2019
This year went by extremely fast. I learned a ton about starting a business, traveled around the world, built on new blockchain protocols, went and saw the future and came back to work on that which I believe shaped it in the present.
There is the confluence of technology that is happening before our eyes, we're accelerating towards it. We are all so immersed in our phones; constantly updating a collective of which we are all aspirants of. Though the pendulum is shifting in a way to give the creators back the future. It will be between the technology incumbents and those with the ability to harness the gifts in applied cryptography and distributed systems. Technology is all around us and all encompassing. There are so many new languages, new frameworks being developed, new platforms for application development, new approaches; superpowers being given to us in a golden age of technological development. The level of control that one has at their finger tips to provision, automate and control computational resources is baffling. The level of control that one has at their figure tips with sound money not bound to a particular state is baffling. With one keyboard and a monitor you can patch into the world's computing power; for application development and for transferring ownership of value. You can leverage the compute of the giants or build on the new computing paradigm. The future of enterprise software is built on next generation, traversable, merkalised data structures.
This past year I learned:
How to deploy infrastructure using Terraform, Kubernetes and Docker Containers How to build Corda Blockchain Applications How to write external data source connectors and ws event-driven middleware
This is going into the 7th year writing on this blog, I am over 92,000 views all time.
Hit just over 20,000 views this year.
Some more stats:
Here are the past couple years of this same blog posts.
2013: A Year in Review
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
Here were some of my goals from 2018:
Focus in 2018
Build Dapps Build with ReasonML and ReactJS Work with 200 Customers to start building Dapps Work with people passionate about Crypto/Blockchain + Salesforce Build a great team Go to China First Program Learn Mandarin Every Day on my phone and read the phrase book Run 3 Miles and lift every morning Build something incredible with IPFS Build Dapps NLP Engine from scratch with Prolog Build Lisk Apps and deploy from Salesforce Keep a daily journal and a physical calendar Say my autosuggestion every morning Run, and read everyday Get 150K views on the site Eat Healthy: Chicken, Vegetables, Almonds, Salmon, Brown Rice, Egg Whites, Protein Powder, Tuna, Oatmeal, Almond Milk Drink more water
Some of the Highlights from 2018
Salesforce World Tour Demos in Paris and Hanover CordaCon in London Web3 Conference in Berlin ETH SF Hackathon and built GenomeCDP NYC Filed my (own) first provisional patent
build, keep, learn, write, read.
Focus for 2019
Build Dapps Learn Rust Hack on Substrate Run every day and lift every day Genomic Health: Eggs, Avocados, Chicken, Steak, Red Inca Quinoa, Black Beans, Vegetables, Steelcut Oatmeal Learn Mandarin every day instead of social media Get 200k views on the blog Deploy all node infra with Terraform and K8s to dapps.network Build out engineering team in Bay Area Learn more about STARKS / ZKPs (Zero Knowledge Proofs) Build more CorDapps and become expert at writing flows Travel to Japan for Customer / Business Keep a daily journal and a physical calendar Say my autosuggestion every morning Relaunch all websites using Next.js Get 8 hours of sleep Code every single morning, first thing in the morning Drink more water
This year I spent a lot of my time traveling and with that I read and reread some great books:
Principles - Dalio Why We Sleep - Walker The Rust Programming Language Ready Player One - Clide Life After Google - Gilder Docker Containers Microservices CryptoAssets Originals An Eassay on the Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field - Hadamard Shoe Dog - Knight The Truth Machine - Casey Superintelligence - Bostrom The Nature of Space and Time - Hawkins
Interoperability
There is an underlying meta surface that is being built that not only acts as a way of intercommunication between application specific blockchain but provides the ability to stand up ones own network, define functionality at a blockchain runtime level and change on the fly these networks with the configurable modules. This is powered by the Substrate blockchain framework.
There will be a network of interoperable global blockchain networks that are transferring value leveraging a number of methods to cryptographically check the validity of transfers using contract mechanisms. There is a protocol for reference for multiple blockchain systems that leverage Bitcoin and Ethereum like transaction order and verification mechanisms
I believe that the opportunity for redesigning the next generation of enterprise software is embedded within this confluence of factors that lead to the following value and attributed that are either nonexistence or as adequate as done on blockchain:
The blockchains of the future will be built upon:
UTXO Transaction Model and Signatures Proof-of-Authority (POA) / Proof-of-Stake(POS) Aura / Avalanche Consensus Mechanisms SNARGS / Privacy Computation / Zero Knowledge Proofs Formally Verifable Contracts and Agents Commitees / Validator Srts / Routings / Attestations / Digital Jury Shared sets of compute / storage / consensus TEEs / Secure Enclaves / encryption Beacon Chains / Randomness / threshold relays IBC / Multiporocol / Extrinisics / intrinsics/ inhereners Blockchain Middlewares and Modules Web Assembly Virtual Machines / WASM Data Commons / Marketplaces / Exchanges Governance structures, rewards, penaltys Distribution mechanisms Tokenization of All Assets
Substrate leverages libp2p as the peer to peer network protocol
IBC – Cosmos, Tendermint and Polkadot, Substrate
Interoperability is a key component for developing the next generation of blockchain and cryptographic networks by having traversable and configurable chains that have metadata that is mutable but data that is mutable. Metadata can control governance structures, consensus algothirms, modifications for different type of blockchain transaction mechanisms and other types of modules.
IPFS
I think that decentralized filesystem build with the hash links and content addressing is the future of the internet.
I am really excited to build with IPFS and combine it with other p2p protocols. The shift towards decentralized p2p technologies such as bitcoin and ipfs are part of a shift towards individuals have full ownership, responsibility and control of their valuable digital assets. A digital asset can be a coin; but also personal data, or the metadata about what we do. These sorts of networks are shifting the pendulum back towards personal computing that can still be networked and used however not through a custodian service where we are told to fetch that data from.
The concept of What vs Where a piece of data is:
Tamper proof/evident Permanent Content Addressed Immutable Ever Present Traversable Hash Agnostic Interoperable
It is at the crux, a powerful concept.
SNARKS and Privacy Compute
Snarks and privacy compute are going to enable to next generation of scalability and privacy for blockchain networks. The verification of data using a PCP structure is effectively the way that blockchains will able to take a message pass it into the root of a merkle tree, hash that, and have that hash verified by the reveiver of the message, therefore not having the exact message but being able to verification the output of the computation. SNARKS are going to have to as computation improves but there is the ability to apply this cryptography for blockchain network scalability across multiple chains. Para-chain implementations will create an interoperable network of libp2p type networks where content addressed hashing is bring used to develop different paratypes.
B2B Enterprise Software
The next generation of b2b enterprise computing has arrived and is based on a substrate where companies are operating in unison with verifiable, replicated processes and data to yield top line growth. There will be a collective oneness for all businesses where data is owned by the customer, processes are verifiable and distributed amongst a network of peers and nodes in the network at scale. This is the natural progression of computing where the enterprise now can ensure the integrity of their data and replicate the processes amongst multiple partners in a vertical. Nodes on the network can instantly communicate with other nodes on the network in real-time with shared sets of entry's into each's own transaction ledgers / vault. All of the business information that is called on by Smart Contracts will be the same across every node in the network and run in a trusted executable environment to create a secure encrypted ledger.
Genomics
In September and October I did a Health and Wellness Genome Test and was it was very interesting to see the results regarding complementary food and specific workout routines that are specific to your allele types. I started getting interested in different applications of blockchain technology to genetics and at Eth SF Hackathon build Genome CDP:
GenomeCDP was my first attempt to learn more about MakerDAO and the Dai Stablecoin. The idea was that you could collateralized your tokenized SNPS in exchange for a loan from the MakerDAO. The idea being that once tokenized as a Non-Fungible Asset in a Multi-collateral Debt Position to Genomic Data would remain relatively stable in price and or could be basketed with others as part of a study. Because this has a price tag on it by big pharma, researchers; it could be collateralized. If the data was bought or sold they could pay off the DAI Loan, Wipe the CDP and use the data. Ideally a secondary layer would be some immutable chain of usage of the data that would lead to a residual or payment to owner of the genomic data if used to solve some disease or beneficiary down the road.
When speaking with others about the project at the hackathon, some thought the idea was somewhat dystopian in that if you couldnt pay back the loan the someone liquidates your NFT and your genomic info is now theirs. Others thought on a more altruistic and open way that the data should be written to a chain but completely open for research as a pool but selective disclosed personal data obfuscated leveraging Zero-Knowledge Proofs.
Blockchain Week SF / CESC 18
I went to CESC 17 in Berkeley last year and this year attended Blockchain Week and CESC 18 in SF. It was much larger this year going from College Auditorium room to grand ballroom but the content just as great if not better.
Notes from the week kind of unstructured:
Plasma Casper Beason Set On-Chain Governance Proof-of-Stake 99% / 1% POW for SNARKS/STARKs Oracle Problem and Group Computation Channels vs. Plasma Channels on top of Plasma CDPS, MDPS, Stablecoins Mechanism Design / Crypto Game Design Secure Enclaves Merkalised Data Structures Separation of Compute, Storage, Consensus Middlewares and Wallets WASM Web Assembly Virtual Machines Machines Owning and Transferring Value Reputation Systems Avalanche Consensus Sparse Merkle Trees Sharding Inter-Committee Routing
Notes from Web3 in Berlin
Money from first principles Verifiable links, trust the commons, data markets web3 governance and standards mixing layer 2 with substrate cosmos and IBC
Substrate
Learning more and more about the Polkadot network and substrate. Need to continue to deep dive on this protocol and learn how to write runtime modules in Rust to create interoperable application specific parachains.
Authors Chains States Extrinsics Intrinsics Inherents
Internet = Communications
Bitcoin = Money
Ethereum = Computation
Substrate = Interoperability
Some thoughts going into 2019:
Secure Enclaves, Replicated State Machines and state of the Art BFT will disrupt Cloud Computing Privacy Computation using zero knowledge proofs (ZKPs) will drive the adoption and growth of these networks. Tokenized Data Markets and Tokenzied security liquidity Devops confluence will drive scalable blockchain network adoption Universal Timekeeping Mechanism via Blockchains Blockchain Networks need Safety, Liveness, and Resilience Replications and Partitioned agreed upon state Replica resiliency leads to increase in latency Need to deep dive on running Lightning Node and Channels Tezos Baking Delegate planning Elastico, OmniLedger, RapidChain
The message has to be very concrete and tangible:
what does it do
what problem does it solve
how does it improve x
what is the main goal
why is that the goal
condensed in general to:
who or what brought it about
what it’s made of
what shape it has
what it’s for
Definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it. I will continue to build the mastermind group and devote my energy to drive combinatorial creativity through technology and people.
Happy New Year.
Live the Dream.
-Dom