Oliver JL RenwickA counterfactual history
One of the core promises of public blockchain technology is that truth is objective: if it’s on-chain, anyone can confirm its existence. Naturally, that means that at a certain point, someone asked the question: what if it could be off chain, and we could still confirm its existence?Truth by AssertionTo be clear, that common reality or objective truth is still the goal, at least for now. But in the face of rising transaction costs on Ethereum Mainnet, people began to get innovative in figurin...
Oliver JL Renwick"I wouldn't want to throw you into the deep end at your first anarchist co-op"
I hope you consulted the week's calendar: https://devconnect.org/scheduleNotes from Devconnect IstanbulNovember 2023 - Oliver JL Renwick - @mapachurroFor Technical Takeaways, scroll down. For color commentary, keep reading.Last year at Marienbad; next year at DevconWhen I was going through my notebook this morning, on my Istanbul to Heathrow flight, out fell a sticker I got at Devcon VI, in Bogotá, advertising ETH Istanbul. It’s a weird memory, because it seemed quite clear at the time: ...
15 Oct., 2022, en route BOG-EWR
E.G. Galano, co-founder of Infura, got up on a stage at the Ágora Convention Center in Bogotá, Colombia, this past Thursday, and tried to remember. Or, in another sense, he tried to remind: remind us of how Infura started–with the original slides that Herman Junge put together in what seems like the palely-lit streets of memory, but is in fact a short six years ago–and how, all along, we’ve been building towards the decentralization of data connectivity and distribution. It’s been a street with potholes and curves, no doubt.
This Devcon was, on a fundamental level, about returning and remembering; about coming back to things that have been put off for a long time. The event itself was originally scheduled for 2020, and one of so many things that we’ve collectively lost since the first months of that year was the ability to hold this seminal event that seeks to push technology, and its integration with people and systems of power, forward. We finally got to see Devcon Bogotá through, and remind ourselves of why we’re doing this in the first place.
“Como las hojas al viento, como el sol espanta el frío… Así espero tu regreso: a la tierra del olvido…”
Erik Marks and the rest of the MetaMask Snaps team were out in force, remembering the origins of the idea of Snaps: opening up the space’s most popular identity management system, MetaMask, to developers so that they can integrate it into the network, platform, or app that they wish. Not only did they remember the origins, but they demonstrated the power of it now through a hackathon, a hacker house, and a live-coding workshop.
kumavis, for his part, had quite the task cut out for him: he had announced, at Devcon V, his project LavaMoat, a groundbreaking security system preventing supply-chain attacks against any JavaScript project. It’s been three tumultuous years, and he managed to put into words all the work that was in them to create, and launch into production, the product that is today securing MetaMask’s users against this attack vector.
We’re often afraid of returning and remembering. The past can be framed in the halo of a sweet memory, or can be something lurking in the hallways of our dreams and anxieties. The truth is, confronting the past generally doesn’t mean confronting what happened, or what was: it means confronting what is, now; and with the perspective of time comes awareness of how much of the now is made up of things we’ve lost.
Bogotá is a city that is very high in altitude, sitting at some 2600 meters (or 8500 feet); the weather drifts perpetually back and forth between strong tropical sunlight through the city haze, sudden rainstorms, and the sensation of being in a cloud forest of a city. For those of us affected by the altitude, the overall effect is one that makes the city a bit ethereal; I always feel the Andes like a presence that goes somehow beyond the physical.
“La vieja calle donde el eco dijo: "Tuya es su vida, tuyo es su querer," / bajo el burlón mirar de las estrellas / que con indiferencia hoy me ven volver…”
My own memories of the city came and went like the clouds over top of Monserrate; turning a corner or dropping off a colleague at a hotel with a sudden immediate knowledge of what was around the next corner, or of the restaurant that used to be next door; a fleeting sensation that I bought a book in that bookstore, which is still on my bookshelf. A street cart selling dulce de leche wafer sandwiches in exactly the same place where I bought one, so long ago that I wasn’t yet lactose intolerant; I can still remember the grated coconut.
Standing alone at the airport–itself a kind of phantom structure built on top of my memories of a much more crowded, much less modern airport with canelazo and drink carts stationed regularly every few gates–I saw a literal sign that memory had come to Colombia to stay:
The pain, horror, and strife of Colombia’s recent past is a thread that has woven its way through my life, personally and professionally; a thread of violence that, as remote as the country may seem to many, unravelled itself in societies all over the world. One of the most prominent ghosts during my time in Bogotá was that of semiautomatic weapons and soldiers. I kept expecting checkpoints, heavily-armed private security guards, tension around the dreaded motorcycle cicarios and interacting with taxi drivers who have no reason to trust the person getting into their cab.
“Sentir… Que es un soplo la vida; que veinte años no es nada…”
By Wednesday or Thursday, that memory began to take shape, like a phantom limb. Simply put, despite it being a very large city with the safety problems that come along with that anywhere, I found Bogotá to be much safer than my memories of it. The safety of the now has been built on loss: loss of the struggle of the FARC, loss of the drug trafficking industry which has displaced itself further north, closer to its main consumer economy; loss of countless lives and dreams in the meantime.
We saw the Colombian Museum of Memory under construction, a physical equivalent of the UN’s report; its jagged edges put us in mind of the mountains surrounding the city, of the mountains once occupied by the FARC, of the roofs of the houses built by the internally displaced on the south side of Bogotá, in Ciudad Bolivar.
Having a place for memory is a powerful thing; naming it, seeing its shape, allows you to be reminded by it, instead of remembering it.
This week in Colombia allowed me to see the shape of my memories in the light of today, and reminded me of all the reasons I love the country so much: from the simple things like the never-ending variety of fruits, and their inimitable spicy sauce on top of street empanadas, to the country’s incredible capacity for musical and cultural production, the irresistible urge to share music and experiences together, and perhaps most of all the variety of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic groups, and the country’s increasing ability to acknowledge and attempt to protect those groups individually and collectively. A former colleague often repeated to me the slogan that ‘liberty must be watered regularly with the blood of patriots’, and no one knows that better than the Colombians.
Many at Devcon were learning all these things for the first time, shaping their own memories. But they, too, were being reminded: reminded that Ethereum was not made to make us rich, it was made to set us free. That our space is not intended to build a network for the extraction of value, but rather to build networks that anyone can use to build the tools they need to solve their community’s problems.
Gone are the fervent DeFi huckster vibes; people at Devcon VI wanted to know how we scale Ethereum.
Presenters gave talks on how we onboard the next billion to web3, and how those billion are likely to be in developing nations. There were detailed sessions explaining how the infrastructure of crypto and web3 is already being used, and is slated to be even more heavily used, across Africa. And China. And the Balkans.
Representatives from a number of Latin American countries reported on how they have already begun, and want to continue, to use web3 tools in enabling citizens to interact with and better manage their own governments. A representative of the Ukrainian government walked us through the experience of the–successful–grassroots effort to integrate crypto tech into civil infrastructure, even before the war began.
Real projects using existing web3 infrastructure to solve apparently intractable economical or social ills were there, delivering results. This technology has moved out of the proof-of-concept stage, into the area of real-world impact.
“…y aunque el olvido, que todo destruye / haya matado mi vieja ilusión / guardo escondida una esperanza humilde / que es toda la fortuna de mi corazón.”
In previous periods of capital transfer and technological advancement, the benefits of those disruptions accrued overwhelmingly to those who had the political and cultural power necessary to assert, and enforce, their right to it. There was a moment, not too long ago, when it looked like the crypto movement was moving in the same direction: the breathtaking sums being given in exchange for lurid jpegs, the eye-watering returns possible through degenerate DeFi trading strategies, all spelled good times for those in the Global North who were quick off the mark and had the money to use.
It looked, yet again, like the story of a technological innovation benefiting overwhelmingly those who had the least need of it: capital begetting, and consolidating, capital.
What is different this time? The existing capital structures can benefit, surely, from the innovations of crypto and web3. But it has been placed squarely outside of their ability to own and control. "Permissionless" is just a tricky way of saying "Public and Free." These technologies lie within the reach of anyone who wants to step up, learn them, and use them. And the hegemonic powers of the world haven't (yet) figured out a way to stop them.
The risk to the West, or North, pick your label, and other traditional power brokers is not that they can't make a profitable model out of these technologies and sell it to the rest of the world; the risk is that by the time they get their act together and bring something to market, the rest of the world will no longer need them.
As they say: where one person sees a risk, another sees a situation ripe with opportunity.
The lyrics in this piece are taken from Carlos Vives’ “La Tierra del Olvido,” and Alfredo Le Pera’s “Volver”--for a Colombian take, see here.
At time of publication, some of the official EF recordings of the Devcon sessions were not yet live on the links included.
The banner photo at the top of the article was taken by Oliver Renwick on 10 Oct., 2022, at the Basilica de Monserrate, Bogotá, Colombia.**
**
15 Oct., 2022, en route BOG-EWR
E.G. Galano, co-founder of Infura, got up on a stage at the Ágora Convention Center in Bogotá, Colombia, this past Thursday, and tried to remember. Or, in another sense, he tried to remind: remind us of how Infura started–with the original slides that Herman Junge put together in what seems like the palely-lit streets of memory, but is in fact a short six years ago–and how, all along, we’ve been building towards the decentralization of data connectivity and distribution. It’s been a street with potholes and curves, no doubt.
This Devcon was, on a fundamental level, about returning and remembering; about coming back to things that have been put off for a long time. The event itself was originally scheduled for 2020, and one of so many things that we’ve collectively lost since the first months of that year was the ability to hold this seminal event that seeks to push technology, and its integration with people and systems of power, forward. We finally got to see Devcon Bogotá through, and remind ourselves of why we’re doing this in the first place.
“Como las hojas al viento, como el sol espanta el frío… Así espero tu regreso: a la tierra del olvido…”
Erik Marks and the rest of the MetaMask Snaps team were out in force, remembering the origins of the idea of Snaps: opening up the space’s most popular identity management system, MetaMask, to developers so that they can integrate it into the network, platform, or app that they wish. Not only did they remember the origins, but they demonstrated the power of it now through a hackathon, a hacker house, and a live-coding workshop.
kumavis, for his part, had quite the task cut out for him: he had announced, at Devcon V, his project LavaMoat, a groundbreaking security system preventing supply-chain attacks against any JavaScript project. It’s been three tumultuous years, and he managed to put into words all the work that was in them to create, and launch into production, the product that is today securing MetaMask’s users against this attack vector.
We’re often afraid of returning and remembering. The past can be framed in the halo of a sweet memory, or can be something lurking in the hallways of our dreams and anxieties. The truth is, confronting the past generally doesn’t mean confronting what happened, or what was: it means confronting what is, now; and with the perspective of time comes awareness of how much of the now is made up of things we’ve lost.
Bogotá is a city that is very high in altitude, sitting at some 2600 meters (or 8500 feet); the weather drifts perpetually back and forth between strong tropical sunlight through the city haze, sudden rainstorms, and the sensation of being in a cloud forest of a city. For those of us affected by the altitude, the overall effect is one that makes the city a bit ethereal; I always feel the Andes like a presence that goes somehow beyond the physical.
“La vieja calle donde el eco dijo: "Tuya es su vida, tuyo es su querer," / bajo el burlón mirar de las estrellas / que con indiferencia hoy me ven volver…”
My own memories of the city came and went like the clouds over top of Monserrate; turning a corner or dropping off a colleague at a hotel with a sudden immediate knowledge of what was around the next corner, or of the restaurant that used to be next door; a fleeting sensation that I bought a book in that bookstore, which is still on my bookshelf. A street cart selling dulce de leche wafer sandwiches in exactly the same place where I bought one, so long ago that I wasn’t yet lactose intolerant; I can still remember the grated coconut.
Standing alone at the airport–itself a kind of phantom structure built on top of my memories of a much more crowded, much less modern airport with canelazo and drink carts stationed regularly every few gates–I saw a literal sign that memory had come to Colombia to stay:
The pain, horror, and strife of Colombia’s recent past is a thread that has woven its way through my life, personally and professionally; a thread of violence that, as remote as the country may seem to many, unravelled itself in societies all over the world. One of the most prominent ghosts during my time in Bogotá was that of semiautomatic weapons and soldiers. I kept expecting checkpoints, heavily-armed private security guards, tension around the dreaded motorcycle cicarios and interacting with taxi drivers who have no reason to trust the person getting into their cab.
“Sentir… Que es un soplo la vida; que veinte años no es nada…”
By Wednesday or Thursday, that memory began to take shape, like a phantom limb. Simply put, despite it being a very large city with the safety problems that come along with that anywhere, I found Bogotá to be much safer than my memories of it. The safety of the now has been built on loss: loss of the struggle of the FARC, loss of the drug trafficking industry which has displaced itself further north, closer to its main consumer economy; loss of countless lives and dreams in the meantime.
We saw the Colombian Museum of Memory under construction, a physical equivalent of the UN’s report; its jagged edges put us in mind of the mountains surrounding the city, of the mountains once occupied by the FARC, of the roofs of the houses built by the internally displaced on the south side of Bogotá, in Ciudad Bolivar.
Having a place for memory is a powerful thing; naming it, seeing its shape, allows you to be reminded by it, instead of remembering it.
This week in Colombia allowed me to see the shape of my memories in the light of today, and reminded me of all the reasons I love the country so much: from the simple things like the never-ending variety of fruits, and their inimitable spicy sauce on top of street empanadas, to the country’s incredible capacity for musical and cultural production, the irresistible urge to share music and experiences together, and perhaps most of all the variety of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic groups, and the country’s increasing ability to acknowledge and attempt to protect those groups individually and collectively. A former colleague often repeated to me the slogan that ‘liberty must be watered regularly with the blood of patriots’, and no one knows that better than the Colombians.
Many at Devcon were learning all these things for the first time, shaping their own memories. But they, too, were being reminded: reminded that Ethereum was not made to make us rich, it was made to set us free. That our space is not intended to build a network for the extraction of value, but rather to build networks that anyone can use to build the tools they need to solve their community’s problems.
Gone are the fervent DeFi huckster vibes; people at Devcon VI wanted to know how we scale Ethereum.
Presenters gave talks on how we onboard the next billion to web3, and how those billion are likely to be in developing nations. There were detailed sessions explaining how the infrastructure of crypto and web3 is already being used, and is slated to be even more heavily used, across Africa. And China. And the Balkans.
Representatives from a number of Latin American countries reported on how they have already begun, and want to continue, to use web3 tools in enabling citizens to interact with and better manage their own governments. A representative of the Ukrainian government walked us through the experience of the–successful–grassroots effort to integrate crypto tech into civil infrastructure, even before the war began.
Real projects using existing web3 infrastructure to solve apparently intractable economical or social ills were there, delivering results. This technology has moved out of the proof-of-concept stage, into the area of real-world impact.
“…y aunque el olvido, que todo destruye / haya matado mi vieja ilusión / guardo escondida una esperanza humilde / que es toda la fortuna de mi corazón.”
In previous periods of capital transfer and technological advancement, the benefits of those disruptions accrued overwhelmingly to those who had the political and cultural power necessary to assert, and enforce, their right to it. There was a moment, not too long ago, when it looked like the crypto movement was moving in the same direction: the breathtaking sums being given in exchange for lurid jpegs, the eye-watering returns possible through degenerate DeFi trading strategies, all spelled good times for those in the Global North who were quick off the mark and had the money to use.
It looked, yet again, like the story of a technological innovation benefiting overwhelmingly those who had the least need of it: capital begetting, and consolidating, capital.
What is different this time? The existing capital structures can benefit, surely, from the innovations of crypto and web3. But it has been placed squarely outside of their ability to own and control. "Permissionless" is just a tricky way of saying "Public and Free." These technologies lie within the reach of anyone who wants to step up, learn them, and use them. And the hegemonic powers of the world haven't (yet) figured out a way to stop them.
The risk to the West, or North, pick your label, and other traditional power brokers is not that they can't make a profitable model out of these technologies and sell it to the rest of the world; the risk is that by the time they get their act together and bring something to market, the rest of the world will no longer need them.
As they say: where one person sees a risk, another sees a situation ripe with opportunity.
The lyrics in this piece are taken from Carlos Vives’ “La Tierra del Olvido,” and Alfredo Le Pera’s “Volver”--for a Colombian take, see here.
At time of publication, some of the official EF recordings of the Devcon sessions were not yet live on the links included.
The banner photo at the top of the article was taken by Oliver Renwick on 10 Oct., 2022, at the Basilica de Monserrate, Bogotá, Colombia.**
**
Oliver JL RenwickA counterfactual history
One of the core promises of public blockchain technology is that truth is objective: if it’s on-chain, anyone can confirm its existence. Naturally, that means that at a certain point, someone asked the question: what if it could be off chain, and we could still confirm its existence?Truth by AssertionTo be clear, that common reality or objective truth is still the goal, at least for now. But in the face of rising transaction costs on Ethereum Mainnet, people began to get innovative in figurin...
Oliver JL Renwick"I wouldn't want to throw you into the deep end at your first anarchist co-op"
I hope you consulted the week's calendar: https://devconnect.org/scheduleNotes from Devconnect IstanbulNovember 2023 - Oliver JL Renwick - @mapachurroFor Technical Takeaways, scroll down. For color commentary, keep reading.Last year at Marienbad; next year at DevconWhen I was going through my notebook this morning, on my Istanbul to Heathrow flight, out fell a sticker I got at Devcon VI, in Bogotá, advertising ETH Istanbul. It’s a weird memory, because it seemed quite clear at the time: ...
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