Feel like you don’t know enough about Web3? Don’t worry, neither do we. That’s where these podcasts come in! In this new episode, the Jabberers sit down with Nik Kalyani, the founder of Decentology and overall Web3 expert. The gang discusses the “big D” of Web3 (and why you need to understand it), how Web3 changes the game for blockchain and the like, and how Web3 is going to make gaming bigger AND more lucrative.

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CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode of JavaScript Jabber. This week on our panel, we have Steve Edwards. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Hello from what am I warm and rainy Portland, cold and rainy Portland. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Excellent. I'm Charles Max Wood from Top End Devs. And we've got a special guest this week. It's Nick. Is it Kalyani? That's right. Nick, do you want to just introduce yourself, let everybody know who you are and why you're famous? 

NIK_KALYANI: I wouldn't call myself famous, but hi, I'm Nick Kalyani and I'm coming in from Mountain View, California, Silicon Valley. I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Decentology. And what we are doing is we are building something called the Hyperverse. This is a platform for Web2 developers to start building on Web3. We wanna make it super easy for that to happen. And what we've done is taken the model that JavaScript developers everywhere know, NPM. So NPM install modules, we are extending that same capability to Web3 and blockchain so you can easily build applications without having to learn any new languages or anything. You stick with JavaScript, HTML, and build things out. So that's what I'd like to talk about today, about building applications and about blockchain and Web3 in general. 

 

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CHARLES MAX_WOOD: All right, so there were about eight buzzwords in there just with the blockchain and everything else. I'm a little curious, because I've heard a number of things about Web3, and I'm not exactly sure. Like when I try and explain it to people, I'm like, this is what I kind of understand but I don't feel like I explain it well because I don't completely understand it. So what, like what is web three? What's not web three? You know, regarding the stuff that's out there, like how do we clarify this? So people go, Oh, that's what it is. And that's how it relates to what I do, you know, using current web technology. 

NIK_KALYANI: Yeah, that's a really good question. So I think of web three as two parts. The first part is the technology and the second part is the culture. So let's talk about the technology first. So it's, basically any technology or set of technologies that are decentralized. And I want to be clear here that there's a distinction between distributed and decentralized. So decentralized literally means that there isn't a single point or single server or single control authority. So decentralized systems can be blockchains. They can be storage. They can be other protocols also. For example, there might be an identity protocol that doesn't rely on blockchains or storage or might rely on both. So the idea is more about not having a simple control point or a central entity that controls it. And it also translates to infrastructure, where there isn't a central point where all the infrastructure is. So that's the technology aspect of it. And the canonical example of decentralized technology is blockchain. The more technical term for it is distributed ledger technology or DLT, but we commonly know it as blockchain and we can parse that out a bit more. So that's one aspect of Web3, which is the technology. But it's also a cultural thing. Web3 is about not having sort of state actors or centralized companies, et cetera, own your data or dictate how decisions are made. It's also sort of a culture where people are starting to think more about economic equity throughout the world, where people who are unbanked might have access to financial tools and financial resources, et cetera. So it's both a combination of the technology and the culture, and together the umbrella catch-all term for it is Web3. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I gotcha. And I think we see a lot of this when people start talking about kind of the stranglehold that maybe Facebook or some of these other bigger companies, Google, have over the flow of information, right? So a lot of people get their news off of social sites like Facebook, or the majority of the world uses Google as their search engine, and so. It's like, well, if, if, if Google isn't always a good actor and I'm not going to get into that, I don't think that's necessarily a, that I don't want to start a pissing match, I guess is what I'm saying. But then, then if it's decentralized, then it's like, look, then anybody who ought to be a player can be a player. Right. And we don't have to worry about whether or not Google or anybody else is playing nicely now or in the future. 

NIK_KALYANI: Exactly. You know, one of the main tenants of web three technologies in general is about the ability for you to be in control of your data, your privacy, and not essentially be marketed, be a marketing, you know how they say, like, if you're not paying for it, then you're the product, right? And so it's that, getting away from that and trying to build a world where you as an individual have control over your own data and your own ability to use services without revealing things about yourself that you may not want to reveal. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. I see that as a lot of the reasons why things like VPNs are starting to become much more in vogue, right? Just cause it's not only like the centralized endpoints, but even the centralized internet providers and things like that kind of make people nervous. Right? It's like, I don't, I don't know who can see it along the line. I don't know who else is on this wifi. I don't. So by, by opening things up, it just changes the game a little bit. 

NIK_KALYANI: I think VPNs are great. But you have to keep in mind that they hide one aspect of your total digital experience, right? But there's more. The moment you get into the point where you are unable to give fake information anymore, perhaps it's a credit card or something like that. That changes everything at that point. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Right. So is it about kind of this inherent distrust or is it about more than that? Is it because you mentioned like owning your own data. So is it about control? Is it? I mean, what? What's the overarching concern that people have? 

NIK_KALYANI: Yeah, that's, you know, you used a good phrase there, dis-pressed. So decentralized technology, blockchain especially, is about trustlessness. You don't need to trust anybody or anything because the data is immutable and you can trust that the data hasn't been tempered with or manipulated with, et cetera. I think, you know, you have to think about web three, when you get down to the the bottom layer here, it's yes, privacy is a concern. Yes, the right to own your data is a concern. But I don't think we're there quite yet in terms of being able to have these systems built at scale where we can assure privacy, where we can assure the ability for people to control data. What we have started with right now is the very fundamental, starting to build the sort of the building blocks of this technology and experimenting with trustlessness. That's what we are focused on right now is can the technology be built and deployed in such a way that the cryptographic proofs that exist, etc., are adequate to ensure that any data that you have stored can trustlessly be verified to be unmodified or untampered with. So that's really the fundamental level we are working with right now, and it's going up from there as applications scale up. So I kind of want to just make sure that Steve or AJ don't have other things that they want to add to this before we start talking about like how it actually comes together because I think sort of these fundamental cultural ideas are important to what Web3 is. And if we don't understand those, then we don't really understand what we're trying to build. So 

STEVE_EDWARDS: I know, you know, as I was listening to you, I'm not, you know, I haven't really studied the blockchain and the little pieces of the technology that are involved in in Web3. But I'm just thinking of times in the past where I've heard podcasts or read blog posts or any other information out there about people attempting to decentralize the web. There's always some new, not necessarily a paradigm, but network that somebody's working on or some other way that people are going to, quote unquote, decentralize the web and help get away from all these walled gardens that we find ourselves dealing with. So I'll have to say that I'll believe it when I see it. I tend to be pretty skeptical of things like this. So I'm curious to see how it works and maybe try to understand it a little better. But when I actually see something functioning, then I'll believe it, I guess. 

NIK_KALYANI: Yeah. I think you have reason to be skeptical because the technology is not yet available at scale. And while the technology works, the problem is that we haven't done as a community at large, we haven't done a good job with the user experience which is why most people haven't experienced it the way, in a way that they can understand it and the way they can believe it and they can really take advantage of the technology. I'm a pragmatist. I don't believe that decentralized technologies are going to replace everything. I think they are sort of an evolution of where we are. And there are very specific set of problems and challenges that they are a great solution for, but they aren't a solution for everything. And we may or may not evolve the technology to a point where it is fast enough and scalable enough where it can potentially replace what we have today, which works very well, but it has its problems. Like all technologies come with some set of problems. And so I'm very optimistic though that for the types of problems that Web3 is designed to solve, it is already showing a lot of promise for working very well. So you express like, you know, the ability to sort of replace Web2. I don't think that's necessarily going to happen. But there is a specific set of people or entities that could benefit from having a web presence that cannot be shut down by state authorities, for example, or dictators or bad regimes. So decentralized storage like IPFS, which is an overblown acronym for interplanetary file system, it's just a decentralized storage system. There's also one called Skynet and there's called RV. Those are some of the popular ones. They make it possible for you to essentially have a website just like you would on web two, except that you cannot shut it down because it is basically decentralized on so many different nodes that you can shut one down, but there's many others still available. So for us who live in the United States, for example, where we have freedoms, et cetera, it's very easy to be complacent about the fact that, oh yeah, you know you have your ISP, you pay them money, and you have your website, and they won't mess with it. But in other places, it's really hard to have that kind of capability and hard to get a message out and the truth about what's really happening without censorship, etc. And those are some important use cases that we need to provide for. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: You know, one of the, I guess one of the analogies that comes to mind takes me back to days of Napster and then LimeWire and some of the other music downloading things back when that was first coming in, where you had different copies of file all over the place and you sort of downloaded pieces and generated your own MP3 file, which is at the time back then. Is that similar to what we're talking about with Web3 or is that just the same idea just with a totally different implementation? 

NIK_KALYANI: So you mean like fit towards? 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Yeah, something like that. 

NIK_KALYANI: Yeah. Yeah, there's similarities, but there's also differences. What those protocols did was essentially allowed streaming from multiple nodes simultaneously to address the bandwidth available with multiple nodes, especially with home users who don't have a lot of upstream bandwidth. So by doing that in parallel, where you get chunks of data from many different locations at the same time, it addresses that. So it was designed to address both the storage problem and also the bandwidth problem. But decentralization is about a slightly different kind of focus. It's about making sure that there's availability of a certain asset, whether it's media or text or whatever, and you cannot shut it down. So while the while reading, you can take advantage of the protocol, might take advantage of multiple nodes being available. The most important thing is availability and also the ability for the network nodes to validate that data has not been tampered with on Napster. For example, you couldn't tell if a file named a certain thing actually contained some malicious payload, right? There's no way for you to tell that. But in decentralized networks, because of the cryptographic underpinnings of it, you can be you can cryptographically verify that nothing has been tampered with. That is, I think, a very, very important aspect of the protocols. 

AJ_O’NEAL: So I've, can you all hear me? Okay, so I've missed part of this discussion, but I'm going to butt in there because of what's happened with OpenSea. Okay, yeah, given that you actually know a key, which no one does, then you can verify that something came from a particular key. However, look at what's happened with OpenSea. People go steal other people's work, they sign it with their key, they collect the money, and they're selling hashes of pictures that they didn't make, they didn't produce, they don't own, and there's no legal recourse for it because they technically didn't actually sell anything with his copywritten because they sold a hash which was not the picture. And also we pretend that IPFS just exists out in the ether among the interplanetary system network, but it turns out that there's only one planet with internet and it also turns out that those hard drives have to exist somewhere. And if you're not paying, then you're the product. Who are these people that are storing all this data? What reliability guarantees would I possibly hope to have? And why are they incentivized to host it? 

NIK_KALYANI: Yeah, so there's quite a few questions there. So let's break it down. We'll start with the OpenSea issue. So OpenSea is first of all a centralized marketplace. It's not a decentralized marketplace. And therefore it comes with all the problems that centralized marketplaces have in general. It is subject to to scammers, it is subject to all kinds of malicious things. It does not change the fact that the actual assets on chain, they are subject to the same cryptographic integrity as anywhere else. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Yeah, but what I'm saying is I can upload a virus to IPFS and you can verify its cryptographic integrity. That doesn't make it not a virus. 

NIK_KALYANI: Sure. And if I intended to download a virus, then that would be great. But if I didn't, I would want to make sure that I knew who the person or the persons were and could verify the on-chain reputation before I downloaded that. So I agree that's conflating two issues. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Okay, fair, fair. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, I want to derail us back to the topic at hand though, because this is like verifying files and things like that. And what we're talking about is kind of this decentralized web apparatus that we're going to build apps on. Right? So my question is, is, you know, you said this is a good thing for some use cases, but not others, right? And so I'm curious, like where, because we kind of went to the Napster example, you know, and BitTorrent and things like that, but that's not really what we're talking about. So what is a good use case for this? Like where are we looking at and going, all right, this makes a lot of sense for, for web three and what we're offering here. 

NIK_KALYANI: Sure. There's quite a few different applications. There's some in the domain of DeFi, decentralized finance. But I think I'd like to use one in the domain of NFTs, non-fungible tokens, because it's something that most people have heard about. They may not actually understand it, but it's a good one. So let's say that you have a digital asset that's actually valuable. And I don't wanna get into what's valuable and what's not, but let's assume that there is a digital asset that's valuable. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Like a podcast episode. 

NIK_KALYANI: A podcast episode, fantastic. It's like the premier one or some amazing thing and it is available as a digital asset and it is extremely valuable. Let's say that it's a million dollars. Many people want to claim ownership of it and have like a stake in it, but they can't. So one of the ways in which you can orchestrate a smart contract with that digital asset is to have fractional ownership. So multiple people can have a piece of that on chain cryptographically verified through their private keys. And you could say that, well, I can just do that by having a Web2 application with maybe a DocuSign or something like that where everyone has signed it and that's great. Now the problem there is transfer of ownership and also who controls that particular asset. So in the case of this fractional ownership, what you could do is set up a smart contract and you say something like if 60% of people vote a certain way, then the asset will be transferred. Otherwise, we'll hold on to it as a very simple decision point there. Individually, each of those fractions, and maybe it's a million dollars and you've made it into a thousand fractions, each of those could independently sell their stake anytime they wanted to without consulting the others. It doesn't matter. It's just transferring the ownership of the asset or the So that's a very simple use case where on-chain without relying on any external entities, without having any kind of storage it just works because of the cryptographic integrity that smart contracts allow you to have. So that's one thing. Of course, the canonical example is cryptocurrency, but I know that that could get political and get into like what's the advantage of fiat, et cetera. But I think fractional ownership of digital assets is a pretty good example. Other simpler examples are where let's say that there's a ban and they issue an NFT and that NFT is nothing more than support for the ban. But also if you happen to show up at their concert or whatever, just by virtue of having that NFT, maybe you get some swag or you get upgraded, you get backstage passes or something like that, where, yes, you could have that exact same thing available, maybe via a Ticketmaster or something like that. But this is the challenge there. You've got a middle person. And one of the big challenges in tickets, for example, concerts is fraud. You don't know if it's authentic or not transferring or buying it from someone else. And that's a huge problem. That problem goes away when you have NFTs as access tokens for digital events. So as I mentioned earlier, I'm a pragmatist and I believe that with Web2 technologies, you can always build in enough layers to enforce the kind of security you have natively with blockchain. That is 100% given. But when the technology exists to do this at scale and just in a simple way using open tools, You have to pause and think like, what is better proprietary solutions every single time or an open solution for everybody. 

AJ_O’NEAL: If you're giving an example of a ticket though, that is something that is centralized. It's issued by a ticketing authority. And I don't, I don't see how a smart contract helps that.

NIK_KALYANI: Like I said, let's take the secondary market. People go to StubHub and sell. StubHub takes a cut. When you buy from there, you do not know if it's authentic. You might get a QR code or a barcode or something like that. You hope that it's authentic. You won't find out until you go to the turnstile. But with a smart contract, the central authority that issues those tickets, they will issue them as NFTs. And they are fraud proof. They cannot be tampered with. They are always going to be authentic. You can know if it's been redeemed or not. When you transfer it, there is no middleman to worry about. You just transfer it and you're done. You don't need anyone to take a cut off of the price. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Oh, yeah. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Right. Because the, so the issuance is on the ledger of the ticket, correct? And then the transfer of the ticket is also on the ledger. So you can verify it every step of the way. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Yep. Exactly. If StubHub was selling the tickets, they could have a way to do this as well. 

NIK_KALYANI: Yeah. As I said. You can always find ways to build bulletproof things. 

AJ_O’NEAL: I guess if it was, if there was a standard for it that did exist and it was cheap to do, which my understanding is that smart contracts are, you lose value every time you take an action because there's a gas price. And so if the ticket was originally $99, but then you sell it to someone, then that the smart contract reaps the cut. And then if they traded to someone else, the smart contract reaps the cut. So I don't, I don't understand. 

NIK_KALYANI: Yeah, that's actually incorrect. I'm sorry. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Okay, great. 

NIK_KALYANI: I will correct that. But before that, you know, I want to take a step back. I understand everyone who is skeptical about decentralized technologies. I get it. Let me step back a little bit and put you into that mind frame when MongoDB was first coming into prominence, everyone said document databases. These are stupid. Why would anyone want that? You know, SQL works just great. And now you look and it is pervasive. It is everywhere. Because people figured out that there are certain use cases where that technology document-centric databases work really well. They work well, especially for social media applications, etc. Where you don't have to do a hundred different sub queries to return a set of data. So this is exactly how we need to approach decentralized technology. I don't expect everyone to believe it or even to care about it, but it is a technology. It is there and it is going to stick around. So the question is, will you just continue to be skeptical about it or will you dive a little bit into it and explore some of the use cases? 

AJ_O’NEAL: So that's what I'm asking. I go with Steve on this one. Show me a use case where it is, so the metrics are more convenient, a cheaper or more performing, right? So for something to take hold traditionally, now there is the hype cycle, the fads, the fashion type of things that defy those, right? But typically, while people buy health, wealth and status, that's what people buy. So the status one can just take all sorts of forms, and it doesn't obey the regular rules. But most most things for a technical advantage to take place, it has to be significantly cheaper, significantly more convenient or significantly more performance. So if you if you look at show me a use case, where this is not a Rube Goldberg machine. Show me a use case where it's significantly something that it works. You could, you know, it's clear, it's easy to say, oh, no, we don't just need to tweak StubHub a little and add an extra check, but that, oh man, if we did this, oh, we'd save on costs, we'd delight customers, et cetera. 

NIK_KALYANI: Yeah, we speak from a perspective where we have access to any bank we want, anytime we want. Let's take a large portion of the world that's unbanked. Cross border finance is huge for them. That is only possible with cryptocurrency. There's a use case that is in use right now in countries where people are using cryptocurrency as their primary means of moving and storing their income. That's one. The collectibles have always been there. We've had baseball cards, we've had stamps, we've had coins, all kinds of collectibles. We are moving them to the digital realm now and making them much more accessible to people at scale, where you can trade them easily, where you can get their value easily, you can know their authenticity easily. So if baseball cards have been around for a while and people like those and they have a hobby and we've made them digital and more secure, why is that a bad thing? 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: So one area that I'm just going to derail us again, that's my thing. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: I think the term is rerail us Chuck after we got derailed.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I mean, it's definitely interesting kind of the use cases that we're talking through here. One thing that I'm a little curious about is, okay, so we're talking about the use case in the sense of, you know, I own an asset and I want to use the asset. I guess my other question, you know, as we kind of dive into this a little bit is, as a developer, right, how does this affect me when I'm starting to look at some of these applications and say, okay, maybe, yeah decentralized banking or decentralized assets of some kind, right? Maybe it's decentralized. No, you have some way of notarizing ownership of something, right? That that's in the physical world. So what does that begin to look like for, for me as a developer, building an app where that's something that, you know, I'm working on. 

NIK_KALYANI: Great, great question. I think I'd like to answer that by first kind of describing the lay of the land or what code looks like in the world of blockchains because I'm not sure that everyone in the web 2 world might understand that. So when we say smart contracts, let's just be clear, they're neither smart nor contracts. They're just basically applications. They just have the term smart contracts that has stuck with it. So many blockchains have the ability to run code. They do it via a virtual machine. The most popular of them is Ethereum and it has the Ethereum virtual machine. So as the name suggests, it is literally a virtual machine and it has a programming language called Solidity and it's got a couple of others also. And what these EVMs do is essentially take code that has been created and deployed on the blockchain. It executes that code and the result of it might change the state of the blockchain and that's data. So a couple of things, the code that you run, the application is immutable. So once you've deployed it to the blockchain, it can never be changed. That's where the contract thing comes from. It's a contract in code, because in typical programs today, you find a bug, you fix the bug, you push out a new release, it goes through your CI, CD, boom, you've got the fix out there, new version, problem solved. With blockchain applications, we have to be much more deliberate, because any code you put there is immutable, it's there forever so that code, when it executes, it manipulates data. That data is in that same application. So we are used to the concept of application logic and data being sort of separate. You know, your data is typically in a database and your application logic is running maybe on your API server or something like that. In a smart contract, both the code and the data, the code manipulates that data. It's all together. So that's what we are talking about when it comes to contracts. How does that actually work? Well, there are functions just like you would have in JavaScript or C sharp or whatever. There are functions and external entity, meaning a person or a program can call using RPC, the remote procedure call into the blockchain node. And it can be any blockchain node. So let's say that there's a Ethereum blockchain and has 500 nodes. You can pick any node you want. And you can access the contract address where it resides and call that particular function with whatever parameters. And if that contract function executes successfully, and maybe it has a value of x equals zero and you wanted x to be incremented by one, then x will now change to one. Now here's the thing about blockchain programs and smart contracts. The data in them is always free to read. You can read it as much as you want, infinitely. But whenever you want to change state on the blockchain, regardless of what you're doing, doesn't matter if it's with your program or you're just moving funds between two accounts, anytime you change the state of the blockchain, you have to pay for that. And that is commonly called a gas. Now, in our world, which we live in, the current world we live in too, that cost is absorbed by someone else. When you use Gmail, you never think about paying for it. Why? Because Google's paying for it. They make their money elsewhere. Here in the decentralized world, the nodes are all run by independent operators there, you have to pay for that computing resource. And that's what gas boils down to. Now, gas is a big issue. And it is like, Oh, God, everything is very expensive. Yes, it is. Because the blockchain technology is going through an evolution. The first sort of way, which Bitcoin actually was the first one, use a technology called proof of work, where your computer, the people who were essentially adding the blocks to the blockchain, it's done through a process of mining simplistic, simplistically that required them to solve complex mathematical problems. That's where the energy usage came from. But people realized very quickly that that is not a long-term solution. So we have since moved to something called proof of stake, where people actually stake money to have the right to do that, which now the cost of energy is no different than you running your computer for browsing or watching a video or whatever it is. It's no different at all. But because the narrative of proof of work is just much more exciting because it's about using energy and depleting the planet's resources and all that. That's the narrative that the media continues to hang on to, whereas that is first-generation technology on its way out. So proof of stake is where things are. Now that brings us to the cost of gas. So because of the way the protocols work, the early Ethereum protocol, et cetera, there was a substantial cost to this. That is changing. If you look at blockchains, like I'll just throw out a few as an example, like Solana, avalanche, polygon, et cetera, the cost of these transactions is miniscule, like one thousandth of a penny at times for our transaction. So even that is evolving very rapidly to the point where the cost of gas will start getting low very quickly and then the technology can start really being adopted by mainstream. So I hope I answered some of your questions there about applications. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I think you did. I'm trying to envision like as far as like costs and stuff, right? So, you know, we, yeah, hopefully we start seeing and get to the point where people are going, wow, this is a really viable way for me to get my computing done. And it's a really simple way of sharing the data. Um, I'm imagining that cause yeah, some of these we're talking about like NFTs or keeping track of, you know, smart contracts where, you know, it's like, I'm transferring ownership of this to that or doing things like that. I'm imagining also, you know, things like you know, maybe social networks or things like that, right? Where again, you know, the, the, your past chain of posts is immutable or, you know, maybe there is some kind of a deletion or encryption or something like that, I guess. I don't know how realistic that is, but we'll set that aside. So, so I build this web three application where essentially when I post, you know, it, it does that work on the other end. And then, yeah, I can just go read it off of the blockchain and posted to my site, so it's all decentralized. The issue that I'm curious about is, we've seen other things, social media like Twitter and Facebook, I remember during Arab Spring and stuff, people were saying, well, anybody could post to it and so it helped all these movements and things like that. Again, not passing any value judgments, I know there are political concerns there. But eventually, it became much more centralized. So now we have claims of censorship and things like that. Again, I'm not getting them political on this. But within Twitter and Facebook, right, they're taking down posts that they, you know, about things they don't agree with and they're closing accounts for violating their terms, which some people agree with and some people don't. And so I imagine that this blockchain kind of solves some of those issues. But if I own the blockchain or I'm the one that is writing those contracts, would it just become another centralized place where I'm just storing it in a fancy way? 

NIK_KALYANI: Yeah. If no one checks that smart contract code and sees that you've done that. One of the beauties of public blockchains and smart contracts is all the code is available for everyone to look at. And so if you see code that has those characteristics, you would say like, well, this is ridiculous. I will not use it. 

AJ_O’NEAL: So this is related, maybe just tangentially, maybe not as much I think. But what about the I don't remember what social networks they were. But basically, there were some decentralized social networks. And they just started I guess looking at root nodes and figuring out which clients were coming from a particular sub network and then blocking people and then blocking anyone that didn't have those networks in their block list. I want to say it started with a G. I don't remember what it was, but that happened last year. A quote unquote decentralized network started censoring people too. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. I don't know if you're talking. I know Mastodon you confederate between social networks and I don't know if you can disallow people from other networks. 

AJ_O’NEAL: But they basically just made a pact of... Because the way that... 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Oh, interesting. 

AJ_O’NEAL: The descent and correct me if I'm wrong, Nick, here, but the way that the blockchains work is on a concept of a distributed hash table. And the distributed hash table is a fancy way of saying you ship the authority with the code. So when you download the code, the code has the distributed hash table root nodes in it and then you contact those root nodes and then it gives you other nodes. And each node could create a blacklist and just say, hey, we're not going to allow these nodes. So people don't... Everything has a source of truth. There is no such thing as truly decentralized because you have to reach out somewhere to start the conversation and it has to be a known entity. And so I'm not clear on the technical details of this, but what I think happened was some of the root nodes and the secondary nodes just kind of made a pact together that they were going to share a blacklist of nodes that participated in networks that a certain client used. And then they started telling other people, if you don't adopt our blacklist for your nodes in your hash table, then we're going to put you on our blacklist. And so they started, they started central. It wasn't really centralization. It was, it was group consensus. It was majority vote, which is, is what a blockchain is essentially, but they were able to move. 

NIK_KALYANI: So what's your, yeah. So one of the, the core premises of the security of decentralized networks is to protect against something that we call the 51% attack where you cannot have sort of a majority of the nodes, just make a decision and then essentially cause a havoc. So the protocol, I'm not a protocol engineer, and I don't know enough about the workings of protocols, but those are the kinds of things that larger scale, more popular blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, et cetera, have addressed really well. So if there is, if someone has created a protocol, what we call an L1 chain, and it's a standalone entity whose purpose is to run a social network, et cetera, and if they have not engineered that protocol well to handle the security and make it susceptible to 51% attacks. And I can certainly see the scenario you described manifest itself. But in general, on the larger public chains, this is something that is like bread and butter. You have to have protected against it. You do have the potential for forks to happen. That's when a majority of the nodes start veering off on a different using a different blockchain. So, but that has not happened and is not foreseeable to happen for a while on the larger public chains. But you're gonna have smaller chains with fewer nodes where for all practical purposes, they are no more different than a server farm, you know, in a Web2 world. So in that case, yeah, I mean, people can do the kinds of things you're talking about, but I don't wanna take that, have those things take the limelight away, you know, from the fact that a vast majority of the public protocols have been designed to be secure against those 51% type attacks. Cool. 

 

Hey folks, this is Charles Max Wood from Top End Devs. And lately I've been working on actually building out Top End Devs. If you're interested, you can go to topendevs.com slash podcast and you can actually hear a little bit more about my story about why I'm doing what I'm doing with Top End Devs, why I changed it from devchat.tv to Top End Devs. But what I really want to get into is that. I have decided that I'm going to build the platform that I always wished I had with DevChat.tv. And I renamed it to Top End Devs because I want to give you the resources that are going to help you to build the career that you want. Right? So whether you want to be an influencer in tech, whether you want to go and just max out your salary and then go live a lifestyle with your family, your friends, or just traveling the world or whatever, I want to give you the resources that are going to help you do that. We're going to have career and leadership resources in there and we're gonna be giving you content on a regular basis to help you level up and max out your career. So go check it out at topendevs.com. If you sign up before my birthday, that's December 14th. If you sign up before my birthday, you can get 50% off the lifetime of your subscription. Once again, that's topendevs.com. 

 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: So I guess one thing that I'm wondering about is this is a JavaScript show, right? You're writing this stuff in Solidity. I'm assuming the NPC calls have, you know, it's JavaScript or whatever, right? Just HTTP call or something. I mean, why would I want to get into this? Right? Because most of the web just, it just functions kind of the way that it always has. So why would I want this? And then the other question I'm asking in a minute is how? 

NIK_KALYANI: Great question. And so, you know, in the world of web development, you have front end developers, you have backend developers, and you have full stack kind of developers. This is no different than that. If you are going to right smart contracts, you can the analogy is you're a backend developer. You're working with APIs, databases, stuff like that. You're working in the world of blockchain. Let's say it's Ethereum, you're working with Solidity. If it's a Flow blockchain, you're working with Cadence. If it's Solana, you're working with Rust. This is a developer with specialized skills and experience of understanding the new programming paradigm of smart contracts. I'll give you a simple example. When we program in C sharp, Java, JavaScript, whatever, we are rarely thinking of the cost per line of execution of our code. 20 lines, 50 lines, don't think too much about it. It's not content. Every execution, every operation there costs money. So you write really tight code and you use a concept called fail fast. You wanna make sure you check all your inputs and all that. Not at the point where you're gonna use them in your code, you check them all up front so you can fail immediately. So there's no... So all of that in a nutshell, is highly specialized. So if you are going to go down that path, it's because you're choosing to. There is no requirement that everyone who builds decentralized apps be a smart contract developer. In fact, 70 to 80% of developers for decentralized apps already have all the skills they need. JavaScript, HTML, CSS, know how to use NPM install, and the library associated with the the particular blockchain with Ethereum, the libraries are Web3.js or Ethers.js. Take a pick, either one of those. In fact, there's even a framework called HardHack you work with, all JavaScript, nothing to do with smart contracts or anything like that. You literally are writing JavaScript functions. That's it. So for JavaScript developers, Web3 represents a green field of opportunity. Like really amazing applications you can build. There's a lot of opportunities and there's a lot of money, honestly, from a career standpoint to be made with just taking your skills and learning one of these libraries, not learning a new language at all, but learning how decentralized apps function. That is for a competent JavaScript developer, about an hour's worth of work. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Okay. So it sounds like, yeah, I probably have most of the skills that I'm going to want or need in order to pick this up, right? So I can pick it up rather quickly. I guess the other question I have is, I mean, most people, if they're looking for jobs, they're looking for jobs based on some kind of demand curve. And you're talking like there's a lot of demand out there for this kind of work. How do I figure that out? And how do I find those jobs? 

NIK_KALYANI: Yeah, I mean, a large number of the jobs right now are in two domains, creating decentralized finance applications and creating NFT-based applications. Those are super, super high in demand. And if you just Google crypto and developer, I think you should be able to find it on the usual sites, you know, or usual job sites. They are available. The thing though is with decentralized technologies, and Web3 in particular, I talked earlier about how it's not just about the technology, it's about culture. So I think when you talk about jobs, this might be an opportune moment to talk about organizations. More than likely, as time passes, like let's say, you know, we are in 2023, 2024, most people who are just entering into the Web3 space are going to work not for a company, but are going to work for a DAO. So a DAO is really think of a company, but with its governance model, etc. built on a smart contract. So instead of having a board of directors, etc., it is more governance is handled by the members of the DAO. A closer analogy would be something like a collective or an HOA or something like that, where it's about the people who are part of a community by virtue of owning tokens in that community, they have votes in what that community does. So you could, as a member of the community, propose an action or a change in how the community works. The other members vote on it, and then it becomes how the community functions. So more and more DAOs are where people go to do work. So if you're a designer, you might go work for a DAO and do your design work. If you're a programmer, you might do that. So there are special purpose DAOs being created for content creators. There's now one of the largest DAOs is Developer DAO, which is growing very, very fast. And in fact, at the end of February, they will have their first conference and a large number of those developers are JavaScript developers. So that's where I think a lot of the career growth is going to come. It's not going to come through centralized companies making blockchain applications. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Okay. So color me confused and skeptical at the same time. I'm confused. So if I'm a developer and I'm working for this DAO, how's my day to day different than, than working for a company? 

AJ_O’NEAL: I, you know, your, I work for a DAO by the way. 

NIK_KALYANI: So you might have some question there. 

AJ_O’NEAL: So I do work for Dash Dash Incubator, which is a DAO. I recently learned this because to me it's, you know, kind of money in hours out kind of thing. I will pick... 

STEVE_EDWARDS: You recently learned that you're working for a DAO or you recently learned about DAO? 

AJ_O’NEAL: I recently learned that it is called a DAO.

STEVE_EDWARDS: Gotcha. Okay. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Because so the way that it works is there are proposals, at least in Dash, I imagine the different DAOs can have different ways of organizing things, but there are proposals and there are stakeholders and stakeholders essentially, it's not all Ethereum smart contracts. There's other stuff as well. And Dash has its own way of doing its quote unquote smart contracts slash voting system. But basically proposals go up, they get assigned a manager. The manager assigns a bounty for specific tasks within the proposal. Then developers request to take on the task. Then when the task is completed, the manager signs off on it. And then the bounty is claimed and issued from the voter node pool. I'm not sure if I'm explaining it right. Brian will probably kill me once he listens to this episode, but. But that's my experience with it is Ryan and I have a conversation. He makes sure that a task gets put up on a list with a bounty associated with it. And then he makes sure that I get paid to my Dash address, and then I can cash out in US dollars or eat it out back steakhouse. Because I now have a MasterCard and gift card system called Dash Direct and all this stuff. So it actually... And Dash is a little bit different from the other ones because Dash is digital cash. If you go on their website, there's no mention of blockchain or cryptocurrency. They're very much marketed towards, here's a technology that happens to exist. We're trying to figure out how to make it easier for people to do digital money. It's not necessarily the blockchain religion. It's just somebody created blockchain stuff. They're trying to take advantage of it. And a lot of the work is related to that end. So the things that I am working on are management tools and also merchant tools so that it's easier for merchants to transact digital money. So it is somewhat self-serving in the sense of...some people have given it the criticism of a company script because you're working for the company that's job is to produce the ability to transact this money and you're given this money as payment for the work that you do. But Nik, you can extend on- 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So there's this list of work that has to be done and you say, hey, I wanna do this project and there's a predetermined amount that you get paid for completing such a task and then you get paid for it in digital money or monopoly money or however you determine to get paid. Is that right?

NIK_KALYANI: It's certainly not monopoly money. It is real. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: I know I'm just thrown. Yeah, I know. I'm just thrown in terms. 

NIK_KALYANI: That is one model. And you actually described it very accurately. I mean, there's bounties. You can think of it like the gig economy, right? Like you can take that on. But then there are DAOs where which are a little more mature, which have gone beyond all simple tasks. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Gloves thrown down. 

NIK_KALYANI: Sorry. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Just saying. They're dows that are a little more mature. Technically, dash is the very first down. So it would actually be the most. But anyway, going on, 

NIK_KALYANI: I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe it's not about the maturity of the doubt, but the majority of his model where they, they recognize that for certain complex tasks, you can't have ad hoc developers do stuff. It requires continuity. It requires experience, et cetera. In which case you might have a working group or a guild there are different names where you might have a full-time role and you draw a full-time salary and that might be typically in either USDC, which is a stablecoin, the equivalent of one US dollar for each USDC, or it might be in tokens or it might be Ethereum, depending on what the model of that particular DAO is. But ultimately, it comes down to the fact that you are not contractually bound to only work for one DAO. You can be working concurrently with as many DAOs as you want at your own pace, at your own schedule, at your own location, however you want. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So how's that different than standard freelancing? 

NIK_KALYANI: The difference is that standard freelancing requires you to be more upfront about sort of marketing. You need to go and sell yourself and promote yourself and find your next gig, etc. Here with DAOs, the gigs are are available, easier to find and you don't have to limit yourself to one particular doubt. You can choose the skills you want to apply and work on them. So yeah, in a sense, it's similar without the need to constantly have to market yourself. There's also, 

STEVE_EDWARDS: so how is this tied back to web three then? I guess is where I'm confusing. I mean, it's to me, I mean, what you're explaining sounds like a business model. Sure. It's, it's maybe slightly different from freelancing or a standard company. It's just another variation, but I'm curious, I'm trying to understand how this ties back to Web 3 and blockchain and all the other stuff we've been talking about. 

NIK_KALYANI: I think that's a fantastic question. So the DAOs have emerged in order to address the fact that we live in a world where in companies a very few people make all the decisions and a very few people benefit from the productivity of a very large number of people in that organization. Your average person does not get the same benefit as say the CEO or the board of directors, etc. Whereas they are doing all the work. DAOs are about democratizing the workforce and making it so that there is shared rewards for shared labor. And it's also based upon a set of rules and governance where you as a person working in an entity have a say in what that entity does more than you would. You would say that the parallel is stock ownership, but stock owners in a public corporation, for example, have very little say. You can show up at a meeting or whatever, but as individuals, your vote doesn't matter too much, but in DAOs, your individual votes matter. You can also delegate them to people who you trust. So it's it's way more flexible and it's also governed through smart contracts. So it's all open and transparent. There are you can do shenanigans. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: OK, but there's still there's. Sorry, Chuck. One more thing. There's still, you gotta have a manager, right? You're talking to a manager, you gotta have somebody that puts the work together and decides what's the work to be done, what's the value for this and so on, right? And I would think at some point, you gotta have an ultimate point of decision-making, just because based on personal experience and what I've watched, whether you wanna go back to the infamous Occupy Wall Street or any of those types of organizations where everybody tries to go by consensus, that didn't work. You need a final authority in some cases. So I'm curious to see where that fits in these DAO’s.

NIK_KALYANI: Yeah, within DAOs, you can have working groups, you can have guilds, etc. Those can have leaders, you can have a core group of leaders. The key thing to understand here, Steve, is that it's open and transparent. So everybody is aware of what's going on. And there isn't some of the closed room decision making, the favoritism, the nepotism, all of that. It's much, much, much harder to do because it's transparent and open that's the difference. And ultimately, this is designed for a generation of people that are coming out of college, et cetera, that are really disgruntled with how life, in general, has been to them. It's really hard for them to find, their career prospects are not super bright. They want to work, but we value experience more than maybe excitement and passion and the ability to wanna dive into something and just learn. Those kinds of things are not valued in companies today, it's harder to get a break. And DAOs give, especially young people, I think the opportunity to start exploring and experimenting with different things while finding their niche and finding their passion, and building experience. So DAOs won't replace everything not anytime soon, but they are an ongoing experiment. They are a new experiment in this laboratory of sort of business. It's a new way to conduct business. And I feel like especially for information centric businesses, DAOs are a great way to go. The jury is completely out on what will happen with DAOs if you, for example, change, choose a model where the company is manufacturing or something like that. But you have to look at it as an experiment. It's a work in progress. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. I think what I'm hearing is that the DAO itself, like AJ explained how the DAO that he's working for works, but they, I mean, they can adopt whatever governance model they want. And then the, what I'm understanding is that any changes to the governance model may then necessitate a change to the smart contracts that they use to govern the Dao, right? And so then when I vote or you vote or whoever votes, you know, that's all governed by smart contract at that point, right? So we changed the structure by changing the contract, which we all voted on using the smart contracts in the first place. And then all of this is saved to the ledger and it's all transparent and at the same time, if I buy into the Dao, so if I buy somebody else's token, right, and so I can vote or I buy enough of the tokens so that I can vote so many times, however it's structured, right? Again, maybe I buy six tokens, but it still only affords me one vote. That's all just built into how it runs. Then it's all open and transparent. I can see what's happening. I can see how the decisions are being made. All of the voting and everything else happens in an open way where everybody can see what's going on and it's all audited publicly. I can see where some companies may want to make private decisions. Like if they want to buy and negotiate on real estate or something like that, if the Dow needs to buy an office. I can see those kinds of things being something that they have to figure out and negotiate within their structure. But the rest of it, yeah, it seems that at the end of the day, the rest of that stuff all just gets handled on the Dao and then maybe, yeah, if there is some kind of privileged information that needs to be managed, you know, you put some kind of smart contract on that where it's encrypted maybe for a certain amount of time or things like that until until, yeah, it becomes open or however you manage that. But it's all you can see how it all runs because it's all managed in that decentralized manner. And then you set up the smart contracts to facilitate the actual business. 

NIK_KALYANI: Yep. That's a beautiful and very accurate summation.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. And I could definitely, I mean, I can come up with things that I think are probably drawbacks to it. I can also see that there are certain advantages to it, right? Where everybody kind of knows what's going on and how and why. And maybe you issue more. So you have a certain level of tokens that are there and then maybe you have a cryptocurrency that's also on the same blockchain that that's how people get paid. Or I mean, there are lots of it seems like it opens up a lot of possibilities, which

NIK_KALYANI: Yeah, I'll tell you one of the drawbacks, which DAOs are working to fix right now, is this idea that you have whales, meaning wealthy people who own a lot of the tokens. Well, they'll have a disproportionately large amount of the vote and they can influence where things go. We don't want that. That's not desirable. So DAOs are responding with having these models where there's, for example, quadratic voting, where each subsequent vote based on your tokens requires more and more tokens. So you get to the point where all your millions of tokens, et cetera, will still not be a sizable amount of vote. Another thing they're experimenting with is domain based voting. So for example, if the vote is about marketing, and you are a marketer, then your vote carries more weight than someone who's not a marketer, that kind of stuff, et cetera. So there's lots of these exciting experiments being run. And it's not perfect. It's not even good yet. But I can tell you it's very, very exciting because we get to it's like almost seeing a human experiment at scale in business models in real time. You're participating in it. You know, it's so much fun. It's kind of like being there in the early days when maybe the stock exchanges were being formed and things like that. What are the decisions being made? How did they come up with, you know, a C Corp versus an S Corp or whatever, all those kind of things. This is just so exciting to be part of this movement and to participate and you know that, well, some of these ideas are going to just bomb terribly. They're going to fail, but some of them are going to be just awesome. And that's what excites me. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Well, and tying this back to web three, cause we kind of went on Dows and NFTs and all this stuff, right? 

AJ_O’NEAL: Well, that's all web three though, right? It's all web. 

NIK_KALYANI: Yeah. 

AJ_O’NEAL: And the web three is just anything that is, is related to a blockchain or a cryptocurrency. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. For, for me, if I'm going back to just building apps, right? Kind of the thing that we do on the web right now. That's where this gets kind of interesting because I think there are going to be some applications that eventually blockchain is the way or Web3 is the way that they materialize. Just won't make sense once we figure some of this stuff out to do it any other way. And so if you're getting into it now, if you're interested in it now, it seems like a terrific direction to go in. Just keep in mind that yeah, it's still early. So some of it, yeah, we're still wading through some of the garbage that we're going to have to wait through on this stuff. But it, I think understanding it early is also going to be beneficial to a lot of people. 

NIK_KALYANI: Yep. Uh, and that's what I'm working on with my company in this technology. We are building the hyperverse for web two developers. And our basic thesis is that most web two developers don't want to learn smart contract programming and you want to make it as easy as NPM for them. So with the hyperverse, what we are doing is we are essentially having smart contract developers build these blockchain primitives, if you want to call it them, we call them smart modules. So instead of having like monolithic smart contracts that do a lot of things, we'll have smart contracts that do one thing really well. And what web developers can do is using our React-based front-end JavaScript libraries, just wire up all these different smart modules, kind of like Lego blocks and orchestrate your decentralized app. And not only that, you can make hybrid apps. You can have a combination of web two and web three apps. So maybe only one aspect of your app needs to be web three. Great, you know, build a web two app and just add this web three. So we are in the process, we are blockchain agnostic. So we're gonna work across all major blockchains eventually. And with the hyperverse, it'll be like NPM install. Just like that, it'll be hyperverse install. Pick the module you want, like NFT, add that. You've got, and then import it in your React app and you're good to go. 

AJ_O’NEAL: So How could you possibly be blockchain agnostic because they're highly, highly specific algorithmic protocols. So it seems like you either have to build for each of them individually, or you're not really building something on a blockchain. 

NIK_KALYANI: Yep, you are 100% right on both counts. So when I say blockchain agnostic, what I mean is that our specification that we have created, think of it like the NPM spec, right? It requires you to have a package JSON, it requires you to have a certain number of fields in there with certain values. Just like that, we require that hyperverse smart modules and the libraries, the front end libraries conform to the spec that is still evolving. We are working on it. But we are then making our hyperverse tooling available for each blockchain that we support. And for each of those, developers will have built the custom smart modules that would make sense on that. One of the things that's emerging right now is that Blockchains are also becoming special purpose. So there's general purpose blockchains like Ethereum, but then you're finding that there are some blockchains which are so fast that they're great for gaming, for example, or for DeFi, et cetera. So you're right. So each blockchain will have its own unique set of smart modules, but they're gonna have a common look and feel and they're gonna have a common front end where you can go and search and find these modules based on the blockchain you've picked. And the library for each one is also different, but because the hyperverse sort of interface is common across them, all of them, from a programming standpoint, it doesn't matter which blockchain you're programming for, the experience is the same, the developer experience is the same. 

AJ_O’NEAL: So okay, two things. One, how many different competitors do you have? Because it seems that this is something everybody wants to do, is to abstract all the blockchains. In which case, how do you get in a leading position to become the authority on abstracting blockchains so that people, so that you actually have real value rather than just being one of the millions of minnows? That's one. That's one. And two, if you abstract away all the blockchains, then how do you get any of the value of what they specifically offer by their differences? 

NIK_KALYANI: Yep. So we are not abstracting away the blockchains because what we are doing is making sure that the hyperverse library for each one is consistent. But the value proposition that we are providing is not necessarily in sort of the JavaScript part of it. Yes, we provide that, but anyone else can also come and provide that, that's fine. The value we are providing is in the actual modules, the smart modules that are referred to on chain. What we are building is an open, decentralized marketplace for smart contracts. So what I mean by that is any developer who knows how to program smart contracts can build a smart module and they can monetize it. They can choose to say that for each transaction, I want a penny, or if there's a monetary value to the transaction, they can say, I want 2% or whatever. So smart contract developers can monetize it that way, but for the JavaScript developers, you don't have to worry about how that module came into existence. You just need to decide if you wanna use it, if the price of it is reasonable for you, then you just use it with the Hyperverse library. Now, if you don't want to use our libraries, like the JavaScript libraries, and you want to like, well, I'm just going to write my own, you can do that because it's all on chain. So the value we are providing is not in the abstraction of it. The value we are providing it is in having a standard way in which smart contracts can be created, built, deployed, monetized, and more importantly, secured. Because one of the things that is a big challenge with any open source is, is the code secure? What if it's malicious? So we are building a community of auditors that will all audit those smart modules. And if they trust that the code is secure, they will stake their tokens as a form of security for those modules. That sort of access and insurance layer and allowing anyone consuming those modules to trust it. If the module turns out to have a problem, the stake, the money put up by those auditors gets slashed. They lose it. And that money then gets distributed to whoever suffered a loss. So this is an innovative security model we are also building on that. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: So one thing that I'm curious about, because we've talked a whole bunch about this, it seems kind of forward looking to me to be thinking, okay, you know, I'm gonna go learn how to build web three apps or web three organizations or whatever. What do you see coming next that's exciting? If we're being forward thinking, right? What's the next innovation gonna be? Or where does it come? 

NIK_KALYANI: I'm learning, I'm seeing every day that gaming, web three based gaming is huge. If you think about, the scenarios today where in-game assets are siloed into a certain game. NFTs are completely transforming that because you can have the ability to have a Web3 games where you can take your assets. You know, you want a sword in this game, go take it over to the other game. Trading and having games that have a play-to-earn model. So during the past year or so during COVID, for example, Axie Infinity was a very popular game in the Philippines the ability to make a living because they would essentially play this game generating in-game assets which are valued by other people who didn't want to spend that much time playing to earn them and just wanted to use them and they were willing to pay money to buy them. This is how a lot of people in the Philippines survived the pandemic. This is Web3 at scale solving and bringing economic equity. So I think gaming is going to continue to grow and a play to X whatever that X is, whether it's, you know, earn or grow, etc. Or even X to earn, you know, different models like that are being experimented with. And I'm very, very excited about those. Right now, you see, for example, Dapper Labs has NBA Top Shot, where you can collect NBA moments. Right now, they're just collectibles. But there is a mobile game imminent, where you can take your moments and assemble them into virtual teams and play. So that's going to be exciting. We do that, right? When we do the football games and stuff like that offline, when we pick our teams, et cetera. But being able to do that with NFTs that we own on chain, it's really exciting stuff. 

AJ_O’NEAL: So I must say, as the resident skeptic, this is actually something I believe is accurate. I believe that because gaming is a self-contained universe. And if you're talking about indie gamers, so if you're talking about a big studio, they're going to, you know, Nintendo is going to want the e-shop, Xbox is going to want Xbox Live, et cetera, right? I don't see them switching over to shareable assets anytime soon. But if you talk about indie gamers, somebody creates a standard Unity. Is it called Unity? Is that what it's called? 3D model. They created NFT for it. You have your character in one game. You transfer your character over to another game. From the developer's perspective, there's a financial incentive in it because they can put a smart contract into the character and the character being transferred can generate them income. They can build a business model around that and then they create a standard protocol to transfer assets between games with... I mean, they still have to come up with a schema for how to define the characteristics of the avatar or whatever, but I could definitely see this among indie gamers. It's a universe that exists within the internet, it doesn't require any outside interaction. It doesn't require any outside verification. It doesn't require any outside regulation, no oracles, none of that stuff because everything began and ended in the internet space without any real physical contact beyond it. So I actually believe that that is a use case that might not have been solved any other way because the big game big game studios would have no incentive to let you transfer trademarkable characters between universes. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Congratulations, Nick, you have earned the AJ seal of approval, which is very difficult to earn. 

NIK_KALYANI: Yay, I'm so excited. Thank you. Yeah, but really, you know, I think your analysis was spot on the big game studios. They have no incentive to get rid of their walled gardens. And yeah, with indies, etc. This this makes a lot of sense. And actually, the NFT standard, it's called ERC721 and another one called ERC1155. They've been baked in. They are there for a while now and they support all the standard metadata and all of this kind of stuff already. So we are actually working with a few game, game platforms to build just this kind of thing. And it's really exciting. Uh, I'm not a gamer, but there's a bunch of people on our team are gamers and they are pretty excited about this thing. So, yeah. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: I think ultimately what AJ explained kind of solidified in my head what this is all about, right? Because the big console makers, right, they're the ones with all the resources, they're the ones that benefit from a centralized infrastructure. And so they're the ones that are not going to go for this, right? And similarly in a lot of these other places where I'm providing a process or a things like that, where they either need to, or I want them to, because I benefit from it, need to keep them centralized, right? I need to keep them where in my app, where they live, blah, blah, blah, right? I'm not gonna go for this. But if I want to benefit from being part of an ecosystem where I can share, push, exchange, and otherwise keep track of ownership, location on the web, or whatever, and I can make a living by allowing people to participate in my thing and participate in everyone else's thing, those are the things that this opens up, right? And it seems like that's what we're talking about here, you know, with the different, the DAOs even, right? It's okay, well, do I want to be part of a centralized control company or do I want to be part of something that's a little more democratized like a DAO? Do I want to be part of a computing ecosystem where I share resources and other assets among the other parts of that ecosystem? Or do I want people to live in my little area, right? And there's nothing necessarily wrong about either approach. And they're going to be pros and cons to every organization and every application, depending on how they do it. Right. Some of them is just not going to make sense. And some of them are really well. And so that's where people are going to make that decision. Right. It's, it's, I'm going to benefit more from being part of this open ecosystem than I will by being behind this wall. 

AJ_O’NEAL: And if it's proof of stake type stuff, the indie game developers, it might make sense for them to run their own blockchain for essentially somewhere between 20 and $100 a month. To run their own node is what I meant to say, to participate. Because if you want to participate in a blockchain, you're either going to be running at home, and that's going to be unreliable if you're trying to provide a business service, or you're going to be running it in the cloud. And if you're running in the cloud, your bare minimum is probably looking around $20 a month. 

NIK_KALYANI: Yeah, I think that's where I would disagree. I don't think there's any need for game developers to be concerned with the infrastructure. Other people that's one of the beauties of the decentralized web. 

AJ_O’NEAL: It's not decentralized if you only let the... If the only people who are participating are a very small select group of people, it's not decentralized. If the game developers want to get in on this and they don't participate in it, you have to pay in at some point. Otherwise, there's no guarantee that the stuff you need will be there when you need it. If something goes wrong and people get out of this specialized NFT chain, if you've got two other people that are still running it, it'll still work. But you have to be able to supply the demands of your users. Anyway, I cut you off. That was rude of me. I'm sorry. I'll let you speak. 

NIK_KALYANI: Well, now what I was going to say is you should pick a blockchain that is already secure. And when I say the term secure for a blockchain, what I mean is it's got enough nodes out there unlikely to be shut down. It's reasonably decentralized. So like 500 nodes, a thousand nodes, you pick whatever is a reasonably good number for you. And some of the popular blockchains these days are hitting those thousands of nodes. So yeah. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: That makes sense. Yeah, there is some risk inherent in being part of a smaller chain with fewer nodes. But at the same time, right. But that on the flip side, if it grows and you're an early adopter, then there are advantages to that as well.

NIK_KALYANI: Maybe, maybe not. I mean, the advantages would be if you sort of acquired the native cryptocurrency of that blockchain at an early stage and you have, you're holding a sizable amount of it then. Uh, but otherwise really what you're benefiting from is the fact that the platform on which you are building is growing stronger and is getting more adoption and that always helps. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Cool. Well, we're kind of at the end of our time. If people want to check out the hyperversio building. Where do they find all that stuff? 

NIK_KALYANI: Yeah, so they can go to decentology.com. We are going to start our preview here in early February. And all through the month of February, we'll be releasing incremental updates. And we'll be doing a public sort of launch in March. I come from the Web2 world myself. I've been in the Microsoft ecosystem for a long time. Was a co-founder of DNN, open source CMS, the C Sharp development, et cetera. So I also initially looked at this with a healthy amount of skepticism. And what I would encourage people to do is to not just go by what the media says because most of those things are old and outdated. Go check out and download an SDK or something now and just tinker with it for a weekend and see for yourself what it's like. Skepticism is warranted and welcome because that actually helps improve things I think skepticism without actually having experienced or tried it, you might end up being skeptical for the wrong reasons. Be skeptical, but for the right reasons, you know? So check out this stuff. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So let me clarify. Sorry, you're saying not to believe the media. Am I understanding correctly? Kidding. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Here we go. All right. A few other things. You guys do a regular meetup where you talk about the Web3 stuff, right? Where do people get on that?

NIK_KALYANI: Yeah, so we have a regular sort of every Thursday we have, I call it a block chai and chill, where people just bring their chai or their coffee or whatever and chill and we talk about Web3 topics. I also do a lot of Twitter spaces. I'm at at Tech Bubble on Twitter, where I generally try and answer web developers' questions, much like what we have been doing today. But you can find all that information from decentology.com. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Right. And then one last thing I just wanted to bring up is that I've been wanting to for a while put out sort of a regular like second episode segment kind of thing about JavaScript topics. And so I talked to Nick and some of the other folks at Decentology because I wanted to bring in Web 3. And so we're going to put out you're going to get a Web 3 topic going forward on that as well. So that's going to start sometime in February. Keep an eye out because yeah, Nick and I will jump on one every month and just give you something about Web 3. So keep an eye out for that as well. 

NIK_KALYANI: I am really looking forward to that. That's going to be. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah. I kind of wanted to set the stage here, right? Cause there is context that will help people understand what we're talking about there. All right. Well, let's go ahead and jump into picks. 

 

Hi, this is Charles Maxwood from top end devs. And lately I've been coaching some people on starting some podcasts and in some cases, just taking their career to the next level, you know, whether you're beginner going to intermediate and immediate going to advanced, whether you're trying to get noticed in the community or go freelance. I've been helping these folks figure out how to get in front of people, how to build relationships and how to build their careers and max out and just go to the next level. So if you're interested in talking to me and having me help you go to the next level, go to topendevs.com slash coaching. I will give you a one hour free session where we can figure out what you're trying to do, where you're trying to go and figure out what the next steps are. And then from there we can figure out how to get you to the place you want to go. So once again, that's topendevs.com slash coaching. 

 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: AJ, do you have some picks for us? 

AJ_O’NEAL: I don't know. I didn't know we were doing this today. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: No problem. 

AJ_O’NEAL: We'll stump it up. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: All right, Steve, do you have some picks for us? 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Do I have picks? I'll just stick with the jokes of the week. No, Nick, this is always the high point of the podcast. Chuck just gets tons of contact letters that say we need more dad jokes. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: So. Mm-hmm.

STEVE_EDWARDS: You can hear the excitement. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Sure. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So anyway, my favorite things are eating my family and not using commas. You know, I'm very good. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Took me a minute. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Sorry. Yeah. Punctuation matters. Punctuation matters. Yes. So the other day I beat a black belt at karate and my next challenge is a green sock. And finally, so I was sitting in church the other day and I was sitting next to this elderly couple and I heard the wife say to her husband, She goes, I let out one of those silent farts, what do I do? And he says, change the battery in your hearing aid. Pfft. 

NIK_KALYANI: That's true. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Yeah, don't laugh, it only encourages him. All right. Well, I'll jump in with my picks here real quick. So I always do a board game pick. My wife's cousins and her sister and brother-in-law came over to play board games on Saturday. And we had a good time. Uh, one of the games that we played that my sister-in-law brought is called wavelength and it's more of a party game, which really is not my speed at all. I, I generally it's like, it's like, oh, Is this more or less what everybody else thinks? It's just, eh, whatever. Anyway, this one was kind of funny though, because some of the things, we just had funny conversations off of them, which was fun. So I'm gonna pick it if that's your speed, you know, it's the, well, it could, because what you do is you dial, so you have a dial and it's a blind dial, so you just spin it, and then when you're done, whoever's giving the clue opens it up and you see where the where people will score if they guess it, right? And then you close it back up and you have a clue card. And so one of the clue cards was like, vapes doesn't vape, right? And so give a clue, you know, it's like 30 year old men, right? Cause I was aiming for a little bit more toward vapes, but you know, not all the way there, right? Where you might pick a different demographic or pick a person that you know vapes and everybody else know vapes, right? And so anyway, the conversation quickly turned to my wife's aunt and uncle, I guess, both vape. And so then it turned into jokes about them vaping and whether or not people were embarrassed about talking about whether they vape. It was really funny. And so, you know, it's that kind of a thing. And that's really what, for me, I like the mental stimulation and the challenges that come with board games, but I also like the social aspect of it. And so if you're looking for the social aspect, I'd check that game out. It's called Wavelengths. Wavelength or Wavelength. I'll put a link in the show notes, but you should be able to find it. It's got a very colorful box. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So could you say that turned into a very vapid conversation? 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Anyway, a few other things I'm going to put out there. I am currently hiring some folks to help us run some meetups on JavaScript and Ruby and Angular, at least because those are our biggest shows right now. And then I'm also getting ready to put JavaScript Remote Conference, another JavaScript Remote Conference together probably in May. So if you want to speak at it, or if you want to participate in it, I'm probably, I'm thinking about doing more than one track and so I may also need somebody to MC one of the tracks. Anyway, just keep an eye out for it. We usually get some pretty solid heavy hitters for that. And so if you're interested in being a part of that, let me know. If you know anyone who wants to sponsor it, also let me know. But yeah, that'll be at jsremoteconf.com or you can just go to top end devs and click conferences and it'll show it. So those are my picks. And then finally, one last thing that I'm going to shout out because I love them is I got a couple of new flavors of built bars. Built bars are, I always joke that they're candy bars, but they're protein bars. And since I'm doing low carb, they have like four net carbs and it's cause they coat them in chocolate, but they, it's not like overly sweetened or anything and so it keeps me in that range where I want to be for my carb counts. And I'm really, really enjoying that. So I'm going to shout out about that. And that's pretty much what I got. AJ, did you want to do pics before Nick does, or should we turn it over to Nick? 

AJ_O’NEAL: I can pull some pics out of the hat here. Okay. Actually, I just discovered this channel. So what I was doing was I was setting up YouTube live for my church because we had this broadcast system that was actually really good and really easy to use. But for some reason they're abandoning it, probably because there was never proper training and anyway, but so we're switching over YouTube live and I started doing this this thing and then and then of course YouTube wants to suggest to me all of these I guess See, I don't know what YouTube's trying to do But it but it brought up this this atheist channel and I actually really really like it It's called genetically modified skeptic I've watched two halves of his videos so far or maybe I've watched a video and a half but it this is just I'd have to say this is one of the most Christian people I've seen on YouTube because his whole thing is about debating with dignity. And he points out where some of these... Well, the two things I've seen is basically there's some Christian people that are not being polite or very Christian. And he picks apart their argument in a very non-emotional, non-inflammatory way and talks about it. And I just think that he handles it so respectfully, and I really like this kind of content, stuff that goes against things that I believe, but in a in a metered way, or not necessarily goes against what I believe, but that might appear to go against some of the things I believe or have a different perspective. So genetically modified skeptic. But I do. There's this there's this whole thing when you're when you're a believer of faith, you have to be really open minded about the how and the what as you hold to the why because faith is about the why. It's not about the what and the how. And I've had personal friends that when they start to learn more about science and reasoning and whatnot, they lose their faith, which is really sad to me because the faith isn't about all of the words verbatim correct. It's about when you follow these principles, do you reap the good fruit of the good tree. So I'm gonna put that caveat on there because I don't want to steer anybody towards the end of their faith. And I think that sometimes when people approach things that are, I mean, I don't want to baby anybody and say not ready for it. But I think that is kind of a thing milk before meat for those that are faith, you probably know that expression. But anyway, so I like this channel, I'm going to watch more of this stuff. Hopefully, I like more of it. I love I love this kind of meter debate style. And and then of course, I'll pick the normal things. Actually, no, one other thing is if you are interested, I am looking for people to work with. I've got more work than I can handle. So feel free to reach out to me. I've got a very simple litmus test, which I'm going to post here. If you can solve this litmus test on your own in a reasonable amount of time, which I think that an hour would be reasonable to get most of the way there. And I think that it's certainly possible many people will get there within 15 minutes to get most of the way there. But if you can solve this litmus test, then I could probably farm out some work to you. So if you're interested in that... And I consider this to be a mid-level problem-solving skill. I don't think this is too difficult, but I do think it is above what most people would consider beginner. So I'm going to post a link to that problem. And then yeah, then the normal stuff. If you want to follow me on the YouTubes, on the Twitch's Beyond code is the more structured content and then my live streams and whatnot go under CoolAge86. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Gotcha. What you said reminded me of a meme I saw the other day on Facebook where basically they were saying, you know, it was a missed opportunity to not have Neil Young go on the Joe Rogan show and discuss with Joe what his issues were. And that kind of assuming they would both be civil to each other, I think could have been a really interesting thing if you've heard the controversy over Spotify. Just that kind of a conversation I feel like we lack a lot of times where it's, it's, Hey, look, you know, let's, let's actually understand each other instead of just, you know, throwing barbs over the fence one way or the other. Anyway, Nick, do you have some picks? 

NIK_KALYANI: I do. And I apologize for any background noise. I got construction going on outside and they just decided to increase the noise right about now. So yeah, I have two picks. One, I also like board games and I probably might have heard of this one. Settlers of Catan. It's an only, but a really fun one. I think that's a great one for the social aspect, especially when you go, you go about arguing with people and, you know, getting into little fights with them, et cetera. It's, it's kind of fun. And, uh, I want to, uh, also suggest a TV show that I watched on Netflix recently that I really, really liked. It's called Halt and Catch Fire. It's, uh, the history of sort of a startup, a tech startup in Silicon Valley. They go through the whole sort of, this is in the early days of computing. So you get a glimpse into the birth of micro computing and then software and all that kind of stuff. It's a brilliantly done show and I really like that. So yeah, those are a couple of picks for me. And I also wanted to say thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed this conversation. I really like that you had some great questions and we had a really good debate. So I really love that. So thank you so much. 

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: You're welcome, thanks for coming. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Thank you too much, Nick.

NIK_KALYANI: I don't get offended. I enjoy these because if we can't handle skepticism from smart people and we are not able to defend and come up with good answers for this, then this technology is not very good, right? I mean, so it's going to improve when there are more people approaching this with skepticism, etc. I think it's only going to get better and better and better. It's far from perfect right now.

CHARLES MAX_WOOD: Well, I think we've seen that with all kinds of technologies. And that's why I want to cover it is it's like, okay, well, as we get a little further down the rabbit hole on this, yeah, you know, what are the possibilities and what opportunities do we miss if we're not willing to even look at it? So we're going to go ahead and wrap it up here. Thanks again for coming, Nick. Till next time, folks, Max out. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Adios. 

NIK_KALYANI: Bye bye.