Decentralized applications might someday offer alternatives to modern monopolies. Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Amazon—all of these services could be recreated on a decentralized stack of technologies like Ethereum, IPFS, and Golem. Fully decentralized services could be more transparent, cheaper, and more efficient.

But let’s be realistic. Today, even the simplest applications of fully decentralized blockchains don’t work as well as we need them to. Cryptokitties offered a glimpse into how a simple viral application can limit the throughput of Ethereum. And don’t forget that these technologies are in some ways still subject to centralization in their current form. Miners form the decentralized consensus layer—and that mining activity is physically centralized in large server farms.

The decentralized future is possible. In order to get there, we need to make progress on the low-level tools that such a world will be built upon. This is the realization that today’s guest Karl Floersh had. Karl is a researcher for the Ethereum Foundation. He was initially excited about the prospect of decentralized apps—such as a decentralized Uber. But as he looked more closely at the space, he realized how early we are, and how much work there is to be done on foundational technologies.

Proof of Stake is the central topic of discussion in today’s conversation with Karl. Proof of Stake is a consensus mechanism that is an alternative to Proof of Work. In Proof of Work, miners race to validate blocks of transactions. This results in duplicated effort and perhaps wasted energy. In Proof of Stake, validators are chosen to approve transactions. These validators lock up an amount of currency that they are willing to “stake.” If a validator acts badly, the validator will lose their entire stake.

This mechanism could be more efficient—and we will explain why that is in this episode. If Proof of Stake works, it could lead to a faster, truly decentralized Ethereum blockchain. That’s a remarkable potential outcome.

Transcript

Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

Sponsors



Today’s sponsor is Datadog, a cloud-scale monitoring and analytics platform. Datadog integrates with more than 200 technologies so you can gain deep visibility into every layer of your stack – and any other data you’re interested in tracking. For example, you can use Datadog’s RESTful API to collect custom metrics from your favorite crypto data sources, and analyze trends in Ethereum prices over time. Start a 14-day free trial and as a bonus, Datadog will send you a free T-shirt! softwareengineeringdaily.com/ datadog



Do you think blockchain technology is only used for cryptocurrency? Think again. ConsenSys develops tools and infrastructure to enable a decentralized future built on Ethereum, the most advanced blockchain development platform. ConsenSys has hundreds of web3 developers that are building decentralized applications, focusing on world-changing ideas like creating a system for self-sovereign identity, managing supply chains, developing a more efficient electricity provider and much more. Listeners, why continue to build the internet of today when you can build the internet of the future on the blockchain? ConsenSys is actively hiring talented software developers to help build the decentralized web. Learn more about Consensys projects and open source jobs at consensys.net/sedaily



Users have come to expect realtime. They crave alerts that their payment is received. They crave little cars zooming around on the map. They crave locking their doors at home when they’re not at home. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to making your app “realtime.” PubNub makes it simple, enabling you to build immersive and interactive experiences on the web, on mobile phones, embedded into hardware, and any other device connected to the Internet. With powerful APIs, and a robust global infrastructure, you can stream geolocation data, send chat messages, turn on your sprinklers, or rock your baby’s crib when they start crying (PubNub literally powers IoT cribs). 70 SDKs for web, mobile, IoT, and more means you can start streaming data in realtime without a ton of compatibility headaches, and no need to build your own SDKs from scratch. And lastly, PubNub includes a ton of other realtime features beyond realtime messaging, like presence for online/offline detection, and access manager to thwart trolls and hackers. Go to PubNub.com/sedaily to get started. They offer a generous sandbox tier that’s free forever (until your app takes off).

