Hey everyone. Thanks for making it to the morning sessions. I know it's not easy, especially after yesterday's parties. So, yeah. Originally, this is this was meant for the real world Ethereum track.
So, I'm going to talk to you today a little bit about the legendary legendary Pokemons of crypto, aka apps apps apps. Not much of infrastructure in here. Um and the main goal of the talk is actually to talk about how do we actually approach decentralizing one of the most essential activities on the internet, which is collaboration. And I'll use specifically the Def Con collab app that we developed for Def Con with a bunch of teams right here, including the Def Con team, and that I'll describe in a bit. I'm Andreas.
I'm the co-founder of Fathers and Dedoose.net. And let's go. So, super important Oh, actually, super important context to get started with. There is over half of all internet users that trust one single closed sourced and centralized app suite for their daily knowledge and collaboration.
Google Workspace. And this is catastrophic because it's what you do every day. It's related to your identity. It's related to your friends, family, social graph, etc. So, the premise that underlies my my talk here is that internet freedom, meaning your digital rights, right to access information, right to coordinate with others, right to not be censored on the internet, cannot be guaranteed behind walled gardens.
Worse even, we cannot even imagine new forms of coordination and collaboration that are independent of the cloud empires and a third party guaranteeing this type of collaboration for us. I'm going to speed through because I have only 10 minutes, so I'm going to go at 1.2 speed here. The problem speaks for itself. Uh mass surveillance, constant leaks, uh constant fumbles by companies and these companies going bankrupt, link rot leaks, etc.
And uh this problem is actually one that the crypto community knows very well. And yet, um it has a bit of difficulty moving on to something new. Uh we should know better, but we could not necessarily do better until very recently. So, you know, we had our old aspirations and we've moved into something that is a little bit convoluted, uh messy, and a bunch of infrastructure that doesn't give us enough direction. Now, um my point uh in the second section is that we should think of social technical counter positioning to the cloud empires, to the current situation on the centralized web.
And one useful concept uh uh to use here is by Ethan Buchman which shares personal computers on leased and unimaginable levels of sovereignty and interoperability for people and community computers, meaning public blockchains, will do the same for groups. Now, examples. Examples because we want to see apps here. This is the Def Con collab uh dot io app. Uh the reason why I wanted to show you this today is because it was a community effort.
It's something that uh uh started with the idea that okay, what if we didn't depend on 15 Telegram group chats, 35 notion pages, 63 Luma pages, and more for our conferences, and actually preserved our knowledge and ability to communicate, connect, and collaborate on something that is properly decentralized. So, here on this app, this is powered by smart contract that lives on Gnosis chain. It's powered by the chatting is powered by XMTP. The storage happens on IPFS. It is also the content addressing of all your content here is put on chain.
Access permissions are also done on chain. You have people actually contributing incredible knowledge through PDFs, their own notes, comments, likes, et cetera. And this combines the technology that has matured over the past 10 years, including from Waku, from L2s, from Zupass for authentication, et cetera. And one cool part of this app that I really wanted to highlight is a real-time collaboration that you can do. And this is accessible to all Def Con attendees at the moment, which is enabled purely through a peer-to-peer connections to your peers.
So, let me show you with a little introduction by Vitalik himself. See. Yeah. Well, how does Google Docs work? It's like, okay, you know, everything goes off into a cloud and like, you know, like server is like somewhere in America.
Like, I'm not even sure where, right? And the reason why it has to be this way is because people started to think about collaboration, right? And people started caring about you know, things like So this was just quick demo of the right live collaboration that you can do in a peer-to-peer manner. Now just to finish since I have just one minute I want to give you a little list of apps to give you a little bit of hope about the direction of the space at the moment. I just wanted to highlight one of the latest just talk blog post just to describe the actual properties that developers might have been looking very actively for in 2017 during the ICO era when we were still calling Ethereum the world computer which is that if you give Ethereum code we can receive a very strong guarantee that it will run it anytime we call on it and that if you give Ethereum data and know with certainty it will still be available in the future unaltered and uncorrupted.
So, there are a lot of primitives that have matured since. I have 30 seconds. Uh these are some of them. Oh, I'm going to put them just online here so that people can see that, take screenshots, be available also on YouTube. Uh those primitives have matured.
Today, we combine all these public blockchains with peer-to-peer networks in a really scalable and useful way, and this allows us to create new generation of apps that rival the UX and actually protect the data of our users. At a global scale, we don't need 3 billion people anymore depending on one centralized cloud empire. We can actually have properly decentralized apps for everyone, and these are some of the amazing examples that have emerged in the past 2 years only. So, I highly encourage you to actually look them up, try them. This is the future of Ethereum, and this is actually, I believe, the future of the open free web, and not one that will be guaranteed by third parties that nobody actually wants to trust.
Thank you very much. All right. Thank you, Andreas. Cool stuff. Looks like we got some questions.
How does one ensure power doesn't centralize over time or fail to be maintained? Yeah, uh great question. So, uh the immediate answer is try to rely on as few third parties as possible. So, we have a bit of a morbid thought experiment in our team. Uh we like to think, "Okay, what happens if our whole team disappears tomorrow or turns uh uh turns malicious?"
And the answer is that uh our apps or decentralized apps can continue running because we actually do not take care necessarily of uh introducing new infrastructure. We actually leverage networks that already exist and that do not depend on one, two, three, four parties actually maintaining them. So here you have communities that are maintaining these community computers, if you'd like, and building apps on top of them guarantees that, you know, the apps that you're using are passing the walk-away test. Team can walk away, you can continue accessing your data, running the software, and be independent and self-sovereign. Love it.
Yeah. So we like the tech, we like the vibes. How do we How do we bring the noobs? So a lot of the apps that I actually showed in the last slide are noob-friendly. So Radical, for example, is for your average developer coder.
Instead of using GitHub, they can use Radical. Diox.new is made so that you wouldn't have even the need to create an account, which is a friction that even Google Docs have. Has A lot of those apps also work offline. They work in a way that do not require wallets, that do not require you to docs yourself at Coinbase, give the name of your family, where you live, picture of your cat in order to get some crypto to then send to your wallet to then actually sign in a transaction to actually be able to use the app.
So a lot of those app do not require all this. And account abstraction is something actually that got us past this important threshold of UX, which is something that we're taking full advantage of in the apps that I just showed you. Right on. And we see question around how do you how do you do the real-time tech? Is it using CRDTs, sync servers?
Tell us more. Yeah. Uh so, yes. Uh we're using CRDTs, amazing piece of technology that came out or matured by 2019. I highly recommend an article by Martin Kleppmann at Ink & Switch that talks about CRDTs and how infra-less and peer-to-peer apps are actually possible.
Also, our code is open source. If you want to learn a little bit more about it, go ahead and look at it. And yeah, we use WebRTC. We use IndexedDB to keep as much data as possible local and do the syncing via WebRTC and some other technologies again that you can look up on GitHub or come talk to me afterwards for a discussion. Right on.
Give it up again for Andreas. Thank you very much.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.