 Hola Cancun, what an epic death con this was. Can we agree? Let's give it up for Ethereum Foundation and everyone making this happen! Yeah! Thank you! So let me play this. Okay, so before we begin I would like to ask how many of you have heard of Akasha before? Can we see a show of whoa? Okay that is impressive and I'm just curious how many of you have actually tried the alpha and wow okay so we have quite a few alpha veterans thank you for taking the time to play with the app. For those of you who haven't heard of Akasha before as a word it comes from Sanskrit and it means ether but it also stands as an acronym for advanced knowledge architecture for social human advocacy and what we are trying to build is a peer-to-peer alternative in a world where the social media networks are modeled after the Napster architecture where the user depends on a server or a server operator or an entity and we want to tackle this problem from a different perspective using different technologies so in a word we want to showcase the potential of Ethereum combined with IPFS to solve all problems using new technologies and the thing we want to achieve is a shared and persistent information commons that can help people put that can help people regain their collective memory and freedom of expression back from the clause of corporations that monetize each click and really everything it's really bad so to put it visually the Napster web apps are like web apps rely on the server admin or the server itself and if for some reason the user does not comply or respect whatever the server operator wants they lose access to the service in the alpha we took the hardest challenge we could find which was to build a fully decentralized desktop app meaning that each user when they downloaded and installed Akasha application they were actually installing bundled an Ethereum node and an IPFS node so in the beta thanks to hard work of the team we will also introduce a fully functional web version which will remove the need to sync with the chain and the users will then rely on MetaMask or any other web resource provider like status or missed and when we say that free speech is embedded in software what we mean is that whereas the user can be kicked for whatever reason from the Napster like web apps on Akasha the users are in full control over their identity and the content they are posting so our story began on May 6th, May 3rd 2016 on WordPress Freedom Day and this is when we basically announced that we've been working for quite some time on the Akasha alpha it was a total shot in the dark for us we weren't sure exactly what we expect so it was kind of a test to see how it will be received among ourselves before we release the website we talked and we say okay man what would we consider a success you know just to to have some some numbers and Marius here said like 30 people in the first 24 hours would be cool Roxana here more optimistic 50 people and I was secretly hoping at around 100 24 hours later we surpassed 200 signups which was like whoa and then in less than a month we surpassed 2000 people so it became clear that we weren't crazy or that we weren't the only ones so these these numbers might not seem much at first but it's worth mentioning that every single person that signed up for the alpha reached organically our website so we just published blog posts linked them on Reddit or tweeted them so what we wanted was to measure the real interest in the application and we felt that paid advertising would pay in those results we would end up measuring the efficiency of targeted ads rather than the real interest in in the application and idea so fast forwarding until early 2017 one year after Ethereum we launched the first public version of the alpha and it was called into the ether it was received very well by the community and I suppose you guys also tried it hope you had a pleasant experience when you when you tried it and basically in the alpha we tried to have a basic functionality you find in a social network which was to publish something to comment on something to read something to vote and to follow people combined also with things like since we are using Ethereum one of the side effects is that each identity is also a wallet so people can also send resources to each other and so forth and after the release one of this is actually a screen from the Akasha application a comment and on the first row you can see that someone was like excited that there's a doubt that normal people can use and for us it was like exactly what we were aiming for but I think the big point here was that with all these people you and the others that might be watching this this conference we proved that it is possible it is possible to have an application that does not rely on servers for people to communicate among themselves and thanks to your playfulness and your time put into testing the application we identified some bugs and we also identified what can be done better and Marius now is going to explain one of the lessons we learned in the alpha and that we applied in the beta Marius thank you yeah yeah so what is this yeah I think all all the alpha users got stuck at a given time in this loading loading screen this was happening because of the way we used to load the resources we were trying to get all of them at once so if at a given time one of the resources would be unavailable the all other resources would have to wait for that one to become online before fetching them to the user yeah so in the beta version this was one of the biggest challenge we we had to solve we've done this by loading every single resource individually as you can see in this demo yeah so it comes with a great improvement on the UX side so enough with this yeah so another highlight of the of the beta is the first token experiment in the alpha we had AETH which served as a placeholder token and I just want to to make something clear this is there is just one token which is this currently nicknamed AETH we are open to suggestions regarding the name we want to avoid confusion with other projects like Ethereum if anyone heard of it okay and this is just an experiment to get the ball running right so we fully assume that we are we don't have all the answers but we invite everyone to collaborate on finding them so to give you an overview of how this token works on the surface AETH is in an ERC-20 compatible token it works pretty much as you would expect from an ERC-20 token you can send and receive but there is a twist you can lock it for a predefined amount of time and this will give you some something we call MANA which acts like a a regenerable crypto field that can be burned inside the application Marius will cover this in more detail afterwards and essence is basically MANA that is burned and if the quality of the content is deemed as good the authors and the persons interacting can consume this essence to mint new tokens in existence and not lastly karma is our experiment on the proto reputation layer and Marius now we'll give you a presentation of the token flow of the states and how everything ties in together so so starting from the beta version every user will have to burn a small amount of MANA to interact with the application so how do we how do we get MANA yeah a user can get some MANA by locking his akasha tokens for a period of time during which he gets periodically the MANA replenished the MANA used for the MANA burned for doing actions in akasha can be collected afterwards into two specific resources called essence and karma karma will serve in akasha like some sort of proto reputation which will unlock specific features like creating communities and so on which will require to be above level of karma the other one the essence it's interesting because this is the first idea which came to us to incentivize the users to create content on akasha because it can be consumed to mint new year c20 akasha tokens and be spent afterwards also at any given time the user can unlock their modified tokens and afterwards it will go to the year c20 state by passing to a delay time which we call it a cycle yeah so let's see a new basic flow so we have the publisher which posts an entry on akasha the readers afterwards can express their general feeling about the quality of the content by voting after a voting period the entry will generate a small amount of essence which afterwards can be claimed by both publisher and the reader by specific use case you can look on the flyers yeah but like when we were starting to feel good about ourselves like yeah man i think we're on to something here uh vitalik did it again so then just a few days ago vitalik published this this entry so he basically pointed out that there are more than just uh so a good token economic system uh requires more than just a way to insert units of that particular currency into circulation and um you know uh this is uh quite interesting because uh following a couple of days the media started to digest this information and started calling the tokens invented until this point as tokens 1.0 and you know if you think about it it's pretty accurate since we are still barely scratching the surface of what can be done and we are still trying to understand the basic pieces of the puzzle that make a good token work and then things kept snowballing and by by the end of the day we had like this this sort of stuff and it's like everything you need to know about cryptocurrencies so um you know 90 percent of startups in general fall so maybe it would have been more accurate to say that with a poorly designed token 99 percent of the token startups will fall but to focus on the positive uh the question of how do we get to token 2.0 started to to take shape and uh since vitalik thanks started this uh i figured that it's best to just show a short video of a short segment of a recent video done by uh vitalik so without further ado the nice thing about cryptocurrency i think is that it just makes it so bloody easy to create one of these economic mechanisms you just write it up in code that it just makes it real easy to sort of serve as an economic experimentation ground for doing these kinds of things and so you know the sort of the whole point of economic experimentation is sort of coming up with these sort of clever clever little tricks to sort of combine together incentives and sort of put you know put things together in this nice way that gives people the the incentive to do the right thing and you know just yeah there's probably quite a lot to be done it's just uh you're thinking we're barely getting started we are barely getting started i like to focus on that right it's still just year two after ethereum and um our approach to this thing to to uh maybe answering this question is that uh just as ethereum had during its frontier uh the ethereum uh olympics uh where i were developers from around the world were invited to identify bugs attack vectors and basically if you can break it go ahead and we'll learn from it from it will become stronger uh we invite everyone uh here and uh that's watching the presentation to join us in uh breaking and reinventing and re-breaking the token proposal and basically with the aeth proposal and what we uh showcase today we want to just get the prototype in the world and then uh in the sort of cypher punk inception like uh fashion twitterate co-creating the open on akasha itself so uh we will use tags to coordinate and later on if we still have time we will show you an actual demo of how this uh this will work but basically what we want or hope is that uh if we approach things from this perspective maybe people and and startups can think of of tokens as these dynamic adaptive systems which involve multiple pieces that you have to carefully uh put together uh rather than a graph going from zero to the moon right so um i think together if we will tackle this uh this question um we might uh reach some emergent shared understanding because uh no one has like the full idea of what is token 2.0 but a thousand little half-baked ideas can come together in something completely new and the cool thing about this is that this is a code i really like is that the mind once stretched by a new idea never returned to its original dimensions and if you want uh an example just remember that in uh 2014 ethereum had the ether presale which led to around 18.5 million dollars being raised to fund the development of the platform and it was number one as in the most successful crowdfunding campaign in the history of the internet and now a couple of years later over three billion dollars have been raised by companies using icos as a form of raising funds for their projects so just one idea huge impact so now the big picture of what we are trying to accomplish is like we're not trying to compete with the big boys i mean they have billions of users would be nice but let's get real uh we want to have a real alternative in in place to keep them in check and uh this is not like a paper or plastic back choice we want to offer people a fundamentally different choice when it comes to each person's digital sovereignty as human netizens and uh i think we can all agree after this beautiful death con that watching history in the making is cool but we think that writing the future ourselves is even cooler so on this note we invite everyone to be to to join us in building together in this decade a better knowledge uh architecture for the next century and uh we actually have all the tools uh and we have like a pretty good idea of where things can go and uh the future is not the place we get to visit the future is a place we get to create and i would like to announce that the beta signups are open for everyone that wants to participate and subscribe just go to akasha.world insert your email in and in a matter of weeks we will send you the invites and we will start release the beta and since i see we still have two minutes i will now show you a demo of what the beta looks like and this is basically the dashboard view in which we have like different streams and different columns which can be customized by the users and here we add a column which is a tag and in this case it's crypto olympic so people can coordinate on the ideas brainstorm these are proposals they can use the entries and the comment section as counterproposals or to discuss various uh uh ideas and this is like an example in which is hola kankun hola defcon how how it works to publish a comment as you can see the ui has changed quite a bit also in the back end we uh basically are now looking at the completely rewritten decentralized application from dap so it would be more correct to call it like version two but since we started with the alpha we we will name it beta and here on the left side these are what we call boards for now and basically offers like different windows into specific topics so if we take the example of defcon one of the of the boards could have been like events presentations workshops and people could have coordinated better rather than checking on reddit 10 discord rooms one slack you get idea two geeters and and so on so i would like to thank you all for your attention and uh it's a great being here hope to see you on akasha soon