Enjoy enjoy a round of applause for Nanook and it's Carson and Sevo and all the other guys that are holding this down Really providing an amazing service have really Having to suffer through all the Bitcoin talks and Monero. Oh, it's got to be painful, right? Just kidding We could do this all day. So this talk is about oh, it's not really a talk. It's an AMA. So we need a lot of you know Interaction with you guys. So don't be shy You know be I'm gonna run around with the mic and Hear what you have to say and we want to answer your questions We have some of the biggest experts in Ethereum on stage right here. It's pretty cool. So take advantage of it I'm gonna give a quick like two-minute introduction to what Ethereum is a Just so just in case there are a couple people who don't really know the first cryptocurrency was Bitcoin and It does an incredible job at moving money around in a transparent way and Ethereum does the same with lines of code Effectively it's kind of the the goal of Ethereum is to be the decentralized world computer So there's the idea is there's one computer that anyone can put an application on and then anyone in the world can interact With that application now, there's a lot of technicalities to pulling this off But that's the quick like 10-second intro Now for let's go straight into introductions with these guys. So this is Jordy Bellina. Jordy say something about yourself Well, just some mainly I'm an Ethereum fan It's I'm a Solidity Dep and Well, I did a lot of things in the last two years in the Ethereum some of them Writing some smart contracts doing a lot of audits for many of the contracts and White hacking also some contracts and a lot of a lot of stuff. I'm very excited in the In what's gonna happen in the upcoming years in the space Hey, I'm Christian Reitwitzner. I Yeah discovered the Ethereum project in summer 2014 and Yeah joined as a full-time developer also around that time and I Created the Solidity programming language around then and this is also still my main focus of work there but I also work on Yeah, research questions on the topic of privacy CK snarks Interactive verification of computations so scaling solutions and other things I I'm Afri. I'm quite active in the Serum community for several years now and Most recently joined parity as community manager Hi, I'm I'm glad I Been working on Ethereum. I mean maybe I got I got it. I got it got involved like Volunteering April 2014 and I started working on proof of stake September 2014 and that's still what I do And I'm also working on sharding and a few other side projects, okay? I'm gonna talk these guys up a little bit more. So Jordy is one of the most prolific Hackers in the space. He's he rescued 10% of all or protected 10% of all Ethereum Inexistence with the Dow when that happened and then helped give all of the when it became C gave all that back to all the Dow token holders and then also when the parody hack happened He and the give a team what? flew into action to protect two hundred and ten million dollars worth of Ethereum and he develops incredible apps like Especially for giveth also many me token contract and he's pushing another token standard So as far as dap development, this is a great opportunity to ask Jordy about that Yeah, like Christian said he is the man who created the validity the programming language So anything about that this morning on the train. He added error messages. Okay, this guy is Incredible I started I started two days ago on the train, but it was developed on the train between Berlin and Leipzig Yeah in two days I mean the guys and also one of the few people who understands the case snarks in the world Okay, so go go wild Offery has is on the front line community manager for parody like that is that is an exciting adventure So and he also moderates the reddit and is really just all over the community space So if you have any community questions, he's the man and then Vlad is scaling Sharding sorry scaling proof of stake also really interesting on governance protocols and the governance strategies in general so lots of opportunity for questions and Who wants who wants it who wants first crack at it? Oh Come on Hello, thank you very much for coming. So I have a question about these Smart contracts on Ethereum. So I can see how they kind of work inside of the chain but let's say I want to tie them to some real world when making maybe a wager with someone or Selling some product that's kind of he has to confirm that it really happened. How can they Kind of tie to the real world event Do we need certain people observing the real world and then say, okay, this happened so we also tell the chain? Yes, it happens or how does it tie to the real world? I can yeah, so basically We generally refers to these things that provide data about outside things into the into the chain as oracles and there's a whole problem of how to secure these data feeds and Make sure that you're not being lied to as a smart contract about the outside world There is an interesting idea there. It's the future markets That's very related what an oracle is. It's a kind of betting That something really happened for something. That's real. That's a way of introducing Decentralized oracles a way to do on that and there's a lot of stuff that's working on there But that's one of the ways to put data in a decentralized in a decentralized in a decentralized way I mean perhaps so this that's a very Good question because it's a tough one and there's no real solution to this problem yet. I would say but So this is not them. I would say this is not the main focus of application on ethereum So you you don't need that if you just have interactions with two people because these two people They can interact with the system giving their their personal opinion about the state of the world and if they disagree then you have to kind of moderate or if you already have a digitized system with Digital signatures and hashes like I don't know a file sharing system Then you can put ethereum on top of that to provide them a layer of incentivization to yeah for example, but when you have a bit or a network then People don't provide files if they are not interested in these files so you could use ethereum to pay people to hold on to the files that you like and It's really easy there because everything is already already digital and you don't need this interface to the real non-digital world Sorry, but in terms of like what the kind of classes of solutions are There's basically you can have like a single trusted Oracle and you can try to make it It's really trusted by like using secure hardware or making it someone with reputation like you know maybe Reuters or Bloomberg will provide a data feed or like Maybe you can provide it yourself And then there's like these incentivized solutions that don't really have oracles like kind of Jordy was talking about and then there's things kind of We have oracles that have reputation systems, but not just financial incentives So the design space for oracles and securing them is yeah, I would say Still not hasn't provided like any like silver bullet solutions, and I'm not sure that like there will ever be one You know so that the blockchain like it's like this amazing autonomous thing, but if it wants to interact with the world you may need to like Put some data in there Just let me give you two examples of oracles that are running right now in the space One of those is price oracle that's running right now in the maker now In the site in the stable coin that they are doing it's a federated oracle So there is like a 10 source through the 10 twisted source Mainly there is a smart contract what that what does is do the median the median of the prices So if there is one or two that are just far away or they're trying to treat the system is not gonna work That's one of the examples that's doing it and the other is the one that wants implement the gnosis and it's mainly It's it's a centralized oracle who decides, but then there are rest so that a lot of the people can Can can can bet the oracle can say okay the oracle is bad and then starts like another procedure It's a more decentralized procedure where there is another kind of voting and a more decentralized system These are two examples that the people is working right now in the space about oracles Hey I have a question that relates to security so Looking back at decades of security breaches and exploits There's a growing Realization the security and software industry that The only viable way to have some degree of security is to Is simplicity Okay, sorry So to build Simple systems and simple components that can be verified and then maybe combined in a secure way So when I look at solidity, I was taken aback by the complexity and of the size of the language and You know judging by the exploits we had the DAO parity twice, etc, etc It would appear that it's almost impossible to write really good secure code in Solidity are there any plans to introduce something, you know a pin down button down simpler language that can be maybe you know verified and That could be used to write like high profile smart contracts with a lot of money riding on them On the blockchain First first of all, of course, there is a balance that this happens in in always in especially in a T a balance between functionality and Security, okay, and it's a balance if you get a lot of functionality things gets more complex and it's more easy to not work and also mentioned that 100% so 100% warranty that something is safe You never have it. So it's the security is something that has a measure. So Depending on the application Your optimal place is in one side or in the other or or in the other site or you some somewhere in the middle and Smart contracts, I would not say that's impossible to write Unsecure smart secure smart contracts There are a lot of smart contracts that are working and that they're working. Okay, and at least until now looks okay Of course, it's a very very very young technology people. We are still learning how to write these smart contracts I'm sure that Christian has a lot to talk about the solidity and about the improvements It has been in the language in order to improve security, but Well, if you try to do Some of the some of the functionality some of the smart contracts that are doing that that can be done in in in ethereum It's impossible to do in another in other technologies that's not in ethereum, so Yeah, I'm not sure how where I should start but So first solidity is not the only language for ethereum. There are multiple languages with various degrees of complexity You could program the whole thing in EVM assembly, which is an extremely simple language, but it I think I would say that the fact that it's Extremely simple doesn't mean that it's easier to write correct smart contracts in because it's extremely low level and Then the other factor that you have to take into account is the ethereum running programs on ethereum is extremely expensive, so The the the final bytecode has to be cheap and this I would say this already rules out many Languages that have a complex runtime. So for example garbage collection is something that is not really practical on ethereum Yeah, and then So this is these are some reasons why solidity is built the way it is built Having said that we are reducing a lot of complexity as of lately Yeah, but so there are also yeah, so You can programming it in directly in assembly over the last several months. We also created a new language called Yulia, which is more or less EVM assembly plus function calls loops and variables and I would say this is an extremely simple language. It has also been formally specified and the idea there is also to it allows to Provide to compile into several backends So where it also makes it a future compatible with a switch to a web assembly based virtual machine and It will also be a future intermediate language for solidity So solidity compiles to Yulia Yulia compiles to EVM And then there's also viper which is Yeah, it has pythonic syntax and Has the special feature that It always has an upper bound on the gas costs for each Function so it doesn't provide unbounded loops for example, which is also a measure of simplicity of a language I'm not sure if that qualifies for for being able to write secure smart contracts Yeah, someone else I Gotta I got a follow-up question. I got a follow-up question from the crowd when is solidity 1.0 When the community feels that it's ready Okay, there it is any other questions Hi, thanks for doing the MA. I was wondering with increasing interest By corporations and Ethereum What do you think is the long-term perspective? Will corporations use a public Ethereum blockchain or will They develop something similar and use it within their corporations and not use the public world computer Yeah, so the question is like How will corporations like will corporations use the public blockchain or will they end up using like their own private block chains? Or like something connected to the public blockchain Private block chains are a very very interesting technology I think it's a technology that can be used in the corporations and it can be a Breakthrough it's like API is Standardized the way the corporation stocks one each other, but a blockchain a private blockchain can like Formalize it's like the log everything that's happened and and this is a very cool technology, but personally This is just a good technology blockchain is Something that can really change the world and it's and it's happens in the public block chains not in the private block chain So that least in my side I'm more interested in the in the public block chains where where everybody can use it and you can Change social socially and what are the things can happen? But of course this technology is very good for the corporations and for private technologies Can work very good, but I do think that I mean I totally agree. I mean I think private block chains kind of suck and are boring But you know from a tech point of view, okay, they're kind of interesting and just a distributed system but the I think that there's a really big opportunity for corporations and institutions and To use the public blockchain actually because the public blockchain represents Kind of neutral ground outside your jurisdiction that you can operate and access from your jurisdiction It's kind of like digital international waters. It's somewhere you can put rules that are Going to be enforced and trusted by people who don't believe in the legal system in your jurisdiction It can let you access customers that you wouldn't otherwise be able to reach It can let you operate in jurisdictions that you otherwise would be banned from these aren't necessarily uniformly positive things, but I'm sure that they're gonna. There's gonna be lots of use cases for corporates for institutions for Private associations for all sorts of organizations To use the public blockchain because the cool thing about the public blockchain is that it exists outside of For all of many intents and purposes Your jurisdiction Afri, I know parody does a lot of enterprise solutions, right? Can you talk about that a little bit? I Kind of agree private blockchains are boring, but in the case of Ethereum or Companies using a private or permissioned is theorems or EVM based blockchains shows That this is technology that's important that's actually has a use case and companies are using it and that's that's just paving the way to use the public Ethereum blockchain for like enterprise Applications and in most cases you you have limitations using the public blockchains due to scalability reasons for example if you have Or if you want just want to save money on transaction fees and I think Maybe we will talk about scalability later. I think the future will be that there are a lot of blockchains huge ecosystem of private permissioned and public blockchains that At some point will work together as a whole heterogeneous system of chains And the future will be building bridges between them Hey Hello, could you name me a use case for private blockchain? I can't imagine It being an advantage over a usual database Yeah, it's Right now if you see the quantity of money that suspended just verifying that the normal connection between companies Matches and Who is responsible of if I send you that good data you send me the bad data? You just follow that protocol. You don't follow that protocol all these communications that happen between companies If you put that information in a blockchain for public or private but you put in a blockchain Which is a unique source of true? It's like this is like the mind the mind source. This is and and this can save this can save a lot of verification time between Problems checking the logs from one side the logs from the other if you manipulate the logs You don't manipulate the logs and this is very very very interesting. I think that all the communications that happen between Companies will end up at some point in a in a in a blockchain and imagine the quantity of information That's that's going on between between companies entities and corporations in the society From like a more distributed systems point of view A block chain is a consensus protocol, which is like a database on steroids I mean it can do it can replicate and like More interesting data structures then it's possible with just a database Hi, this is I think following up a little bit on the questions about programming for Ethereum I'm not very knowledgeable about how you program for Ethereum, but my understanding is that When you write programs they can have bugs and those bugs can result in things not going the way you want it And possibly losing a lot of money and so I'm curious specifically on the axis of You know when you write a program for Ethereum, how can you make sure that what you've written actually expresses what you want? Doesn't have a bug or a security flaw in it or when you read a program that someone has written for Ethereum Someone shows it to you and you want to audit it. How do you know when you read it that it actually does the thing that it's supposed to do? I'm curious You know if you had to start over and design solidity again what you would do differently if you wanted to improve it along that axis and If you could name a criterion by which you would consider it a language successful Like you know what point you would feel like okay. I've now achieved a language I think it's sufficiently easy to understand and sufficiently easy to read and write First I would say that most You would first time I need to say that I've been auditing many contracts and I tell you that a lot of the bugs that we found in these smart contracts Were not in the code itself. We're more in the specification itself So formal verification and language and all that stuff is not a warranty It's not it's not the only thing that makes a contract Secure how you do it. You will never have the warranty Assist because even even formal verification that gives you this mathematical maybe that the definition is bad So you even that you cannot warranty that way And then it's just a matter of trying to get as better as you can and the way it's just auditing a lot Do running bug bounties a lot having very good depths watching and it doing simple code just following following the The best standards that we are learning and improving every day Yeah, I mean I guess my question is you have a lot of experience doing this now You have experience as a language designer You have experience writing contracts and I'm just curious, you know, what have we learned from from all this experience? if you go to there is a page I think it's in in somewhere in the consensus repository where there is like a full list of Examples and different ethereum's and different bugs is the best practices. I think it's called solidarity and it's huge list just reading that list is Enormous list just reading there. You will see how much we learn How much we learn in the last two years and that I tell you it's a lot a lot almost every project that It's in the space will learn something from any of the project and there was part two of that question, right? If you had to redesign solidity again, what would you do differently? Yes? I mean the most of the questions they they are not specific to to solidity or block chains. This is just so You can be sure that a that a program I mean you can never be sure that a program does what you think it does You can not even be sure that what you think it does is actually what you think it does because you might not think about all the cases and I think a good way to get close to that point is just to provide as Many different perspectives on a program as possible and this means one perspective is is the code itself another perspective is running test cases and a third perspective is a formal specification and another perspective is internal assertions in the program and so on and Yeah, if I would start over I Would add Yeah, verification tools much earlier than what we did when we when we did that The reason it was a little delayed was that we try to basically fully formalize the language in the beginning which is a huge effort and That's why we pushed it back a little and at some point we realized that it's yeah, it just doesn't make sense and Then we basically started over with these formal analysis tools and just added mechanisms where you can at least do formal assertions about single functions or single blocks of code Yeah, and another thing I would do different is probably like If you add a feature and think of a way people could ab use it and then you think oh, yeah That probably won't happen. I mean people yeah, and then yeah, it will happen of course and so Yeah, basically more take into account which mistakes people could make Would you change anything about the EVM? Yeah, certainly tons of things like what like what? 32 byte types was probably not the best idea. I think the main reason to have 32 byte How's it called native Size whatever register size. I think the main argument for that was that you could do Crypto more easily and crypto stuff usually requires large numbers and It turns out through Ethereum through the virtual machine through smart contracts You can actually abstract away all the crypto stuff So you can you can do this and you don't have to know anything about crypto I mean you have to know about how to use how to verify digital to signatures perhaps But you can even go without that because the system does that for you and these I think these 32 byte types slow down the virtual machine extremely and also Blots the blockchain and Things like that. Hi my question is regarding Competitive competitor platforms So there is a recent surge of Ethereum killers also self-proclaimed Ethereum killers Qtum and and Cardano and Ignoring the price and everything Just the technology They are young platforms who claim to fix all the theorems mistakes Which is I don't know it sounds a bit ridiculous, but I'm interested specifically in the scaling. I mean those platforms The main offering compared to Ethereum is that they're using no proof-of-stake and Cardano for example boast that their proof-of-stake is Super legit and super verified and peer reviewed. So my question is basically is why Why aren't you copying them and generally? What do you think? About those solutions Yeah So I have a lot of opinions about these solutions for the most part because well firstly like their proof-of-stake protocol I mean it has nothing at stake and long-range attack problems. They have not done any of the economic work I almost at all right They just are doing consensus protocol work and the consensus protocol work is not even asynchronously safe It's like partially synchronous. They have low overhead, but like so does any So can any blockchain really? So I think their consensus protocol is like way over-hyped it under like you know like not actually that great I think like EOS also consensus protocol sucks. I mean basically you go down the list I'm really like I think all of their consensus protocol is like are far from optimal You know people do accuse me of over-engineering sometimes But I think like you know just I can tell that they're like quite far from optimal in terms of the like consensus protocol stuff But the thing the main thing to realize about Ethereum killing is that? There's a lot more to the blockchain than just the core technology, right? There's all sorts of upstream tooling. There's the community. There's the culture. There's the governance There's like their whole raison d'etre that like brings everyone together, right? If you bring a community together to kill Ethereum like that's like not gonna be a great community Like I mean at least it doesn't it's I'm not inspired to join maybe because I'm conflicted out But but maybe because like it's not really like being against something and like it's not that like exciting, right? So somehow the there's the community governance and tooling side that is way beyond like these technical claims that they have and that what takes years to build out and it takes a lot of work that isn't Something that like you know nerds can do alone in a room overall Therium at the end it's made about Technical about depths about technical people mainly in the people that's in the community and We are not married on a terium. We are married into technology. We are married in improving in getting the things better If any and we are not against Anybody any chain that is trying to do the things is trying to improve in trying to fix is trying to get in the things Better great. It's perfect We want to do that. We are we are all on that. We are all on that Space and this is mainly the spirit if we if appears a new Chain that's better than a terium and we see that that's the way to go Most of the depths in the theorem will go there. It's a kind of it's a kind of Improved it's about a kind of thing about the technology about getting better That's very much the spirit. That's very much the spirit in the theory and said that Well, if you compare right now, they only Chain this you know through incomplete The way you can really create that smart contracts and you can really do interesting things that has been running for More than two years now. That's working quite well that has suffered and suffered a lot of attacks That's robust and it's in a in a stage where you can really do Real applications. I think that right now is a theory probably there is other ones that start are still there great but the one that's clearly Different at least in my in my side. I don't know all the other space for me is for me is a theory Yeah, I want to say something on that too as adapt developer I don't really see that distinction. It's kind of silly That's like saying is Android the iPhone killer, you know, if you're making apps Do you make an app just for iPhone because you're an iPhone maximalist? I mean sure if you don't want to get the rest of the customer base So it just the whole concept seems kind of silly. I love multiple platforms. Sounds like a great idea Next question Tom you got something Okay, I was wondering about the EVM and about decisions. How likely would it be to fix that? And how easy would it be to to fix those decisions for like a new version without breaking everything? Did you get it? I'm asking about the like the you are talking about bad decisions in the EVM like 32 bits Types and so on and how easy would it be to change those design decisions in the EVM to Improve the the EVM itself like how easy So I mean adding new opcodes to the EVM that is something we do with every single hard fork but changing these these core things like the size of the The size of the values of the arguments That probably won't happen But what we are considering is completely replacing the virtual machine by a web assembly based virtual machine and this solves I mean it is a trade-off because it's not 100% in our hands web assembly, but It solves lots of other problems So this is we would rather go to web assembly than changing one of these core properties of the EVM I guess Can you say something about you awesome? No you know so e wasm is basically web assembly plus Certain built-in functions to access the blockchain and interact with with storage other contracts and so on plus Yeah built-in resource consumption counting so the We we when we execute a smart contract We always have to keep track of how many resources it consumes so that yeah to protect against the DOS attacks and just to reward the miners properly and For the EVM we do that as part of the interpreter So every single opcode has a certain cost some costs some opcodes have cost that depend on the arguments or the current state and This is a little difficult difficult with web assembly because it's mainly built to be compiled and The way it is solved there is we just take the web assembly Yeah code the AST and modify it so that It basically has a global counter which just gets incremented Accordingly for every single line of code that is run or similar every single instruction there And so you can just take this modified AST run it through any Yeah, any compatible web assembly interpreter or compiler and get your resource counting automatically Hello For this technology to really change the world. I think it has to reach people at some point so Otherwise it might end up as a corporate tool as a niche tool so that I think basically that means Transactions granularity of transactions granularity of contracts might increase substantially and that also then Raises the question of scalability so Do you think the technology is already ready for really scaling this up to a point where we really can say This is a tool which might this is a tool which might end up Thanks, this is a tool which might end up as a as really a game changer or changing the world in the end well Scalability is a is a challenge is probably one of the biggest challenges in blockchain space It's and there's a whole bunch of different types of solutions and there are various like stages of completion, but There's there's kind of a couple of questions like one of them is like what are the fundamental limits to how scalable this can be and You know on-chain and you know, what's the bet? What's the most efficient way that we can use the blockchain right? and There's a lot of people doing work on both of these directions I'm personally working mostly on the sharding kind of direction and I don't yet know like the limits the scalability But I can tell you that it's not unbounded like it's not going to scale infinitely for any given like node capacity We can only have like a finite number of shards because we have to maintain Consistency properties across shards and that takes an overhead that is increasing in the number of shards And so I think it's very unlikely that we're going to get infinite scalability on chain But that doesn't mean that it's not going to be much more scalable than it is today Besides a scalability Of course, I want to mention also the other two points for going mainstream one is security And the other is usability which is which are very related one each other sometimes wet here the volatility in the case of the coins but these are the Probably the four things that needs to go for in order to go mine the string for security is not only about the smart contract security it's also for example fishing attacks or Education of the education of the people is very very this very lighted also to the usability part So a lot of effort needs to be done to go mine the stream. That's not only tech technology It's also about education explained the same way that at least now Maybe your your mother or your grandmother bring you brings you one day to the bank and Explains you how the banks works and you put the money and somebody truest and all that We need to do a little bit the same With the society and explain how to keep how to work with this the crypto with this is centralized world And we can take a lot of advantage of this But it is also this social part that we need to Spread to the people to show how this technology works when it's ready. I Have a kind of applications questions Do you think it would be possible to build a cryptocurrency exchange inside of a theory on blockchain? In some way that we would not have to trust any of these like sketchy companies that run Existing exchanges It already exists right now. It's the delta Delta the delta is one and zero X is the other one. They are more or less on chain Both of those and well, they they are not Scalable if you want to run a boat on those on those exchange problems not gonna work very good But it's a first it's a first a step And I'm sure that these side chains and proof of stake and all sharding when the technology improves this This new change Will come probably I will tell you that the centralized exchange is probably the most Seen project when you go over the space is like I know like I don't know like 10 or 12 ICOs and companies that are trying to do this decentralized exchange in the space Yeah, they work in in the tokens between the theorems. Yes This is the delta works between in tokens between the three between the three Yeah, but you can have like a token that represents for example a Bitcoin or a Neuro or whatever And then it's not about the change. It's then you just do the The value converter of what would you withdraw and and I have thing to note about these protocols Is that it's not all on chain? It's just the custody of the funds in the settlement of trades That's on chain with these two what we mentioned and it's it's kind of a Non-custodial exchange is one way to think about it But there is and that technology I think is more promising in terms of having good usability quicker than a fully on chain exchange Hi, I have a question. I recently was asked to review a ATM providers back-end code because he was selling ether at an Ether ATM kind of Bitcoin ATM Ether ATM and at one point a lot of these transactions were failing and I looked at it and it was like because I think it was I'm not sure That's why I'm asking there was a transaction a mempool already for a previous customer and Then we send out the next customer but that was not confirming because there were some transactions coming ahead of that and we couldn't bump the fee because there Seems to be no replaced by fee or something like that And you cannot have more than one transaction in mempool. Is that correct and or maybe I? Misanalyze the situation I mean I can take this one if you want I know there's a non-cis and so The first person when an account sends a transaction they have to be done in order And so there's this little counter called a nonce and when the if the first transaction hasn't gone through Then the future ones won't so you have you can bump the fee You can replace the transaction by sending another transaction with the same nonce as the one that's stuck So you replace that one and then all the rest should follow through if the gas is high enough for the miners to pick it up What are the use cases you guys are most excited about? Yeah, no, I'm happy to start. I'm I'm most excited about This this use case for like international institutions and for international governance of like a middle ground Like a neutral territory that like governance institutions can use that is outside of the jurisdiction of any of the individual members so for example, like if we're gonna have like a cap and trade product, you know for like carbon credits having the record be not in the jurisdiction of any one of the States of the agreement, I think will make it easier to agree to right and so I think it'll make it a more powerful policy right as I think the use of the blockchain as this kind of Non-jurisdictional thing is the thing I'm the most most excited about Governance, of course is one of those There are other for example, well as I mentioned before for example all these stable coins And all these evolution of the money. It's also something that's happening. That's very interesting in the blockchain Of course all the donations platform that we are doing give it it's also this can change a lot This is a good a good application that I'm working. I'm very excited on I don't know is there are many applications Yeah, these are not specific applications or use cases but more like directions were Hopefully the community will go and I'm excited about anything that allows us to remove these pesky ads everywhere by just paying for stuff you yeah, someone does for you even if it's a tiny amount and also removing the fact that All companies collect personal data all the time Because you can just remove this company from the transaction directly for tiny things directly trade with the person your Yeah, you're Having a relationship with I'm personally a big fan of autonomous devices and autonomous organizations like Self-owning cars or like a self-owning IoT devices that are Programmed for a special use case and they can manage themselves and I'm also I would like to see like another use cases of decentralized autonomous organizations on the blockchain Maybe without putting too much money into it Something I'm also to kind of excited about but you know more nerdy less kind of less exciting kind of way is like a reduction in transaction costs by using smart contracts like I think that we're gonna see like you know In like industrial organization and like you know like like we'll find cases where we can reduce transaction costs by using smart contracts and I'm excited about that because you know transaction costs are the root of all evil as like you know from a cosy in point of view He's like an economist you should look him up and what are the use cases for sticky snacks in Ethereum? I will tell you just one he will tell the rest but one of those is for example an anonymous voting I'm not so good with use cases I've got I've got I've got a bunch I've got a bunch I Really love a partial settlement of state channels with zero knowledge proofs. So you show that you I'm allowed to To this to like withdraw this money from the state channel without showing anything else and allowing the state channel to continue I'm or even full settlement with zero knowledge proofs. I like The I really love the idea of recursive zero knowledge proofs for guaranteeing the validity of blocks So like every block header should have a zero knowledge proof that it's valid and that the previous block was had as valid zero knowledge proof So that you can verify one zero knowledge proof and know that the entire blocks history is valid like that's magic More generally along this lines is like the idea of like saving computational time by providing zero knowledge proofs as a Concise proof that computation happened and I think I'm really excited about his privacy Right, I mean we want to have like anonymous currency on the blockchain We don't want to link our tech our activity via the gas, right perhaps. I mean ZK snarks actually have two properties and the first one is the zero knowledge property that you can kind of Convince someone about something without telling why it is true And the other property is that the proof is is tiny compared to the actual yeah Compared to a computation that would verify the same thing and you don't always need zero knowledge there But it basically comes for free at least for ZK snarks And that's why you can do something like you can verify the validity of a blockchain with just five cryptographic operations one one one particular application that I'm excited about is a Imagine a decentralized exchange or even a centralized exchange that doesn't know who's placing the orders, right? Because you produce a zero knowledge proof that you have a right to place an order And it doesn't need to know who's who who's matching with because you can produce a zero knowledge proof that you've been matched when you need to withdraw And so like that's super cool tech There's like a Distribution tech where basically you want to like oh make a payment to some to like like of dividends or something and if you Don't want people to know how much of the share they each other have there's also there's all sorts of applications because privacy is a serious problem and Zero knowledge first are one of the easiest and most you know conceivably available general-purpose tools that are on in the pipeline One last question who wants it? I mean we weren't trolled at all. Yeah, I know there's Monero guys who want to talk You know like Bitcoiners give us something. Let us have some fun. Oh, we got we got one This is Thank you very much for being here for Christmas. I give my family gift of ether I wanted to give them Bitcoin but the transactions fees were too high and right now de facto. You are the payment network Right now. I can see ether becoming the payment Network the amount of transactions is through the roof and Yes, people are transacting money using ethereum Bitcoin is now But yes, I'm sorry. This will be a question Thank you very very much. This is amazing work And I think you're trolling the Bitcoiners This is I give you bad news Bitcoin and ethereum software the same exactly the same problem Of course ethereum is is newer and it's much better in in that but the essence It's also limited the blocks are limited the the quantity of transactions that can do ethereum is limited Maybe right now is better, but it is not solved The the the the scalability problem is not solved yet So I'm sorry ever that's not a good news for that But but but also the governance that ethereum hasn't committed to not solving it. Thank you guys. Thank you so much There's one last thing I want to say If you got a little bit excited about ethereum now and know a little C++ and Would Find it great to work full-time on an open-source project then Please talk to me. We're hiring C++ developer facility


Welcome to Much More on Medicine. I'm your host, Catherine Noor. Do you have diabetes or pre-diabetes? Well, if you do, stay tuned to learn how you can improve your diabetes. Much More on Medicine is an opportunity to learn about all aspects of healthcare. I talk with guests about medical and alternative care treatment, insurance, medication, surgery, rehabilitation, prevention, and Much More. Today I'm talking with licensed registered dietician, Jennifer Papastofano. Jennifer is a certified diabetes care and education specialist and is passionate about diabetes care and improving the lives of those with diabetes through education and technology. She earned a master's degree in foods and nutrition from the University of Utah. She has a private practice in Lutherville, Maryland, where she focuses mostly on diabetes management. Welcome, Jennifer. Hello, Catherine. It's great to have you here, and I understand that you used to live in Hawaii. I did, and that is how we met. How many years ago? It's like half a lifetime literally ago that I was in Hawaii. Absolutely. Yeah, and since then you've become a dietician. Tell us a little bit about what you do every day. So as a certified diabetes care and education specialist, I work with patients at all levels of diabetes, whether it be pre-diabetes or they're first diagnosed with diabetes or have advanced diabetes or they're using multiple daily injections of insulin. And I've been doing this for 18 years. When I lived in Hawaii, I worked in insurance as you remember. And one of the things I started to realize was a lot of the people injured in car accidents who had diabetes didn't recover as quickly as everybody else did. So that sort of got me interested. At the same time, I was interested in nutrition and found that I could get a degree in nutrition and eventually become what used to be called literally a month ago was certified diabetes educator. The rebranding just happened about four weeks ago. So now I'm called a certified diabetes care and education specialist. It's a lot of words. And you actually went to my alma mater, which was University of Utah. Yeah. And so what is diabetes? I know some people, they hear it, but maybe they don't really know exactly what that is. So there are three major kinds of diabetes. The first one, we're not really going to talk too much about it, which is gestational diabetes. And that's for pregnant women. And generally, what diabetes is, is you have glucose or sugar in your blood that doesn't filter into your cells properly. And the reason we need sugar in ourselves is because that's how we get our energy. And so when we don't have sugar getting into ourselves, the sugar that remains in the bloodstream is very damaging to what's called the microvascular system. So having high blood sugars for long periods of time literally damages every organ in your body because it's running through your blood. And so I always say that, you know, if you want to think of diabetes on a very fundamental level, one of the roles of our red blood cells is to carry oxygen around the body. So if you have high blood sugars, you have literally sticky blood and the oxygen isn't able to get to the very tiny spaces throughout our body, like the backs of our eyes or kidneys or fingertips or toes. And so these areas slowly get suffocated. And when you've talked to somebody who's had uncontrolled diabetes for long periods of time, you find out that these areas are the ones that are affected. You know, I think one of the scariest things would be to go blind from uncontrolled diabetes, for example. So there are, as I said, three types of diabetes, gestational pregnancy, then there's type one diabetes. Type one diabetes is an autoimmune disease, your body attacks itself. And these patients will typically immediately go on insulin. There is no oral medication that can help them. And then finally, there's type two diabetes, which is the after step of pre-diabetes. They really are the same thing at a different level, where you start to show some dysfunction and glucose processing. And type two diabetes is a progressive disease. So really what I do is I try to slow down the progression. And in fact, I can, in some cases, reverse the diabetes, but it has to be a permanent lifestyle change for the patients. Okay. And you mentioned the possibility of going blind. I've also heard of diabetic neuropathy. Can you? Yes. Is that where they can't feel their feet or something? Yeah, I mean, some people have numbness in their fingers as well. But numbness in their feet is usually, people will tell you at first, they feel like they have socks on and they don't. Sometimes they have burning in their feet. It's very uncomfortable. But again, this is a progression from poor circulation due to diabetes mismanagement. Okay. And how does someone know to get tested to see if they have diabetes? What kind of symptoms would they have? Well, generally speaking, your doctors should be at your annual physical screening you for diabetes. And they always do a glucose test. Generally, over the age of 45, they should be doing what's called a hemoglobin A1C, or we'll just say A1C for short. And what a hemoglobin A1C is, it's a three month average of blood sugar. The reason it's a three month average is our red blood cells live for three months. And then we get a whole new set of red blood cells. And A1C is a marker on these red blood cells that show how much sugar has been stuck there for the past three months. So that's why we'll have this test on every three months on our patients. If the A1C is above 6.5%, then that is a diagnosis of diabetes. If the fasting glucose is at 126 or higher on a repeated test, that is a diagnosis of diabetes. And if you do a random test, whether you're fasting or not, or you just ate, and it's over 200, then you in fact do have diabetes. Pre-diabetes is the other factor. Do you want me to continue? Sure. Pre-diabetes is just a step below that. So normal fasting glucose is 99 and lower. Pre-diabetes would be 100 to 125. And the pre-diabetes A1C would be 5.7% to 6.4%. So there are quite a few people out there with pre-diabetes thinking they're still safe. But really, in fact, that's just a step below diabetes. And if you don't work on that quickly, within five years, the patient will have over diabetes. And the chances of reversing it go down the longer the diabetes has not been managed. At what point do you come in and help and work with the patient? So, you know, that's a great question. And I have to say it really depends on the practice group that you work with. I'm in a large patient-centered medical home building where there are about 30 physicians. They all know I'm there. So when their patients have high blood sugars, they give them my number or they give them the number of several diabetes educators in the area. And it's really up to the patient to come and make that phone call. Unfortunately, what I see is a lot of people think, well, if I just cut back on my food, I'll be fine. And it's not that easy. It really does really behoove you to spend that time with a diabetes educator. Because we do have a little bit more knowledge on how to balance the diets and the lifestyle in order to improve it, as well as manage medications. Okay. So you work with them at the pre-diabetic or a diabetic stage to discuss their diet, correct? Diet, lifestyle, medications. I'll talk to them about their sleep, all of the factors that go into insulin resistance, which is what type two diabetes is. Okay. What we hear a lot when we talk about diet these days is carbohydrates. And let me ask you, do carbs play a role with diabetes? Absolutely. So carbs are the main nutrient that turn into sugar in our bloodstream. And so this is a wonderful graphic showing the types of carbohydrates. And I think just about everybody with diabetes knows that starches are carbohydrates. I mean, that's pretty common knowledge. Everybody knows bread and pasta and potatoes. A lot of people are not aware, however, that beans, even though beans are very healthy for us, things like chickpeas, black beans, these are also a significant source of carbohydrate, corn and peas. So these are other things that we eat that turn into sugar in our blood. And you might be thinking, oh my gosh, those are healthy foods. Of course they are. That's not that we can eat these. The problem with type two diabetes is that you don't filter glucose out of your bloodstream fast enough. So we have to work on how much shows up at one time and then refuel again later when your body has had a chance to absorb the sugar. So it's not a matter of that this food is bad or not. It really is a matter of how much can your body handle at one time. Okay. So carbs are not the enemy. They just need to be controlled, right? Correct. Control portion control and timing is a huge factor. And generally speaking, I like to start my patients. If they're women, I like to start them on 30 grams to 45 grams of carb and men at 45 to 60 grams of carbohydrate at each meal. So that number at breakfast, not that number at lunch and that number at dinner. So at each meal and then a snack for somebody who's not on insulin injections could be about 15 to 30 grams of carbohydrate. Okay. What about that person who says, I don't eat breakfast. I don't eat lunch. I only dinner. Is that a problem? It is a problem.  You know, I get a lot of, typically it'll be a male client who's a contractor and or he drives a truck or something like that all day where they really just don't want to stop and eat.    What happens is our bodies are brilliant. The main reason we need glucose is to keep our brain supplied with a source of sugar. And if we don't eat, our liver has the ability to actually crank out sugar for us. It's our backup plan, I call it. So you end up with this dysfunction where your liver is cranking out sugar frantically, you don't make enough insulin or you don't use your insulin correctly. So you can't get your cells open to get the sugar in the cell. So there's this dysfunction that the liver is now an overdrive. And so just by backing up and eating three small meals at least a day, you can certainly balance your blood sugars out much better than one, what I call the bear kill meal where you have this massive meal at the end of the day. Okay. And one thing that we might not think about when we're drinking five cans of soda a day or whatever, or coffee or whatever, what about liquid calories? Absolutely. So, you know, most of my type two patients will have a weight problem. Most of my prediabetes patients will have a weight problem. And one of the easiest things you can do to correct that is stop drinking calories. One of my biggest selling points to patients that are addicted to sodas is I tell them, look, if you cut out one can of soda per day, you'll lose about 14 pounds in a year. So a lot of those, these people are going, you know, getting these big gold sized drinks, filling them up, and they say, well, I drink them all day. But, you know, think about that if you can switch to something with zero calories, you're going to lose significant amount of weight and weight is something we can all see it's tangible, we can feel it. So that's something that the buy-in is really good for patients, whereas like these blood sugar things, if you're not testing your blood sugar, it's much harder to get compliance that way. But the liquid calories, we generally have patients that have low blood sugars, we have them drink liquid calories like juice, soda, anything like that, because it brings their blood sugar up so quickly and it doesn't take a lot. So why would you do that if you have prediabetes or diabetes?  You're actually trying to not do that. So that's my advice on liquid calories. Sure. And of course, water. Yeah, I'm sure that people will say, I don't like water. Do you hear that sometimes? Oh, I don't like the taste of water. That's shocking to me. Why does your water have a taste? And I hate to say we need to grow up a little bit and do it anyway, because it is really one of the most important things we do is to hydrate ourselves. Years ago when I was getting my master's degree, I actually was going to do a research project on hydration and metabolism. There was a pilot study done at the University of Utah, but unfortunately, I would have had to wait another year and a half to graduate because the lab wasn't finished yet, but they did do a subsequent research project and found that hydration certainly helps your metabolism. So who wouldn't want to help their metabolism, right? We all need a little more metabolism. So water is definitely one of those essential pieces to get health. It dilutes your blood sugar if you have a high blood sugar. And of course, it helps with so many other things in the body. Sure. Well, I love to drink water and I quit soda. I think I was in my 20s when I quit soda and have been happy ever since that I quit. But you know, sometimes you want some other drinks. When we come back from the break, we can talk about other drinks like coffee and alcohol. But at this time, we're going to take a short break. I'm Katharine Nora. This is Much More on Medicine on the Think Tech live streaming network series. We're talking with Jennifer Papastofano and on five things you can do to improve your diabetes. Physical therapy specialist and the host of Movement Matters. My show is designed to teach you the simplest and most effective treatment strategies to get you out of pain and back to doing what you love. If you or someone you know is having pain in a certain area of the body, it would like a free assessment in treatment over media or in person. And then come on the show to talk about it. Email us at thinktechmovementmatters at gmail.com. Or if you have a topic you would like to know more about, please email us. My goal is to decrease pain all over the world, inspiring people to take better care of their bodies to enjoy life to the fullest. I look forward to hearing from you. We're back. We're live. I'm Katharine Nora and this is Much More on Medicine on the Think Tech live streaming network series. And we're talking with Jennifer Papastofano on five things you can do to improve your diabetes. Jennifer, before the break, we talked about liquid calories. Let me just ask you, what about alcohol? Can you drink alcohol if you're diabetic? Yeah. So I want to say first that alcohol and insulin are a dangerous mix. So contrary to popular belief, a lot of alcohols can drop your blood sugar. And that's usually a very big shocker for people. The problem with, you know, and don't think, hey, I'm going to manage my diabetes with alcohol, because that's a really bad idea. The problem is we don't know when your blood sugar is going to drop and your blood sugar will drop quickly.   And this is when, especially young people that are drinking in college and they're on insulin, it's very dangerous. And they can actually, I've known a couple of people, unfortunately, have died from this. So alcohol and insulin is a dangerous game. I would say if you're going to have a drink, make sure you eat something with it.   For people on oral medications, it's generally safer. But again, you want to be reasonable about alcohol, not only because of the calories, but because we don't know when your blood sugar is going to drop and it could have a side effect that you're not, that's not expected. Okay. And what about coffee? Oh, I will defend coffee to my grave. It is one of my favorite things. You know, if you said Jennifer, alcohol or coffee, I'd be coffee all the way. The problem with, I mean, I love coffee, and I don't drink too much, but I have a cup or two a day. But the problem with coffee is Starbucks has evolved. The problem and the good thing about coffee, I should say, is Starbucks has evolved. And Starbucks, as wonderful it is, some of these these drinks there are five and 600 calories. I think last time I looked at the Carmel Macchiato, and I don't speak Starbucks fluently, but it was like a venti, something like that. It was five or 600 calories. And I thought, Oh my gosh, that's like more than a meal. So if you're really trying to slim down, really look at Starbucks and how it's affecting you, you can get some of their sugar-free syrups that would cut significantly down on the calories. You can put some low fat or skin milk in there that would significantly cut down on the calories. But really think about that. If you're addicted to Starbucks, you may need an intervention and you need to cut back and just stick with the coffee milk and some stevia and save yourself the problems that occur with too much Starbucks. My friends will laugh because my favorite drink is grande non-fat, no whip, no foam, extra hot, hot chocolate. And I will defend that till my death. But as long as it's not every day, Catherine, and you zoom all that off. So you'll there you go. You got it, man. So, okay, you mentioned that you lived in Hawaii for a while. And do we have a problem with diabetes in Hawaii? Yeah. So prior to our interview today, I actually succused me for looking away. I'm reading some shocking statistics that I printed off just because I was curious, what is the prevalence of diabetes in Hawaii? So this is the burden of diabetes in Hawaii is from the American Diabetes Association. And this is approximately 154,365 people in Hawaii, which is 13.1% of the adult population has diabetes. Let that sink in for a minute. It means more than one in 10 people that you know have diabetes. The cost to Hawaii is $1.5 billion per year. There are an estimated 41.5% of the population has what's called prediabetes. So it's that little step below. They're almost there. They have prediabetes. So can you imagine the cost in healthcare, just to the state of Hawaii? I was looking at like what the national burden is. And I found that one out of every seven healthcare dollars is paid for, paying for, excuse me, paying for diabetes. And the other thing was 67% of all of diabetes care is paid for by government based insurance, meaning Medicare or Medicaid. So, you know, if you want the cost of healthcare to go down, we really have to start taking care of ourselves. I mean, it is an amazing burden on society. And you know, we talk about the cost of drugs, the cost of insurance. And honestly, if you look at the cost of diabetes, it's magnificent how much of a problem it is in the United States. Wow, those are shocking. And if we just can make some good decisions ourselves, we can make a big dent in that, is that right? Absolutely, absolutely. So, okay, let's move on to non diet things. Is sleep a factor in diabetes? Yes. So, you know, when people come to see me, they expect to just talk about food. And I start asking them, so what time do you go to bed? What time do you get up? Do you sleep well? How many times a night do you get up? And they're always like, what the heck is she asking me this for? Like, it's getting kind of weird. But sleep apnea is a significant problem. And I would say probably out of 10 patients that I see, eight of them have sleep apnea. It's a shocking statistic again. And sleep apnea is when you stop breathing when you sleep. And that can be life threatening. And so if you have a snoring problem or your spouse says you don't do because you probably don't hear yourself, you should certainly get that tested. And the testing now is great because you can actually take it home and sleep in your own bed, which is easier than having people watch you. And then you bring the machine back to your pulmonologist and they can evaluate your data and let you know if you have sleep apnea. So sleep apnea certainly in sleep deprivation certainly contributes to insulin resistance. Remembering that that means that you don't filter glucose out of your bloodstream fast enough. And so getting significant and adequate sleep is important. And most of us, I think, sleep less than five hours, which is unbelievable. And a minimum of six hours is needed for benefits for health. And every time I read about weight loss, I read that you do much better with weight loss if you're actually sleeping eight hours rather than much lesser period. Absolutely. Correct. So when we sleep, we produce something called growth hormone, which when you were little, we all got bigger when we were little. Now we repair our bodies. So growth hormone is a significantly important part of our sleep that if you're not sleeping well, then you aren't getting that repair. One of the shocking things that's coming out now is that sleep deprivation is actually being linked to Alzheimer's and dementia. And as we're living longer, this is becoming a bigger problem. I've known many, many friends who have parents that have Alzheimer's and dementia. And they're thinking that when you don't sleep, the toxins and all the buildup in your brain doesn't get removed.  So not only is it for our physical health, sleep can reduce cravings in the afternoon. It helps repair your body. But the brain health is extremely important. And of course, lack of sleep contributes to insulin resistance and that snack attack that we all get at three o'clock if we haven't slept well. Sure, absolutely. Okay.  And when I go to Zumba, I see people of all different sizes and ability levels. I see people that are very large and people that are very small and muscular or fit. And I get the impression that some of those people are being told that they need to move in order to become more healthy. Is that true with diabetes as well? Yes, absolutely. So if you ask me, what's the antidote to insulin resistance? So remember that your cells have kind of closed off when you have type two diabetes and you need to reopen them so the sugar gets out of the bloodstream and gets in the cells. The best way to get those cells open is activity, movement, exercise, whatever you want to call it. It's get up and move more than you're doing right now. And, you know, I have patients that telling them to exercise for an hour, it's out of the question. They won't be able to do it. They have this sense of failure. I also think as Americans, we overcomplicate activity. We have to wear the right shoes. They're white, right outfits.  And that's what I tell people, you know, 10, five minute walks is great. Go ahead and do that. Has to be above and beyond what we're doing now. And what that does again is it opens up your cells. It is the antidote to insulin resistance. And it's one of the hardest things to get people to do. Remember, exercise and activity never has to be heroic amounts of anything. It just has to be activity. And one of the things I loved about Hawaii was that the Asian culture taught me a lot about just lifestyle. I don't think I ever lived next to an Asian neighbor that wasn't sweeping cleaning, doing something active all the time. And I really admired that actually. Sure. Well, I prefer to use my two legs rather than my car to do things. And I prefer to walk to the store or walk to the movie theater or walk to work instead of or walk to Starbucks and have something horrid or wonderful actually. So I'm going to ask you, what about vegetarianism or veganism? Is that a good thing for diabetes? I think vegetarian actually works fine. If you're eating eggs and some people consider vegetarians also to eat fish, pescatarian, they're called. And dairy products, that works out very well. If you're going to be a vegan, however, your diet predominantly is carbohydrates and some vegetables, which are lower doses of carbohydrates. It is a very difficult thing to manage diabetes as a vegan, but it's not to be said. It can't be done. I just feel like that's going to accelerate the insulin burnout. I hate to say that to people. I know I'm offending somebody out there, but I do currently have a client like that. And it's going to be very challenging for her to eat the amount that she needs to eat in order to control her blood sugars. Okay. Well, we've learned so much today, Jennifer. Thank you so much. We've learned about what you can eat and what you shouldn't eat and also that you should increase your movement and increase your sleep. So we're out of time and we'll have to wrap it up. I'm Katharine Norr. This is much more on medicine on the ThinkTech Livestreaming Network series. We've been talking with Jennifer Papastafano on five things you can do to improve your diabetes. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you to our broadcast engineer and to Jay Fidele, our excited producer who puts it all together. Please join us for future ThinkTech productions.