In his talk at WordCamp Europe 2022, David Lockie gave a whistle stop tour of the Web3 universe – what is Web3? What are DAOs, NFTs, smart contracts, Layer 2s and DeFi. He then moved on to focus on why they matter to WordPress. What are potential disruptors? Should we be scared or excited? Or both? What are some of the things that will likely be challenging? What might some of the opportunities be? What can WordPress teach the Web3 community in return?
David’s suspicion is that Web3 will disrupt Web2 (and humanity) to its core, helping us to ask good questions about the institutions we’ve built up and what we need going forward. The talk attempts to combine zoomed out, blue sky thinking with some practical advice and guidance as well as introducing a number of ways in which the WordPress community can learn more about Web3 and start to get involved.
Dave Lockie’s interests lie in WordPress, open source and technology trends, especially Web3. He founded Pragmatic in 2012 which merged in 2020 with Angry Creative where he worked as CMO until early 2022. He applied for his WordCamp Europe talk before joining Automattic as Web3 Lead only around 3 months ago. Dave is a deep thinker about how technology can help us to create a better world and loves to share his research and thoughts. He is an advisor to Adnode and WordProof and is just finishing up a role as WordPress ambassador for Grant for the Web. Outside of work, Dave currently lives in Brighton, UK and loves mountain biking, cooking, reading, photography and travel. You find him on Twitter @divydovy.
Unofficial WordCamp Europe 2022 POAP
At the end of his talk, David offered an unofficial POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol). POAPs are digital mementos, minted in celebration of life’s remarkable moments. It’s a new way of keeping a reliable record of life experiences. Each time they take part on an event, POAP collectors get a unique badge that is supported by a cryptographic record. These badges are Non Fungible Tokens (NFT) and open a whole new world of possibilities.
The Proof of Attendance Protocol (POAP) is the infrastructure that enables the minting and recombination of memories by POAP issuers and POAP collectors. This is a set of smart contracts which, for practical reasons, is currently governed by POAP Inc. P.O.A.P. was established in 2018 through the enthusiastic adoption of issuers and passionate POAP collectors.
Slides and Audio
- You can find the YouTube live stream recording from track 1 on day 2 below the transcript.
- The slides can be found on slideshare.net or downloaded from here 0as a PDF.
- The following is an enhanced version of the audio recording which can also be downloaded.
Transcript
Amit Sion: [00:00:00] So our next speaker, Dave Lockie. His presentation is WordPress and Web3 Trends, Distributions, Challenges and Opportunities. He’s been a longtime contributor to the WordPress community and is now working at Automattic as Web3 Lead. But this is where it gets interesting. He actually studied zoology at university and his name in Scottish means keeper of the lake. He also hopes to move to Portugal in August with his family. I think we’ve all fallen in love with Portugal whilst we’ve been here, so I don’t think you’d be the only one. I think a few of us will be coming back here. So please join me in giving a very warm welcome to Dave.
Dave Lockie: [00:00:50] Okay. We good? Hi everyone. I’m Dave Lockie. I am indeed here today to talk to you about WordPress and Web3, how it could be disruptive, and what opportunities and challenges that disruption could present. I’ve been a freelancer, an agency owner, an entrepreneur and a marketer in the WordPress space for about 15 years. And I’ve been into crypto and blockchain for about five now. I co-chair the BIMA Blockchain Council and I’ve been really fortunate to be able to mesh those two worlds together by becoming Web3 Lead at Automattic. So a few points of order before I get going. First, there’s no way that I can cover everything that’s going on with Web3 today. It’s just like vast and infinite, and it’s probably changed since this morning. So I just want to kind of inspire you, give you some new ways to think about this space and to encourage you to, like, get involved on your own. These are my personal views, not those of Automattic. I’m obviously working on this for the company, but these aren’t in any way Automattic’s views or policies or positions. But I would love to hear from you. If you’ve got questions, you’ve got concerns, you’re excited. Let’s chat about it because this is my work. You can find me @divydovy most places and nothing you hear today is financial advice. Here’s what we’re going to cover. What the heck is Web3? Which could be an entire presentation on its own.
Dave Lockie: [00:02:24] Disruption. Opportunities. Challenges. Dreaming. Like What could this all mean out in the future? And then like, how can you get going today or tomorrow? But first, I want to talk to you in a broader context, like why Web3 matters to me. As Amit says I did zoology. And so I think about things over great time spans. And when you ask people what it means to be human, many people will answer that it’s speaking or writing. It’s language that differentiates us from animals. But interestingly, money proceeds at least written language. And we know this because the first examples we have of writing our ledgers like this, that record transactions. I guess somebody shot (?) like an ox for some ears of corn or something like that. Now, Carl Sagan once said that a book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. And by the end of this talk, I want to convince you that money is just as profound as language and that actually the two technologies intertwine really deeply and always have through our history. One might even say that to trade is to be human. These are snail shells recovered from like a massive pile of them from 75,000 years ago in South Africa. And they were used as like local currency. And this is the origin of the English phrase, shelling out to spend money. And what money did for our ancient ancestors is it allowed us to scale trust and coordination beyond our family groups, beyond being simple hunter gatherers.
Dave Lockie: [00:04:07] We could exchange food with neighboring tribes in times of surplus. And what money did was it gave us the ability to then trade back for food into the future, both over time, but also with groups that we haven’t necessarily met, especially as those time periods of extended tribes fought, etc.. So money has evolved since the earliest records of humans. It’s a very durable technology and it persists to this day. We’ve got fintech, we’ve got consolidated debt obligations, credit cards and all of the rest of it. But whereas almost all other human technologies have rendered us almost unrecognizable compared to 75,000 years ago, money is not unrecognizable. The euro coin that you might have in your pocket is essentially a durable, standardized snail shell. And even today, we can go into any store and using our metallic snail shells, we can trade for arbitrary goods and services with people we’ve never met before. And so it’s been very resilient and it remains core to a lot of what we do every day. But perhaps the most profound technology that we’ve invented so far is the Internet. It connects us all globally, instantaneously. But notably, money has been absent until recently as a protocol, as part of the Internet. And that’s left the Web at the mercy of bolt (?) on business models, especially advertising, relying on mass collection and use of data.
Dave Lockie: [00:05:37] And I think it’s reasonable to say that that has proved problematic, variously leading to manipulation of politics, polarization of public debate, increasing power by authoritative regimes, and the risk of censorship and reduction of our freedoms. And this just seems at odds with what we do every day with WordPress. We’re a global community. We build software together, and it’s at odds with our mission of democratizing publishing and commerce. So I believe that Web3 can help even with this mission, and it can do that by giving us freedom to transact alongside the other freedoms of GPL, and it can give us tools for borderless coordination that we’ve never had before.
Dave Lockie: [00:06:23] So first off, what actually is Web3? This is the most busy slide in the deck and it’s also the one I’m going to spend the longest on. So top left we’ve got the blockchains themselves. So these are protocols that define a shared ledger that anyone can read and write to run by a decentralized network of nodes and made antifragile by making it more profitable to strengthen the network than to attack it. And in this paradigm, tokens are like the Web3 version of snail shells. Top right, the blockchain is creating new primitives around identity and transactions, and these infrastructural elements can be combined to create these new use cases like NFTs and DeFi. And people experience these use cases through access layers.
Dave Lockie: [00:07:14] So it can be just like a browser. It can be integration with like a Web2 app, but it can also be done through wallets. So we’re going to talk about that a little bit more. So just to recap, decentralized infrastructure, no centralized party, nobody can control it. New primitives, lots of new jargon, new use cases, new ideas for how we use technology, and then potentially also new experiences as well, new ways that we access that. And really what this is about is interacting with the state of this public ledger. So anyone can read at any time, but if you want to write to it, you have to pay. You have to, like, transact. You have to assign some meaning to that. And in a way, we can look at changing the state of the ledger as meaning like we all agree that this is changed because we can all see that state change right there. The way that I describe or define Web3 is that decentralized digital technologies that give people new ways to organize and collaborate. One way to think about it is that this technology can give us a way to collaboratively scale transactions and meaning. In the same way that the Web gave us the idea to scale values, scale ideas and communication. So it could be as profound for how we coordinate and capitalize and make progress towards our goals, as the web was for communication.
Dave Lockie: [00:08:51] Dave, you’re saying all these words. Most of them I haven’t heard about before. What does this actually mean for WordPress? Like, how could it disrupt things? Well, let’s have a look at a couple of examples to imagine what a new digital freedom to trade and transact online might look like. The first one is this. Web3 is a very fast growth trend. This is basically showing that a year ago nobody bought or sold NFTs and a year later there were 260,000 wallets that are trading NFTs weekly. So this is a phenomenon that is 24/7 global permissionless. It’s always happening, and that means that things can happen at Internet speed and scale. And that’s just important to bear in mind. Now let’s look at an actual Web3 user journey. So this is a screen recording of me using the Metamask app. Metamask is a wallet that allows you to control addresses within a crypto network, and it’s sort of similar. If you’ve ever seen like a Chinese style super app, you log in with your identity first. You’ve got all of your data there, and then you go into your shopping, your council tags, your housing, whatever, your bill payments. So you go through one app and it’s a gateway out to the rest of the web. It’s kind of like that here. You bring your own identity and your own data to what is behind that app.
Dave Lockie: [00:10:17] But the difference here is that we’re not relying on a centralized party. We can create our own addresses, we can have multiple identities across multiple chains. So hopefully that means the video plays. So here’s the wallet view. We’re going to go to the browser. It’s just like Chrome or other browsers. You can type an address and we’re going to go to 1inch, which is a decentralized exchange, eventually. And this is just like Google, you launch the app. So that’s like the decentralized application. And now because I have connected with my wallet already, by connecting with my wallet here, I’m saying I want to connect on Ethereum with Metamask. I’m connected so I can see all of my transaction history, all the assets that I’ve got, and it can see that I’ve got DAI, which is like a Stablecoin, represents a dollar and if I wanted to buy some ETH I could swap DAI for ETH right here in the app and I can do permit and swap and if I wanted to do that I would sign it. It’s a taxable event, so I didn’t for this presentation and that financial transaction would then go through and I would end up with ETH instead of DAI. And that was without the intervention of any centralized third party. No banks, no counterparty, it’s all just done algorithmically. So this is like freedom to transact, to trade.
Dave Lockie: [00:11:40] But Web3 is not just about finance. It’s also about coordination, community content and networks. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me like everywhere I look, the financial and economic systems that we live in optimize for GDP and profit. Everything else is an externality. Environmental degradation is not factored in. Climate change externality. Social justice will throw some money to charities, but I don’t think that’s what a rich and sustainable economy looks like. And so Web3 gives us new tools to collaborate on this stuff. We can represent different assets online, we can make our money programmable, and we can also create communities of interest around driving that change through. So the software that we write that defines the organization controls who can access it, how we raise capital, how we deploy that capital, and generally how we organize like it’s literally a business but written with software. It’s open source. Anyone can see it. Pull requests everything else. A lot of this is, like, quite ethereal. So I want to just, like, pause and talk about a particular project to try and paint a picture. So I’m a zoologist. I care deeply about climate change and environmental sustainability. There’s one concept that comes out of Web3 called regenerative finance, and it looks at how do we use these tools to improve the world around us? How do we like build sustainability back into our economic systems? One project in particular is called KlimaDAO, and what it does is it takes carbon credits and brings them on chain and allows them to be part of programmable money. Web3.
Dave Lockie: [00:13:21] The idea is that as people buy carbon credits online, they can lock them up and then that reduces the supply of carbon credits, which pushes the price on the open market up. As that happens, the carbon emitters gradually have to reduce and mitigate carbon instead of simply buying carbon credits online. So that’s an example of how we can use these economics, these new programmable money tools to drive real world change.
Dave Lockie: [00:13:46] Challenges. So we’ve talked about wallet aware experiences, identity and data portability, the freedom to transact new coordination tools, and the speed at which these new models and paradigms can come about. So the first example of a challenge is that the wider digital ecosystem looks to be adopting NFTs and pretty quickly, this is Instagram and it’s an official Meta press release showing how an upcoming release of digital collectibles could look on Instagram. Like The Blockchains can’t support it yet, but theoretically they could roll this out to 3 billion people overnight. So like Web3 is happening and we have to be aware as a community and think about what we’re going to do. And of course, NFTs also imply digital wallets. They imply digital payments, they imply currency exchange. And indeed, META has announced a patent for Meta Pay, which is that it’s their own digital financial infrastructure.
Dave Lockie: [00:14:47] The second challenge, I would say, is to think about how we need to redesign our experiences when all apps and browsers have digital wallets baked in. Brave. This is a screenshot of the Brave browser. Kind of gives us some idea of that today. And like we’re all super frustrated by the web. Like why do we need to accept cookies or deny cookies or close the sign up newsletter thing or like log in for our paywall subscription like every site, it’s so broken. And I think that Web3 can help create better experiences in that way because we come with our identity, with our global preferences, with our data, already portable, already there. So it means that we can block trackers, we can set these global preferences, which hopefully governments will like, recognize a better solution than bloody cookie banners. And still we can remit value to the people whose content we’re creating through micropayments, through tokens like Brave has their own token built in. But it’s easy to imagine we can now use this programmable money to more directly support the creators that we enjoy. So it could create a better experience for many web users. But it definitely creates challenges for website owners who now have to think about segmentation and personalization based on wallets and how to adapt their revenue streams to deal with these new and varied ways to make money.
Dave Lockie: [00:16:12] But Web3 is also enabling direct competitors to innovate. This is Mirror, and it’s a re-imagination of a content publishing site in Web3. So we’re connecting. We’re going to our dashboard. That’s the Metamask browser plugin, like the same app that I was using before. And it will now take me to a dashboard that doesn’t look a million miles away from a WordPress dashboard. I can create an entry. I’m just going to import one from my WordPress site to save time and hey presto (?), we’ve now got like a block based Web3 publishing platform. It doesn’t do a perfect job, but it’s like pretty good to go. Interestingly, when we come to publish, either we can just publish it or we can also mint it as an NFT. So that means that not only can somebody publish, they can instantaneously assert their rights because it’s timestamped on the blockchain, but they can also make that for sale. So it could be a whole article, it could be a picture, a podcast, a video, whatever people can right then and there, buy that NFT from the creator so they get revenue. And for me this is one of the most fundamental things about Web3 is that it supports creators to create in ways that aren’t possible now. So we’re going to have a look at two opportunities. We’re going to look quickly at payments, because I think it’s like a bit of a no brainer.
Dave Lockie: [00:17:37] And then we’re going to spend a bunch of time on NFTs because they’re like super head bending. So this is a chart of Bitcoin and Ethereum volume. So on-chain volume for these two, like the biggest two cryptos as averaged out over seven days. So this isn’t price, this is just usage. And these are big numbers. We’re looking at like 20, $30 billion a day of transactions going through these chains. So if people want to pay, they want to transact with crypto on WordPress, like who are we to stop them? Like surely we should encourage this like freedom to transaction alongside our open source software. Now NFTs, I need to take a bit of a breath here because it’s a big one. So this is a screenshot OpenSea and it’s an NFT marketplace. Now, NFTs are popularly stupid pictures of monkeys, but they can also represent anything that you want to be scarce or unique, i.e. nonfungible. On this screen, for example, we see art. We see membership of a private member’s club in London. We see an NFT that represents completion of an educational course. We see proof of charitable donations, patronage of creators, and rewards for completing tasks within a decentralized application. So you can go to my blockchain address if you know it and you can see all these NFTs. But I’m the only one that can transfer them, so you can ask to buy them, but I don’t have to sell them.
Dave Lockie: [00:19:03] They’re all under control of my cryptographic private key. So going back to that point about enabling creators, this is a tweet from a music artist and he says here, in two weeks of NFT sales, he’s made more than he would have if he had had 90 million plays on Spotify, 90 million plays. So my question to you is like, how do we use this tech to better support the creators that use WordPress because everything derives from them. If people have a better experience using WordPress, then all of our businesses, all of our work becomes more important.
Dave Lockie: [00:19:42] The other thing that I want to rest on here for a second is the idea of royalties. So let’s say you’re an artist, do a beautiful painting, you hang it in a gallery and you sell it for $1,000. The gallery takes 500, you take 500. It’s a good day’s work. Next week, it gets sold at auction for $100,000. You get nothing. The gallery gets nothing. With NFTs, you can program in royalties so that every transaction of that NFT on whichever marketplace between whichever participants you get, the creator or anyone gets a cut of that. So you could say, right, I want 1% of all transactions forever or 10% of the first five transactions or I want carbon credits to be locked up every time I do a transaction.
Dave Lockie: [00:20:29] You can program all this stuff together. And so it not only creates this direct connection between creators and fans, I can just publish something. You can buy it. There’s no YouTube, there’s no Facebook, there’s none of these people in between us. But it’s also an ongoing connection because every time that asset is transferred is bought, some of that money comes back to me as the creator. And so it encourages these ongoing relationships, these ongoing meaningful value creating exercises between creators and their fans, which just hasn’t really been possible before.
Dave Lockie: [00:21:05] Okay. So what about the physical world? Now as well as an artist, you’re also a super good trainer designer. You love this sick trainer design that you’ve made, but how many pairs do you manufacture? Ten, 100. 1000? A million you simply can’t know. NFTs allow you to pre-sell your trainers so that you know exactly how many to produce, this reduces environmental impact and makes you a more profitable business. But they also got some other cool stuff as well. Like it introduces this idea of and I really find this word quite discomforting: physical digital crossovers. So digital representations of physical goods. And remember that as we’re building this technology, it’s not just Web3, it’s also 3D. It’s also AI like the day is going to come when we’re walking down the street and we see a pair of trainers in the shop window and we like triple blink or whatever it is to pay for it.
Dave Lockie: [00:22:00] And suddenly we can equip these trainers on our avatar. And that matters because other people will be walking around with this like augmented reality experiences as well. Later on, I can use that same NFT to go and redeem for a physical pair of trainers as well if I want to. So it brings that connection, that crossover. The NFT can represent like a proof of authenticity, like or warranty, but it can also act as a key to ongoing loyalty and rewards between you and the brand, because you’ve got that direct connection. And I want to have a look at that now because I think this is like such a great opportunity for WordPress. Token-gating, the idea that you can unlock experiences both online and in the real world by connecting a Web3 wallet and varying the experience depending on which tokens that wallet contains. So sometimes this is called wallet aware or wallet first experiencing. You can use your own tokens so you could distribute a token back to your loyal customers or your community, or you could use third party tokens. And for example, in an ecommerce setting, you can use it for access to exclusive products, access to pre-sales periods, discounts or even personalization. So like you could see that this person has a Bored Ape, you could overlay it on a t shirt and produce that instantaneous offer of a personalized bit of merch for your customers.
Dave Lockie: [00:23:27] These are all great ideas. But actually there’s a fundamental problem with ecommerce that token-gating is solving right now, and that’s the problem of botting. When people do releases of popular products, then often scripts come in and they buy up all the stock before your genuine customers can get access to it. And that’s a really difficult problem to solve for (?) to the extent that US Congress is trying to pass legislation, let’s hope it is as good as the cookie banner law because that was great. Having token-gated experiences allows you to define who can buy their stuff and how many they can buy, and it’s very difficult for scripts to replicate that because they might have to go back in time to have performed certain actions to prove themselves as a lower customer. So it’s a very sophisticated way of trying to solve a very difficult problem. And of course, what all this means is that we can start building out communities of trust because we can better trust who we’re dealing with. So by adding economics to the web, we can add meaning on top of the communication. WordProof is a good example of this. It allows merchants to timestamp their terms and conditions and their policies, such that consumers can be assured that they’re not getting diddled out of a refund, for example.
Dave Lockie: [00:24:40] But let’s make the Web more trusted. So dreaming. I think this is a really compelling future for WordPress and WooCommerce because of the convergence and composability that these technologies create. They allow creators and communities to play and work together with freedom from third parties, totally in line with our freedoms and our open source ethos. And they harness the ability of human transactions now to become digitally native. And I think we’re already seeing the start of this incredible value, value creation and innovative like explosion of stuff all just tied together by this incredible cryptographic network. But I also think Web3 gives us some opportunities to address like serious challenges. I see WordPress open source, the open web as public goods, but it’s hard to defend that against centralized interests. Web3, I think, gives us better tools for coordination, but more importantly, it gives the users of WordPress more possibilities to become resilient, financially resilient and successful on their own. And that is only going to strengthen what we’re doing. And to these four freedoms of GPL, I think it also potentially adds a fifth freedom, the freedom to transact, to trade. These freedoms are not protected by a national constitution subject to sanctions, but by native economic incentives that are part of the protocol of the Internet. So really dreaming like this gives us the opportunity to reinforce our digital freedoms and to extend what we do as the WordPress community out into the world.
Dave Lockie: [00:26:27] Like what more can we do beyond publishing an ecommerce software? Like what is the change that we’d like to see in the world if we had the tools to transact freely at internet speed and scale? Could we mend division and censorship? Can we coordinate on global scale challenges? Like what more can we like? What’s the change you want to see in the world? Like, these are the tools. This is the time we can go and do that stuff.
Dave Lockie: [00:26:51] So here are some more practical examples of like how you can get involved today. So just bring it back down to like, okay, but what’s happening now before I give you those steps, a note of guidance and caution. So this is a framework called Kingpin (?), and it asserts that different situations require different approaches. So most WordPress work falls into like a simple, complicated or complex realm. So you either know exactly what to do, pretty much what to do, or at least you know where to start. Web3 is like in a different realm. A lot of the time it’s in the chaotic realm. Somewhere you need to be more experimental or more exploratory. You need to understand risk and be prepared to manage it. So just remember you might experience both through the browser. They’re very different beasts and you need to be aware of that.
Dave Lockie: [00:27:44] One thing that you can do is go to web3wp.com and mint a WordPress Wapuu. This is a first in a series of experiments from this team. I’m involved, they are looking at this Web3 WordPress crossover. Perhaps these will be used for token-gating in the future. If not, they’re just kind of fun and it’s an interesting way to support this project. The other thing that I definitely recommend is that you sign up to Col BLOCK seven (?) before June 15th. It’s an eight week educational experience and community. I’ve found it incredibly valuable. You can use this referral code. I don’t get any money for it. It’s basically Whiskey Popper Kilo, Bravo seven (?). It’s I think this time around it’s free. It’s really incredible. I’d definitely recommend it. I’d recommend you go and participate. Go and read this stuff, sign up for some newsletters, make up your mind, do your own research like you really can’t trust anyone. So trust yourself. And to trust yourself you need to educate yourself. And if you want some like more structured ways to just get involved, there are a bunch of learn to earn sites. Rabbit Hole is one of those rabbithole.gg and you can earn trivial amounts of crypto for completing tasks that get you familiar with the tools and the wallets and the experiences. Finally, I thought it would be fun to offer you all today an NFT that represents your attendance here today.
Dave Lockie: [00:29:13] So a POAP is a proof of attendance protocol. It’s like an event sticker, but it’s better because every time you upgrade your MacBook Pro, you don’t lose all of your history. So it’s like something that you can collect over time. All you’ve got to do is fill in your details on this form and I’ll send you a link to claim your own. It’s free. You can do it by email. You don’t have to have a Web3 wallet and the link there is bit.ly/WCEU22POAP. They’re really cool I think. So, these were not my ideas. I just tried to shine the light on what’s happening and try and cut through some of the headlines and the news and the «Bored Ape Gets Stolen» type headlines. Web3 is risky. It’s chaotic. It’s new. It’s not like your day to day lives. Nothing that I’ve said today is financial advice, and this space isn’t for everyone. Some people find it too intense, but I believe a better world lies ahead of us. And I hope that you in our incredible ecosystem will join me and exploring it. And I’m really excited about that journey. I’ve only skimmed the surface. I desperately want to talk to all of you who’ve got an interest, a care, concerns. If you want to be histrionic about something at me, that’s cool as well. Obrigado, Porto.
Amit Sion: [00:30:41] Thank you so much, Dave. If anyone would like to ask questions, please come up to the microphone at this stage and please don’t head out yet. I can see you leaving. We’ve got a few announcements to make. Yes.
Qeustioner 3 (Dan): [00:30:54] You touched on two topics during your presentation. The first one was making it more secure. On the other hand, freedom to transact. And what’s your take on? I would like to ask you I would like to ask you two questions. What’s your take on the security of the transactions? So, for example, running, running breach (?) was hacked for $620 million. That’s a little bit unsecure. And the other thing, growing pressure toward regulations of stablecoins, for example. So now your customer processes. So I would love to know your take on those two topics.
Dave Lockie: [00:31:38] Thank you. So just just a simple just the simple questions for me to start off with.
Questioner 1: [00:31:43] Sorry, I think you just.
Dave Lockie: [00:31:45] Just some simple questions to start off with now.
Questioner 1: [00:31:48] Okay. Thank you.
Dave Lockie: [00:31:49] So the first one I think is like it’s a great question. It’s really interesting. So and it all comes (?) back to a lot of criticism that we all have faced about like isn’t WordPress insecure because we’ve read stories about WordPress sites being hacked, right. You know, like one bad plugin and suddenly 10 million WordPress sites are exposed. And I look at DeFi and the breaches that are happening there in the same light. Like WordPress is open source, which means anyone can see the code, which means it’s easier to find exploits than if everything is black box and proprietorial. But security by obscurity is not a sustainable tactic and building in the open in these adversarial environments, sure, it’s going to lead to like losses and breaches along the way, but over time we’re going to build far more resilient, battle tested systems. And this is just what the genesis of a new global economic system looks like. It looks at all of the different cybersecurity risks there are, whether it’s in the code, whether it’s with people like one crypto breach was because they kept their private keys on a AWS server that they didn’t secure properly.
Dave Lockie: [00:32:50] So the security angle is really important because cyber security transcends crypto, but crypto makes it very immediate and tangible. And there’s like I follow quite a lot of cybersecurity stuff anyway, and there’s quite a funny meme, which is that if you get owned by hackers and all they do is like install a crypto mining bot, then it’s like a tax on you for like not keeping your cybersecurity stuff up to date. So it’s very complex. I think it encourages all of us to be more mindful of cybersecurity, to be take care of our hygiene. And that matters whether you hold your traditional bank account details on your phone in notes, or whether you have a crypto wallet like it’s on all of us to take individual responsibility for our safety and security online. Crypto just makes that a lot more obvious to people.
Dave Lockie: [00:33:47] In terms of, the question was, what do I think is happening with stablecoins and regulation? Regulation is definitely like an industry risk, but to my mind, the future that we’re looking at for crypto in particular, but I also think like the world at large is that we’re going to see centralized, regulated government, nation state control, KYC, AMLO, fake (?), and then we’re going to see decentralized, plausibly, undeniably distributed, decentralized, not under the control of any particular party and the best organizations, I think leverage both those things, like when you need to have contracts, control real estate, pay salaries, a centralized organization that’s KYCed is the best vehicle for doing that. If you want to innovate at the edges or you need to have a medium of exchange across like nation state boundaries or provide freedoms to people that live in authoritarian regimes. You need decentralization. And actually that’s something that us in the WordPress community have been dealing with since its genesis. So we’ve got like Automattic and WordPress.com and we’ve got WordPress.org and the two, it’s not an either or situation. I think we’re stronger because of both of them and over time I think we’ll see that play out as centralized companies start spinning out these like decentralized networks that they can influence and control and vice versa. So the answer is it’s inevitable. It’s necessary. It’s a good thing we should protect consumers. It’s also not the death of decentralization.
Amit Sion: [00:35:22] Please. Next question.
Questioner 2: [00:35:24] Hello, my name is Petra (?) and thank you very much for a great presentation. I wonder what is your vision for how the Web3 the crypto (?) of this world would be embedded in the core of WordPress? Or would it be always a separate optional thing like an experiment? So what’s your take on that? Thank you.
Dave Lockie: [00:35:50] Thanks. That’s a great question. Maybe if I can, like, answer not answer your question, you’ll forgive me. I like how it was engineered is above my pay grade. But like one imagination of how Web3 could look like with WordPress is that the ability for anyone using a WordPress site, whether it’s WooCommerce or not, to be able to specify text, image, whole posts, whatever they’re uploading as mintable as an NFT so that people can transact with it and then design experiences using that flexible WordPress estate so that people can be part of the community, they can transact and buy merchandise, they can access exclusive content. Any of those things I think can be led onto WordPress really neatly with not very many steps today. And I think that’s a really exciting proposition for WordPress because it speaks to our strengths as an ecosystem against our centralized competitors that don’t have decentralized organizations around them. They don’t have excellent ecommerce and excellent content publishing and excellent community and everything else. So WordPress has always been like a create your own experience situation. Now suddenly those experiences translate very directly to like livelihoods as we all become increasingly dependent on digital, for our well-being, for our communities, for our politics, or the ability to do this intrinsically within WordPress is just like very exciting for me as you might be able to tell. Thank you.
Amit Sion: [00:37:30] Please. Next question.
Qeustioner 3 (Dan): [00:37:34] Hi, Dave. I’m Dan. Thanks. Great talk. Yesterday, Alain also gave a really good talk about the future of the Open Web, and he posed the question about how do we find models for sustaining it from a monetary point of view, since ads are really a really bad model and I had a chat with him after and said, What about crypto? What about blockchain? Do you think there’s a way? He didn’t really have thoughts on it. I’m wondering if you see a connection between keeping information free and democratic, but profitable with a way that’s better than ads by combining it with Web3?
Dave Lockie: [00:38:16] Yeah. Thanks. That’s a good question. I mean, I think the answer is yes and at several different levels. So again, coming back to the need to support creators to thrive on WordPress better than they can thrive anywhere else, I think that’s an advantage we have because it saves your way to (?) Squarespace, to Shopify. They’re all under pressure from shareholders to increase their take rate to take more from the creators that use those platforms. Automattic and WordPress ecosystem hold each other in check. Like, you know, we have to all play nicely because we’re growing the pie and we need to keep the cake tasty for everyone. And so I think we’re like strategically better place for that because that means that we are less likely to be gouging creators, right, creators, get a fairer deal using WordPress is like a pretty good place to start, and creators choosing WordPress over all other platforms trickles down to like the rest of the WordPress economy. Like if nobody uses the WordPress software, then like we’re all looking for jobs. Probably with Shopify.
Dave Lockie: [00:39:23] I’m not saying anything about Shopify. I love you really. But I also think there’s some more fundamental ways as well. Like what about open source contribution? At the moment it’s all very like, you know, five for the future and we’ll like we contribute because we love the community like we’ve all seen people in the community get burnt out by that. We’ve seen supply chain attacks on NPM modules because the supporters can no longer afford to like, work for free on this. Like, you know, it’s that great meme, isn’t it? Like this one. This massive Internet infrastructure is all supported by this, like one guy in Delaware working on his laptop. And that’s kind of true. And so looking at the economics of open source and using these new tools to make it more sustainable, but without breaking the goodwill, without breaking the community and all the hard work that’s been done so far for me is perhaps the biggest challenge that we have ahead of ourselves. Like how do we overlay explicit economics on something that’s been entirely implicit before and make it better without also making it worse?
Amit Sion: [00:40:26] Right. Any other question? Yes, please.
Questioner 4 (Mike): [00:40:32] I am Mike. Do you think it’s a case of trying to everything? This feels very daunting. You know, if you’ve never actually experienced it before and you’re looking at it and you think in this chaos, your diagram, how can the people be best reassured about the particularly the security side of things? Because transact anything with a transaction is always with any potential client for us and everything is like, well, we don’t want to touch that. That’s got some really bad press. How do you think people could be best reassured?
Dave Lockie: [00:41:07] Honestly, I think for a lot of people, you wait until there’s like a shiny button in Instagram and you press it and trust Facebook to look after you better to look after you. But if you if you want to take the red pill, then just go and explore, like read what people have to say. Make up your own mind. I offer you two pills.
Amit Sion: [00:41:35] Okay. Now, before we wrap up, I wanted to make a few notes and especially we have the family photo straight after this. 12:45, just outside gate one. Now, we try to take the family photo yesterday, but not enough family members showed up, so we’d love it if everyone came. Now I know what you’re thinking. Amid I don’t want to miss out on the lunch. There’s not going to be enough food. The organizers have told me there’s enough food to feed us all. You don’t have to rush. So please join us for the family photo. It’s a momentous event being here for WordCamp Europe for the 10th anniversary. A few other items. There’s a workshop at 2 p.m.. This is WordPress through the terminal by Milana Cab. There’s a few seats left, so if you’re interested in that for WordPress through the terminal register at the workshop registration room at level one. And there’s also a discussion about developer advocacy between 2 to 4 in the WP Café. So that’s all for today. So please join us for the photo now. But before we do that, before we wrap up, please, another round of applause for Dave on an awesome presentation.
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