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Room cleared after spoke to the overflowing 3000 person room, and I’m up right after the break. This is the biggest stress test of my audience pulling abilities. I’m aiming for a 0.01 vitalik or 300. My biggest competition is lunch 😆
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Thanks all who came to my talk. Had a great lunch meeting with a bunch of EF people and then met up with for a bit. Now at a loose end wandering the Agora. Considering wandering all floors and scouting swag pickings. Dunno if I have capacity for more talks today.
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I’m also mostly free for the rest of the conference except for a couple of meetings and a few talks I don’t want to miss, so if you see me bumming around the agora today or at the Hilton, feel free to flag me down to chat.
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Okay, calling it a night. Was great to catch up with my mathematician friend from UMich days , who is one of the few ambidextrous ML+crypto people I know (who can also geek out over relativity, time etc). Did not expect we’d meet in Bogota 🤔
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Did a bunch of meetings today and didn’t go to any talks or sessions after mine, but tomorrow, plan is to do take in a few. Should be more relaxed now my part is done (advantage of speaking early in an event is a) you get to relax after and b) a lot of people now recognize you)
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Reflections on Day 1: This is one of the hardest-to-read crowds I’ve been in, in a good way. Unlike trad conferences, I can’t quickly sort and cluster the attendees into a handful of obvious “types.” This is more a primordial social soup than a mature social milieu with types.
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But I’ve had enough primordial social soup for the day so it’s room service again. I’m in a funny situation here… I’m new to the scene, but enough people know me that I probably *could* pack my calendar, but I’m not on any critical path here, so there’s nothing I *must* do
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There’s also a ton of things to go to here even if you know nobody and don’t want to make the effort. Lots of side events with free food. The general vibe here is social discovery in teams. Maybe 10% true isolates, 40% people who’ve come with 1-2 team members, 40% deep scene.
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It would be fascinating to map the social graph of devcon. I think it would be a small-world graph, but with some small worlds (like the EF team running it) that are first among equals. Very appropriate for a milieu associated with a decentralized technology.
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I did randomly drop into a couple of talks for like 10 min each today beyond the opening general audience talks, and damn the difficulty scales really fast. Every talk seems deep in the technical weeds of some esoteric topic silo that’s 80% different from the next one.
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Beyond basic protocol level, this is not a tech “stack” in the traditional sense, and I suspect people from one small world will at best understand the innards of 1-2 adjacent ones. 3 hops away from your small world/well, it’s basically alien talk beyond basic shared elements.
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Actually what it reminds me of is math, in terms of field structure. Except for a few people like Grothendieck who supposedly built mansions with vast swathes of math, most mathematicians can’t understand anything the mathematician in the next room does.
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Above the basic “protocol” of say sophomore college STEM math (say calculus, stats, perhaps a bit of topology, real/complex analysis), it’s a Babel situation
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Won’t tweet the obscenely large sandwich I had for dinner. Ordered fries too not realizing it came with chips. To my credit I only ate half. But I will share picture of this 75% chocolate bar that I’m eating a bit off for dessert. Came with hotel room. Speaker perk I’m guessing?
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Verdict: good chocolate. If you’ve never been an invited speaker at a nicer conference, be aware that there’s often a nice goodie bag waiting at the hotel. Conference I spoke at a few times in Chicago came with a nice cab of popcorn, jellybeans etc. Tomorrow I must swag hunt.
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gn wagmi etc If you’re around, come to the meetup tomorrow if you can (linked up thread), or just say hello if you see me.
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After fun breakfast chat, now catching back half of this panel on “notable security incidents since devcon V”
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Panelist arguing that flash attacks are more in MEV bucket (miner extractable value) than hacks/security exploits. So software working as intended rather than bugs. Just in very inefficient markets. Though I’d argue algorithmic stablecoins are theoretically suspect too
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Interesting distinction: DeFi is new classes of attacks, NFTs/consumer retail is simple, old attacks from 10y ago deployed against new classes of users. Commoditization curve of attacks?
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Apparently the reality.eth module for gnosis safes are essentially superuser bots that can be easily exploited if misconfigured
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Good stuff here. He won a bug bounty by white-hat stealing it from a honeypot safe set up by gnosis and then helping others defend. Takeaway: Configuration audits should be a thing
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