It’s 4am and I’m sitting in a hotel room in Shanghai, China. The second ever Ethereum developers conference is set to kick off in a few hours. The time-zone shift woke me up early, and I’m sitting in my bed playing with my newly modded phone. The Chinese government censors most large American mobile apps behind something colloquially referred to as “The Great Firewall” so you need to use all of these shoddily made, Chinese government approved, replacement apps instead. The preferred app for messaging is an app called WeChat, a bizarre Slack / Venmo / Tinder hybrid that 800 million people use to communicate every day. We have a group chatroom for the conference going, which I’m scrolling through when my phone buzzes. Someone posted a new message. “The Ethereum network is under attack”.

Ethereum is this insane thing going on in the tech world right now. It’s a new cryptocurrency that is picking up the pieces of the fractured Bitcoin ecosystem and trying to succeed in accomplishing what Bitcoin has failed to do, deliver the first batch of successful consumer applications built on top of blockchain technology. You can think of Bitcoin a bit like a shared google doc spreadsheet that anyone in the world can send data to, one global ledger of accounts and balances. Ethereum builds on this idea by providing a mechanism for users to add custom formulas into the cells. Anyone who has done any kind of Microsoft Excel programming knows how powerful spreadsheets can become with just a few simple formulas. Ethereum is the first working implementation of programmable money, a simple concept that may one day bring the entire global financial system to it’s knees. And it draws brilliant people from all walks of life into its orbit.

The 4AM attack on the network is bizarre in that it’s not really a malicious hack, but more like comical mischief. Ethereum runs as a distributed system. At any given time, there will be thousands of separate computers (also called nodes) running the Ethereum protocol and keeping the network online. The actual software that the computers use to run the Ethereum protocol comes in many different flavors, the most popular one is an application called Geth, written in Google’s Go programming language. 85% of all Ethereum nodes are running Geth at the time. The attack pushes a piece of data onto the blockchain that exploits a bug in the Geth software causing the program to crash. Because every live node syncs the latest version of the blockchain in real-time, just like that 85% of the Ethereum network goes offline. Some developers are able to respond by switching over to the Parity Ethereum client, a new client written in the high-performant Rust Language that is currently gaining market share, but for others switching over to Parity is too risky without having time to run extensive testing. The Ethereum network is essentially frozen until an update can be pushed to Geth.

The main developers of Geth are asleep in Shanghai. They might not even have their laptops with them, as it’s risky to take your work computer into mainland China if it contains any sensitive information. They’re also scheduled to go on stage and give a presentation in a couple hours. When they wake up, do they fix the bug and miss their talk or go onto the stage? Like I said, comical mischief. People slowly start to wake up and news of the attack starts spreading. In a back room somewhere developers start pounding on their laptops. In a matter of hours, the bug is identified, an update is shipped, the nodes download the latest version of the software and go back online. Crisis averted. The net result of the attack? The conference start time gets pushed back half an hour. The Geth developers come out on stage to a raucous applause. Just another day in the cryptocurrency world.

Ethereum has a certain resiliency to it. It reminds me a bit of being in Israel. When you live under the constant threat of attack, you develop a desensitization and rationality around the notion of outside threats, so you respond to them with logic instead of emotion. The term ‘anti-fragile’ (meaning something that becomes stronger every time it is put under attack) has been a buzzword in Silicon Valley lately, but Ethereum has thus far personified it. Nobody is overly phased by the 4am attack. It’s doubtful that such a large portion of the network will run the same client software at the same time in the future. This attack vector won’t work again.

DevCon is the single best tech conference that I’ve ever been to. It’s a firehose of technical information and ambitious product demos blasted at you non-stop over the course of three days. There’s an energy and an optimism that I’ve never felt before, and an underlying belief amongst the community that Ethereum has finally gotten it right and we’re t-minus one year away from cryptocurrency truly exploding into mainstream consciousness.

While other technical communities are bickering about who can find a more esoteric reason to censor a conference speaker, Ethereum is moving along with a laser focus on solving real problems, like how to scale the blockchain to thousands of transactions per second, how to make developer tooling more approachable, and how to keep the network running despite the constant barrage of hacks and DDoS attacks being levied against it. At DevCon you’re just as likely to find a web developer, a systems engineer, an academic, or an MBA. A transexual, an avid Trump supporter, a Chinese entrepreneur, a New York City venture capitalist, or a techie in a hoodie who has 5 million dollars worth of Ether. It’s a safe space for eccentric personalities. You still have your typical discussions at the bar about immutable databases and functional programming like you would at any tech conference, but the whole thing has an elevated sense of scope around it, like these discussions you’re having actually matter somehow.

The biggest news from the conference comes in the form of two competing visions for Ethereum’s eventual switch to a proof-of-stake model. A make-or-break release under the code name “Casper”. The proof-of-work model was one of the brilliant inventions of the original Bitcoin protocol. A system that manages to align the incentives of all actors towards keeping the network running honestly and investing in the future of the currency. Ethereum is switching away from this battle-tested methodology to something more ambitious and unproven. Something that, if it works, will consume less electricity and allow for faster transaction processing times.

Vitalik Buterin, the 22-year old wunderkind behind Ethereum, presents his “Mauve Paper”, a well-reasoned approach for how to move the Ethereum network to proof-of-stake. Vlad Zamfir, a theoretical mathematician, later unveils his competing vision for proof-of-stake. Vlad speaks at 100 miles per hour. “I feel bad for the Chinese translators” someone says. The entire conference is being live-translated into Chinese, or it least it was until Vlad took the stage. On cue I see a Chinese girl take her headset off, the translators had no chance on this talk. “I need a presentation about this presentation” someone else says. Two competing models, unveiled publicly in front of the community. The better model will win in the end.

I meet a guy from Germany who runs one of the biggest Ethereum mining rigs. He shows me a picture of his setup on his phone. I’m blown away by the scope of it. A massive farm of servers all working 24/7 to solve esoteric math problems to ensure that new transactions get mined into the Ethereum blockchain promptly. “How much electricity does that use?” Someone asks him. “A couple million dollars a month” he answers. But it’s still profitable, very profitable, because the Ether it produces is worth so much. He goes to Vitalik “You know, you better make sure that Casper is well tested before switching over. It needs a lot of testing.” He’s half-joking, but there’s a vague semblance of hostility in there. The longer it takes for the Casper fork to go live, the more money the miners will make. Moving to a proof-of-stake model renders their massive hardware farms irrelevant. Every month that goes by before Casper goes live has a multi-million dollar impact for miners running the network. No pressure or anything.

Alex Van De Sande unveils the next version of the Mist browser. It’s the most impressive product that’s demoed at DevCon. Mist is a next generation web browser that runs on top of the open source Chromium engine powering Google Chrome. It lets you browse the internet just like any web browser does, but it also hooks into your Ethereum wallet, meaning you can trivially pay for any kind of content as you’re browsing. No credit card needed, no bank account needed, no obnoxious sign-up forms. It will unlock an entire new class of digital business models.

Juan Benet unveils Filecoin. A cryptocurrency built on top of Ethereum that will pay users to store files, creating a distributed version of Amazon S3 for the world to use. A BitTorrent protocol on steroids. Juan announces that the team thought long and hard about how to build it, but eventually decided to build on top of Ethereum due to the incredible community emerging around it. The crowd goes wild.

I go to lunch with a couple of millionaires. They call themselves the next generation of “Oil Tycoons”. Crypto ballers who were savvy enough to buy up massive amounts of Ether during it’s initial offering to the public. Ether has increased in price substantially since it’s launch, something like 40x. Traditional investments don’t return 40x the money that you put into it 18 months later, but Ethereum just did. Again, crypto is insane.

And all this is barely even scratching the surface. You see a new UI for the Parity client, academic papers on formal verification of smart contracts, mobile apps that connect to the Ethereum network, and beyond. There’s a black hole of interesting topics to understand in the blockchain space. A friend tells me about the term “chronocracy”. The way you can have a “plutocracy” or a “meritocracy” a “chronocracy” is an ecosystem where your status is defined by how much time you have put into it. There’s so much to know about how the low level protocols work, about how the current financial system works, that the status hierarchy at DevCon is a proxy of who has put in the most time to understand it all.