In this session, Dominic Williams, Founder of DFINITY, creator of the Internet Computer, and all-round good dude explains how the internet computer interoperates with Ethereum.

Subscribe @ cycledao.xyz

The Internet Computer Weekly - Chain Keys and Ethereum Interoperation with Dominic Williams

DSCVR is in essence a decentralised Reddit - or news aggregator - hosted on the Internet Computer. Rick Porter, formerly BCG, began building DSCVR in 2020 on a hunch that a decentralised news aggregator might be a significantly impactful app. The project has taken him on a journey through token economics, scaling and future application design on the Internet Computer.

DSCVR the Decentralised Reddit

Between the Internet Identity System and application scaling, there are a large number of subjects that the Internet Computer community is still coming to understand.  Especially in the context of the prior described vision of the IC.
Jordan Last addresses misconceptions and reformulates unanswered questions, bringing clarity to areas of ambiguity.

The Internet Computer Weekly

Misconceptions & Open Questions with Jordan Last

Singapore-based decentralised finance-oriented accelerator, DeFiStarter, is gunning for the Internet Computer financial ecosystem.

By onboarding Ethereum-based teams and mirroring their applications on the Internet Computer, DeFiStarter gains access to both communities and, once IC Ethereum integration is complete, the benefits of cross-platform solutions.

CTO, Sam, explains

https://www.dfistarter.io/

cycledao.xyz

The First of the Accelerators: DeFiStarter

From a background in traditional systems to the forefront of decentralisation in traditional industry, Mike Shwartz has seen a lot. His project, Origyn, is an effort to make robust NTFs, or digital twins, of real-world objects. This extends to something he calls a "Plan Industry Platform" - an administrative platform for entire industries. 

origyn.ch

cycledao.xyz

Origyn & the Emergence of Pan Industry Platforms

Building an Internet Computer-hosted board game has led the team at Toniq Labs toward a complete metaverse infrastructure. Following the runaway success of their NFT marketplace which sold $350,000 worth of Chronic NFTs, we discuss a universal gaming currency, Stoic wallet, and the future of the Rise of the Magni game.

@toniqlabs
toniqlabs.com
cycledao.xyz

IC Games, the Metaverse, an NFT Marketplace: Toniq Labs Has it All

Norton Wang discusses the future of governance on the IC. The Axon neuron manager, cycle_dao, ICRocks, combine to form a Voltronic image of application & IC governance and code verification. 

cycledao.xyz
axon.ooo
ic.rocks

Norton Wang & the cycle_dao

Manu Drijvers drops a knowledge bomb in this session, answering your questions about the inner workings of the IC. 

cycledao.xyz

Knowledge Blast: Inter-Subnet Communication, the DKG, and Chainkey

Bob Bodily, Chief Product Officer of Toniq Labs dives deep on NFTs and Toniq Labs' plans to expand their offerings.

https://toniqlabs.com/

cycledao.xyz

https://entrepot.app/

Toniq Labs NFT Art Deep Dive

The Internet Computer native website builder, ICME, is the brainchild of Houman Shadab & Wyatt Benno, a lawyer/no code enthusiast and startup builder respectively. The website builder is the first step on their path to democratise application building on the IC.

icme.io

cycledao.xyz

The No Code Revolution Comes to the IC with ICME

Community Manager Moritz Fuller explains his decision to build a Liquity front end on the Internet Computer. From here we discuss the challenges of hosting DeFi products on the IC, upgrading canisters, and the mysterious role of boundary nodes.

Waterslide Announcement:
https://blog.waterslide.app/waterslide-the-first-defi-frontend-on-dfinitys-internet-computer/

cycledao.xyz

Decentralised Frontends, Upgrading Canisters, & the Mysteries of Boundary Nodes

From the early days of entrepreneurship to the deep inner workings of the Internet Computer, Matt Grogan discusses his history working with Dominic Williams.  We then deep dive on OpenChat, application design patterns, and the SNS.

OpenChat Deep Dive

Andrew and Evan of The Internet Computer Report join to discuss the state of the community, events in New York, and global opportunities for IC-based products.

cycledao.xyz

Today New York, Tomorrow, the World

The Internet Computer requires a large amount of tooling to support web & enterprise developers.  Austin Fatheree believes that should be developed by the community.  Grants are already active for significant tooling, creating an independent alternative to the DFINITY Developer Grants program.

icdevs.org

cycledao.xyz

ICDevs & the Drive Toward Community Developed Infrastructure

"Web" can be used as a performance descriptor to represent the expectations of contemporary users. Does the IC achieve this? Where does it hit and where does it miss. In this episode, we explore the nuance of this term and gain a deeper grasp of the Internet Computer as a product.

cycledao.xyz

What Does it mean to be "Web Speed" with Manu & Diego

Concordium is a "compliant by design" open proof of stake blockchain that has achieved fame among Rust developers as a friendly place to develop.

Community representative Beni Issembert Joins to discuss the origins and ambitions of the project.

The Third Web #18 - Concordium

Principal Engineer, John Wiegley joins Diego Pratts in this episode to reduce the practice of staking ICP to common English. 

We discuss ICP economics, burning & staking, the importance of governance on the IC and a whole lot more along the way.

 John Wiegley's community conversation on the subject can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVNSxFFAYUo

Understanding ICP Staking and Neurons in Simple English w/ John & Diego

In this episode Justus Ranvier joins for a discussion about Open Transactions and the future of smart contract platforms.
Then a few words from international man of mystery jl777 on the SuperNET and the life of an anonymous coding machine. 

http://bitcoinism.liberty.me/
https://nxtforum.org/nxtservices-releases/darkpaper-for-teleport/
www.jl777.org
http://thesupernet.org/

Credits:
Content - Justus Ranvier and jl777 
Music - Csus
Contact - beyondbitcoinshow@gmail.com

Beyond Bitcoin - 13 - One To Rule Them All

MetaMask is a Chrome browser extension that will enable trustless interaction with DApps. Developers Aaron Davis and Dan Finlay discuss self sovereign identity, leaving Apple to develop on Ethereum and developing decentralized web services. We also talk about the Web 3 experience.

http://metamask.io

Content: Aaron Davis, Dan Finlay, Arthur Falls
Editing: Richard Toth http://podcast-editing.com


The Ether Review #23 - Aaron Davis, Dan Finlay, MetaMask

Bob Summerwill has been developing the C++ Ethereum client since July last year. His background is primarily in game development but he spent a short time in finance as a “Solutions Architect” giving him a unique insight into development and culture across these fields. There are some interesting posts we speak about in this episode on his company website DoubleThink. Today we look primarily at the importance of C++ but I took the chance to ask Bob a few questions that had been accumulating over the last few weeks. 

https://bobsummerwill.com/
http://www.ethdocs.org/en/latest/ethereum-clients/cpp-ethereum/
https://github.com/doublethinkco/cpp-ethereum-cross 
http://github.com/ethereum/cpp-ethereum 

Content: Bob Summerwill, Arthur Falls
Editing: Richard Toth 

https://twitter.com/bobsummerwill
https://twitter.com/arthurfalls
http://podcast-editing.com

The Ether Review #25 - Bob Summerwill of the C++ Team

Sometimes the urge to layer in-jokes into a podcast title is impossible to resist. . . and then 24hrs later you change it. 

The effort to understand the significance of type based and functional programming languages led me to the Urbit project. This attempt to re-design the internet is one of a number of technologies that have evolved alongside blockchain and address some of the same problems. The Urbit developer's focus on mechanical perfection is a sensibility worth observing.

The first title was in reference to Mike Goldin's tweet about deterministic finite automata:
https://twitter.com/voidsnax/status/712044031090540545

This from the Urbit website:
"We believe controlling your own data, code and identity is the definition of digital freedom. We believe everyone needs digital freedom, not just a few hackers. We believe the only tool needed to solve this problem is a general-purpose server made for human beings.
Your urbit is your cryptographic identity, personal archive, application platform, and device hub. It's as easy to manage as an iPhone."

Content: Galen Wolfe-Pauly, Curtis Yarvin, Arthur Falls

Subscribe on iTunes:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ether-review/id899090462?mt=2

The Ether Review

The Ether Review #46 - Curtis Yarvin & Galen Wolfe-Pauly on Urbit

David Sønstebø, co-founder of IOTA, discusses this next-generation post-blockchain platform designed to serve as the backbone for the Internet-of-Things (IoT).

IOTA is a groundbreaking new open-source distributed ledger that does not use a blockchain. Its innovative new quantum-proof protocol, known as the Tangle, gives rise to unique new features like zero fees, infinite scalability, fast transactions, secure data transfer and many others.

Because the Tangle uses a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) instead of a blockchain, users automatically act as validators, allowing transaction validation to become an intrinsic property of utilising the network. Each transaction requires the sender to verify two previous transactions, resulting in infinite scalability while avoiding the validation centralization that is common with existing consensus mechanisms.

IOTA is also developing a novel standard for embedding minuscule ASIC chips in all IoT devices. These chips perform nominal proof-of-work hashes in order to prevent spam and Sybil attacks, and because the network is partition-tolerant and only eventually consistent, brute force hashing attacks are prevented.

With a transaction volume limited only by the speed of light, IOTA is a promising new solution to the limitations presented by blockchains.


iota.org
twitter.com/iotatoken
twitter.com/davidsonstebo

consensys.net
consensysmedia.net
etherreview.info
https://itunes.apple.com//podcast/the-ether-review/id899090462?mt=2

IOTA white paper: iota.org/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf
Directed Acyclic Graph: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*F-rjJqQ1PyF8dOnjOaiLFg.png

Ether Review #69 — IOTA & the Post-Blockchain Era

Ether Review #69 - IOTA & the Post-Blockchain Era

Subodh Sharma is a professor of computer science at IIT Delhi, one of the most prestigious universities in India. While he’s not teaching, Subodh conducts research into the formal verification of distributed systems, and his work on the automated formal verification of smart contacts has drawn international interest. 

I called up Subodh because I was looking for someone to explain an approach to writing software called the actor model. The actor model essentially involves sandboxing tasks in such a way that complexity is minimized and all behaviors of a software system can be known under all conditions. 

Currently the actor model is applied to the management of telecommunications networks through the Erlang language, and also in secure servers. Understanding the way robust distributed systems are constructed assists in the assessment of platform designs and gives us a view into the future of the ultimate distributed system - the Third Web.

The Third Web

The Third Web #12 - The Actor Model

Care of DFINITY I was privileged to attend the Web 3 Summit in Berlin last year. While there I interviewed Aeron Buchanan, the Executive Vice President of the Web 3 Foundation and Gavin Wood, Founder of Ethereum, Parity, and the Web 3 Foundation. These guys are two of the individuals that launched the programmable blockchain revolution and these interviews plot a course from the founding of Ethereum to their vision of the decentralized web and give us a trajectory beyond.
A quick production note. These interviews were filmed in the style of the other filmed interviews on The Third Web, unfortunately the footage was lost to a dead macbook leaving only the audio. As I usually cut myself out of the filmed interviews my contribution is less geared for production. 

Visit https://web3.foundation/ , https://www.parity.io/ for more information

Aeron Buchanan
Executive vice president of Web 3 Foundation
Masters in Computer science with a focus on engineering at Oxford
Worked in film
Then completed a PHD in computer vision
Became algorytm designer

Tell us about your time at Ethereum
Ethereum was initial exciting
Went from raising interest to actually delivering and things changed a lot
Aareon ran most of Eth Dev
Very stressful

Was Ming Chan hard to work with?
Came later
Eventually delivery of Ethereum was on course.
A CEO or COO type role was needed.
Eth foundation was not doing much at the time.
The plan was to transition EthDev responsibilities to foundation
After a worldwide search Vitalik chose Ming Chan
Aeron transitioned out shortly thereafter

Web 3 Foundation
Drives the development and deployment of polkadot.
Parity is building the rust implementation
The runtime of polkadot is Parity’s Substrate.

What is Web 3?
Web 3 is different things to different people.
To The Web 3 foundation Web 3 is the deentralized web.
The Web 3 foundation aims to map out and build the technologies needed.

This seems very blockchain focussed
Yes, and polkadot is blockchain platform
The blockchain platform part is only part.
There needs to be a large number of other components to build the decentralized web

How do you build decentralised messaging and storage?
We are leaving that to others like IPFS.
Proof of replication is something that people who looked at proof of storafge instead of proof of work overlooked.
Whisper and Secure scuttlebutt are interesting options
Coordination can happen on the blockchain but messaging on the blockchain is a non-starter.

When will all this stuff come together to make ausable platform?
We are not yet at a stage of maturity.
The technologists building all of this know we are not at the end yet.
We started with scripting
Moved to scalability, reputation, messaging & everything else. We are not yet through the checklist.
Polkadot takes us 95% of the way to scalability
The next one is reputation. No clear solution yet.

Whats the challenge with reputation?
Proposals look at the result rather than the approach.
Reputation is different in different contexts.
There must not be an originator. Reputation must be decentralized.

Gavin Wood
Founded Ethereum
Founded Parity
Founded Web 3 Foundation
Lead of Polkadot.

The Third Web #14 - Dawn Of An Ecosystem: Substrate & Polkadot

What is Edgeware
Edgeware being developed by an entity called Commonwealth Labs
Built on Parity’s Substrate
Grandpa finality tool
On-chain governance
Scripting built in.
Using Web Assembly (Wasm)

Building on Substrate
People used to build their own web servers, now they use the cloud.
People used to build new chains, now they can use Substrate.
This enables builders to focus on the area of their expertise.
One month after development began a test net was operational
Three months the project was live.
EOS was too centralised
Ethereum was not flexible enough

WebAssembly
Being able to use Rust or C++ is great
Still being experimented with

The Polkadot and Substrate ecosystem
Friendly and helpful community
20 projects underway
100 planned for the end of the year
Platform still stabilizing
People are building now planning to switch to the security of the Polkadot chain.

Securing the edgeware chain
Delegated PoS aiming to move to Nominated PoS as Sybil resistance mechanism
Grandpa for finality
Round Robin leader selection
The ultimate goal is to rely on the security of Polkadot

The problem of governance
It’s a problem that has been pursued by humanity for all time
Blockchains increase social scalability
Improves legibility
Enables new organisations
These new organisations need new governance systems
Blockchains are new so there is naturally experimentation and opportunity.
Want to further this human endeavour in the blockchain world


How does edgeware actually do governance?
Allocate tokens using a “Lock Drop” of ether.
One token one vote.
Vote can be allocated
Focusing on core changes to the network/protocol, allocation of on-chain treasury that is bootstrapped by the block reward.

The Lock Drop
Initial token distribution is the linchpin of effective network governance
Require the belief in the economic value of the token
Previous ways of doing this were an ICO or airdropping a token
The Livepeer Merkle Mine was an interesting experiment
Edgeware hopes to get the same effect of distributing tokens to people who want to actively participate without the bloat of a Merkle Mine.
Ether tokens are locked in a contract that prevents the tokens from moving for a period of 3, 6, or 12 months. The registry of locked tokens is used to initiate the Edgeware chain with additional tokens allocated to individuals who locked their tokens up for longer periods.

Infrastructure on top of infrastructure
Are we locked in an infrastructure phase?

The Third Web #15 - Edgeware & Parity, Infrastructure on Top of Infrastructure

The range of third-web platforms in development today is greater than ever. From data-centric blockchain based approaches to agent-centric designs like Secure Scuttlebut, the potential futures of the third web are rapidly expanding. 

Today we look at another approach with the Urbit platform. Like Secure Scuttlebutt, Urbit is agent centric. It is a deterministic operating system designed to be the filter between a user and the online services they use. 

I last covered Urbit in 2016 and the project is now nearing public launch. Galen Wolf-Pauly explains.

What is Urbit?
A personal Server
A secure computer that 
you actually own
Stores an event log of everything that has ever happened to it
That’s designed to live on any cloud server
But be controlled by a private key that you actually own
Your Urbit is meant to replace all of the consumer cloud software that you already use

How can it possibly be better than all of the expensive software that has already been created?
The basic thesis is that everything we use today runs on top of a unix of some kind.
The reason we wound up in this centralised world of cloud-based software is that Unix is too complicated.
Because the Unix is complicated, complicated layers between Unix and the application are needed.
The Urbit solution is to rip all of that out and create a single, extremely simple, complex system.
Urbit is a virtual machine, programming language, and operating system in 30,000 lines of code.
For comparison, Wordpress, an application that runs on Unix is 500,000 lines of code
Technical simplicity should turn into user interface simplicity.
Additionally, by hosting your Urbit in the cloud you no longer have a middleman serving you applications, Instead you only need them to host your virtual computer. 

What does an Urbit future look like?
A single platform allows tighter integration of, for example, productivity software like Git & Asana.
As a designer, Galen looks forward to interface standardisation, -having messaging, documenting, code collaboration, task management and other consumer software working seamlessly as one system.
Rather than interfaces built for many people.

Do we need a new back end for a new front end? Hasn’t Wechat done this?
Today we use many services that have unified UIs
Google has both email and documents but do you really trust Google to have total control and visibility into your use of those services?
What if Google goes away?
Being able to run a server myself that I trust will be around a long time and is secure to me makes me feel alot better. [Platform Risk]
Wechat is a really great achievement
Apps are more like modules
But you have given total power to a single company
The decentralised Wechat pitch has gotten tired but Urbit is very much targeting that problem.
The future of cloud computing does look like that but makes no compromises in privacy or durability.

The Third Web #16 - Urbit, Your New Server

Holochain has been a project simminging in the background of the blockchain space for several years now. The promise has been a panaceaic solution to the performance and scalability issues facing decentralised hosting platforms. It’s an oft heard claim, but, as founder Arthur Brock expounds in this interview, by giving up our insistence on global consensus in favor of discoverable and verifiable local state, a world of options is opened to us. 
This kind of discussion follows from the Secure Scuttlebutt and Urbit episodes. It raises, and offers answers, to questions of data vs agent based ontologies. But most interesting of all, it forces us to reconsider why we wanted to use a blockchain in the first place.



Arthur Brock from Denver Colorado
Interested in alternative currencies in 2001
Self organising companies are just a form of currency hacking
Discovered what a huge leverage point for change currency is
Change the business incentives and all business will reshape towards those incentives
The Future of Money, Bernard Leotard
2003 alternative currency became main gig
Metacurrency project 2004
Met Harris Brown
Currencies as more than money - symbol systems that we use to coordinate at scale
Out of metacurrency project came Ceptr 2006
Interact/transact with anyone else without intermediary
Required a reinvention of most of the communications stack. Modeling on nature - biomimicry
Prototyped for rewrite of computation, communication, commerce
Took piece of Ceptr and built Holochain, completed in Go in 2017
Bitcoin neither blindsided nor felt like a culmination of work
Seemed like a ham handed design
Questionably successful
Has captured a large following
Has not achieved what Arthur Brock wants to achieve
Not to dismiss blockchain - if nothing else it has prepared public consciousness and awareness for dealing with these problems.
Blockchain has altered the discourse
Pulled discourse in a crazy direction
Recreates unhealthy patterns turbocharged
Definitely need new money but need to do it in a manor that does not amplify volatility and wealth concentration
Recreating old problems won't get us somewhere new
Core issue is validation, not consensus
Everyone must use the same validation scheme to participate in consensus [validation is more fundamental than consensus]
Push for global state is a lazy way of modeling problems
In reality there is no global state or time. Only relative state and time.
Holochain uses an Agent Centric approach rather than a Data Centric approach.
Each agent has their own chain for an application, only tracking the agents activity.
Genesis block of each chain includes a hash of the source code of the application.


Holochain.org
Holo.host
Artbrock.com
Ceptr.org
Metacurrency.org

#webscale
#patriciatree

The Third Web #17 - Arthur Brock, Holochain

As Ted indicated in episode 2, The Urbit ID public key infrastructure and the Urbit network are core to the way individual Urbits communicate and maintain self-sovereignty. In this episode we hear from three members of the Tlon team, each explaining the part of the system they are most familiar with. OS lead Ted returns to introduce the subject.

Tlon engineer, Logan, Explains the use experience of Urbit ID, The reason for some of the design choices, and the topography of the Urbit Network.

Philip is a resident cryptographer at Tlon focussed on Public Key Infrastructure. He rounds this episode out by explaining what a PKI is, the differences between PKIs, and the way the Urbit ID PKI is implemented.

urbit.org/install/

Urbit.live

Understanding Urbit

Understanding Urbit #4 - Urbit ID & the Network

The recurrent theme of calm computing is explored more deeply in this discussion with Logan Allen whose focus is infrastructure and product at Tlon.

Logan sees the attention economy, with all it’s popups and news feed clickbait as a result of the way startups are organised and funded. In between rebukes of VC capital and the growth business model, Logan describes a software landscape where the user is king, extending the views of Christian and Anthony.

The only way Logan believes this can be achieved is to create a computing platform with different product design incentives.

Part of this picture is a unified tech stack that applications share rather than the bespoke, but very similar, internal tooling built individually by major tech companies like uber, facebook, airbnb and others. 

For Logan, Urbit addresses this by standardizing a large part of the system stack. As an abstract I/O interface it separates the software and hardware layers in a way that allows applications to be developed for an environment that is consistent across hardware.

This makes Urbit a much more efficient way of developing software from a corporate perspective by reducing dev-ops and the size of the layer that security concerns can happen in.

One of Logan’s most powerful revelations is that today, system software, linux for example, is deeply complex and growing ever more so and the number of people who understand the way it works is shrinking proportionally to the task of maintaining that software. Designing a new platform that evolves toward stability may be the only way to ensure a secure computing landscape in the future.

urbit.org/install/

Urbit.live

Understanding Urbit #6 - Built to Last

Tlon COO Erik Newton and Community Manager Kenny Rowe join this session to provide some additional background to Tlon and the Urbit Community. 

Erik Newton begins by explaining the relationship between the Tlon corporation and the Urbit project. We also discuss the reason behind the valuation of the address space, business opportunities, and plans for the launch of Urbit OS 1.

Then Kenny describes the cultural reach of the Urbit aesthetic and how he found himself pulled into the project from his prior employer, Maker. In particular the notion of the Kelvin versioning system evolving toward stability as opposed to complexity, and the power of unique terminology to avoid false cognates.

Kenny elaborates on the community on-boarding strategy of Urbit and its suitability for the collaboration needs of DAOs and front end requirements of smart contracts.

urbit.org/install/

Urbit.live

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