Final Thoughts: Ethereum Devcon4 & Ethereum 2.0 (Serenity)

So guys, Ethereum Developer Conference 4 just ended. DEF CON 4 is over. So I want to do some concluding thoughts on DEF CON 4. So first off, I want to say it's a pretty impressive site, more than 3,000 people, and I think much more than that because quite a few people barge through the gates and crash the party. So to that respect, it's great to see that many developers in this whole ecosystem. So unlike a lot of the other conferences, these guys are the guys who are coding, developing, and building in the space. And even though in the last few months, Ethereum prices dropped, the fact that they're here building and talking and making up workshops, I think that's a pretty awesome site to see that. They're not flooded away. The other point to make is that there's no talk about price here. A lot of times, you know, during conferences, you might think, oh, everyone's talking about price, speculating. There's much less speculating. These guys know that bear markets are hard. It's not easy to feel your NC asset prices just drop. And it's pretty brutal on a lot of people. But these guys, they chose to not only stick with Ethereum, but they keep building on Ethereum. On that note, too, of course, not everyone here is developing on Ethereum. There's actually Bitcoin Cash, EOS, developers, Quark Chain, whatever. They're all here because they want to learn from each other. And you can see that this space is not that territorial as we might think it is. Everyone, you know, there's a huge open source movement. Everyone's developing and opening up their code and, well, supporting each other. So I think that's pretty cool. And of course, there's also less distractions at this conference, not a single talk about ICOs or fundraising. It's very like laser focus. Let's build. So in the next bull run, if when that happens, then, well, we have something to show for it. We have users using it. We have users using dApps. We have services that people can reliably use. We have stable coins that, well, are stable and working. And obviously, there's a lot of mistakes along the way. So Vitalik famously came out and sang a song about all the mistakes that were made prior to the announcement of Ethereum 2.0, also called, well, Serenity. So they brought back the old name. That's probably what everyone is talking about right now. Ethereum 2.0. So what is Ethereum 2.0? Well, it's the kind of upgrade to the Ethereum network that we've all been waiting for. It adds kind of the speed to the layer one solution and 100x upgrade to the transactions per second. So it's actually, well, scalable and usable and doesn't clog up and break. So that's such a huge kind of upgrade that we direly need. And also, the second thing is, of course, move to proof of stake. So we all know right now, Ethereum is not very energy efficient. We need miners to mine Ethereum. But why can't we stake it and, well, be more economically friendly and efficient? That being said, of course, this upgrade has been in the works for a long time. So if you've been around in the space and you know what's happening, then all that's really happened right now, all the announcement of Ethereum 2.0, all that's been really announced and new, well, it's just the name for it, Serenity. So a lot of people are joking about just nothing new being announced. It's rather just, well, a rehash, a rebrand of what's already there. That being said, however, there is a roadmap for it. The roadmap for it includes this kind of building of a new Ethereum chain and the migration of the current chain into a shard of a new chain. So that's kind of an interesting way to put it. So what they might do is they might run it in parallel. The specs aren't fully finalized yet, but what they might want to do is they want to run it in parallel. So you can start migrating if you are adventurous into this new chain for a high efficiency. But if you're also you're building on the old chain, when you might fear that the migration might cause your dApp to break, well, then you have a chance to experiment and, well, move on a test. The timeline for this, however, that's not very specified. Nothing is really down on paper right now. We know that the next update to Ethereum, that's been delayed until next year. So it's still a lot of planning and, well, a lot of waiting as well. Final comments on this. We have a lot of offline talk as well. If it's just them presenting themselves at DevCons, it's not enough kind of updates for us as a community overall. So now I finally get, oh, look, yeah, MakerDAO. There's a lot of hype around there. They're having a huge presence here. But online, it's not as strong as, well, offline. And the same with quite a few other projects here. So that's kind of why you see the offline component coming in. Well, that's because DevCon is so huge and people build a family around this. On the note of family as well, it does definitely feel like a family reunion for a lot of people. These guys have been in the Ethereum space for a long time. This is actually the fifth DevCon, you know, because they count from zero. So there's a lot of people with lifelong friendships coming back and meeting each other and you can see them, you know, very happy and engaging. And I think that's kind of cool. The amount of support that they can give to each other. The fact that it feels like a family and they all want to kind of make this whole system grow. And, of course, can defeat the centralized systems. That's awesome, right? But the downside, the flip side to that is that if it's too much like a family, then doesn't it feel a little bit like a frat house? Like if they can only promote their own projects and the people, the OGs here, if they just, well, refer each other, there's two issues to that. One is that there's a lot of centralization. Well, you know, they just support each other. And because they're OGs, they get a lot of attention anyways. And the other issue is that new ideas, new guys who are coming into the space, they have a harder time proving themselves because, well, OGs want to support other OGs. So in that respect, I feel like for Ethereum to grow a little bit better, then they need to be a lot more open as well to the new projects that are coming into the space. Otherwise, they're just going to jump to something else. And one more bit of criticism is, of course, the dreams. So we all know that I think there's this whole feeling that we can achieve anything at DEF CON. And I really love that feeling. But at the same time, there's also a lot of kind of dreams, dreamers out there that are trying things that has been tried before. You know, this world, there's a lot of concepts that just don't work a little bit like communism. Communism doesn't work. The kind of, you know, splitting everything equal share and having equal votes. It turns out that human nature is a very strong factor here. And, well, it made the human greed and human laziness really killed communism. And in the same way, you know, Ethereum developers, they need to start realizing, well, OK, how do we make these projects work? And how do you make these decentralized organizations work in the real life? And, of course, how do we combine the technology that they have, because these are all programmers, with a hustle as well? You know, Apple as a company works because there's Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, you know, the tech genius and also the marketing genius, the guy who can hustle and bring the people onto this project and let people see how amazing it is. That is actually quite hard to do. And you need both. So there is talk about this. There is talk about kind of improving UI, improving the user experience overall. But I think for the next step to happen, you need a Steve Jobs here or you need someone that can really push business minded people that can really push the technology forward. So those are my concluding thoughts to Ethereum, DEF CON. If you guys have been to DEF CON, leave a comment below about what you thought as well. I have another video coming up just with general people poking a mic in their face, just talking about the conclusion, what they think of Serenity. That's coming up as well. So I hope you can stay tuned to that. And if not everything else, thank you guys so much for watching this channel. Upcoming conferences too. SORA conference, Block Show conference. These are conferences I'll be attending. I'll try to compare that with Ethereum DEF CON and also have a cool stream on Omar's channel as well, where with me, Omar and Ran from CNBC Africa, we talk about some cool stuff. So I'll try to put a link up there as well. Thank you guys so much for watching. See you next time.