ah cancun what an epic def con this was
can we agree let's give it up for a
Tyrian foundation and everyone making
this happen yeah thank you
so let me play this technology okay
so before we begin I would like to ask
how many of you have heard of Akasha
before can we see a show of okay that's
that is impressive and I'm just curious
how many of you have actually tried the
Alpha Wow okay so we have quite a few
alpha veterans thank you for taking the
time to play with the app for those of
you who haven't heard of Akasha before
as a word it comes from Sanskrit and it
means eater but it also stands as an
acronym for advanced knowledge
architecture for social human advocacy
and what we are trying to build is a
peer-to-peer alternative in a world
where the social media networks are
modeled after the Napster architecture
where the user depends on a server or a
server operator or an entity and we want
to tackle this problem from a different
perspective using different technologies
so in a word we want to showcase the
potential of etherium combined with ipfs
to solve all problems using new
technologies and the thing we want to
achieve is a shared and persistent
information Commons that can help people
put the key that can help people regain
their collective memory
and freedom of expression back from the
clause of corporations that monetize
each click and really everything it's
really bad so to put it visually the
Napster web apps are Napster like web
apps rely on the server admin or the
server itself and if for some reason the
user does not comply or respect whatever
the server operator once they lose
access to the service in the Alpha we
took the hardest challenge we could find
which was to build a fully decentralized
desktop app meaning that each user when
they downloaded and installed the Akasha
application they were actually
installing bundled and etherium node and
an IP FS node so in the beta thanks to
hard work of the team we will also
introduce a fully functional web version
which will remove the need to sync with
with a chain and the users will then
rely on meta mask or any other way tree
service provider like status or or
missed and when we say that free speech
is embedded in software what we mean is
that whereas the user can be kicked for
whatever reason from the Napster like
web apps on Akasha the users are in full
control over their identity and the
content they are posting so our story
began on May 6th mater 2016 on World
Press Freedom Day and this is when we
basically announced that we've been
working for quite some time on the
Akasha alpha it was a total shot in the
dark for us we weren't sure exactly what
we expect so it was kind of a test to
see how it will be received among
ourselves before we release the website
we we talked and we say ok man what we
consider a success you know just to have
some some numbers and Mario's here said
like 30 people in the first 24 hours
would be cool
roxanna here more optimistic 50 people
and I was secretly 24 hours later we
surpassed 200 I now switch was like whoa
and then in less than a month we
surpassed 2,000 people so it became
clear that we weren't crazy or that we
weren't the only ones so Disney these
numbers might not seem much at first but
it's worth mentioning that every single
person that sign up for the Alpha
reached organically our website so we
just published blog post linked them on
reddit or tweeted them so what we wanted
was to measure the real interest in the
application and we felt that paid
advertising would taint those results we
would end up measuring the efficiency of
targeted ads rather than the real
interest in in the application and idea
so fast forwarding until early 2017 one
year after it helium we launched the
first public version of the Alpha and it
was called into the ether it was
received very well by the community and
I suppose you guys also tried it hope
you had a pleasant experience when when
you when you tried it and basically in
the Alpha we tried to have a basic
functionality you find in a social
network which was to publish something
to comment on something to read
something to vote and to follow people
combined also with things like since we
are using aetherium one of the side
effects is that each identity is also a
wallet so people can also send resources
to each other and so forth
and after the release one of this is
actually a screen from the Akasha
application a comment and on the first
row you can see that someone it was like
excited that there's a tab that normal
people can use and for us I was like
exactly what we were aiming for but I
think the big point here was that with
all these people you and the others that
might be watching this this conference
we proved that it is possible it is
possible to have an application that
does not rely on servers for people to
communicate among themselves and thanks
to your playfulness in your time put
into testing the application we
identified some bugs and we also
identified what can be done better and
Mario's now is going to explain one of
the lessons we learn in
alpha and that be applied in the beta
Marius
thank you yeah so what is this yeah I
think all the Alpha users got stuck at a
given time in this loading loading
screen this was happening because of the
way we used to load the resources we
were trying to get all of them at once
so if given time one of the resources
would would be unavailable the other
resources would have to wait for that
one to become online before fetching
them to the user
so in the beta version this was one of
the biggest challenge we we had to solve
we've done this by loading every single
resource individually as you can see in
this demo yeah so it comes with a great
improvement on the UX side so enough
with this so another highlight of the of
the beta is the first token experiment
in the alpha we had a ETH which served
as a placeholder token and I just want
to make something clear this is there is
just one token which is this currently
in nicknamed n-eth we are open to
suggestions
regarding the name we want to avoid
confusion with other projects like idiom
if any and this is just an experiment to
get the power running right so we fully
assume that we are we don't have all the
answers but we invite everyone to
collaborate on finding them so to give
you an overview of how these token works
on the surface a ETH is in an ear C 20
compatible token it works pretty much as
you would expect from an ear seatback
token you can send and receive but there
is a twist you can lock it for a
predefined amount of time and this will
give you some something we call mana
which acts like a regional creep
that can be burned inside the
application Maurice will cover this in
more detail afterwards and essence is
basically mana that is burned and if the
quality of the content is deemed as good
the authors and the persons interacting
can consume this essence to mint new
tokens in existence and not Leslie karma
is our experiment on the proto
reputation layer and Mario's now we'll
give you a presentation of the token
flow of the states and how everything
ties in together so so starting from the
better version every user we have to
burn a small amount of mana to interact
with the application so how do we how do
we get mana the user can get some mana
by locking his Akasha tokens for a
period of time during which he gets
periodically the mana replenished the
man I used for the mana burned for doing
actions in a cursor can be collected
afterwards into two specific resources
called instance and karma karma will
serve in Akasha like some sort of proto
reputation which will unlock specific
features like creating communities and
so on which will require to be above
level of karma the other one the essence
it's interesting because this is the
first idea which came to us to
incentivize the users to create content
on Akasha
because it can be consumed to mint new
years to 20 Akasha tokens and we spent
afterwards also at any given time
the user can unlocked the magnified
tokens and afterwards it will go to the
Year c20 state by passing to a delay
time which we call it a cycle yeah so
let's see
and basic flow so we have the publisher
which post an entry on Akasha the
readers afterwards can express their
general feeling about the quality of the
content by voting after a voting period
the entry will generate a small amount
of essence which afterwards can be
claimed by both publisher and the reader
by specific when we were starting to
feel good about ourselves like Yemen I
think we're onto something here
Vitalik did it again so then just a few
days ago Vitalik published this this
entry so he basically pointed out that
there are more than just so a good talk
and economic system requires more than
just a way to insert units of that
particular currency into circulation and
you know this is quite interesting
because following a couple of days the
media started to digest this information
and started calling the tokens invented
until this point as tokens 1.0 and you
know if you think about it it's pretty
accurate since we are still barely
scratching the surface of what can be
done and we're still trying to
understand the basic pieces of the
puzzle that make a good token work and
then things kept snowballing and by by
the end of the day we had like this sort
of stuff
is like everything you need to know
about cryptocurrencies so you know 90%
of startups in general fall so maybe it
would have been more accurate to say
that with a poorly designed token 99% of
the token startups will fall but to
focus on the positive the question of
how do we get to talk in 2.0 started to
take shape
and since Vitalik thanks started this I
figure that it's best to just show a
short video of
a short segment of a recent video done
by VTEC
so without further ado the nice thing
about cryptocurrency I think is that it
just makes it so bloody easy to create
one of these economic mechanisms you
just write it up in code then it just
makes it really easy to just service an
economic experimentation ground for
doing these kinds of things and so you
know that's sort of the whole point of
economic experimentation is sort of
coming up with these sort of clever
clever little tricks that sort of
combine together incentives and sort of
put some little put things together in
this nice way that gives people the
incentive to do the right thing and you
know the skin there's probably quite a
lot to be done it's just really we're
all getting started I like to focus on
that right it's still just ear - after
each area and our approach this thing -
maybe answering this question is that
just as a theorem had during its
frontier the etherium Olympics where
we're developers from around the world
were invited to identify bugs attack
vectors and basically if you can break
it go ahead and we'll learn for it from
it will become stronger we invite
everyone here and that's watching the
presentation to join us in breaking and
reinventing and replaying the token
proposal and basically with the I ETH
proposal and what we showcase today we
want to just get the prototype in the
world and then in a sort of cyberpunk
inception like fashion to iterate
co-create in the open on Akasha itself
so we will use tags to coordinate and
later on if we still have time we will
show you an actual demo of how this this
will work but basically what we want or
hope is that if we approach things from
this perspective maybe people and and
startups can think of of tokens as this
dynamic adaptive systems which involve
multiple pieces that you have to
carefully put together rather than a
graph going from zero to the moon right
so I think together if we will tackle
this this question we might reach some
emergent shared understanding because no
one has like the full idea of what is
talking 2.0 but a thousand little
half-baked ideas can come together in
something completely new and the cool
thing about this is that this is a quote
I really like is that the mind once
stretched by an idea never return to its
original dimensions and if you want an
example just remember that in 2014 a
theorem had eater presale which led to
around eighteen point five million
dollars being raised to fund the
development of the platform and it was
number one as in the most successful
crowdfunding campaign in the history of
the internet and now a couple of years
later over three billion dollars have
been raised by companies using icos as a
form of raising funds for their projects
so just one idea huge impact so now the
big picture of what we're trying to
accomplish is like we're not trying to
compete with the big boys I mean they
have billions of users would be nice but
let's get real we want to have a real
alternative in in place to keep them in
check and this is not like paper or
plastic bag choice we want to offer
people a fundamentally different choice
when it comes to each person's digital
sovereignty as human netizens
and I think we can all agree after this
beautiful Def Con that watching history
in the making is cool but we think that
writing the future ourself is even
cooler so on this note we invite
everyone to be able to join us in
building together in this decade a
pattern ology architecture for the next
century and we actually have all the
tools and we have like a pretty good
idea of where things can go and the
future is not the place we get to visit
the future is a place we get to create
and I would like to announce that the
beta signups are open for everyone that
wants to part
paid and subscribe just go to Akasha dot
world
insert your email in and in a matter of
weeks we will send you the invite and we
will start released the beta and since I
see we still have two minutes I will now
show you a demo of what the data looks
like and this is basically the dashboard
view in which we have like different
streams and different columns which can
be customized by the users and here we
had a column which is a tag and in this
case is crypto Olympics so people can
coordinate on the ideas brainstorm these
are proposals they can use the entries
and the comment section as
counterproposals or to discuss various
ideas and this is like an example in
which is all a con or a Def Con how
it works to publish a comment as you can
see the UI has changed quite a bit also
in the backend we basically are now
looking at a completely rewritten
decentralized application from dub so it
would be more correct to call it like
version 2 but since we started with the
Alpha we will name it better and here on
the left side these are what we call
boards for now and basically offers like
different windows into specific topics
so if we take the example of Def Con one
of the car of the boards could have been
like events presentations workshops and
people could have coordinated better
rather than checking on ready 10 discord
rooms one slack you get idea to jeeter's
and and so on so I would like to thank
you all for your attention and it's
great being here hope to see you on
arkasha soon
[Applause]
[Music]