Decentralized applications can be built on the Ethereum blockchain. Just as the Bitcoin blockchain is a distributed, append-only ledger of financial transaction history, Ethereum is a distributed, append-only ledger of computational transaction history.
New kinds of applications can be built on the Ethereum blockchain—and just like every new technology, we need an interface to bridge that new technology and our existing technology. We can use a pure Ethereum browser like Mist—or we can use a Chrome extension like Metamask to turn our normal browser into an Ethereum interface.
Dan Finlay is the lead developer of Metamask. In today’s episode, we explore why you would want to interface with decentralized applications and the different ways of doing so. A few examples we explore—simple transactions like transferring Ether from one person to another; or transacting with a smart contract.
My personal anecdote: I recently used Metamask for the first time to fund a GitCoin issue. GitCoin is a way to put up financial rewards for people solving open source issues. I locked up $42 in an Ethereum smart contract, and it became the bounty of that issue. The issue was solved, and I released the $42 from the smart contract to be sent to the developer who solved it. In this example, Ethereum served as a simple escrow service. To send my Ether, I used the Metamask plugin on my Chrome browser. If you are a little confused—don’t worry. We explain it all in this episode.
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.
Monopolies and Proof of Stake with Karl Floersh
Mar 12, 2018
Show notes
Decentralized applications might someday offer alternatives to modern monopolies. Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Amazon—all of these services could be recreated on a decentralized stack of technologies like Ethereum, IPFS, and Golem. Fully decentralized services could be more transparent, cheaper, and more efficient.
But let’s be realistic. Today, even the simplest applications of fully decentralized blockchains don’t work as well as we need them to. Cryptokitties offered a glimpse into how a simple viral application can limit the throughput of Ethereum. And don’t forget that these technologies are in some ways still subject to centralization in their current form. Miners form the decentralized consensus layer—and that mining activity is physically centralized in large server farms.
The decentralized future is possible. In order to get there, we need to make progress on the low-level tools that such a world will be built upon. This is the realization that today’s guest Karl Floersh had. Karl is a researcher for the Ethereum Foundation. He was initially excited about the prospect of decentralized apps—such as a decentralized Uber. But as he looked more closely at the space, he realized how early we are, and how much work there is to be done on foundational technologies.
Proof of Stake is the central topic of discussion in today’s conversation with Karl. Proof of Stake is a consensus mechanism that is an alternative to Proof of Work. In Proof of Work, miners race to validate blocks of transactions. This results in duplicated effort and perhaps wasted energy. In Proof of Stake, validators are chosen to approve transactions. These validators lock up an amount of currency that they are willing to “stake.” If a validator acts badly, the validator will lose their entire stake.
This mechanism could be more efficient—and we will explain why that is in this episode. If Proof of Stake works, it could lead to a faster, truly decentralized Ethereum blockchain. That’s a remarkable potential outcome.
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.
Proof of Stake with Subhan Nadeem
Mar 09, 2018
Show notes
For a decade, Bitcoin’s proof-of-work system has run without disruption. In a proof-of-work scheme, Bitcoin miners compete to solve a cryptographic puzzle associated with a block of transactions.
Every ten minutes, all the Bitcoin miner nodes race to be the first to solve a block of transactions. Only one miner wins each block, meaning the other nodes’ time was ultimately wasted. There is also a massive expense of electricity.
Bitcoin is a system with low transaction throughput—about 7 transactions per second. Computer scientists have wondered—is there an alternative way of doing consensus? What if we took all the wasted compute power from proof of work, and allocated it in a way that makes transactions get processed faster?
But Bitcoin’s governance tends to be extremely conservative. A change to the consensus mechanism probably won’t happen any time soon in Bitcoin.
Ethereum’s consensus mechanism is modeled after that of Bitcoin—proof-of-work mining. But Ethereum’s governance ethos is quite different. Ethereum is in the process of planning and implementing proof of stake, an alternative consensus mechanism in which trusted validators are chosen to validate blocks of transactions.
Subhan Nadeem is a student at the University of Waterloo where he studies computer science and business. He is the author of several popular articles on Medium that explain blockchain concepts. He joins the show to talk about crypto from the point of a student—and gives us a great walk through of different consensus mechanisms.
To find all of our old episodes about cryptocurrencies, check out our apps in the iOS or Android app store. They have all 700 of our episodes, with recommendations, related links, discussions, and more. And it’s all open source–if you are looking for an open source project to contribute to, come check us out at github.com/softwareengineeringdaily. We welcome all kinds of contributors–new developers and experts. Engineers and non-technical people.
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.
How Aragon Manages DAOs with Luis Cuende
Mar 08, 2018
Show notes
Humans organize into groups. There are lots of group types: religions, corporations, national governments, state governments, citizenries, clubs, musical bands.
Every group has governance. Governance defines the rules and the ways that rules change. The United States requires citizens to pay taxes. A corporation requires you to show up to work, but they have to pay you a salary.
Most groups today are managed by people. If you break a law, you have to go to court and sit in front of a judge and jury, who decide how you will be punished. If you work at a corporation, and you have a problem with your manager, you go to HR to arbitrate it.
These organizations are centralized. There is a governing body that sets the rules. If there is any ambiguity, the person who happens to be in power gets to decide how the ambiguity is resolved. Power is centralized in that governing body.
These organizations are run by people. The governance of these organizations is enforced only to the extent that the human government carries out its duties.
A decentralized autonomous organization is a group that can run with neither centralized nor human intervention. It is decentralized and autonomous. It is a DAO.
Aragon is a platform for running and managing decentralized autonomous organizations. Luis Cuende is the founder of Aragon and joins the show to explain what a DAO is and why people want to create them. We also talk about the engineering of Aragon and the structure of its ICO—which raised $25m via a token sale.
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.
Smart Contracts with Raine Revere
Mar 07, 2018
Show notes
Smart contracts are programs that run on the Ethereum blockchain. A smart contract developer pays Ether to deploy the contract. When a contract is deployed, every full node on the Ethereum blockchain has a copy of the contract code in that node’s address space.
Every full node needs to hold a copy of every smart contract. This allows every full node to process every call to any smart contract. If you want to call a smart contract, that contract will execute on every full node.
When you call a smart contract, you are initiating a transaction. Like Bitcoin transactions, these Ethereum transactions get batched into blocks. Ethereum full nodes compete to solve the cryptographic puzzle associated with a block. But instead of mere financial transactions, these are computational transactions.
Raine Revere is a smart contract engineer and cofounder at Maiden and she joins the show to describe smart contract creation and deployment. It’s a great introduction to some Ethereum fundamentals.
To find all of our old episodes about cryptocurrencies, check out our apps in the iOS or Android app store. They have all 700 of our episodes, with recommendations, related links, discussions, and more. And it’s all open source–if you are looking for an open source project to contribute to, come check us out at github.com/softwareengineeringdaily. We welcome all kinds of contributors–new developers and experts. Engineers and non-technical people.
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.
Bitcoin’s Future with Joseph Bonneau
Mar 06, 2018
Show notes
Joseph Bonneau is co-author of Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies, a popular textbook. At NYU, he works as an assistant professor exploring cryptography and security. His YouTube lessons teaching Bitcoin have hundreds of thousands of views. His material offers clear explanations of how Bitcoin works.
Since Joseph has a clear understanding of the objective facts around Bitcoin, he is the perfect person to ask about the more subjective topics: the common misunderstandings of Bitcoin; the governance tradeoffs between Ethereum and Bitcoin; proof of work vs. proof of stake.
Joseph believes that the early mainstream cryptocurrency solutions will be largely centralized—and that we are likely to move beyond Bitcoin to more efficient currencies. I enjoyed hearing his reasons behind this perspective.
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.
Dogecoin with Jackson Palmer
Mar 02, 2018
Show notes
Dogecoin was started in 2013 as a joke. Jackson Palmer forked Bitcoin and created his cryptocurrency as a play-off of the “doge” meme. The currency became popular as a means of Reddit users “tipping” each other. If I made a comment on Reddit that you liked, you might send me some Dogecoin. This use case allowed people to share the idea of Dogecoin virally, and Dogecoin became valuable, even though the currency did not have any technical properties that made it significantly different than Bitcoin.
As Dogecoin was becoming popular, an experienced Internet scam artist took notice and started a Dogecoin exchange called Moolah. Moolah was used to steal money from its customers and investors, and the CEO was arrested.
Jackson Palmer was not involved in this scheme, but it soured his feelings about Dogecoin and the entire Bitcoin space. His coin, which had been created as a joke, had been repurposed as a weapon to steal money.
Jackson left the Dogecoin community in 2015 to focus on other things. But as Bitcoin entered the mainstream conversation, Jackson has been pulled back into the world of cryptocurrency. Jackson’s YouTube channel has over 20,000 subscribers, who tune in to learn about consensus protocols, new tokens, and cryptocurrency news.
In today’s episode, Jackson and I discuss his experiences with Dogecoin, and how that compares with the scams around low-quality ICOs that are pulling in retail investors today. We also discuss more positive things–such as proof-of-stake and newer consensus protocols.
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.
Also–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.
Blockchain Scalability with Peter Ullrich
Mar 01, 2018
Show notes
There are two factors that limit the rate at which transactions are accepted into the Bitcoin blockchain: block time and block size. Block time defines how often a new block is appended onto the blockchain. Block size defines how many transactions fit into a new block.
As of March 2018, the current block time and block size allow for about 7 transactions per second to be accepted into the Bitcoin blockchain. In today’s episode, we discuss the technical limitations of the Bitcoin blockchain and some potential solutions to scalability: SegWit and lightning network.
Today’s guest is Peter Ullrich, the host of Explain Blockchain. Explain Blockchain is a podcast I have found tremendously useful as I have started to learn about blockchains. He provides thorough, technical explanations of complicated topics, and I recommend subscribing to his show, and listening to the episodes multiple times because there is a lot of content condensed into a short amount of time.
Over the next month, we will be exploring a variety of blockchain-based technologies. Some interviews will be high-level conversations that assume only a familiarity with cryptocurrencies. Some of them will be deeply technical and assume a strong understanding of Bitcoin and Ethereum. And some episodes, like today’s episode, will be aimed at the developer who is in the process of “going down the rabbit hole.”
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.
Bitcoin Transactions with Daniel Van Flymen
Feb 28, 2018
Show notes
Bitcoin is an immutable, append-only blockchain ledger that reaches consensus through proof-of-work. The contents of the ledger are financial transactions–people sending and receiving Bitcoin currency to each other.
Since Bitcoin, there have been other cryptocurrencies that have similar properties–like Ethereum and the IPFS/Filecoin system. Similar to Bitcoin, they use a decentralized, proof of work-based system with a currency reward system–but the ledger being maintained is not purely financial. A currency is a necessary component to maintaining the blockchain’s validity.
Over the next month, we will be exploring a variety of blockchain-based technologies. Some interviews will be high-level conversations that assume only a familiarity with cryptocurrencies. Some of them will be deeply technical and assume a strong understanding of Bitcoin and Ethereum. And some episodes, like today’s episode, will be aimed at the developer who is in the process of “going down the rabbit hole.”
If you are finding yourself reading about Bitcoin and Ethereum a few hours every day, but you are still struggling to grasp the basics, this episode is for you. It is meant to be a complement to other introductory resources, such as “Mastering Bitcoin,” by Andreas Antonopoulos.
Cryptocurrency systems are revolutionary–they will unlock completely new applications in the very near future. It’s If you are trying to understand these decentralized currencies and applications, the best place to start is with Bitcoin. That’s why I was happy to have Daniel Van Flymen back on the show.
Daniel was previously on for one of our most popular episodes–” Blockchain Building,” in which he talked about how useful it can be to build a blockchain based system for practice. Today, Daniel discusses the basics of Bitcoin transactions. What happens when you send money? How are transactions represented on the blockchain? How do full nodes and light clients interact with each other?
These are difficult topics to discuss purely over audio, so this episode is best listened to as a companion resource for someone who is studying cryptocurrencies.
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.
Tether, Ripple, and Blockchain Reporting with Matt Leising
Feb 07, 2018
Show notes
Your friends from college are asking you how to buy Bitcoin. Your mom is emailing you articles about the benefits of decentralized peer-to-peer networks. Your shoe shiner is telling you to buy XRP.
It is 2018, and cryptocurrencies have become a daily part of news headlines. The general public may not understand how this technology works, but everyone knows that changes are on the horizon. At some point in the future, our financial and computing systems will be deeply integrated with the cryptoeconomy.
We all remember the dot com boom. We know that some people got fantastically rich during that period through speculation. We think–maybe this is our chance to make money.
If you read Reddit, or almost any news site, you will see stories of obscene wealth intertwine with pseudoscientific discussions of how a new cryptocurrency is going to change the world. What is fact and what is fiction? How far are we from a beautiful future, with frictionless micropayments?
Matt Leising is a journalist at Bloomberg who has covered financial markets for 15 years. Today, his reporting has been completely engulfed by cryptocurrencies. There are so many dramatic stories, it’s hard to pick what to focus on.
Today, we discuss two topics he has covered recently: Ripple and Tether.
Ripple is a company that makes enterprise blockchain solutions for global payments. That sounds like the future, and it is no surprise that people would want to buy into Ripple if possible. Ripple has been around for 7 years, and they have a strong team and relationships with major financial institutions.
One of Ripple’s early projects was a currency called XRP. The goal of XRP was to make a fast, scalable digital asset that would facilitate currency exchange among banks. We covered Ripple and XRP in previous episodes with David Schwartz and Greg Kidd.
XRP remains in circulation, but Ripple the company has shifted development resources away from XRP, and towards RippleNet, which seeks to replace the aging SWIFT code system for banks. Today, XRP is being experimented with by several money transfer companies, but the digital currency is not widely used for anything–well, other than speculation.
In the tremendous cryptocoin bull run of early 2018, XRP shot up as sharply as almost any other coin. In an article about Ripple, Matt Leising tried to get to the root explanation for why this occurred. Was it a sudden market recognition of some long term value of XRP? Was it a stampeding herd of people who did not know the state of XRP? Was it a pump and dump?
A few days after publishing his article about Ripple, Matt wrote about Tether. Tether purports to be a “stablecoin”–a digital currency which is pegged to the value of something less volatile. Stablecoins are useful in that they can reduce the friction of exchange between tokens. Without a stablecoin, you might have to transfer from one cryptocurrency to USD, which probably involves the US banking system.
If you can use Tether instead of USD, you have less transactional friction. Perhaps you can escape the onerous tax consequences of day trading cryptocurrencies. Tether claims to have $1 USD in reserve for every 1 Tether in circulation.
So if you wanted to cash out Tether for USD, you should theoretically be able to do that–except that Tether seems to have no connection to any banks. And Tether has severed its ties with auditing agencies that it was working with.
There is $2.3B of Tether in circulation. That is a small fraction of the overall trading volume of cryptocurrencies. But it is unknown how much the current crypto bubble is propped up by the functionality of Tether–the ability to seamlessly move between cryptocurrencies without going into USD. As long as the market believes in Tether (and today it is indeed at $.999014) in valuation, this stablecoin mystique will persist, and market friction will continue to be smoothed out by that belief.
This was Matt’s second appearance on the show, and it was a blast to have him back on. In his last episode, he discussed the infamous DAO hack, which led to an Ethereum fork. To find that episode as well as links to learn more about the topics described in the show, download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS or Android. These apps have all 650 of our episodes in a searchable format–we have recommendations, categories, related links, and discussions around the episodes. It’s all free and also open source–if you are interested in getting involved in our open source community, we have lots of people working on the project and we do our best to be friendly and inviting to new people coming in looking for their first open source project. You can find that project at 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.
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