 Developers, developers, no, I'm kidding. Beyond the bubble. Yeah, so sounds good. Cool. My name is Taylor Gehring. Thank you. Been working with Ethereum for a while now. And I wanted to give a less technical talk. You can see here I've titled it Beyond the Bubble. And I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to present, but in the end, it's overcoming education and adoption challenges for the blockchain industry. Sound? So I get asked a lot, what do I do at Ethereum? It's kind of like this. What would you say you do here? This is from the movie Office Space. Yeah, so what do I do at Ethereum? This is me in the very beginning at Miami when Vitalik announced the project. And since then, I've worked on a couple components of the project. At first, I was working on the website. Then I helped on the Go Ethereum project and then infrastructure. And now I'm doing less technical work. I'm doing kind of external relations. And what is that really? Well, it's really taking technical topics, breaking them down for the layperson, and explaining them in a very simple way. So this is kind of what I do. Ethereum blockchain platform. Come hear the gospel. I go to meetups, public conferences like this one, private symposiums, and do some blockchain education and training. And you can see here, is there a pointer? Nope. So on the bottom left here, I just went to this in Orlando a couple weeks ago and had the pleasure of speaking with the CIA, FBI, DEA, Secret Service, SEC, and a few others. Kind of nerve wracking being in the crypto industry and talking to these organizations. But interesting nonetheless, because I get to hear what they think about blockchain. And I get to share what I think about blockchain with them. Why have I chosen to do this? I have the technical capability to program. So why go down this route of less technical things? Well, I want to answer questions about growth beyond our very small industry, very, very small. Trying to find the perfect elevator pitch. And I'd like to help avoid this stagnation that plagued the Bitcoin meetup scene. After two or three years, I think the value transfer aspect has been discussed. And the meetups kind of died down a little bit. So I have good news. Well, we've already started really pushing beyond our small little industry. And I think we all know that. FinTech is rapidly developing blockchain solutions. And we have ongoing interests. I get calls from people, emails from people all the time. And they want help with various projects. And some of those projects are IoT. Some of those projects are energy, medical related. And I think they're pretty much ready for adoption. FinTech has picked up the baton, if you will, and run with it. And I think these other segments are about to grab the baton and continue the race. And soon, I really hope that we'll have governments and nonprofits on board. There seems to be a lot of interest for voting applications and other things like that. It's hard to really say, Vitalik wrote a blog post about the long tail of blockchains. And we don't really know, but it's starting. So another aspect of this is mom and dad. How do you explain to mom and dad what are blockchains for? They're not corporate enterprises that are looking for efficiency gains. They're not FinTech organizations look to transfer money faster. They don't really care that much about IoT and having a light bulb that talks to your refrigerator. So how can you get mom and dad on board with blockchain? Well, there's a big problem. Generally, people don't really care about technical innovation. If you're not in the tech industry, why would you care about blockchain? My mom's a nurse. She doesn't care about blockchain. But if it's something that immediately improves their lives or makes their lives worse, they're definitely going to pay attention to this. And what I've come up with in terms of talking to my mom and getting her to understand blockchain and why it's important to me and why I think I can make an impact on the world kind of really boils down to the slide up here. The internet still functions off 1970s technology. You send an email that's in plain text. You access a web page, generally it's in plain text. And the result of this, actually, is that our data is leaked by companies all the time because our data is stored on their servers. Our identities are stolen by hackers. If you have shopped at Home Depot or Target or a variety of other organizations and you have a credit card stored online, there's a good chance that that credit card was leaked to hackers. And also we have this problem of our behavior being monetized by advertisers, which isn't a problem in and of itself, but if you're going to monetize my actions, maybe I'd like a cut of that too. So it's kind of interesting. We're still working with 40-year-old technology, let's say, and yet the yet web is ubiquitous. We all have smartphone supercomputers in our pocket that connect to a global information store, and it's everywhere. In fact, if you were born after 1995 or so, you've never lived in a world without internet, which I think is really amazing. I grew up in the 80s and I had computers without networks, and that was really cool, and I really don't understand how I was able to function back then because I'm so addicted to the internet now, but yeah, I have a young sister, and she was born after 1995, and rather than her friend coming over to hang out, they would FaceTime each other. They just pop up the iPad and hang out like they were in person, but over the internet. So she has a vastly different understanding of the world and it's connectivity than I do. So we have an internet age, most of the world's getting connected, and we still have these broken 1970s legacy technology. Why? Why are there no obvious solutions? Why haven't we fixed this yet? We know it's a problem. The good news is people are beginning to understand the need to have the same privacy and security guarantees online as with offline. So one really good example of this is if you wanna have a private conversation with your friend, doing it online is a little harder. You can't step into a room off the side, close the door, and have a private discussion. And I think we should change that. As our lives become more and more connected, it's going to become more and more necessary to have these kinds of conversations. Not because you have anything to hide, but we need these digital versions of what we're used to in the physical world. And on top of that, with all the hacks and all the leaks, even older generations are starting to see the need to have security and privacy by default. We want our emails and messages encrypted. We want our online transactions to be encrypted. Really, there's no reason that most of our activities shouldn't be encrypted by default. So let's start building these systems. And really, this is kind of where I boiled everything down. So I gave a talk last year at DevCon 1 in London, and it was entitled Ethereum in the Enterprise. And I basically created a selling point for IT managers, IT professionals, say these are things that you can bring back to your organization and try to integrate blockchain or distributed technology into your organization. And I think it was a really nice way to kind of give that sell to people that weren't so interested in the ideological principles of blockchain but found the technology interesting nonetheless. Since then, having had a lot of conversations about the properties of blockchain and this technology, peer-to-peer technology, so forth, I found that actually, this idea of data under owner authority to be very powerful. This was a phrase that I borrowed from Nick Szabo. He wrote about it some time ago. I boiled this down though, because it's a bit dense of a phrase. And really, it boils down to own your own data, right? We all use Dropbox and services like store our files, but at the end of the day, we don't really own that data. We upload pictures to social media sites. We don't own that data. Shouldn't I own that data? It's my photo. So far more than be your own bank, people are interested in own your own data. And even my mom understands this, which is a huge leap for her, I think. So yeah, what can we do? What does this have to do with blockchain, right? We're an Ethereum, DevCon, Blockchain-type conference. Well, part of what I'm trying to do is get outside this industry and move into other parts of the technology industry and explain to them how blockchain can be used. So for example, next month, I'll be heading to All Things Open in Raleigh, North Carolina. And there, I'll be talking with 2,000 free and open source software people that are interested in this kind of technology, IoT and the like. And I think it's going to be our job to help build a better web, a better internet. This is something that we've talked about in Ethereum for a long time. We've talked about the vision of Web 3, something more secure, more distributed, less failure. So I think over the next couple of years, this is something people have asked me as well, you know, what's going to happen? We've seen what's happened in the last two, what's going to happen in the next two. And really, all our Lego blocks that we've been building are starting to come together. And we're going to take those Lego blocks and start building bigger and better things. And in that process, we hope that we build a better web, a better internet. Something that is similar to the app experience. This is an experience that has proven people understand it, and we're building it. I'm sure you've all seen this image up here a few other times, but it's a listing of dApps. I think this is a really great way to explain to people what's possible until it's ultimately a fabric of the internet. And in the end, if we do this all right, people will have the ability to manage their digital lives. And I think that having that kind of control over their digital life, just as they do with their physical life, will be something empowering to most people that they will start to appreciate the kind of work that we're doing now, the effort, the man hours, the years of time spent building this for what they thought was a questionable purpose. But in the end, we can actually give it a lot of meaning to them. So that's it. That's how we can push beyond the bubble. Thank you.