 Hello everyone. So, this is a panel about blockchain and the free software community. How does the blockchain fit into the free software community? I have been hosting this panel at a few other conferences with some interesting results and discussions and I hope we're going to have an interesting discussion here. The basic idea is the question at least last year when I started this blockchain was very very much hyped and very much dominated by coins and tokens and people trying to make money and it seemed really at odds with what the free software community is standing for and so I was starting to ask the question what's what's going on here this is coming out of the free software community in some form it's using open source free software code for the most part and everybody is saying it should be using free software and open source code for different reasons that we'll talk about and so I started to organize meetups and these discussions in order to find out more about what's going on and what's the what's the reason for the state that the things were in. So quickly introduced the the panelists so you have already heard talk so we have Stefan Bayer from sorry what was your company name again from cryptomics we have Amod from Gitcoin we have Subtack sorry sorry Subtack from Gitcoin and Amod from Mozilla and Jolin okay I'm gonna start off the the questions sorry where's my list here so yeah I'm gonna start of the first question is basically why are you using blockchain in a project and what how did you get started with that okay so well I'm not actually using blockchain in a project I'm sort of a consultant and I look at a lot of blockchain projects you know other people's projects how did I get started with blockchain well I'm come from a distributed systems background and you know we were already working on consensus protocols and fault tolerance replicated databases back in the early 2000s but people were working on that much earlier but I was in the early 2000s so so it's just a natural continuation of my earlier research yeah so my project basically Gitcoin it started off more as an open source project so all like including my CEO me and most of the other team as we have been involved in open source for quite some time and we all knew that sustainability was a problem in open source so we started off as solving sustainability problem in open source and block and seem like a good way of doing that because any ways blockchain allowed you like I said as a technical stack it allows us to change the transactional state or a programmatic change into financial financial rewards right so that's why we felt that blockchain is a good way of solving the sustainability problem in open source so that's how we started off with blockchain and our application basically is open source in itself as well so Gitcoin if you go to GitHub you will see that it's the source code is basically open source and it's the platform mostly is a centralized Django application but then we use blockchain for the stakeholder parts and the funding process so yeah that's how we got started so regarding me you may say me as a blockchain enthusiast because being an open source developer I must be open to all the technologies and the same's blockchain and machine learning those are very much booming technologies so if I want to succeed myself or if I want to take my knowledge further then definitely having a no in this technology or having a know-how in this technology is really important for me so having this blockchain and relating it to the various industries like I had been working in the insurance in the healthcare in the media advertising as well so basically what are the problems in those industries and how exactly blockchain can leverage the security in those that is one of the major concern and if we can enhance more security in it and that will be a really great option to do so so yes blockchain can be used as a security and basically my personal experience with it is very really good basically if we can implement our existing know-how because blockchain as I said that it's a concept and that can be implemented with the existing architecture be it cloud orbit the infrastructure to leverage or to make the existing architecture even more efficient and what exactly it is now so yeah hi my name is Jordan personally I'm using blockchain for research projects for a couple of years then I found the blockchain and open source project last year in Singapore and I believe that the blockchain technology can benefit the internet of things industry for many areas such as the data trust security and security okay so how do you see in in your work the relationship between blockchain and free software yeah well most of the projects I see I I see are actually open source and they do want to make money so often there are ICOs involved and and you know you mentioned that's a bit of a conflict but you might see it as way but but but that's generally open source in terms of I look at this also from a cyber security point of view and and you know I'm a smart contract auditor and and I think it's essential these projects should all be open source from a security point of view and also from you know we're placing our trust in these protocols and projects we are eliminating third parties with a protocol so we have to be able to see what this protocol does so yeah I think most projects are actually open source and and they should be yeah so I'll talk about so when we say free software like we all know it's not really about that it's not supposed to be any talk about money right so it's more about the freedom right so it's about distribution it's about the decentralization of everything it's about people working from different parts of the world and that's kind of the underlying thing of blockchain as well the idea itself the concept itself comes from the decentralization of the things so I like seeing blockchain more like from a decentralization perspective than a security perspective so I guess the underlying principles are very similar as though it's about money and then open source we say free but it's more about freedom than though many people think that open source means that it has to be free but it doesn't necessarily need to be free it's more about the freedom of the things so I guess they are kind of connected in that way that they have similar kind of principles it's just that many of the open source people I feel that it's kind of like marketed in a very wrong way are told in a wrong way by many people because since mostly when we talk about blockchain the thing that comes to our mind is cryptocurrencies or tokens rather than it being a technology stack solving maybe IoT problems or maybe sustainability problems so I guess that's why it's thought of as like not so open source friendly but I guess at the end of the day most of the blockchain projects are also open source and so yeah those are pretty good connected in between right I would like to see this blockchain from a bit mobile perspective because the reason being I belong to a country where agriculture is the primary occupation and still the farmers are committing suicide because they are not able to pay their debts and the main reason for this is being there being cheated or they are being fooled on by the landlords that the debts are still remaining where they're already created so imagine in such a kind of country where maybe in agriculture insurance will be healthcare and these sectors have a lot of people surrounding it so in that case if you're not able to build a trust over here then those administration becomes absolutely futile and having a leveraging technology like blockchain which can inbuilt have a trust factor in it a secure factor in it then we can be able to have the basics or the at least the primary occupation of the country being leveraged to a very secure and a trusted channel so yes blockchain it's first of all it should be open source because that will cater to a wide variety of the developers the especially end users and it will help them making a life a bit bit more simpler than what it is now rather in in many cases in many rural areas where people are able to actually leverage technologies or harness technologies at least this blockchain can help getting a next step or a step ahead than what it is now yes I think the problem is people join the blockchain ecosystem for rewards they want to be rich actually most of them become millionaires due to mining Bitcoin and Ethereum's so from my own perspective is that to running a sustainable open source project we really need a platform such as give coin it's because the github is a open source community platform for managing open source projects but we actually need a platform as a coin to running a good bounty programs because a good bounty programs helps to be a sustainable blockchain ecosystem but I think people join any blockchain open source project for rewards and not really wish to country open source projects we use solidity smart country of Ethereum to write the apps but actually we didn't check out the source code for Ethereum and make any contributions all right let's get a little bit more technical how do you specifically use existing free software and open source in your project or in your work with the projects that you're working with okay so well from my point of view there are two things when I audit a project I obviously use free software free open source software for all the tooling you know starting from the text editor and and the static analytics to tools but in general you know all these projects that they built on free open source and you know if you build on the Serium platform you're using a lot of tools and the actual protocol which is open sourced and in general I think in any type of software it's very difficult to develop these days without using open source you know the API's that you use to access the platforms that they generally open source the the the front end libraries everything so yeah if that answers the questions it I see it yeah true I agree with Stephen Rice for example with Gidka and late most of the blockchain projects if it's not just a white paper or a token or a smart contract which has been written out there for someone to use someday or a token which just says that this token is built on this principle and it's actually practical does nothing apart from people buying it and stuff so if you're actually making a project a blockchain project where you can use the blockchain technology it has to have some kind of application right even for as simple as making a browser blockchain enabled or web she enabled as we say we use a project on MetaMask which uses Chrome extensions or module extensions which are written in JavaScript which is again open source project right we in Gidka and the entire Gidka is written in Django so Django is an open source project we use jQuery in front end so jQuery is again an open source project then we use Linux servers for deployment of the entire Gidka platform which is again an open source project so when you finally create a project out of it where you're using the blockchain anywhere so you will definitely more or less use open source project like I was saying in my slides like even the closed source companies that we have kind of directly or indirectly would be using open source projects for making their application so as to say so it's not like that if you are a blockchain application you are gonna avoid or not use open source projects you're definitely gonna use open source projects and most of the blockchain projects that are there use some kind of reactor Django or some kind of language to build the platform there where you can go and use a blockchain in itself right so which is written in some kind of open source project and probably deployed in a Linux server or it's an Android application so it has open source involved in it anyways right to take this discussion forward as Saptak had already mentioned in his previous talk that whether we know what is open source or whether they don't know what is open source but we definitely use open source without being realizing so because we are whether whatever project we are working in we are surrounded by these technologies that we inherit your implicitly definitely use use them so as far as I'm concerned I'm a Java developer so I've definitely used all the APIs and everything and also I'm into machine learning so basically the technology like TensorFlow and all the open CV etc so I'm using those to basically create something like object detection and image recognition etc so yes I use open source widely and in definitely in support of it we are using open source projects such as not yours for your tools especially I think the most important part of the open source ecosystem is the community so as mentioned a couple minutes ago I think the most important thing is to to bring people to bring open source developers into our projects but actually we can not make until now because of many people joining the project ecosystem for mining coins and not really to contribute contribute their open source come in and even they didn't express their interest in contributing any branch branch open source projects so I think the major problem it's a culture of the blockchain because it's not really the problem of the open source project so the last question was how do you use fuss in your project and since you don't have a project we can jump straight to the next question and that one was not on the list so based on what you just said about the people joining the projects for mining and so I would like to ask now in the in the last year there has been a lot of change in the perception of blockchain and Bitcoin because of the value drop and so on so I would like to ask do you see a change in the perception of the projects or in the attitude of the developers or creators of the projects in the last year or do you see a change in the future what what are your thoughts on that yeah tricky question I don't think there is a big change in attitude I mean projects generally want to make money and get funded that that's you know when you create a company and you decide to do something based on blockchain otherwise you need funding usually and then last couple of years we've seen everyone do an ICO because that was the easiest way to get money so you do crowdfunding before that startups went to venture capital now they're either going back to venture capital or they talk about a security token offering but in the end the goal is to to fund their development you know that might be adults with some of the free open source principles but but a lot of these projects are about startups and and making money so I don't think that has changed and I don't think that's likely to change soon obviously there's also a lot of misconceptions on you know cryptocurrencies tokens and what is Bitcoin and and what does it have to do with blockchain but but you know that that's slightly related only yeah I completely agree like most of the startup projects so it will be needing some kind of funding and based on what happened like the last few months which which we are like calling the crypto winter kind of a thing where everything is going down and stuff so maybe there are not many millionaires who can like just throw away money to any of the blockchain project that's coming up so many of the companies the people who throw away the money of blockchain are kind of thinking more consciously okay whether we should be funding this project or not but I guess in a way it's gonna reduce the amount of people who thought just like so it's as good and bad parts the bad part is obviously maybe many of the good projects might now need other ways of getting funding and stuff but a good part is also that many people who just thought of it as a investment plan for their future so many people will now be using blockchain I guess more like a technology stack rather than just an investment plan of like hodling what we call in blockchain right we just hold all coins right like we buy Ethereum and keep it and hope that it goes up and then it's our retirement plan also as to say but now maybe we will be more like biddling on blockchain which is like using the technology stack and trying to make more of stuffs out of blockchain and use it in a practical applications rather than just thinking of it as a money source this question basically reminded me of one of my incident so when I basically heard this word Bitcoin for the first time and I went to a sphere of my fellow developers that what exactly it is anyone knows about it so one answer I received it's like no Bitcoin is or cryptocurrency is something which stock people use is none of our concern so what I mean to say is that it blockchain or these technologies will take some time to sink in so it just like our internet when it was launched around it when it came into being around 25 years ago it did not become or it did not be famous at the first month or the first year it basically through various applications or through various web apps basically it went to the developers and went to the end users so it depends on our enthusiasm that how exactly we want to dive deep into a particular concept and how exactly we would allow ourselves to research on these further in this aspect so even though having a variety of usage unless and until we are giving the end users a confirmation that yes the trusted applications are more secure applications can be built using blockchain and if you're not able to develop a prototype or develop a sample application for them which actually will benefit them then only it will be possible for a developer or a contributor to enhance or promote the advocacy of blockchain yeah I think last year the winter of critical currency people left the critical currency market because the price was very bad but they they briefed that the market bear was gone by this couple of months and then come back to the critical market for next chance to make more money not really expect to use the blockchain technologies so for me I didn't see any changes as well was the question cryptocurrencies blockchains or distributed ledgers generally which level you're asking blockchain generally for example yeah I'm not terribly fast either way about the sort of changing fortunes of people who pump up shoe or burst bubbles and seems a spectacularly unimportant it does create short-term problems sure we've seen that before what I think so firstly point out that that cryptocurrencies are only a subset of blockchains albeit currently a fairly large subset but hyperledger has been sort of grinding away on on other problems that don't have anything at all along lines of cryptocurrency I'm not yet convinced either whether they're good ideas but they're largely unaffected so it is strictly cryptocurrencies that have been sort of subject to this bubble bursting type behavior I have finally allowed myself to become an advisor to a blockchain company what appealed to me in them was that they are from the outset running a business meaning organizing people and systems and resources to deliver something of value to customers who give you money not investors not speculators not bc's not whatever but customers so who's receiving the thing that you are producing and paying you for it what I'd suggest that the cryptocurrency will do is allow resources to shift back to companies founders developers GPU supply has been an actual issue to move back to other things that are actually more valuable and so in that respect I would say it's a sort of gradual improvement but yet not a gigantic effect yeah I'd like to dig deeper into exactly what you just said so the the cryptocurrencies are the ones that are losing whereas the rest stays the same is that but I'd like to ask everybody else so you really think that is the case or are other projects that are not cryptocurrency focused suffering from the the down hype so to speak from the negative publicity that is coming now or not what is your thought on that I'm not entirely sure that there are two aspects to this and first of all obviously it if you wanted to start a project now based on blockchain it'd be a harder sell to the general public but on the other hand it might also be you know I think we see a lot of really poor projects that have disappeared and and we we get better quality projects now so yeah cryptocurrencies have been affected startups have been affected but not not only in a bad way yeah so means I agree with him that many of the projects which like many of the projects have faded away at such and many of the good projects have stayed back but I do agree with Roland as he said like I don't believe personally and it's nothing to do with my company company's opinion but I don't believe that blockchain solves everything it's not like that unified string theory kind of a thing that solves all the problems right so it's not like that every time there is something okay I have to make it in blockchain it's not like that you don't use PostgreSQL for all your databases you don't write JavaScript in your backend all the time so it's similarly blockchain you don't use blockchain for any problem that is thrown to you so I don't believe in the blockchain everything principle that many of the blockchain ecosystem people believe in right so there is all this projects which has a particular thing that should be used there are applications I believe where blockchain helps maybe in trust applications and stuff like that but it's and I believe those projects will still stay because that's a technical that there it has been used as particularly application which has the features that are needed for the trust improvement and not like just for using of money similarly in Gitcoin we didn't really see but we might like I at least hope that may like not hoped but I thought that maybe because of the script of inter people might have a negative feeling of earning in form of blockchain because we are but like finally funding the projects in the form of ERC 20 tokens so it might not have been as attractive of earning in Ethereum as it was one year back or like two years back than it is now but we didn't really see a massive change in that way that contributors are no longer contributing to the project because it's in blockchain which is a good thing like I thought maybe that would happen but that didn't happen and yeah it's like so for me it's not new right because for me like I work in a US bus company so I earn in the US dollars and which gets converted to Indian rupees so I have always faced this US dollar and Indian rupees values going up and down up and down up and down so it's very similar to that if I think of it right it's very kind of similar to that it might blockchain the currencies might again go up and people might again come back to it and all the stuffs but it's practically to be used where it's supposed to be used and not just thrown away everywhere so I guess all those projects and many of the projects I've seen in the ecosystem are using blockchain so they're like okay I have a lot of Ethereum lying about what do I do I will make a project in a particular marketplace which I don't even know about how the marketplace works so this is something I've seen again and again happening and this kind of projects would have any ways gone down whether it the crypto came or didn't come right so I guess yeah so whichever projects used blockchain because blockchain made sense in using in that project I guess they will still stay because they are not really dependent on the cryptocurrency aspect of it right I might have a bit different opinion about it so basically from whatever I've analyzed or whatever I have kind of researched about it I somewhere feel that cryptocurrency might be the future so if any technology or if any organization is not adopting cryptocurrency now then they have to do it sometime later so it is beneficial to have a bit open-minded in that case that since even though right now I'm not using a technology but if it can be the future then in that case I should be ready enough to extend my current architecture to incorporate the technology as well okay I don't know it's a hard topic for me but you know many of my friends in Asia they create startups because blockchain technology it's a hard topic meaning it's a fashion because for entrepreneurs who create startups doing project companies they can stand they can sit right here give presentations and running they were writing lots of high papers and they were running the raw shows around the world so they feel such things are very fashions so I don't know it'd be a bit speculative for me I would I said that the other applications are sometimes a bit questionable and yes a good factor those are probably I was going to say sort of a halo effect because of cryptocurrencies but but fashion is is as accurate a way to describe the problem that people are doing stuff both startups or startups and corporates and maybe even regulators are getting involved in blockchain projects which in situations that really don't warrant it and often because I suspect that it's fashionable or in the setup case this is sort of halo effect because hey you know blockchains are cool so invest in my setup so yes maybe there's an amount of that dropping I can't quantify it but it wouldn't be it wouldn't surprise me that there are places where the benefit is not necessarily obvious so point to the MAS running a blockchain trial between the central bank and the local banks the problem they're solving is Swift Swift is appallingly awful in sort of 1960s era EDI today to sort of encapsulate it in Jason so there are certainly the certainly scope to improve some of those ancient systems but yeah is it the right technique and you need to and is the tendency to do it being pushed too far forward the last couple of years because of the the assent of cryptocurrencies and therefore are they starting to recede speculative yes but I don't have concrete evidence it's a way to see I want to open the space for for also for questions for the audience so that means we're gonna continue talking but if you have a question please raise your hand and then you can join the discussion or if you have any any opinion to what we're talking about please raise your hand and yeah you want to say something right now here we go okay thanks so I've been in a startup accelerator for the past several months and we've had presentations by partners from Sequoy Golden Gate Ventures Founders Fund and the consensus has always been that blockchain is cancer and startups that can't explain how their business process is dependent upon having a blockchain probably haven't thought about without they can't explain how their business processes are improved by the blockchain probably haven't thought it out too hard and that's had a kind of a knock-on effect in the companies that people are starting in this accelerator at least and I see people that are doing fractionalization projects without using blockchain which is kind of interesting and I'm wondering if you all have seen that yet or or if you see people changing their projects away from blockchain and just going back to what you're saying before like delivering business value for the company or the investors yeah it's it's actual stigma not seeing just a lack of hello you're seeing an actual stigma yeah and the cancer part I didn't say that like one of the one of the partners over there that's what that was their words for it so okay well now we have some data yeah so I kind of wanted to talk about it in a V like Roland also said right the hello effect right so it's I'm not sure about the cancer part means yeah but to be fair before blockchain it was a similar scenario with machine learning and AI right so any startup would say that we are using machine learning and AI if even if it was like tree if look if conditions if else if if else if and you say I have used a machine learning project I made an AI or you just wrote a rejects and it gives a chatbot and you say it's an AI assistant system you're probably gonna get funding from some big VC and stuff right so that's I feel has always been before that I guess it was cloud then it came to machine learning AI now it's blockchain and surely something new is gonna come again after sometime because crypto winter is already here so that hello effect is kind of always there in startups and everywhere right so I like to call them keywords so it's like in keywords you use these keywords to get funding out of it so many of the projects do use that it's not like there are no other alternatives of doing something which you can do it with blockchain right there are always different other alternatives and you should be considering different ways of doing things and it's so yeah many of the projects I believe do that just to get the funding part of it or because it's trendy but not because it's actually needed in the project so that is there and I have seen that happen in the ecosystem again and again yeah so that's true but I am not sure I would go ahead to call it a cancer but yeah I hope that answers your question to some extent so just to one point to add to his so regarding blockchain I'm not sure of that might be the case because blockchain itself is an expensive technology that we cannot using just for show off and without any purpose and as far as the startup is concerned if there is any heavenly investor who just is ready to fund fund the startup without knowing what exactly they are going to do with the funding then that that would be the best case but I don't think any investor would do that so especially having the incorporating technology like blockchain without having any materialistic use of it would be would not be that often scenario okay so to latch on to that you said somebody here said blockchain winter and you say blockchain is cancer do you think the blockchain winter is helping us to fight the blockchain cancer or is it making it worse anybody want to jump to this question well in the ecosystem we are saying that the crypto spring is coming unlike Game of Thrones winter is coming but I'm not sure how long this winter runs unlike in Game of Thrones but I don't know like I said like this surely clears out a lot of the noise right so I would say that because of the winter it would clear out a lot of the noise and many of the projects that remain would actually be good projects like he said that many of the projects which actually need blockchain would still be there because they need it for the technology itself they don't need it because it was a money-making machine for them right so in that way I would say that crypto winter to some extent acts as that apocalypse thing that we often have the reset button that the mother nature uses sometimes to cleanse the earth so maybe it's something like that where we can be like okay the crypto winter kind of clears out all the noises and all the pollutions that we had in the blockchain ecosystem and all the good things that were there for the projects itself stays on so yeah I feel that it might have some effect in fighting the cancer but yeah so you know occasionally Gardner comes up with something useful that the thing I'd point to at the moment in this case is the Gardner hype cycle it's a curve that looks sort of like this where you've got you know initial excitement over the top expectations the trough of disillusionment and then a sort of gradual climb into normalization and then I'd suggest the crypto winter is just a trough of disillusionment for this particular category of technology hello okay yeah I feel the same like the graph I think now we are at the normalization just climbing up the normalization graph of it since the Linux foundation has come in and they are coming up with the hyperlature and some of the R3 Codra who are forming and financial consortium to customize the blockchain solution to fit into the enterprise needs and I really I think now the enterprises are looking into it and seeing how this can be adopted definitely the public blockchain is not suitable for the enterprises to take it up straight away I think that is already a customization of the blockchain is going on few high level things I would see is business to business interphase interfacing framework I think that's where I'm seeing blockchain is going towards where it can form like an business to business integration framework on the other side some sharing of information across the industry I think there are already projects on the KYC shareings where you have already KYC information is verified by someone and all the banks doesn't need to do the same work again so they wanted to share the information they're already finding out some real use cases of it and there is one more area on the independent currencies for an ecosystem for example the food industries or the transport industries they can come up with their own currencies to use it across the different things but I something related to the loyalty points where in now in the Kings Kings flyer is already going into the blockchain to exchange the loyalty points to other loyalty systems where they can exchange the information I think there's already the industry use cases or coming in some serious investments are going on on the blockchain so one thing I really feel is like whether there is a value proportion has been rightly found out or not there is these are all the use cases which could be achieved by different technologies and different ways that we are doing now whether the blockchain can provide that value proportion instead of doing it the other way like distributed technology or whether the blockchain can provide the value proportion is for the real question I believe I'd suggest that the I forget his name the IBM speaker on Thursday laid out these are the six or eight criteria for identifying projects that were candidates for blockchains now generally this is hyperlegia based but it's thinking was broader than that and I think that sort of is a more thoroughly spelled out variant of what you're saying if you don't take at least these six boxes then you know give up now you're almost certainly better off with the trustee who's you know who's trusted or bonded or in some other way constrained become trustworthy only once you've got a situation where provably all six don't apply then yes it starts to make sense to look at a blockchain and at that point either the running costs or the risks drop to the point where there's a there's economic value being created and yes then the parties can argue about who should get how much of the newly created by so it's happening it's good to see yeah I think there's a big difference between the practice and the theory in theory blockchain can bring a lot to to these sort of enterprise networks you described and there's a lot of adoption and the two types of adoptions that there are companies and enterprise networks that sort of get on the bandwagon as well and and really don't know what to use it for and you know sort of force the issue but but there's some really good ideas and you know if you look at supply chain for example the theory of what the the blockchain can do to pick supply chain is it's very clear you know everyone agrees of the advantages but then you see companies trying to implement this and and you know you've seen them there's a big use case with IBM and mask for international shipping I think which you know it's a basically difficult to to actually get to work in practice and and for a number of reasons one it's difficult to get anyone everyone to agree on the common protocol and to get everyone involved and second we just don't know how to do these things properly and and there are a lot of proof of concepts being presented as successes and and I don't think they're all such successful examples and so again with all new technology you know you have to be careful what works and what doesn't and things that might look like a really good idea don't actually work in practice in the other way around you know some some things that are bad idea really take off that always happens so yeah I mean I would also agree it's not about exactly I feel that it's not more about the industry or particular places where we can apply it's more about the reason why you where you are using the blockchain right like he said the six boxes that you need to take so this is I would tell an experience I had in a hackathon where I was mentoring in blockchain so one of the projects when a group did was like about investigation report filing in theft so what they said is like and the application that they made was because there have been theft reports or investigation reports for other reasons which have been manipulated by the police or someone like that right and they made a project to be very simple it's it was built on blockchain and to ensure that any kind of manipulation becomes a transaction and the transaction is openly visible to everyone so anyone who makes a transactional change to the investigation report that was filed basically it can be tracked back to whoever made the changes so I can kind of understand the use of blockchain over there because it's it's ticking some of the boxes right but then another project it basically was like okay we are using RSA encryption but since everyone says blockchain is more secure so we will be using blockchain now that's somewhere my question is because finally the encryption algorithms that are used in RSA or in blockchain are kind of similar right so the underlying cryptography is more or less similar but many people would be used to make it secure just because it has been trendy that blockchain makes everything more secure so I guess the reason why you're using blockchain also plays an important role in wherever the project you're using blockchain itself so we have less than 10 minutes left so I want to bring the topic back to free software and open source and ask you how can the free software community benefit from blockchain work now a year ago we would have said there's a lot of money in blockchain so we can use it to fund a free software development so that's changing so what is left or what what are the benefits now well it has changed in a way that I see also not as successful anymore but you know it's still a way of doing funding in in sort of a decentralized or democratic way you know you can you can actually get a project funded somehow using smart contract based crowdfunding you can you can call it an ICO and STO or whatever you can still do that and and and get get funding and it's different funding you know it's funding anyone can participate and in most countries in some countries you have to be a credited investor but but it's still possible and obviously then there are projects such as Gitcoin which you know which sort of take this open this up much more I mean you probably more qualified to talk about this but the way I see it it's it's a bit like an ever open ICO where you can just ask for money in any way you want and get projects funded yeah so I also feel that like like the thing is we never talk like this about other projects like like we don't see so yeah Python is Python still important in open source or like C is important in open source so I guess in similar ways we shouldn't be saying about why blockchain is important in open source so I would say that it still uses like it can be used very in different projects if it needs to be used if the application asks for the use of it and also blockchain enables you still it and like you can maybe the money factor isn't big but the important part about blockchain it helps helps you to programmatically like put a financial benefit to the programmatic transaction of any kind which is where Gitcoin is also using blockchain right so like we kind of change our state of an open source issue and pull request is what we decide as a blockchain transaction right so if someone starting walk on an issue to someone sending a pull request or the pull request getting marched now this can be tracked as a transaction states different transaction states and then the final financial benefits consert of it so there are different ways how it comes it's not basically like just about the money thing or the value of a particular coin going up at now I according to a blockchain is more of a with respect to the free and open source communities blockchain is more of the things which they need to implement it in order to make their system even better secure because as we know we were ever of decentralization we were ever of the encryption and other technologies but putting it all together is something blockchain I would suggest so it's like using whatever resources we are having and a technology which you want to add up to in a more managed in a more managed or in a more efficient way without without with ensuring that none of these resources go futile that is what the open source communities need to focus on okay yeah from a high level view the open source developers can get its benefits from ICO and other open source monies especially we can use towards such a solidity to issue our own critical current issue our own tokens and there are other many critical currency platforms except Israel for such purpose so I think it's it's very different from about 10 years ago open source developers can only get funds from traditional investors and big big funds but it's quite different now you can get small mining I mean meaning start mining to fund companies from crypto funds and other individual crypto investors so I think this is a very good news for open source developers that's a bit philosophical but I suspect there are some some broad trends one is yeah get past the the crypto winter and normalize a bit stabilize a bit what's happening with cryptocurrencies and they become more broadly applicable as a means of direct payment for engineering effort the get-go-and-time stuff the second is that as we sort of climb this sort of latter curve of normalization for blockchain blockchains generally it means that the demand for engineering talent stabilizes and grows along with it and that is an opportunity it requires a slightly different engagement to engage with individuals but it's an opportunity in the sense that people they're working on things that are infrastructure companies in that situation have a recruiting need and got it the tech companies a bit able to recruit if they are allowing their developers to contribute meaningfully to open source and free software and I have forgotten the third thing there was a third one but it's gone so I'll stop it too we're down to one minute the sensor out of time basically does anybody have any last words that they want to add or any any comments from the audience does anybody have any comments about using blockchain for increasing governance inside of corporations and banks and how that can be used for you know the GES scores of the company I mean I've just heard anecdotally that like people are being offered you know blockchain projects to basically use smart contracts to cut out a bunch of analysts inside their company yeah okay I don't think we have time to answer that question now but that's a that's a bigger question we can discuss out on the hallway so okay what's left to say is thank you for coming and thank you for engaging with us and I hope we gave you an engaging discussion and I hope we you were able to take something away from from this discussion thank you thank you everybody