The return of Web3 summit was great event for me. I watched the videos from the 2018 edition, and attending the 2019 edition was my first main Polkadot/Blockchain related conference. So being back in the same venue was very nostalgic.
I will share a few notes from the summit here. I won’t try to structure my thoughts a lot, consider this a brain dump.
My intention for this event was to ignore most of the talks and watch the recordings later, and spend more time talking to people in person. Unfortunately, I started to get a bit sick from the second day onwards and fully skipped the third day.
- The “Resilience[1] is a Spectrum Fallacy”: Being exposed to other ecosystems, I frequently heard a similar opinion, that I eventually described as the “Resilience Spectrum Fallacy”: Arguing that resilience of a system is a “spectrum”, and strong BTC/ETHL1 style resilience is not always needed. I don’t disagree that for certain systems, for example one meant to facilitate large volume, small value transactions, this is a great choice. But I also often hear this argument being used in situations where it is clearly not a choice, but rather a reaction to the fact that the system failed to scale while maintaining resilience, therefore it changed its narrative to argue resilience was not needed to begin with. Optimistic roll-ups and bridges are prime examples of this: They are often implemented with suboptimal security guarantees, and if you listen to their advocates, they preach the above argument/fallacy. The reason I find this to be an important realization: Polkadot’s cynical rollup mechanis[2] is precisely the answer to the technological shortcoming: It scales the system with almost identical security guarantees to the L1/RC, and this is damn unique. I think we have a shot here at posing Polkadot-based technologies (Cynical Rollups, our bridge design) as a counter-example: “Look, resilience doesn’t have to be a spectrum, and you can scale without compromising it, and at a cheap cost”.
- Bullish on Personhood:
- While one might raise an eyebrow to another tattoo-based project
I am super excited to see how the individuality project will unfold. It is related to the above point as well: It is a true step forward for the entire wbe3, and importantly it is not trying to solve a problem by compromising core principles. Other than governance, a good personhood system, combined with onchain reputation scores, can be a much better solution to the Oracle problem and meaningfully bridging the gap between real world and digital systems. All in all, I am excited to know that this project, which is truly on the frontiers of the Web3 space, is part of Polkadot. - Interestingly, I also think that if personhood takes off as intended and at scale, it will be the beginning of the end for much of the gambling on speculative tokens that we see in the space today. Perhaps this would mean that the entire crypto market cap would shrink by a lot, but what remains would be much more based on utility rather than speculation
- While one might raise an eyebrow to another tattoo-based project
- Unaffiliated → GREAT: I found the lack of excessively advertising from any ecosystem (incl. Polkadot) to have a very positive effect on me. I felt being in an academic convention, where people are trying to solve problems rather than sell products.
- Don’t Like “Less Trust More Truth”:
- Perhaps a nitpick, but the flaw in this motto is that it attaches an unfair negative connotation to “Trust”. Very often you see people mindlessly frown upon any phrase containing the words “So we should trust in
<...>” and cheer at “So we removed the need to trust in<...>” no matter the context
I think the right phrasing is “Less Blind Trust, more Verifiable Trust”. - Countless people indeed “TRUST” the bitcoin network in order to accept it as a good place for long term store of value. There is no better way to phrase it than to say “I Trust Bitcoin”. The equivalent would be, what, “Bitcoin is Truth”
? No.
- One trusts the correctness of the math (e.g. that a certain hash function works as intended, that game-theory works), science, and auditability of the entire system. I would still call all of this “Trusting”, but a flavor of it that is better described as “Trust rooted in verification accessible to all”, i.e. “Verifiable Trust”.
- Perhaps a nitpick, but the flaw in this motto is that it attaches an unfair negative connotation to “Trust”. Very often you see people mindlessly frown upon any phrase containing the words “So we should trust in
- Parallel Hackathon: Didn’t Work. Despite the well organized logistics, the parallel hackathon did not work out for me at all. I knew I would not go to any talks, but talking to people basically took almost the entirety of my days. I suppose for those who have a smaller networking circle, combining the hackathon with some talks could have worked, but for me, it was a complete non-starter.
- JAM / Node Impls / CoreChains:
- I had multiple long talks with people with JAM, pointing them out to my article when need be, and overall felt an improvement in the understanding around JAM.
- An interesting one was with Gossamer. They are currently pursuing the JAM prize next to Polkadot 1.0 node implementation and while some ambiguity exists, they think they can reuse a lot of their code and knowledge. I hope to see the treasury eventually stop funding more Polkadot node implementations, as it will not be useful in a few years. I had a similar conversation with the folks from people from LimeChain async here
- We also talked about when/who will eventually implement the
CoreChainsservice, which will be pivotal to making sure the existing ecosystem is migrated smoothly. Currently, this is formally the responsibility of the fellowship.