Cryptocurrency Networking with Soumya Basu
Mar 27, 2018
Show notes
Soumya Basu is a PhD student at Cornell, where he studies distributed systems problems associated with cryptocurrencies. Soumya is advised by Emin Gun Sirer, a Cornell professor who previously appeared on the show to discuss smart contract security.
Soumya joins the show today to talk about a variety of issues in the cryptocurrency space. We first explored the degree to which Bitcoin and Ethereum are actually decentralized–which might be less than you think. Because of the centralization of mining pools, much of the transaction processing is also centralized. After talking about decentralization, we got into Soumya’s research focus–cryptocurrency networking and block propagation.
Bitcoin transactions are collected into blocks. When a Bitcoin full node solves the cryptographic puzzle associated with a block of transactions, that full node broadcasts the new block to all the other nodes in the network. It is important for that block broadcast to be fast and efficient so that the other full nodes in the network can be made aware of the new block as soon as possible, and they can start working from the updated chain.
The problem of making all nodes in the network aware of a new block is known as “block propagation.” Block propagation can be accelerated through the use of relay nodes. A relay node is a node that is dedicated to communicating these new blocks throughout the blockchain. Soumya is working on a relay node architecture called Falcon–and in this episode, we talk all about what Falcon is.
If you are looking for all 700 episodes of Software Engineering Daily, check out our apps on the iOS or Android app store. We’ve got tons of episodes on blockchains, business, distributed systems, and tons of other topics. If you want to become a paid subscriber to Software Engineering Daily, you can hear all of our episodes without ads–you can subscribe at softwaredaily.com. And all of the code for our apps is open source. If you are looking for an open source community to be a part of, come check out github.com/softwareengineeringdaily.
Meetups for Software Engineering Daily are being planned! Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup if you want to register for an upcoming Meetup. In March, I’ll be visiting Datadog in New York and Hubspot in Boston, and in April I’ll be at Telesign in LA.
Transcript
Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.
Consensus Systems with Ethan Buchman
Mar 26, 2018
Show notes
Consensus protocols are used to allow computers to work together. A consensus protocol lets different servers agree on the state of a system. For decades, these protocols have been used to establish consensus among database nodes, application servers, and other infrastructure that runs within an enterprise. More recently, new consensus protocols have been invented to allow cryptoeconomic systems to agree on the state of a financial system.
The first cryptoeconomic consensus protocol to reach wide adoption was Nakamoto consensus–the proof-of-work system used for consensus of Bitcoin. Since then, other systems have been developed, with different tradeoffs in security, speed, and formal verifiability.
Ethan Buchman is the CTO at Tendermint, a consensus system for blockchains. In addition to working on Tendermint, Ethan works on Cosmos, a network of blockchains. In this episode, we talk about different consensus systems–for centralized, trustworthy systems as well as for trustless systems like currencies.
Transcript
Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.
DAO Reflections and Slock.it with Christoph Jentzsch
Mar 23, 2018
Show notes
The DAO was a system of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain that investors put millions of dollars into. Back in May 2016, it was the largest crowdfunding event in history, and we discussed it in detail in a previous episode with Matt Leising. The DAO was hacked due to a security vulnerability, and this event led to a hard fork of Ethereum.
The DAO was organized by a company called Slock.it. Slock.it’s original goal was to allow people to connect devices to the Ethereum blockchain. If you could connect smart locks, cars, and electricity systems to the blockchain, it could create decentralized systems for sharing these devices. To raise money, Slock.it created the DAO. Although the initial scope of the DAO was to raise money for Slock.it, over time it expanded in scope to become a decentralized system for venture capital.
When the DAO was hacked, the events that followed shook the Ethereum community. The hard fork lowered the financial damage inflicted on the investors–but there was still outrage within the community. How was it possible for an open source crowdfunding project to launch with a security vulnerability? As the Ethereum world looked for someone to blame, they turned to Slock.it.
Thus began a very difficult period in the life of Christoph Jentzsch. Christoph is the CEO of Slock.it, and he has been involved in the Ethereum community since the early days. When people think of Slock.it, they might imagine a group of people that move fast and break things. But in fact, Christoph’s early work on Ethereum was around rigorous unit testing of different Ethereum clients. He was obsessed with testing, and consistency between the different Ethereum interfaces.
In today’s episode, Christoph and I talk about his early experiences with Ethereum, his reflections on the events of the DAO, and the direction that Slock.it is going in today. Since the events of the DAO, the company has refocused its efforts on the original mission–to connect devices to the Ethereum blockchain.
Meetups for Software Engineering Daily are being planned! Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup if you want to register for an upcoming Meetup. In March, I’ll be visiting Datadog in New York and Hubspot in Boston, and in April I’ll be at Telesign in LA.
If you are looking for all 700 episodes of Software Engineering Daily, check out our apps on the iOS or Android app store. We’ve got tons of episodes on blockchains, business, distributed systems, and tons of other topics. If you want to become a paid subscriber to Software Engineering Daily, you can hear all of our episodes without ads–you can subscribe at softwaredaily.com. And all of the code for our apps is open source. If you are looking for an open source community to be a part of, come check out github.com/softwareengineeringdaily.
Transcript
Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.
Streamr: Data Streaming Marketplace with Henri Pihkala
Mar 22, 2018
Show notes
Data streams about the weather can be used to predict how soybean futures are going to change in price. Satellite data streams can take pictures of the number of cars on the road, and judge how traffic patterns are changing. Search engines can aggregate data from different queries and determine what people are most interested in.
Data streams define how the world is changing over time. Technology companies process these data streams and make decisions based on that stream. The most direct example of this might be financial trading companies, which use all kinds of data streams to predict economic price changes.
When Henri Pihkala worked on algorithmic trading systems, he saw how useful these data streams are, and decided to build products around data streaming. Eventually, Henri started working on Streamr, a platform for data streams to be bought and sold on top of the Ethereum network.
Streamr is an adaptation of technology that Henri worked on before he started working on the decentralized version. The original technology is a user interface for connecting data streams and building applications on top of them, and he acquired several customers for that platform. Today, the Streamr platform is still mostly centralized, but Henri and his team are working on building out the decentralized infrastructure.
Streamr raised an ICO worth ~25 million Euros. Most startups would not raise this amount of money before series B, much less before they have a product with a large user base. In this episode, Henri discusses why they raised so much money and explains why ICOs are different than equity raises. The investors who participated in the Streamr ICO received the DATAcoin token. Henri also explained why it makes sense for this ecosystem to have its own token.
Transcript
Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.
Status.im: Ethereum Mobile Browser with Jarrad Hope and Oskar Thoren
Mar 21, 2018
Show notes
To use a web application, you probably open a web browser or a mobile app. To access an Ethereum application, many people use an Ethereum browser. In previous episodes, we explored Metamask and Mist, which are Ethereum browsers for the desktop. In today’s episode, we explore Status, a mobile Ethereum browser.
Status founders Jarrad Hope and Oskar Thoren join the show to talk about the engineering of Status. How Status connects to the Ethereum blockchain, what people want from Ethereum applications, and the engineering of the Status app itself. Status is built using React Native–which is working out quite well for them.
We also talked some about the mechanics of an ICO. Status has raised $100m in their ICO for the Status Network Token. An ICO differs from raising equity in several ways. Rather than representing a direct stake in the business, a token represents a stake in the ecosystem that is being built.
Through their ICO, Status raised much more than a startup at a similar stage in company development would have–and the vesting schedule for the founders is 2 years. After two years, their stake will be liquid. This illustrates another way that the ICO can contrast with a traditional startup equity offering.
In a traditional startup, there is not a liquid open market for equity prior to the company going public. This can be good, as it forces the founders to maintain their skin in the game until they have proven the business. But it can also be bad–founders should arguably be able to take some money off of the table even if their business model is not completely worked out.
In the interview, Jarrad explained that he anticipates the open source community around Status to be contributing more to the Status app over time, because the community has a stake in the app by purchasing the Status token. I hope this is the case–it would be very cool to see more consumer-facing open source applications.
Status is a consumer facing app–and it did make me think that it is strange that there is so much open source software for building applications (think about React Native, Kubernetes, Kafka), but there are fewer consumer-facing open source apps. There’s not an open source Uber, an open source Facebook, or an open source Google. Why is that?
Maybe that’s because we are still in the days where someone has to pay for the backend compute layer. In other words–open source code is free to host, but running the actual application infrastructure still requires the owner to pay–so it makes sense that consumer applications are still developed and maintained by central actors.
With Ethereum, maybe that will change and we will see more consumer facing, open source, decentralized applications. That is certainly the world that Status.im is hoping for.
Speaking of consumer facing open source applications: check out our Software Engineering Daily apps on the iOS or Android app store. All 700 episodes of Software Engineering Daily are in the app–we’ve got tons of episodes on blockchains, business, distributed systems, and tons of other topics. If you want to become a paid subscriber to Software Engineering Daily, you can hear all of our episodes without ads–you can subscribe at softwaredaily.com. And all of the code for our apps is open source. If you are looking for an open source community to be a part of, come check out github.com/softwareengineeringdaily.
Transcript
Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.
The Business of Decentralization with Anthony Diiorio
Mar 20, 2018
Show notes
Anthony Diiorio was involved with Ethereum from the earliest days. He was one of the first people to see the Ethereum ideas presented by Vitalik Buterin, and he invested deeply in Ethereum–both financially and by helping to establish the early Ethereum community. Anthony started Decentral in 2014, which is a hub for his projects in the cryptocurrency space, the most impactful project being Jaxx.
Jaxx is a blockchain wallet that can hold multiple different cryptocurrencies. It works by connecting a small client-side application to remote full nodes. The user interface is simple, and Jaxx maintains the full node instances that the small client-side application connects to. We discuss the architecture of Jaxx in more detail during this episode.
We also talk about Anthony’s background–which includes a wide range of businesses: marketing, patio door manufacturing, real estate, and eventually blockchains. Anthony had a wealth of information to provide around entrepreneurship–both inside and outside of the blockchain space.
If you are looking for all 700 episodes of Software Engineering Daily, check out our apps on the iOS or Android app store. We’ve got tons of episodes on blockchains, business, distributed systems, and tons of other topics. If you want to become a paid subscriber to Software Engineering Daily, you can hear all of our episodes without ads–you can subscribe at softwaredaily.com. And all of the code for our apps is open source. If you are looking for an open source community to be a part of, come check out github.com/softwareengineeringdaily.
Transcript
Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.
ShapeShift Operations with Jon ShapeShift
Mar 19, 2018
Show notes
A financial exchange is an operationally intensive business. You have customers making a high volume of transactions, your service has to be low latency and highly available, and you are dealing with a lot of money. A cryptocurrency exchange has all of the complexity of a typical financial exchange–and then some additional complexity.
ShapeShift is a cryptocurrency exchange that allows users to buy and sell digital assets–Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and lots of other currencies. ShapeShift also has a set of tools and APIs that allow developers to build higher-level applications that transact in cryptocurrencies. ShapeShift’s CEO is an early cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Erik Voorhees, who will appear on the show in the near future.
Today’s guest Jon is the COO of ShapeShift–he handles the operations of the company. He prefers not to use his last name because ShapeShift is particularly sensitive to social engineering attacks. We’ll get into why that is in the episode–and explore lots of other topics too. How to scale cryptocurrency exchange, the products ShapeShift offers, and some of the near-death experiences that ShapeShift has had. After all–it is a startup, and every startup has moments where it seems like the company will die.
Meetups for Software Engineering Daily are being planned! Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup if you want to register for an upcoming Meetup. In March, I’ll be visiting Datadog in New York and Hubspot in Boston, and in April I’ll be at Telesign in LA.
If you are looking for all 700 episodes of Software Engineering Daily, check out our apps on the iOS or Android app store. We’ve got tons of episodes on blockchains, business, distributed systems, and tons of other topics. If you want to become a paid subscriber to Software Engineering Daily, you can hear all of our episodes without ads–you can subscribe at softwaredaily.com. And all of the code for our apps is open source. If you are looking for an open-source community to be a part of, come check out github.com/softwareengineeringdaily.
Transcript
Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.
Crypto Pump and Dumps with Bruno Skvorc
Mar 16, 2018
Show notes
Cryptocurrency speculation has pulled in a large population of people who do not know what they are investing in. If you hear about an investment of $1000 turning into $1M, it’s tempting to get sucked in yourself.
For most of these everyday people, the game is completely rigged. A large percentage of market activity is driven by “pump and dumps.” A pump and dump is a conspiracy to trick investors into buying a currency.
An insider group commits the pump and dump. This is accomplished by purchasing the currency ahead of time, then promoting it via Twitter, Telegram, and Reddit. The outsiders fall victim to the promotion of the currency and buy it after the fast run-up in value. The currency then crashes, and the outsiders are left “holding the bag.”
Pump and dumps are not a new phenomenon—they have happened with worthless penny stocks. One thing that is new is the ease with which new cryptocurrencies are being created. Launching an ICO is easy. Marketing it is cheap. Pumping and dumping has never been more accessible. And buying them is quite easy as well. This has led to a perfect storm of naive investment capital.
Bruno Skvorc is the CEO and owner of Bitfalls, a site with blog posts, news, and information about cryptocurrencies. He wrote a post called “The Anatomy of a Pump and Dump Group,” which details how cryptocurrency pump and dumps have been used to swindle investors out of millions of dollars.
Meetups for Software Engineering Daily are being planned! Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup if you want to register for an upcoming Meetup. In March, I’ll be visiting Datadog in New York and Hubspot in Boston, and in April I’ll be at Telesign in LA.
If you are looking for an internship, apply to the Software Engineering Daily internship, at softwaredaily.com/jobs. And if you are looking to recruit engineers, you can post jobs for your company there as well–it’s completely free to post jobs and to apply. We are hoping to find interns to contribute to the Software Daily open source project–and if you want to see what we are building, go to SoftwareDaily.com or check out our apps in the iOS or Android app store. They have all 650 of our episodes, with recommendations, related links, discussions, and more.
Transcript
Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.
Crypto Bloomberg with Valentin Mihov
Mar 15, 2018
Show notes
In the finance industry, many people have a computer on their desk called a Bloomberg terminal. A Bloomberg terminal contains news, stock prices, communication tools, and other features that make it worth a high subscription price. And people in finance can afford to pay that high subscription because their decisions can cause a gain or loss of thousands of dollars.
Cryptocurrency investors have a similar set of informational problems as traditional financiers. There is a flood of information. Financial quotes are inconsistent across different exchanges. Opinions from Twitter and Reddit can be tremendously useful—if they are captured and leveraged correctly.
Santiment is a platform that is working to build a Bloomberg terminal for cryptocurrency investors. Santiment has raised 45k Ether in their ICO last July, which was originally an amount equal to ~$11m.
Valentin Mihov is the CTO of Santiment, and he joins the show to explain what Santiment’s product does, and how the token holders will ultimately derive value from Santiment’s ecosystem.
If you are looking for an internship, apply to the Software Engineering Daily internship, at softwaredaily.com/jobs. And if you are looking to recruit engineers, you can post jobs for your company there as well–it’s completely free to post jobs and to apply. We are hoping to find interns to contribute to the Software Daily open source project–and if you want to see what we are building, go to SoftwareDaily.com or check out our apps in the iOS or Android app store. They have all 650 of our episodes, with recommendations, related links, discussions, and more.
Transcript
Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.
Web3 with Fabian Vogelsteller
Mar 14, 2018
Show notes
Most applications today run on a cloud provider like AWS. They are built with a framework like Ruby on Rails. They use a set of APIs like Stripe and Twilio for middleware services. This is the era of “web 2.0.”
With decentralized systems, we are starting to get a feel for what “web 3.0” might feel like. The futuristic idea of “web 3.0” works off of the following idea: instead of using a centralized service owned by a single company, you might purchase your computation and storage from a network of nodes. The nodes will be running peer-to-peer software that competes on price.
Fabian Vogelsteller works on Web3.js, a JavaScript library for interfacing with the Ethereum blockchain. He also works on Mist, a browser for Ethereum. Fabian joins the show to discuss the difference between decentralized apps and centralized apps—and to explain why we need to build a bridge between those two worlds.
Transcript
Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.
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