Pair of views: venue from hotel, hotel from venue
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Back after nap. In session on decentralized programmable keys. He previously did a weird talk at the last refactor camp.
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Distributed programmatic signing. Many nodes hold a key which can be used for either decryption or signing.
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Some big claims here I will have to dig into later. 🧐
Their mechanism opens up a lot of application design ideas, but breaks things like soulbound tokens and eth2 staking.
Big claim is trustlessly transferring private keys.
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Had a nice long stroll around the neighborhood with my Colombian friends and who hosted me last time I was here (in 2016 I think). They run … anyone looking to establish a base here should talk to them.
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Followed by evening meetup with a bunch of people… refactor camp alumni plus new faces. A few of us went to get tacos after. Verdict: as good as LA tacos 👍
And this endeth my Day 3.
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Suricata reunion post-stroll photo. is attending devcon and will be around tomorrow if you want to connect. Suricata runs incubator programs/cohort based courses etc. for startups/scale-ups in Colombia and beyond. I did my breaking smart workshop for them in 2016
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The big reflection I had today was that despite the idealistic talk of developing the LatAm ecosystem, events like devcon will be like flash floods if a few connected people don’t actually place bets by building a base here, making local connections etc.
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The other big thought I had from talks today…
ZK proofs are eating the world.
Every talk is zk proof this, zk proof that, zk proof fixes this, my dog ate my zk proof etc etc
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Hmm don’t know if I’ll have time for this, but Oscar shared this amazing looking vegan restaurant. Any vegans/vegetarians at devcon wanna try making it here for Friday lunch? I have prior commitments for all other remaining meals unfortunately foodbooking.com/ordering/resta
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Anyone know best ELI5 on zk proofs and kzg commitments? I’ve nibbled on a couple but haven’t found anything truly illuminating. Might put in some Study Time tomorrow.
Alright, gn. Livetweet continues tomorrow.
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Day 3, gm. What does the day hold? Conferencin’ energy starting to fade a bit, so gonna pace myself more today. The Hilton here has the best breakfast buffet btw.
No responses to my last tweet asking for best ELI5s on zk proofs and kzg commitments, so random googling it is.
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Flattered, thank you Phil. I aspire to Bruce’s model of eminence grise-ing in my next decade, where I get invited to do some gentle keynote scolding and low-key live meme-coining at zeitgeisty conferences in nice places 😇 #goals
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This Venkat thread reminds me of the kind of things @bruces would write from cypherpunk fairs in the 90s. twitter.com/vgr/status/157…
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Many people seem vaguely surprised to see me at a crypto conference. While it hasn’t been a strong thread of my public writing, it has been a huge part of my cozyweb conversations with friends. But lemme toss in links to a few of the things I *have* posted in public…
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1. Blockchains never forget (2017): ribbonfarm.com/2017/05/25/blo
2. Bloodcoin (talk at Refactor Camp 2018), video: youtube.com/watch?v=ow43pF
3. Magic Beans (on NFTs, 2021) studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/magic-beans
4. Twitter mega-thread on my Web3 explorations (2021)
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Gonna make a thread of my ongoing slow journey (emigration? perhaps…) to Web3, along with my covered wagon full of Web1 and Web2 stuff. Including NFTs, DAOs etc. So if those topics annoy you, you can mute this thread.
Show this thread
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Also, the penultimate Refactor Camp, 2018, in Austin, was crypto themed, and had a bunch of excellent talks, all of which are on YouTube. I guess I can take frontman credit for that though others (, , )
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And finally, not by me, but wrote one of the best speculative economic futures articles, The Blockchain Man (ref to The Organization Man by William Whyte) on ribbonfarm.
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Okay, commercial break over, and I guess I should start thinking about heading over to the Agora. I have a couple of things on the calendar, but am otherwise at a loose end, so will probably be hanging out by 4th floor terrace area between talks, if anyone wants to find me
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First talk: Why Account Abstraction is a Game-Changer for Dapps by
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Account abstraction: Signer != Account
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L2 AA gets past limitations of best L1 support with EIP-4337. Starknet eg.
“Improves UX by 10x”… though it looks like tradeoff is 10x complex tryst stack?
Argent first wallet to support native AA
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Multicalls = can bundle series of tx as one without lots of approval clicks
Can have “social recovery” instead of seed phrase. Because account is a contract that can be programmed.
Power outage… coming back on now.
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Ok gonna go wander to see how outage is being handled
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Only top floor affected. Tripped breaker I guess. Will go somewhere else.
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We’re back… and speaker was not the one listed in program. Just caught kast slide of the AA talk.
Next, Borderless Africa by from Ethiopia
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He wants to switch from “Africa needs Web3” (moral imperative for dev etc) vs “Web3 needs Africa”
Due to demographic logic of young people etc.
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“88% crypto tx in Africa is cross-border.”
“Nigeria most crypto obsessed country based on Google search data.”
“40 of 54 African countries don’t print their own money. France, Germany, England print and keep 6% as fees” 🤯
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👀
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Only 18% of trade is within Africa
10B in Swift fees
10% forex tx fees
… yeah this is stacked heavily against the continent
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Meant to go to the session on next billion but overflowing so attending plantain chops and coffee session instead.
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Gonna go back to 5th floor main room in a bit simply because it’s too big to overflow. This is a true dev conference. A subset of obscure tech deep dives seem to have queues to get in. A talk in a new stablecoin called Gho seems to be the it-event right now.
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Dropped into a panel on ethereum sign-in. Kinda meandering. Feels like a podcast. Gonna bg it and browse twitter unless something makes me peek up.
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Panels are hard to do truly well but also hard to do truly badly. A mediocratizing format. I generally avoid them, but I’ll be moderating one at the California Economic Summit in a couple of weeks. For some topics it’s the only reasonable format.
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Couple of nice real user stories. They make choices like tether and tron that people within crypto would find highly dubious
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Interesting stories out of audience question “who here gets paid in crypto?”
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Audience Q2: “who herevuses crypto for expenses?” … some interesting weird patterns here, like a Mexican grandma cashing out a crypto UBI grant in pesos
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