Dylan on DID

Transcript

0:00 So I feel like Web 3 for me is essentially the changing of the order, right? Like the changing of the order of things, a paradigmatic shift similar to like a structural paradigmatic shift that, you know, maybe if you think about like feudalism over to, I guess, republic, like democracies, right? So the way the internet has developed is that we went from actually a really decentralized basis with Web 1. You would call, and I remember this because I'm ancient, you would call up other computers and you would be on C prompt and that's how it worked, you would directly connect. Now there are a lot of issues with that from the UI, UX level and maybe not everybody was comfortable doing that.

0:56 people doing that, a fair amount of friction, and we started to see the growth of intermediaries to help us basically interact with other people, and that is essentially the rise of Web2. So these intermediaries and interfaces we know of all today, Facebook, Amazon, Google, et cetera, et cetera, they rose, and we had this Gaussian bargain with them that we would We would have really cool, interesting software that allowed us to connect with friends or to buy anything at any time or to grab whatever it was, an Uber, and the price that we would pay is that our data would essentially be leveraged, because the only two business models really on the internet are advertising and e-commerce.

1:51 That's pretty much it. These are the business dynamics, the business models on the internet. There are like two. And I think that a lot of tech companies like to present themselves as much more than that. But that is in fact all they really are from the business. Sure they connect us, but on the backend our metadata is being leveraged and sold back to us. If you think about this in like an everyday example, think about like Joe Rogan, like him or hate him, doesn't matter, we'd all agree Joe Rogan is probably doing well financially, but how much money is he making for the platform that he's on?

2:30 FAR more, FAR more, like in order of magnitude more. So we find ourselves in this, and don't get me wrong, I think Web2 is great, I think if somebody says to me, you just have to sell your soul to have access to all knowledge all the time, I'd be like, Okay, maybe I'll do that. We found ourselves in this situation. But now is the time for change. And I think that there's a lot of people beating the drum for that. The social dilemma that I talked to you a few years ago. I think a lot of people are getting a lot more cognizant about how they're living their lives on the internet.

3:16 What the possible futures are in front of us that we can start thinking about. So I started thinking about how is this all going to work? If Web3 is going to be a thing and if people are going to start to become their own platforms, you need basically some type of identifier, some type of way to identify someone that isn't just a wallet. So, it needs to be able to be flexible, it can operate between off-chain and on-chain contexts, and it needs to be sovereign. And so, thanks to Evan, she turned me on to decentralized identifiers and it was like, wow, light bulb, what a time to be alive, I thought.

4:10 Because not only is there the technology, the technological basis on an infrastructure level to try to make this happen, What is happening, it just got approved by the World Wide Web Consortium six months prior to hearing that. The World Wide Web Consortium is the same body that approves international standards like HTTP or HTTPS. In fact, HTTPS was, I think, the prior standard proved before it is, if I recall. So, one of the things that is really important, so, okay, let me just talk about this for a second, idealism does not equal products, so we want things to go this way, and like, I can wish, I can like wish for things to go this way in one hand, and there's this quote I really like, and I hope you'll forgive me, it's early in the morning, it's a bit crass, or I can crap in the other hand, and I can see which builds up faster.

5:15 Right? So yes, we do have to appeal to a business interest, right? And I think one of the ways, and going back to advertising, it's being one of the major business models. I don't think we're going to create new business models right away. We have to appeal to existing business models. So we're thinking specifically just about ad fraud and the metrics associated with ad fraud and the number of bot just all around us. So if you look at the entirety of the traffic of the internet, up to 40% is not real. So let's think about ourselves as an advertiser. Okay, well, I know that's not real, it's sort of like what I have to do, right?

6:12 I don't really have control of this situation. But, maybe, maybe there's some new company, maybe it's Brave Browser, or maybe there's an old company, maybe it's Samsung, and they're getting all of their user accounts initialized or decentralized identifiers And why is that important? Well, decentralized identifiers allow us to accrue data points and reputation over time. And in the same way that a blockchain has this kind of inviolable proof to it over time, like we can't recreate all this without a lot of work, in the same way we can't recreate someone's reputation approval over a period of time, or data points that are very specific to them, or verifiable credential attestations that are coming from a variety of sources.

7:05 So you can essentially build a sense of realness that has quite a lot of validity and reliability going back to the advertiser Well I don't want to go on this place because I know 40% of what I'm paying for is going to people that don't exist Maybe I'll go to this place for my end dollars, because now I know that they're did-enabled, we'll call it, right? Their accounts are all did-enabled, and now I'm going to put my money there. This I see as one of the clearest entry points into market, but it's going to take a long time to get there. Like, longer than I would like

7:52 And in the meantime, we need to think about how we're going to apply How we're going to do more stinky things in the next few years Because I feel like this is still five years Right? It's going to take five years We've already had conversations going with some well-known brands that you probably know But they're not necessarily ready to port all of their user accounts or Utilizer SDK and put it into decentralized identifiers because some guy who raised some money is like, hey, this is the next thing, you've got to do this. It'll take time. It'll take some time. But we know, despite that it takes time, we know the value of realness.

8:41 And we should be able to have very high conviction that this is where this needs to go. Because I find that you can have an extremely high condition around allowing more freedom of movement for people And I use movement in a very general sense The same way that Ethereum and Bitcoin have taken over the world I never thought it would then, but I didn't think it was like, I wasn't like 99% sure I was like, you know, 95, but I was like, I was like, this is, this is going to go somewhere because it's allowing people to do what they want to do freely, um, some conviction around

9:29 this. So this is just a little, a little explainer of what decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials are, and yes, they're going to come to the rescue, uh, of the world and and help change the basic models and infrastructure of the internet, in my opinion. Companies and fighters agree with me and they sign on. Hopefully less time than that. But decentralized identifiers exist at the most basic levels. They're...and...yeah. I won't spend too much time on that, but they are cool. Computation approval over time. Actually, I want to back up. I think this is important. We kind of have a sense of where things, we think that we're going to end up here and then we always end up here.

10:35 So if you told me three years ago that ChatGPT was going to happen, you'd be like, wow, that's crazy, I didn't expect that. But I would have also told you that we have a ton of applications happening in the blockchain world that people are actually using that don't have anything to do with DeFi. or Asset Place or Speculate Place and I'm completely wrong about that. The other thing that I think is interesting about there too is, at least when it comes to AI, there's also this imminent threat of not only about 40% of bot traffic. So if anything a human or a bot can do as human can do as of, you know, like six months ago,

11:30 So think about like 6 months, 12 months, 2 years into the future, what it means to be real and how we can protect that and how we can understand that and indeed I think that the only way to do that would be through decentralized identity protocols but it's not enough as we learned over the last couple years as we were developing to just have the ability to create a decentralized identifier which we ended up engineering A lot of people have signed up for accounts. So we're kind of like taking ourselves to the next level, we think. You know, like, people as platforms is a nice idea, but how is it actually going to work?

12:13 We need a UI. We envision this as sort of like a mission control. We need a lot of people to get on who, you know, don't know anything about Web3 or crypto or any of that stuff. They don't care, nor should they necessarily care, so we're very into the vision of the account of abstraction and intent centricity. So in other words, if I want to do something, I can simply just say, I want to do something, right? And that intent, whether it's, I want Samsung If you come to send me a bid for access to my decentralized identifier and I'm willing to attach my form about some aspects of my PII, you know, that are going to be sent them, so be it, right?

13:11 Let me be able to do that. I don't need to go to my wallet and indicate this or push this and press this. It's all going to be sort of intent centric and done on the back end by our program. So we want a unified interface for everything but through. That's what we're aiming for. And it needs to be someone interoperable. Yeah, build your own L2 that said it would be fun. Fortunately we have some great tooling now that that title isn't so so bad anymore we were able to quickly, well relatively quickly, deploy via some new stuff on the market like Celestia and Layer 0

14:05 This is where I think we should spend a little bit of time which is future implications in these cases So I talked a little bit in the family yesterday about like 23andMe. If you upload right now your genomic, take that swap, you send it in. They do make a lot of money. It's an existing business model on XST or genome by pharmaceutical companies. This isn't small money either. Like the last deal we made was like $200 million. So, if you've already uploaded, that's, you know, your data is probably, your genomes are probably already out there in a while, but let's say that you have, you can start thinking about, you know, pharmaceutical companies, researchers, etc. having secure access to your genome, you upload your genome, you get paid a fee. That's actually really, really interesting and cool.

15:00 Off-chain and off-chain attestation, so whether you're Subway sandwiches and you want to get your off-chain attestation that you ate a thousand sandwiches or whether you want to get your attestation that you have a medical degree from Harvard that can now stick with you and that can be leveraged in KYC provisioning, sure you can travel to your KYC between different contexts potentially credit scoring, maybe reputational credit score is up there too. But in general, you know, what does consult is a basic computer problem, which is solving for realness. Why I consider basic species progress getting to Web3. Why is it basic species progress? Because of the evolution of how we interact and communicate, and if we are enriching us that doesn't include us, which by this I mean the existing business models and dynamics of Web2, then there's also sort of like a bit of a political imperative there too.

16:32 So we have an opportunity right now to render more efficient, not just the financial rails of society, which it's like, yes, we did that, yes, we did Bitcoin and Ethereum, and now everything's kind of going to be real with that, and it is real, the ETF is going, but we need to find ways to write the efficiencies of Web2, so we need to know what's true, who's real, or at least approach that as much as we can. This is our contact, and thank you, I went a little long, it was all over the place, I appreciate you sticking with me through the journey here, it's great, and thank you for your time.