected with subtraction because um what Brian was saying for example jerk spark you were hanging around around EF I don't even remember where which team you were hanging around all the time or and you were part of this research I don't even know if there was one team specifically or even if there was a notion of specific teams that exist in the structure and then we didn't really try to fit him as as where he he should belong right if we did that maybe we had let me you know his his potentials or his creativity he ended up just playing with ZK area and then uh made Dark Forest right and then what that was the St and he had to let him have his world and so I I've got a question for you Brian which is like do you feel like the world of programmable cryptography is inspired by the world of ethereum yeah absolutely I think one of the the really interesting things that that me and Justin have noticed is just how much this space creation um which is maybe another lens or artifact on subtraction has done for us and for the things that we try to bring to the ecosystem we try to basically embed very similar Concepts in so you know one thing I think about probably a lot of folks here have seen the uh frog game or the the various frog bits floating around um whenever we do these sorts of things at both the technological level at the level of the design of the experience we want to try to make it about uh the participants in the experience and not about like a linear track that we are prescribing or putting together so everything from the fact that the digital frogs are digitally signed ZK friendly signatures that live on your phone they don't live in our servers you can do whatever you want with your frogs that also means that there's a certain responsibility because we don't store your frogs on our server if you lose your frogs that's on you um but what this means is because you know these these frogs they don't have like a zerox Park logo or something on them and the Frog bucket hats are pretty generic frog bucket hats it's just sort of the abstract concept of frogs that is floating around what that gives people is sort of the permission to take that concept and run with it however they want and even over just the last 96 hours that this activation has been online we've seen people do extremely creative and you know funny and technically interesting things that we could not have predicted I think you know on the first day people started making these frog trees of frog necklaces and people started spinning up websites to coordinate and aggregate all the different frog QR codes and links that they could find some people started making you know frog stickers with special sorts of art some people started putting QR codes onto digital backpacks and that's what I think really happens when it feels like the concept of a ZK sign frog is not owned by someone oh so the world is alive in some like the fact that you can lose your frogs mean the world is being taken seriously there are Stakes to frog ownership say that again there are Stakes to frog ownership I don't know if Stakes Stakes is a bit overused here I think lose your frogs Yeah Yeah I I think but it's it's it's less like what are the frogs at Stakes it's more like what can happen to the frogs in some some ways like Define how how much of a world it is you know um there's no frog mommy you can go back to to get your frogs that you've lost right so do you think programmable cryptography would have come into being in the same way in a different ecosystem or do you think this ecosystem is shaped the way that programmable cryptography is showing up in the world right now I mean if I mean okay so there there's no question that there's an impact right I think um the thing I found interesting here is that and I don't think it's it's being shown enough which is that ethereum is as much a technological object as it is a cultural object object right it's not just technology it's culture as well and when you have something that has multiple Dimensions you can kind of like make different things load bearings at different times if you have something that is purely technological and the technology doesn't work then you have failed in some sense oh you can kind of promise that it will work better at some point but there is there is a thing where almost like a support network around you means you can take more risks I think that having an object that has multiple Dimensions makes it more anti fragile in some sense and so I find what I find really interesting with the eum ecosystem is that in general there's a lot of energy for things that on a surface level might look like playful or silly or not going anywhere but actually in many way I think this is almost like an immune system for making sure that um excess talent and excess Capital get distributed to a lot of different kinds of experiments like one sentence we use as ZX quite often is when something is going in a strange direction or not successful we say that's an experiment worth enabling not like this is a failure or something like that and I think uh the great thing with with the E Theos system is that it creates a lot of experiments worth being enabled and you both kind of like increase your your rate of trying things but at the same time you give a lot of space for things to grow and one thing with cryptography and and we see it when we interface with academics or with the industry outside the E ecosystem is that cryptography at this stage outside what it can do very well and has been doing for many decades it's almost like going back to square one in Computing and people don't want to go back to square one because they're like I'm used to all of this nice stuff like why would I go back to square one and so in some in some ways having an a place where going back to square one actually has been done in recent memory you know like ethereum has gone back to square one like a decade ago so because it started at square one I think like this almost like knowledge like it's still within this generation that this has happened does create a lot of space well going back to square one reminds me again of subtraction so not to just completely hit this note again but I think there's something important about being able to let go of things too you know for um I mean there's this there's this analogy that sometimes I bust out with people about ground Apes which are ground apes are really good at grabbing stuff if a ground ape grabbed me I'd be in trouble right they're really strong and they can grab stuff but AR Boral Apes that are swinging through the jungle they can grab stuff too that's important but they have Edge on the ground Apes in that they can let go of things and it turns out letting go of things is like very an important precondition for swinging through the canopy of jungles right and so this letting go it's kind of a subtraction concept but letting go of things is really hard but really really important it's not just you can't just grab new things without letting go of old things you know there has to be this moment where you're just kind of I mean I guess in this analogy you're just hanging in the air um and I mean I'm sure a lot of people here have felt that feeling of letting go of something hanging in the air a little bit that's an interesting feeling um and I you know I'm always talking to people about it in a more philosophical or cultural context where we're talking about language right you know and so of course you know I said in some of my preperatory remarks something about you know we call it technology because we don't know what else to call it um well the first thing you have to do if you want to figure out what else to call it is just let go what you're calling it if you're hanging on to that super tight um you're just never going to create again space so so if everyone's tracking there's a bingo card here with like space subtraction Aesthetics worlding and we're just going to hit all of these a lot because they end up being really really interconnected from from where I'm seeing things um but yeah this idea of um of the cultural object as well this cultural Dimension right different dimensions have different affordances different strengths and like you said sometimes in a dynamic environment you need to beef up other dimensions at different times as a response that's cool if you can do it it's like in Civ you can spend all your money but you've not lost whereas in Monopoly if you lose your money all you spend all of your money you have lost totally and the cultural stuff is really important it's really interesting how important the cultural stuff is because I think we have a default way of thinking about technology um especially Frontier technology we think of Frontier technology being on the frontier of a technological Frontier like the nature of the frontier is technological which means if you want to push out the frontier you throw technology at it and the frontier moves but I think we've recently seen a lot of examples at least during my like adult lifetime seen a lot of examples of people that are pushing on a frontier with a bunch of Technology but the frontier is not budging doesn't move you're not actually getting this new world that you were thinking you were going to get people aren't buying whatever you're selling they're not excited about your vision of the future and it's like well why why not we threw we threw a lot of techn capital at this problem why is the techn capital not fixing the thing just and make it fix the thing and I think part of it is like if you're if you're flexible and you're open to other dimensions you can start thinking about the fact that these froners might be in their nature more philosophical more poetic more aesthetic again don't ask the barber if you need a haircut but I think this is a really interesting time for these things to be on the frontier because a lot of what I see out here from the frogs all the way through some of the the film stuff that's been showcased here and of course the amazing art the dancing the backgrounds all of this stuff I mean a lot of it has I don't want to say it has a little to do with technology but it it's it's kind of in another dimension it's another dimension um and I yeah well one thing I want to say is like I think it's it's it's easy to take a lot of that stuff as flavor text and think like oh you know this is a XYZ conference and everything else is just added to be nice but I think to the trained eye you can actually like start drawing the differences between these things and see when something is more of like a coherent object together mhm have you start seeing like like if we make up like some like new unit like an integration factor or something where like multiple Dimensions gets integrated together as opposed to like you have one mind dimensions and the other one are flavor text where have you seen like that amount of integration happen and grow up over time I suppose in ethereum you must have seen it grow or at least change yeah I don't I don't know I think I've always been just very perplexed by this stuff because I'll go into these technical sessions and everything is pretty much directly over my head but the thing it's not over my head these weird notes that I'm hearing almost like when you hear like a weird when you hear the refrigerator turn on or like when the electricity is not really well grounded in like your hotel room and you hear like a buzzing sound like every now and then I'll be in one of these rooms and I won't understand anything that Brian's saying Brian is dropping knowledge bombs on the entire room about something and there's math symbols on the screen behind them and I'm just hearing some other buzzing note I'm going what is that does anyone else hear that note that's an interesting kind of thing um yeah and maybe want to go back to the point about language and letting go as well because I think that's that's very related and a very interesting thing here um one thing that I've observed about ethereum and cryptography is that well with cryptography cryptography is something that in order to achieve its maximal social value it sort of almost by the nature of the technology must be maximally open it's you know it contrasts with this with something like AI where if I have a really powerful new AI architecture and model and I don't tell that model to the world but I put it behind an API it still is able to create enormous social value cryptography if I invent a new zero knowledge protocol that's super performant and amazing and I don't tell it to anybody then you know it's it's effectively worthless right so cryptography has this effect of being more like language where the more people speak it the more people who can wield it as a tool the more social value it creates and it's not actually obvious though that that even though this is the case cryptography will naturally develop in this direction you know actually with the first generation of cryptography when we think of crypto systems like RSA uh a lot of the first generation of crypto systems was actually patented and they couldn't be used Beyond certain you know circles we couldn't be used um without being licensed until you know many decades when a patent might expire now the thing that's happened that's been very interesting about the ethereum adjacent cryptography world is this is not the pattern and I think that's a direct result of how ethereum approaches things um we don't see there's almost like an immune system that's been built up that's been carried over from ethereum is it an immune system or is it like um being able to see the Lost upside from not having something being well distributed yeah I mean I think that ethereum is a demonstration it's a proof of existence of what happens when you take that kind of I guess more subtractive more space creating approach and so the folks who start thinking about cryptography see well the proof is in the pudding this is actually a very pragmatic way to be this is a very grounded thing it's not just a you know um a nice sounding statement I couldn't help but like track on the fact that you use the word expire uh in relation to patents and that's another fun one of these Spire kind of terms right like expire like there's no more breathing the breath goes out of it um and I'm thinking of course we've done a little bit of prep and talking about some of these things and one of the things that I was kind of struck by Brian was when you were telling me a little bit about how zerox Park thinks about its own institutional design and this idea of expiration or limitation this this understanding that you yourself are kind of a spiritual predecessor for something and you want to take that seriously by making some design choices now while those design choices you know can be can be a through line for you can you say a little bit to that yeah so one thing that um some folks here might not know is that when we first started ZX Park and started putting together this community around uh I guess it was late 2021 we embedded in it basically from the start that after two years by default Xerox Park actually ought to expire and that would be the default and it would have to be an intentional choice on our part to continue working on it and potentially even refactoring significant ly what its focus was and um what its role in the ecosystem was if we wanted to keep doing this Beyond late 2023 and that actually ended up influencing a lot of our decisions on how we decided to do certain things in the first 12 months 18 months um by default there was more of a willingness to let go of things whether that means let go of research directions that might not be so uh might not be panning out and which we you know didn't feel the pressure then to double down on it might mean letting in terms of well actually there is something that's going really well let's let go of that to The Wider Community as well um and you know when we rounded out the corner on two years um by that time that willingness to think more I don't know if the right word is like expansively or or um ephemerally or exactly what it is that was sort of embedded in our thinking and how we you know would just decide whether how how to operate different projects well we've talked about subtraction is expansive right and I think that possibly also goes for institutions but I'm always I'm always torn or not torn but there's a tension there because I think long-lasting institutions matter too right it's kind of cool you almost have like a distributed time preference thing for how long you want institutions to last maybe there's an aesthetic time preference distribution but like when you think about the next thousand years it would be pretty easy to imagine Oxford making it for another Thousand Years pretty easy to imagine like Keno G temple in Kamakura Japan making it for you know into another Thousand Years um you know it's harder to think about that with like Tech stuff because I think it just does feel more like ablative or more temporary and kind of up in steuart brand has a image that I should have thrown on the presentation here uh for Pace layers where you can see that things kind of have their own temporality to them and of course like we're used to tech companies that don't only last too long or they become Consulting companies like IBM or something they change their nature go down the the stack but um I you know it's interesting to think about why a permanent Oxford like an eternal Oxford would be like a dimensionally flattening move and that like something like ZX Park only having like a two-year mandate or a five-year mandate or something can be expansive I mean a you've thought about this a lot probably in the context of the ethereum foundation too it's like um can you speak a little bit to how the subtraction mindset this philosophy of subtraction this idea of expansion has influenced how you've thought about the design of ethereum umum foundation yeah Dimension yeah I think it's well there are many this there are many dimensions that you can see with subtraction but I want to talk about like time Dimension that we we often tend to when we say subtraction especially as an organization people immediately think about the sides you know when you say subtraction and addition um maybe one example I can use is um some well people at the eum foundation we don't really enforce it but since we have the subtraction as a guiding principle um I'm I've been impressed that people are discussing it more like seriously and then the other day I saw this notion page from one of the teams um describing this technical strategy of a project and then the you know the order of execution it starts with a research phase and next is prototype and then normally you would go to a production phase instead they're like oh let's call it subtraction and then what it does it's not really about how much because this is actually working with a team outside obf together it's not about how much the EF team does less but it's more like by subtracting you're thinking about the longterm like future time like if we do more how would this affect to the ecosystem right so we the dimension is not just about the size and then Time Flame like it's like but then there so many different layers of this that that can expand by like and then the important part is like knowing that we have the option it's not like we're telling everyone to always surpress tracks it's more like we don't really notice that that's an option often then but having that as a habit like thinking that as a habit not really to enforce it it's more like thinking about it always thinking about it would bring us more Dimensions more longer term and that's that's why I think subtraction is actually strategy to the long-term thinking yeah and so that subtraction is like one way of creating space for other things to come in and for having some uh inspiring other projects in a certain way but I think as we kind of come to the end of this session I think I'd like to touch on the limitations of inspiration and the limitations of even uh spiritual predecessors right like spiritual predecessors and design inspiration can only take you so far um and then what happens like what happens next um how do you explore a new space that has never been explored before do you have some thoughts on that like how would you go about exploring so we're talking about high dimensional spaces all this extra Freedom all this extra stuff how how how how do you navigate when there's nothing to navigate by there's always something to navigate by yeah I like that I think so there's this interesting result in um reinforcement learning so when you try to get computers to learn things where you don't have training data you just know whether they failed and what you realize is that when you're in an environment where it's really hard for you to get any form of reward at the beginning or just like almost zero signal about whether you're doing well or not the thing that works the best is the most robust is curiosity driven learning so essentially you try to surprise yourself and and your word model and so I think that that's kind of like a meta navigation when you don't know how to navigate I think that when people talk about aesthetic what they're talking about is some form of like unlegible intuition as to what is better um that must be somewhere in their brain and so I think like do not underestimate the power of aesthetic and good taste when you're navigating things that are unnavigable because they're not they are actually probably somewhere grounded into I wouldn't be surprised if I were to put like my evolutionary psychology hat that aesthetic is how we navigate unnavigable things you know like aesthetic intuitions yeah and and a fun thing that I want to add to that is the idea of good taste that you brought up which is funny like we're tempted always to think that the opposite of good taste is bad taste but they opposite of good taste is no taste you know so like actually your taste is a positive content kind of thing and you can use it to guide yourself even when there's nothing else to guide Brian how do you how do you explore High dimensional spaces you've never been in before yeah I think that so much of it is just about what is the topology of the environment that you're putting yourself in if you're putting yourself in an environment where there is a lot of space and there isn't an Impulse to sometimes we use the phrase snap to grid snap to something legible that can be easily understood whether that's snapping to a goal function or snapping to a narrative that is easy to understand that is um rewarded by the surrounding context if you can sort of suspend yourself in a space of uncertainty for a little longer allow yourself to be confused that's a way to allow yourself to be curious it makes it easier to to do so um and so that's one of the things that that I was thinking about when I was thinking oh you know when we first came into the ethereum space there was a lot of space and that made it easier to navigate those kinds of high-dimensional multi-dimensional considerations um so I 10 years into the Devcon experiment worth doing uh I'm sure you felt at times that you're navigating a high-dimensional space uh and I would love to hear as we have a few more seconds to wrap this up I'd love to give you the last word in here how you think about your adventure your exploration into the unknown with Devcon how that's been maybe just a final word for ending decade decade zero um I thought you were going to okay give another monologue in the end but um uh if you have noticed Devon is not every year now right and that's another thing we pushed um so that thinking um speaking of job subtraction subtraction um does bring more quality it has to so the idea is because there are many etherum events out there now um if if Devcon still is needed it has to be very very special it has to be very very special I I do say this to Devon Team all the time otherwise we don't need more addition right and then so that's the decade of I was not involved in all devons but yeah and I want another 40 minutes on the clock so we can have that conversation about how to keep Devcon special but we're running out of time so uh I'm sure this conversation's just getting started um and I want to once again thank the Devcon team here the ethereum foundation of course Justin Brian and a for bringing this discussion into being and thank you all for staying closing Devcon 7 with us I really appreciate thank you so [Music] much amazing thank you so much Nick thank you ya thank you gief uh I have an immense amount of respect for Nick to be able to walk us through a pH philosophical discussion like that uh and uh gub and Justin if you're not aware are their team is responsible for all of the frogs you see around the venue so huge round of applause for that just that ex just that activity I think is incredible uh and of course ya a you're an inspiration for everyone thank you so much uh now we have a short recap of the week [Music] now more than ever building on eum is not only for idealistic [Music] reasons ethereum is Hope ethereum is hope that's what it is for me this is the most Global Devcon [Music] ever I think Devcon shows the strength of the ethereum ecosystem and really highlights the concept of the infinite [Music] Garden welcome to Devon Southeast Asia [Music] oh amazing amazing what a month these four days have been huh all right so I would like to invite up two team members uh who are from Thailand uh o who is our community supporter who's been working tieless for the the past few months yes and Winnie who is one of our production magicians helping make this event what it what it is what what you saw it was so please come on stage um I want to start off with this photo uh uh this was the closing ceremony in Devon bagoda it was exactly 2 years 1 month one day since this video was taken two years ago and one def con ago I was part of the audience like you guys today I'm part of the Defcon team so I can only do this because how open and collaborative defun team is so I thank you for that and it's only because you guys are willing to make it you know make make the travel all the way here to Southeast Asia to make this def CT SE happen that is why I'm able to stand here to make this magical moment happening in Southeast Asia so I thank you all for en enabling me to stand here so as part of my job with the Devcon team I support communities and speaking of communities we need to speak about road to defon program road to Defcon program is a program initiated over a year ago to allow local communities across southeast Asia and nearby to organize their own independ independent ethereum event bringing awareness and excitement on the way to Defcon we gave out 103 grants to 103 events in 15 countries and in 64 communities that's about two events a week or about one road death C event every 3 and a half days all the way in 2024 so please can I get a round of applause to all the road to Dev communities that made this [Applause] [Music] possible and this is what R to Dear looks like in sou Asia Beyond Saudi Asia in homes and also literal road to death so we had two events two road to deathcon events coming from pomen Cambodia thanks to Ry and also from shangai Thailand thank to Shaka for making this happen so some of you might wonder okay you know road to defc is all that great you know for the local communities but what about the defc itself right is it really make an impact to the local communities in South Asia so these are some of the Praises that we had from early attendees on the first day and the feedbacks have rever reverberated across the communities drawing more excitement and interest from from those outside of ethereum ecosystem to join people actually walk in a lot each day just to ask for tickets to get in we also had some funny and creative compliments here on the left here someone said I told my son that you must skip school tomorrow and come to defun right I'm not sure in how many lifetime will we have another event with 10K Builders flying to Thailand to create this experience it's worth it to drop on the other hand you can skip school the entire week because you know why not I can do my homework from Defcon anyway uh another highlight for me is that we also had a Thai Member of Parliament who joined us among the attendees he made a video coverage of Defcon on Tik Tok he even explained what EIP is and describing how CK passport work right tell me me you know how you can think that ethereum is not going to expand into the real world with [Applause] [Music] this so when I say that locals uh praise this event I really mean it you know they are not complimenting in words not in sentences not in paragraphs they are making essays you know to compliment def gun so I with this I believe that I can say that on behalf of soue Asia and Thailand we really thank you for being here you're are not only just making a dent in the etherum ecosystem but you are making a difference in Southeast Asia so I really really thank you all for being [Music] here so now uh that's the community and impact so far now on to the event production by Winnie all right thank you so much oh thank you and I would like to say again so and welcome everyone to our beloved Hometown Bangkok once again um as a part of production as Skyla has already mentioned in the opening that we wanted to make this event not only for Thailand but for all of Southeast ases as a community so one thing that you may have noticed if you traveling all around southeast Asia countries we have so many things in differences but also we we share and Sh it so many things in common such as cultures and we try to account for all of these into production of the stages visuals Vibes that you have seen all elements and beautiful things that we created in these menus also from the steps and you walk in to the food that you have been eaten I know so far that we have a very good comments about the foods here so all throughout the weeks you have been not just eating Thai food but you also experience the food that represents of many countries from around Asia which is more than 30 men news that we have [Applause] selected and the most important part for the production what makes Defcon difference for me I work in events for seven years and I would say Devcon is is a magical process and also I know you feel that too when you have coming into these spaces being not just a conference with many talks and sessions but also so many activities happen around hacka cave with the communities decompression room activities discussion corners and all of the music stage all of these elements combined together to make the Devcon an unconventional event ever and these are also the proofs that I would like you to witness as I hear so many parts of all event producer have said to me that this is the biggest and the most unconventional event that they have ever seen and built in [Applause] bangok and of course guys even though I missed but this is the most fun and beautiful stats I have seen we have given 96 massage from 10 massagers I know that a 960 of you are a very very fortunate one to get okay and this is all the Productions I hope you have a very great time we are we have so much poaching in efforts for all these Devon thank you let's give a huge round of applause to Winnie and to oh without them this event would not be what it is what it was they say they say of these 960 massages they were only occupied by 10 people so I'm not sure what a lot of you guys were doing uh but other stats that I actually really like we have reached over 12,500 people not just that have tickets but that have actually showed up here like 12 showed up here and participated in Devcon 12,500 this is more than double the past Devcon we had two years ago uh we have representation here from over 130 countries the top five of the the top five countries are us with 1,800 Thailand with 1,500 India with 1,49 United Kingdom with 500 and Singapore with 500 as well so uh and many many more countries obviously 130 countries from around the world have come here to Devcon and we are stoked to see that uh at the most Global Devcon ever now 60% of the people who have come here this was their first Devcon this was their first maybe introduction to ethereum uh so that was also super exciting to see we have had over 750 speakers and I I say instructors as well because we obviously had workshops and this does not include the many of you who were instructing and speaking at your own Community hubs or in the discussion corners of which there were probably hundreds more we have over 300 hours of content so hope you get those uh streaming subscriptions or check out stream e afterwards because there's a lot to do lot to review and we had 3,000 question and answers issued through the mircat platform which many of you participated in to interact with the speakers and uh so we had all that content all those questions all of these talks and speakers and and so what did we learn what were the takeaways uh and I think there's there's a few things there's a few things that we want to highlight I'd say one ethereum has scaled right so we heard this in vitalik's talk in the opening we heard it from Hart in his talk we heard it from BK in his talk we have I I'll just quote this this year L2 fees went down from 50 cents to less than one cent this is a huge change uh BK says four years after announcing rollup Centric road map we've launched almost 50 rollups the cost of transactions ethereum just plummeted now you can run a transaction for just pennies said Hart uh and this is clear I think this is clear for many of us using this now ethereum no longer is struggling with these massive scaling problems that we've had for many years and we've we've scaled I would say also l2s are great for ethereum we've seen this both from Mike who was talking about l2s and their relationship to ethereum Growing the ecosystem and uh and and and the relation to the eth the asset uh and Mar who was explaining how C is recently transition from L an L1 to an L2 to join the ethereum ecosystem and bring all of their ecosystem now together unified with us so I would say l2s are not only just great for ethereum l2s are ethereum the ux is improved and ready for the masses we had a entire track on usability we had workshops around usability we had an account abstraction Hub of which I hope many of you got to participate in we discussed things around uh user interfaces around gas fees being low gas sponsoring cross L2 user experience for which Hart says we want ethereum to feel like one chain again and this is what is happening ethereum is feeling like one chain again finally thanks to improvements like ERC 4337 ERC 7683 rip 772 ERC 3668 I can go on but all of this has been discussed here here this week and it's super exciting to see that finally the user experience with ethereum is is improving and your grandmother soon will be able to use it also we we were reminded we covered why we are here why we are here right so I will actually these two quotes out Peter said we shouldn't assume the particular transparency of an existing technology is some kind of moral or ethical imperative rather than a mere technological accident or a temporary limitation and Harry halin reminded us that we must believe that all humans should have the right to use strong cryptography the right to transact freely and the right to of freedom of speech uh and and these are important values and they're not exclusively the only values we need to care about we need to care about open Global participation the importance of credible neutrality Cooperative mindsets many many more but this is what we covered in the cypherpunk and privacy track and what many of you got to listen to and be reminded of throughout this week uh also we got to look at we got to see ethereum through a new light right A New Perspective on what what is ethereum what is crypto ethereum as a defensive technology as one of the defensive technologies that we should be working through through diac day so there are many of you who participated in D act day defensive accelerationism and I'll read a couple quotes out here uh vitalic talks about cyber defense being where all reasonable people agree who the hacker is cryptography zkps Etc help here info events somewhat help here reasonable people can't agree on who the attacker is we need technologists to help filter through this info but I think you can look at ethereum now and crypto as a defensive technology and we now realize why defensive technology is needed in this era uh and in the areas coming up and why we should focus on that why this should be an intentional development of defensive technology we also got to see what is the relationship between ethereum and programmable cryptography so both Justin and gub sheep who you just saw up here on stage uh discuss a lot about the next generation of cryptography we we are now able to use the next generation of cryptography it's been theoretical for many years H and it is finally becoming practical to actually build applications with it and the next generation of cryptography plus e enables applications that we've just simply never been able to build before and this is extremely exciting right so there was an entire Community Le session today uh all it was called programmable cryptography all of the Frog related stuff is all about programmable cryptography it's fun it's gimmicky but there's actually real stuff happening behind the scenes right every time you scan a QR code you're getting a pod you are you are you were you were interacting with programmable cryptography every single ticket you received was a pod inside of zup pass which is a piece of programmable cryptography and all of this in combination with ethereum enables things that we have never been able to build before so all of that content was covered in the Pro programmable cryptography uh track applied cryptography track and more uh and lastly what we saw here what we saw this week was that the ethereum community is global and it is vibrant right I just love looking at this map that we had down there and and I appreciate it for all of you that put pins in and I bet you there are many more who did not but I it's just impressive to see where everyone has come from all the locations that everyone has come from uh and the other thing I really really love to see was the community hubs uh I want to give a big round of applause for everyone who organized one of these Community hubs or contributed to one of these Community hubs because they were absolutely incredible I think I think that is one of the things that separates Devcon in this community out from many others right like this was a a an incredibly unique experience the the content the programming that you had throughout there the passion that you showed and exhibited in these Community hubs were were incredible so so thank you once again and just another Testament to how vibrant this community really is and all of this is actually all of the talks that we just talked about all the narratives you can find already recorded and live on our Devcon app the ones from today should be there soon and soon you'll be able to ask D.A AI if you have any questions around these talks and want to uh learn more about them so stay tuned for that uh but back to what what what are we here for right like what do we actually want to achieve out of Devcon do we want to have a cool event with I mean these are things we do want we want to have a cool event we want you guys to be happy we want the Wi-Fi to finally work for once which I actually think it did pretty well I don't know uh Round of Applause for that I think I don't know how many devons has been since that actually that actually worked uh we also want good food and all these things but really our ultimate goal what is our ultimate goal our goal is to improve ethereum right and use ethereum to improve Humanity this is kind of the goal that we're here working towards and the goal here specifically is that we hope that you all can contribute to this goal right like whether that means creating an app that eventually onboards millions and does so while inheriting the values that we care about or it's building infrastructure that also inherits and and abides the to the values that we care about making more education for for those to spread awareness of what ethereum is how you can use it both like in your local community in your government uh things like this uh or it's like just Community efforts in general all of those I think would be amazing to see come out of this event and and and and what we want to see really is someone who impacts the the future um impacts the future by building or contributing to ethereum somehow and perhaps that person right now is is is attending Devcon and being exposed to ethereum for their first time right like just as Nick reminded Us in the panel this is decade zero of Devcon uh we are focused on long-term goals we are looking at the true impact of Devcon might not even be seen for for many years from now right like hopefully the people who are sitting in this room for the first time getting exposed to Devcon it might take you a few years to actually have this this this massive impact but I absolutely believe you can in fact it's it's it's the same thing that all of us have done right we've all attended our first Devcon we got exposed to our first uh ethereum content at some point and and have gone on from there and so I would say now is the time to get involved now is the time to dive deeper and this is what I would say is the ultimate goal of of Devcon why we're here and and so what's next right what is next we are concluding Devcon southeast Asia what is coming up next Devcon 2026 so Devcon happens every two years right like why do we do it every two years I'd say there's a there's a few reasons uh for one we want it to be significant we want it to be special uh so Devcon happening every two years makes us like really appreciate this gathering this worldwide Global Gathering of the ethereum community much much more it also allows us to focus on the road to Devcon right so what o presented early all of these efforts that we put into this region to help support the community uh and this has all happened uh through the road to Devcon which takes time and so we will hope to work on the road to Devcon over the next two years uh and lastly this event just takes time it takes time to put on it takes a lot of time H we basically start over every year we go somewhere new and so this will be where we end up I mean so this will be when we have next Devcon uh but next year we will have Dev connects so Dev connects uh many of you are familiar with but some of you are not Dev connect is a different type of event entirely right Dev connect is our event where we we delegate we let the community create the content largely so it's a week of many independent events unlike this one right here everyone is in the same venue everyone is together we are all cross collaborating you can get all types of content here at Devcon there are or at devc connect there are many independent events all focused on specific domains specific themes H and they are all organized by those who are most familiar with those domains with those themes uh and so this allows us to go a lot deeper to dive deeper into Dev connect or into these themes uh and this will happen next year so where uh it's an open question and the Forum is open so we have the Devcon Forum H and actually like if you look up here this was one of the proposals one of many maybe even a 100 proposals for where we should bring Devcon uh 2024 and it was actually created by o none other than o who wasn't on our team at that point uh but this was one of the proposals that we created that he created and that we reviewed while looking at all the countries in in Southeast Asia and Beyond uh and so there are proposals open for where to bring not just Devcon not just devc connect but also the also ethereum events in general so we have a we have a proposal we have a we have a forum forum. devon. org and uh yeah I know there are more people more organizations like eth Global included that look at this forum to see where they should bring their events in the future and so if you want to propose your your location there it's also a good way to gather your community together and maybe you end up hosting your own event so let's see here oh I would like to invite back up o and Winnie to cover something special that's happening today uh so oh winie give a round of applause for Owen Winnie all right test test okay um yeah so as some of you might know some of you might not today is like a Tong day right um so I would like to summarize it quickly um I took out excerpt from from from the internet so it's an excerpt by Simon D Luber a French diplomat to sayam um or Thailand back then uh in 1687 so that's about like 300 years ago um what he said is that the siames have also uh formed religious shows when the water begins to retreat the people returns them thanks for several nights together with a great illumination not only for that they are retired but for the fertility which they render to the lands I think this is really well um with our closing day today where the water which is all of you have flowed from all across the globe convene in a single place right now and we are about to depart and going back to our homelands but what you are leaving behind in Saudi Asia is the fertility which will grow the ethereum ecosystem further from today and onwards so today we'd like to invite you all to celebrate with us in the loong day not for just the cultural experience but also for the ethereum ecosystem in Southeast Asia itself raise the nose so there's going to be a lot of activities going on around Bangkok so it will be crowded and super traffic um along the Lakeside there's going to be a l Graton kind of Festival events going on as well so you are open to join after but we are going to celebrate a very spacious and secret l in a way so stay tuned and after just be careful and let's use the Metro because it's going to be very traffic cool thank you thank you thank you Winnie thank you oh you can step up here oh actually yeah done done uh I would like to invite up a at this point everyone this is a the executive director of the ethereum foundation give a round of applause Ria right I don't know okay um so um I'd like to just ask well I said on the panel that if we if etherum still needs Devcon it has to be very very special so I would like to ask question to the audience uh was this Decon special to you was this ston very magical to [Applause] you I'd like to welcome the team who made that happen invite the team Devon [Applause] team nice nice yeah I guess walk all the way in all the way all the way or send Center Center Center go nice um so with the size of the audience more than doubled that's making keeping the quality um professional still yet unique and eum that wasn't easy and these are the people who made that magic happen so please give them big round of applause nice I will I will get the mic back to amazing thank you ya thank you ya and I think one of the coolest things about this team is actually that of these 18ish people we are representing 13 different countries uh so maybe SI aside for a second so we can see exactly where we are from the world around the world uh but one of the coolest things also is that like this event was put on by much more than just this team here right we've been working on this for a year some of us two years to to make this event happen but there are of course many more people involved in making this happen in particular the volunteers so i' would also like to invite up the volunteer leads to the stage volunteer leads can you please come up to the stage and all volunteers can you please stand up stand up and let's give a massive Round of Applause for all of these volunteers they're what made this event happen and on the map here you can see this is where once we once we sum up all of the volunteers all of our team this is where everyone's coming from right like I think this is an incredible representation of the ethereum community and is one of its strength is it diversity so let's come together take a photo let's take take a photo quick photo quick photo quick photo quick photo okay hurry up hurry [Music] up all right amazing okay with this we conclude the opening ceremony uh and I want to say thank you all for coming to Devcon southeast Asia thank you for joining us here today and let's take this let's use this as inspiration to go out and build and contribute and hopefully hopefully hopefully eventually improve Humanity thank you all [Applause] [Music] he [Music] you [Music] spe [Music] oh oh [Music] my oh [Music] oh [Applause] [Music] oh a [Music] n [Music] [Applause] a [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] n [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the oh [Music] a