devcon 7 / tending the infinite garden organizational culture in the ethereum ecosystem
- YouTube
- Details
Tending the Infinite Garden: Organizational Culture in the Ethereum Ecosystem
Duration: 00:23:47
Speaker: Ann Brody
Type: Talk
Expertise: Intermediate
Event: Devcon
Date: Nov 2024
This presentation will discuss the findings of the academic paper "Tending the Infinite Garden: Organisational Culture in the Ethereum Ecosystem" by Dr. Paul-Dylan-Ennis and Ann Brody. Our study examines the decision-making processes fundamental to Ethereum's protocol governance, drawing on interviews with Ethereum's core developers. We identify a central worldview in Ethereum known as the "Infinite Garden" and discuss how Ethereum's social layer is crucial for upholding cypherpunk values.
Categories
- Related
Devcon
Talk
25:44
Keynote: How to Properly Open Source Software: Lessons Learned from the Linux Foundation
It can be challenging to properly open source software: there are licenses, IP, security reporting, and many other issues that need to be addressed. In this talk, we will discuss the best practices for open source software development learned from almost 25 years of experience at the Linux Foundation. Attendees will learn about how to set up their projects for a variety of potential goals, including things like maximizing security and community building.
Devcon
Talk
31:51
Keynote: Lessons learned from Tor
I will share lessons learned during Tor's twenty years as free software fighting for privacy and human rights. We'll talk about distributed trust and privacy by design, how to help people understand the good uses of your tech, getting allies in both cypherpunks and government, why transparency and community-building are so essential to trust, and successes from other spaces. It may seem like the crypto wars never really end, but we all have a part to play in saving the world.
Devcon
Talk
26:12
Keynote: Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again: Why we need privacy
The Web3 revolution seeks to address the sins of Web2. However, in doing so, it’s created an even worse outcome for users - users’ data is publicly available and makes them vulnerable to state-level censorship and adverse actions. This talk will address the philosophical as well as practical considerations of privacy in Web3. Privacy is an industry-wide issue and sits at the heart of all that is Web3. Understanding why privacy matters involves recognizing that it is not an isolated concept bu
Devcon
Talk
15:04
Keynote: Glass Houses and Tornados
The Tornado Cash sanctions and criminal prosecutions have challenged longstanding assumptions within crypto about the limits of money transmission licensing, money laundering statutes, and sanctions laws. They've also revealed a longstanding assumption from some in policy and law enforcement circles: that blockchains have always been and must remain transparent. Neither assumption has served us well and the time has come for legal certainty. This talk is about how we get there.
Devcon
Talk
26:29
Lunarpunk Endgame
Global surveillance is a static world where change is surpressed and society cannot evolve. In contrast, an anonymity-enhanced world resembles a forest. New civilizational experiments blossom like flowers, radiating outward from the freedom-fighters of the future. The lunarpunk end game is to enable a new ecology of social orders. This talk will describe the grand vision of lunarpunk: multipolar space-faring civilization, human speciation, and the reproduction life throughout the cosmos.
Devcon
Talk
11:05
Protecting your Privacy within the Blockchain Ecosystem
Robertas Visinskis gives their talk titled, "Protecting your Privacy within the Blockchain Ecosystem"
Devcon
Talk
24:01
How To Destroy A Network: Offboarding The Mainstream
Crafting Ethereum into a setting (both technically and reputationally) where The Institutions feel comfortable participating in it at scale has been the life work of hundreds of people over the last nine years. And yet, for our success, many feel that the victory has come at a cost too heavy to bear: our losing focus as to why we built the global computer in the first place. If you feel the same way, join me for a brief exploration of what would need to happen for us to cut the cord.
Devcon
Talk
23:15
P4: Private Periodic Payments Protocol
P4 aims to solve the problem of subscription services offering end-to-end private cryptocurrency payments. This protocol introduces periodicity to cryptocurrency payments through an ongoing relationship between the merchant and the customer without unintentionally disclosing personally identifiable information. We are creating this protocol to allow us to offer a truely end-to-end private subscription data storage solution built with Tahoe-LAFS. By sharing it, we hope that other subscription services will implement our protocol and further the adoption of cryptocurrency payments in real world retail use cases. Although this protocol is currently a work in progress, we have already specified some design decisions. For periodicity, we are avoiding a payment pre-authorization design to keep the user in control of their keys. And for privacy we are utilizing Zcash shielded transactions and the coming improvements in the Sapling release. This protocol is being created by the Least Authority team with support from the Zcash team.
Devcon
Talk
10:23
The State of Whisper
Whisper is the Ethereum Foundation's secure communications protocol. It has been designed to ensure darkness, i.e. guarantee that neither a message's content nor its metadata can be captured by an attacker. With the release of version 6 last spring, it is now also used to prototype the switch of the P2P stack from DevP2P to libp2p. This talk will start with a summary of the protocol, followed by in-depth coverage of two upcoming features that will improve its usability: 1) insights into the libp2p switch, and 2) compiling it to WASM to run directly inside a browser, thus bypassing the confusing RPC interface.
Devcon
Talk
31:52
Decentralizing Ethereum Data with VulcanizeDB
Ethereum is a robust platform for decentralized applications, but the same data structures and encodings that make it effective and trustless also complicate data accessibility and usability. How do you know token balances were updated correctly after you sent your transaction? Is an address authorized to seize your assets? How have system parameters changed over time? To answer these questions, we’ve traditionally depended on centralized APIs and block explorers to capture and serve historical data in a performant way. But what if those services shut down or returned modified results? VulcanizeDB has been working hard to address this problem - aiming to make it easier for anyone to set up, maintain, and query their own data directly. The good news: it is possible to keep track of the historical state of smart contracts without storing petabytes of data! The tricky part: you need to be intentional about how you track information, and you need to aggregate data from disparate sources to provide a holistic view. This workshop will provide a demo and hands-on experience walking through how VulcanizeDB simplifies the process of developing and interacting with smart contracts while keeping our applications and data independent of centralized third parties.