WordCamp 2023 Blockchain Presentation

Video Transcription

Session Moderator (00:04):
Hi everyone. I am so pleased to introduce today Jeremy Saxy, who’s going to be speaking about blockchains and WordPress leveraging decentralization for a more user first, community driven and open web. Jeremy has been working in web technology since the days of dial up internet, beginning his journey as a tech support specialist. He has gone on to program small and enterprise level websites, set up and maintain servers own and co-own a few web companies, and continues expanding his knowledge into upcoming Web3 technologies. Gaining a degree in CIS in 2007. He’s fascinated by the ability of human ingenuity to solve real world problems. He has a passion for staying at the forefront of emerging technology with a desire to guide others into each wave of innovation with a focus on internet-based solutions. Jeremy has volunteered on WordCamp organizing teams, assisted the Arizona WordPress meetup group and taught classes at both. He’s currently a member of a decentralized autonomous organization that promotes public goods and education within the Ethereum Web3 ecosystem. Thank you, Jeremy.

Jeremy Saxey (01:31):
All right. Welcome everyone. I like to walk around, but I have to stay stationary for this, so that’ll be a trial for me. Thank you for coming to my talk. Blockchains and WordPress is something that’s near and dear to me, so let’s talk about how we can build a more open web and how we can empower users and communities. Again, I’m Jeremy Saxey and I work at Radiatewp. We maintain websites for our clients and kind of help manage them to kind of help them evolve along with the web so they don’t fall behind. I do that professionally working in WordPress for 15 years. Blockchain is a hobby of mine, and so I do want to emphasize that I’m still learning a lot. It’s a very vast and intricate space, so bear with me as I stumble through a lot of the ways that I phrase things, and that’s part of the reason that I’m speaking.
(02:15):
I felt like I was hitting a ceiling and I wanted to get to the next level. So I’m going to start speaking and teaching on these things more and more so I can get ahead. I learned about blockchain technology in 2010, about there. I don’t remember exactly, but I remember hearing about the Bitcoin white paper pretty early on. I didn’t do anything with blockchain until late 2017 and decided to lose some money in it and kind of rage quit and didn’t get back to it until late 2020. And now I’ve been actively losing money in it ever since. So
(02:47):
I had a very specific question. I wanted to know in the audience, how many people here have taken crypto from an exchange, like say a Coinbase and put it into a crypto wallet and interacted with the blockchain directly. How many? Wow, so quite a few. So has maybe almost half good to know. Okay, I just want to know how far along everybody was. That’s why this is here. I’m not giving any financial advice and I’m not even going to talk about the money aspect very much, but it is part of the story. So it will be mentioned. I’m going to be talking about the technology more and what that enables. But I do warn you, if you do get into crypto for the technology, you might stay for the memes because their meme game is on point to understand the way the lens that I use to kind of think about these things.
(03:35):
I remember learning about the internet and how it was a distributed network that was more resilient because it didn’t have any central points of failure in it, and that kind of fascinated me the way that you could strengthen that networks would be strengthened in that way. Bit torrent when that came out and you had peer-to-peer file sharing the way that you didn’t download files from a server, and again, it was distributed and worked in a manner more akin to how the internet itself works. And then of course, WordPress had democratizing publishing and I really liked that, that you could have your own voice and you could own your own voice and you didn’t have to go through gatekeepers. So there’s kind of a theme. The way I feel about what we’re doing with technology in the world is it’s the concept of disseminating influence outwards towards the edges to make it more resilient. And so if we’re not doing that, I don’t really understand what we’re doing then, so this is the lens that I use. So I’m not saying it’s the right lens, I’m just saying it’s the one that I have.
(04:33):
When you zoom out from humanity and you look at this time, the internet is still really new actually. And so there’s layers to it that don’t exist or things that don’t work very well in it that still come from kind of the meet space world. Instead of being native to cyberspace, one of those things would be money. Money. For example, the internet is 24 /7, your bank is not, money is global or the internet is global and instantaneous, your financial system is not. The internet is kind of distributed and made up of lots of different people and networks and money comes from essential authority, so it just doesn’t behave in the way that the internet does. Another thing is ownership. We have ownership pretty well covered in the physical world, but on the internet, the concept of digital ownership wasn’t really baked into the internet from the get-go, and it’s been lacking.
(05:27):
And so these are the kind of problems we’re trying to solve. So of course you had Bitcoin that kind of took a first stab at the concept of decentralized money. Nobody owns it, nobody issues it. It’s kind of spread out and works in a way that the internet itself does. And then the next one there, I did put an asterisk on that blockchains kind of help with identity and data ideas, but that asterisk is there because I do understand that Bitcoin is a blockchain as well. And on top of that, smart contract based blockchains are much more than decentralized data. They have smart contracts, they have an execution and programmability to them. But for the purposes of what we’re talking about today, this framework of thinking of Bitcoin blockchains and decentralized data in this manner is helpful. So that’s why I’m using it. Alright, so let’s very briefly talk about data and web two and what’s kind of happened.
(06:18):
I think this was the economist article came out in 2017, talked about data is the most valuable resource on the planet even above oil. And so why is it so valuable? Because entities can use that information to influence our behavior. But there’s something thinking about this, I realize there’s a point of access between having that data and being able to influence someone’s behavior and that’s attention. So another way to think about the problem that we’re in right now is that in order for that data to be, if data is the most valuable resource on the planet, then attention is the key to that. So it is also in a way one of the most valuable resources on the planet. And when you think about from an attention standpoint, what gets your attention better? If you’re walking through a forest and you think you see a butterfly, you may or may look at it, you may or may not look at it, but if you think you see a bear, you’re definitely going to look. So the bear is better at getting your attention than the butterfly. But if we’re navigating and we constantly think we’re seeing bears everywhere, that’s not very good for our mental health. So in other words, the way that data is structured in a web two world, it’s creating a misalignment between our attention and the wellbeing of humanity itself. So that’s kind of the problem, the dilemma we’re in right now to kind of help with that, we have things like privacy laws that are emerging,
(07:47):
The privacy laws. In essence, what they’re doing is they’re trying to make data become a liability also on top of an asset. And that’s essentially what they’re doing. So I feel like this is the general direction we’re all moving in order to solve this. And so I think we should just leapfrog the whole process and speed it up. So I want to give a couple frameworks of ways that we can think about data so that our culture around data should change. Let’s just do it. Let’s just start moving and start thinking about it differently. So for example, from a website owner standpoint, when we build a website and we’re taking in personal data for ourselves or we’re making a website for our clients, we’re also handing them a liability. There’s a legal liability there now. So we need to start thinking personal data is a legal liability.
(08:32):
From that perspective, you want to lessen your liabilities or eliminate them if possible. So we don’t want that personal data in our database if we don’t have to have it, let’s just start thinking that way. And that’s the goal to reach. We’re not there yet. Of course, from a website visitor standpoint, they have all this data about us and their influence and our behaviors and our actions and the things that we do are in there. And there are pieces of our identity that we don’t get to control that we don’t have access to. So from a website, from a visitor standpoint, I would really love it if we started thinking along this lines that if you don’t own your data, you don’t own your identity. So if you don’t own your data, you don’t own your identity. And from that standpoint, so when I go to a website, I want to give you the least amount of data about myself as possible or none of it if I don’t have to.
(09:24):
I would rather keep that information on the blockchain where I have keys to it and I determine who has access to it and I can revoke that access. So from that process is already well on its way. It’s happening right now. I’ve been seeing this phrase pop up more and more, and I think it’s an important phrase to remember. People are moving from online to on chain. So instead of putting their personal information in databases all over the place, they’re starting to put them on chain. So going from online to on chain, remember that it’s a good mental model for understanding what’s happening right now. So how does that work from a website standpoint? If a website owner has their website, the content comes from the database. So that’s just how we’re pressing works right now. And then the website visitor brings their identity with them from the blockchain and then the experience they have on the website would be to displaying the content and their personal data information just like it does right now. But the difference is where that data is stored and who owns it.
(10:30):
So let’s talk about data and Web3 and some of the ways we’re trying to alter this and solve this problem. These are the things that I’ll talk about right now briefly. There’s much more to it. And from a technical standpoint, NFTs are just non fungible tokens. They’re just any digital asset that is unique. Your driver’s license is unique. The title to your car is unique, your social security, those are unique assets that could be represented on the blockchain. And they’re unique POAPs, that’s how I pronounce it. That’s how the company that creates them calls it. But there’s lots of pronunciation, lots of people say popes, it just stands for proof of attendance protocol. And this is the technical side. We’ll get into the practical applications in a minute. Those are also NFTs, but they have a special metadata with them that kind of gives ’em specific functionality.
(11:15):
And then there’s the money aspect, which of course in this world is coins like Bitcoin, ether, coin, Dogecoin, and there’s also tokens. And we’ve already talked about the non fungible type, but from a money standpoint, money is fungible. Do you want this a hundred dollars bill or this a hundred dollars bill? They have the same value, they’re fungible. So an example of that would be stable coins, like USDC would be a fungible token. That’s a money on blockchain. Practically speaking, NFTs, everyone I think knows about how they uses digital collectibles. You can spend a tremendous amount of money for a picture of an ape and then you can make that your profile picture. And that’s part of an identity wrapped up in that concept. These are some just practical examples of how it’s being used right now. There’s so many more and we’re literally just barely scratching the surface of what’s going to be done with NFTs in the future.
(12:05):
Don’t think of ’em as just pictures. There’s so much more than that. There’s market for NFTs. And so they tend to have a monetary value. They don’t necessarily have to, but, and again, I’m not saying this is how any of this stuff should be. I’m just saying what it is practically, how it’s being used. The bottom one there is really important. NFTs are really good for building and fostering communities. And that’s when I’m going to give an example of here in a moment, POAP. They’re kind of advertised as bookmarks for your life. So as the blockchain’s going along, we’re going along through time, the blockchain’s going along, building blocks right next to us, the digital representation of what we’re doing here. And so when you get POAP, you can kind of create a little bookmark for your life. So it works well. It’s proof of attendance.
(12:47):
So say you go to a concert, say someone went to a Beatles concert back in the sixties, and then they still have the ticket stub that has value, that means something. And so a POAPcould be, I attended something and then there’s proof on the blockchain that I attended that thing. And then multiple other examples there. They tend to not have monetary value, but one key difference between POAPs and NFTs is they’re better at building and fostering individual reputation versus NFTs being more community focused. And again, we’ll talk about a little bit more about these in a moment. And then money, what they’re doing practically, there’s a defi, decentralized finance and they’re doing kind of banking stuff, but without banks, it’s all that fun money stuff. Alright, so here’s my personal experience in Web3 community and how this came about. That Little Lion guy right there, that’s my NFT. I’m EVM 10 74. And it’s pretty weird how attached you can get to these little things.
(13:44):
So this is how this came about. When I was getting back into crypto and decided to lose some more money, I wanted to find a good source of information and people who knew what they were talking about. I stumbled upon the subreddit, eFinance I and quality of information and the caliber of people there were so high. Everybody knew we had something really special there that it’s amazing what that community was doing. But the community existed on Reddit. So Reddit went away. So did they said, well, we’re a blockchain based community, why don’t we create an NFT to kind of organize our community around? And so they got all the most active participants in the subreddit and made a white list of here’s the people that are available to be part of the community that have been participating. And so they did it retroactively, which I think is good.
(14:38):
If you’re going to build a community, do something retroactive like that. Don’t say this is what we’re going to do. It’ll just be gamed by bots and everything. But just go back and when people are to discover genuine participation in your community and then reward that. And so the NFTs were created and then the EV Mavericks EVMs for short were born. We created a DAO to create a structure for our organization so we could be more purposeful and called it Main Net DAO. And again, a DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization. And here’s the website that we have with our mission statement, which was read in my intro. But yeah, we promote public goods and education and funding them through. But from an Ethereum Web3 standpoint, some of the things that happened immediately after they issued the NFT, they went and created a discord and there’s a bunch of members only channels in there, and your NFT is your key to get into those channels.
(15:32):
It’s NFT gated. We came up with a mission statement. We formed teams and leadership roles and any member with an NFT can create a proposal for something they want the community to do. And then we all vote on those proposals using our NFT and you get one vote per NFT. So it kind of represents an individual. So it’s kind of a democratic process. Voting is messy. This is very, again, this is very nascent. So I’m not saying this is how it should be done. This just tends to work well for our community because of the way it’s structured and the type of people are there. We don’t have a lot of people that our NFTs aren’t all over the place and people accumulating a lot. So in general, everybody kind of just gets one vote. So there’s all kinds of projects going on all the time in this community, so you can just jump on projects whenever you want to occupy your time.
(16:16):
It’s amazing. And you’ve got a great community to ask questions too. It’s a pretty fascinating thing. Also related to that, we wanted to have a conference. So we created our own conference and had our first conference in Hawaii, HodlerCon 2022 is what we named it. And it was family friendly conference. So there I am with my son in Maui at HodlerCon 2022 that also was born out of eFinance and a DAO was formed specifically for the conference, for the organizing team to keep the momentum going. On these events, there’s a DAO now called Luau dao and in East Denver, which is the crypto conference that just ended a week or two ago or whatever, Luau DAO presented at it. So if you want to know more about LuauDao and HodlerCon, then go look at EthDenver’s presentations that were there and look for LuauCon and you’ll be able to learn more about that part of our community.
(17:15):
And we got NFTs, of course, we had the beach bums and so on. BEACHBUM 1 0 9, that was my NFT for attending the conference. And my son, he NFT too. He’s the beach BUM110. So how cute is that? And so my son is already building a digital identity and reputation because of his crazy father. And we get to use those NFTs for voting again. So all the people that attended Hodler 2022 and have an NFT, we all get to vote as a community on where the next is going to take place, how that works. Alright, so where’s WordPress in Web3? I pretty naively thought when I was getting into crypto and Web3, that whole WordPress community was just moving right along with me and I kept expecting them to show up everywhere. I’m like, this is so cool, this is so exciting and participating. And it just wasn’t really there.
(18:03):
And I kind of had to really start examining, get past the excitement that I was feeling and look at some of the downsides or some of the reality of where we’re at currently. And blockchain tech is very nascent. It’s a very future looking thing, and the user experience is not very good right now. It’s not ready for mainstream. That’s my opinion. That is not on top of that. The dev tools that you have to work with are really dev heavy. So there’s not really no code ready solutions for interacting with the blockchain right now. Too much. And that’s the world we live in in WordPress. We develop plugins and themes so that people can build websites without having to code. And it’s not quite there, but it’s getting very close.
(18:48):
Funny enough though, I went to my community and I told them that I was giving this presentation and then I had someone reach out to me and they said, Hey, I am building a Web3 community website with WordPress. You want to come check it out? So within my own community, and I didn’t even know, so evms my community through the rescue. So let’s talk about this and I’ll show you exactly where we’re at right now with WordPress, a real life site that’s being built out on Web3 technology. So this website is called Caches. It’s caches.xyz is how you get there. And a little I, he’s part of my community and the site is not monetized. And so I’m not showing someone’s project or making anybody money, nothing like that. But he out of his own pocket is paying for the development of all of this and all the hosting fees and all of that.
(19:32):
And at some point he has said, I do want to kind of recoup my costs and there might be some type of monetization strategy in the future, but there’s nothing there right now. So it’s just a great example of showing what you can do with WordPress at this time. So that’s why I’m demoing it. But I do want to distance myself that I understand that if he makes money at some future point, then it’s his thing that he’s doing. It’s not there right now. This is really briefly, these are some of off the shelf stuff that he’s using. He’s built on WordPress. He uses bbPress for forums, BuddyPress for the groups, and he uses better docs for the knowledge base and GamePress for the point system there.
(20:11):
The technology that he had to develop a little bit was sign in with Ethereum, so there’s no IDs and passwords using this WordPress site. It hides your wallet address. The wallet that you sign in with Ethereum, that wallet address that you use when you sign in Ethereum that’s hidden. It’s never displayed anywhere. It creates a random username for WordPress. So WordPress is happy but you don’t ever see it or interact with it and you don’t even have to give an email address. And so it can be completely anonymous even to the admins. They won’t even know any information about you whatsoever. I’ll show you the process real quick.
(20:51):
So when you sign up on the website, it asks you to connect your Web3 wallet and then there’s the login with Ethereum. I link there, you click that pops up, which wallet do you want to use? I’ll choose Meta Mask. In this example, meta Mask pops up and says, Hey, you need to sign a request proving that you are the one with the keys to this wallets proving your identity and all the data that’s contained within it. And then once you sign it, then it pops up this and it says, what handle do you want? This would be the display name in WordPress. So you get to pick such and such comments on this thing, what display name shows up, you can put anything you want. And again, the email is optional, so you don’t even have to put in an email address. No personal information has to go to the website at all. So coming back, you don’t necessarily have to do it this way. This is a process we’re going through. So you don’t have to just jump straight to anonymity like that and make the big leap if that’s not how your website works and that’s not how you think about things yet. But I just wanted to point out that caches XYZ Respects Web3 identity. And going back to the slide that I have, the content comes from the database, the identity comes from the blockchain and then they’re mixed together in that user experience.
(21:58):
So let’s talk about what that actually is doing in a practical sense. The moment that I signed up and signed in with Ethereum, I got all these notifications like this and you don’t need to see what they are right there. But when you go to my profile on caches, it noticed that when I signed in with my wallet, I had the EVM-NFT that I had showed you guys earlier and it said, Hey, you get the EVM badge, you’re part of the EVM community. And so it just gave me that badge. It also recognized I had an EI Panda, which is another type of NFT, and now I have that badge as well. So remember I went and did all of this stuff, just some genuine participation in a community, got these NFTs, developed this reputation, this website was built, and I got to come to it and sign up.
(22:48):
And instantaneously I brought that reputation with me. So some of the fun things that the website does, it assigns WordPress roles based off of those NFTs. So that badge I got is also a role within WordPress. So you can do all the stuff that WordPress roles can do. So you can have role-based content access. So in a way you can have NFT content. So can this user create posts? Can they moderate forums? That kind of stuff can be handled based off of NFTs. And you can even have secret kind of communities, which is kind of interesting. So when you go to the site and you look at the list of groups, this is what you’ll see if you don’t hold an evm nft, there’s our EV maverick community, but it’s the public facing one. What I see when I log in is EVM holders. There’s only group as well because that’s relevant to me. So theoretically there could be hundreds or even thousands of communities on this website with groups all interacting and they have nothing to do with me because the private groups that are just for those communities and I get to go to the website and just see the public stuff and the private stuff that applies to me based off of my reputation and my identity that I brought there. And all kinds of activity could be going on and I would be completely oblivious to it.
(24:01):
One of the ways you can gamify based off of NFTs as well. So when you go back to my profile, because I had the EVM in it, he automatically awarded me 500 extra points for that website, what that means on that website. And I got the badges that I talked about. And then so that gave me special privileges. Basically this website says, I trust EVM holders, they get special value on this website and I’m going to create special functionality and roles for them. And so when I brought that reputation with me, I got those badges and got those extra points, which means I can create unlimited groups and all of that. And once again, my Web3 reputation was intact instantaneously when I went to that website and logged in. So the way that I think about this, this is another phrase that I like to use, that Web3 identity is your own is BYOD. Bring your own data. That’s how I’m starting to think about data. Web3, identity is bring your own data with you. So let’s add it to the list. Our culture around data should change. Website owners, they say, I don’t want the liability of your personal data in my database. So just bring your own. And then from a website visitor standpoint, I don’t want to give you this data, then I lose control of it. It’s not mine anymore. So I’m just going to bring my own from the blockchain
(25:10):
So you don’t have to pay for a blue check mark to prove that your Paris Hilton, your NFTs, prove that your Paris Hilton, if that makes sense.
(25:20):
So we’re kind of wrapping up here, getting towards the end. We’ve been talking about the data and from the blockchain flowing to the website, but do understand that it goes both ways. The content that people create on the website, it might be relevant to that website and formatted for that website directly. That’s fine. The content goes back to the database. But if they’re awarded anything or given any new NFTs on the site or POAPs or anything like that, that would go to the blockchain for that user so that they can take that with them so it’s not tied to the site itself. So with just in the last 48 hours or so, he’s working on building a no code NFT creation tool in WordPress right now. So it’s very brand new, but he’s working on building it. It’s just brand spanking news. It’s pretty funny that he’s been, since I talked about this talk, he has been on fire and just been so excited. So they’re waiting for you on that website. They’re thrilled. It’s crazy. So the way I’m starting to think about things is WordPress is the community tool that I’m familiar with and it can empower these communities and individual reputation on this decentralized infrastructure that’s being built where people get to build their credibility, their reputations, and they get to bring it with them to the website.
(26:44):
Seeing everything come together over the last few weeks to see WordPress and blockchain finally come together, I was been waiting for it. And to see what he’s been building has really been amazing to me and I’m really excited to see what these two can do together. To me, they’re just a very natural fit. The ethos, what they believe and what they enable are just, they’re perfect for each other. All right, so to wrap up, there’s my little guy again, my little bugger, hate him and love him at the same time. It is crazy that it’s an NFT. There’s a marketplace for it. I can make money from that thing right now and I don’t, because I value my own contributions to my community. My membership in that community is more valuable to me than money. So there’s this crazy thing that I have to deal with that what happens when the next wave comes and that value goes way up and my sellout or not.
(27:38):
But at the same time, it’s your key to that community and I just don’t want to let it go. And the way that creating that NFT took, remember we started on Reddit? We started on Reddit, we put our identities on the blockchain and created a community around them and we’re no longer tied to Reddit, so Reddit could close. And all we have to do is go find more tools that enable us to express ourselves as a community. We don’t need Reddit anymore. We don’t need Facebook, we don’t need Instagram, we don’t need anybody. We just need the tools that are out there to help us express ourselves. We are rallied around the blockchain. And so it’s integrated into the fabric of the internet itself. It’s not going anywhere. It’s not on a server, it’s not with some company. Our community has value and we’re able to be expressing ourself through these tools. And I want to make sure that WordPress is one of those tools and that’s what I’m going to be doing going forward. I want to be able to be thinking this term, what can WordPress do for your Web3 community? That’s the way I’m starting to think about things.
(28:44):
Alright, and then I’m all done. But this is the last slide here. If you haven’t yet, get a wallet meta mask. It’s not the best experience, but it’s the most popular one. When you find tutorials and things like that out there, they’ll talk about meta mask a lot. You can get the POAP app. There’s an app and it makes interacting with POAPs a lot easier. I apologize, I was going to have a ready for this talk so that you guys could have a QR code and you could scan it and you could get a POAP saying you met, you came to my talk here. And so we would start building our friendship. But unfortunately my girlfriend had a rollerblading incident and so I’ve been at the hospital for the last few days, so I didn’t get to wrap that up. But if there’s enough interest in it, we could do it.
(29:35):
We could cheat a little bit and do it a little bit after and the timestamp won’t be right and all that kind of thing. But if we want to just contact me if there’s enough interest, maybe let’s throw something together and we’ll get something going. And then there was also an unofficial POAP that was going to be created for WordCamp Phoenix and then that one didn’t quite make it either, so I was really hoping you guys had a lot to do with it. But the things you can do, you can get your wallet, go to caches.xyz and practice using login with Ethereum and explore the site. They’ve been creating blog posts about WordPress and what they think and how it can be used. They’ve, created a guide on how to use Meta Mask. When you go to that site and you log in, there’s a link that gives you a perfect tutorial.
(30:17):
Go download Meta Mask, do now go to sign in with Ethereum and it walks you through the whole thing. So go visit and play around. There’s a good community resources there for you. Alright, thank you. My slides will be there at radiatewp.com. That’s our website. And go to about us, we’ll have our two bios there and then the slides will be there. And there’s also, you can contact me through the website. It shows you just contact me that way. That’d be the easiest way. I would really like some feedback. I’m just starting to talk about these things. I want to know where I lost you, what parts you liked, and I want to be able to fine tune this so I can get this message across quicker and more efficiently. I’m not shutting my mouth about this stuff. So thanks a lot.

I think we have time for some questions too. Is that all right? What time do we end? How much time we got? 10 minutes. Perfect. Cool. So hopefully you guys got a lot of questions.
Audience Member (31:17):
You sold your, would they get all the access to everything?
Jeremy Saxey (31:23):
I have a key to it, yeah. Yeah. So that’s why my community, it works well because the value system we have, nobody sells. We are not playing that game. And the fact that it’s a consequence of what you do, but think of it this way, I agree with you. I don’t like that part of it that there is a market for it, but everybody can be a sellout at any time. If anyone offers you money, will you turn against your friend? Will you turn? There’s that problem already exists. It’s not a new one. But on top of that, think about it this way, if I’m contributing and I’m building a reputation, and the more value that my community creates, the more the value of that NFT goes up on the marketplaces. Imagine, say I put all that effort into not making money, but just helping communities and I get to a certain status. If I have an NFT that’s worth several thousand dollars or whatever it is, and I needed it in emergency, how wonderful is it that you can tap into your reputation to help you through something? The fact that that can even exist, it’s kind of mind boggling to me. So it’s a new world, so just kind of take it with the good and bad. Nothing’s perfect. There’s pros and cons to everything. I agree, definitely.

Audience Member (32:36):
You mentioned… inaudible

Jeremy Saxey (32:49):
Yeah, I granted access to the website and it basically unlocked it so that it could see what was there. Then it displayed it, but it never touched the database. So the website owner and the website itself doesn’t know, it’s just the front end interface. That’s just where the data came from. Same as if you connected to the Twitter API and you displayed a tweet, it comes from Twitter, it’s not going to the database. So they could still it if they wanted. I mean that still exists if, but they’d have to go from the front end, steal it and pass it to their database.

Audience Member: (inaudible)

So that’s a good question. Thanks for asking it that way. So he was wondering, I should probably be repeating the questions. If you create content on the website and then you’re gone, how does someone else see that? In this instance, remember when you sign up and you chose your display name, that’s the information you did and you could just put anything you want there. And so the display name that you put and the content that you created goes to the database. So it just functions normally

Audience Member (34:23):
Is all of that reputation… inaudible.

Jeremy Saxey (34:42):
So the points, the things that are stored on the website, for example, for my user profile with those badges. So it read the blockchain and said, oh, you have this NFT, so it assigned me a badge. So then my user profile with the handle that I chose, it just has that badge. And so whatever I do publicly on public forums can be seen by everybody because that’s part of, it’s the display name, the badge and the content are all within the database. So it’s part of the content. That part, yeah, the badge. Because the badge isn’t a part of the blockchain. The badge is what the website said. I’m going to recognize you on this website in some way based off of your nft, but I’m not taking that information out. I’m just giving you the nft, the EVM badge. And then of course the content goes there and then the display name, that’s the stuff that is stored on the website. And then regenerated, that is part of the content.

Audience Member (35:56):
What sort of advice or warning might you have for people as they start seeing it in particular in terms of simple advice, stay secure,

Jeremy Saxey (36:12):
Staying secure, don’t get into crypto yet. It’s not mainstream ready, but there’s a permission to act on your behalf. And the idea there is to really smooth out that process. Because right now when you have a wallet, you’re interacting with it. You’re very interactive with the blockchain itself, and you don’t want to interact with engineers

Audience Member (36:47):
Your whole wallet… inaudible.

Jeremy Saxey (36:49):
Right? And you don’t want to grant that access.

Audience Member (36:55):
Don’t go insights if you don’t.

Jeremy Saxey (36:58):
Exactly. And that’s why I was saying not financial advice. And I keep emphasizing that it’ll lose money. I’m not telling anybody to come in with a bunch of money, just go in and start. Don’t have money on the line. Just learn what it is. But one thing that’s important to remember, we are here because we build with WordPress for end users and clients, and we care about all this crazy technology stuff so they don’t have to. So we need to do a good job at it. So I encourage you to go in and start playing and learning about that close interaction with the blockchain gives you insight into what’s actually happening. So you’re more informed when the new tools that come around that make this all really simple for the end-user that they interact with in ways that they’re used to with technology that’s coming, it’s not there yet. Then what’s going on behind the scenes a little bit more. So you get to care about the stuff that matters. So they don’t have to.

Audience Member (37:56):
(inaudible)

Jeremy Saxey (38:06):
Yeah

Audience Member (38:07):
(inaudible)

Jeremy Saxey (38:21):
Yeah, I think as demoing that site, once it becomes user-friendly and it gets more mass adoption, it’ll just kind of erode away at the old ways of doing things. It’s a process that’s going to happen. I see blockchain technology is solving problems 10, 15, 20 years in the future, but right now it’s being built. And one way to think about it with all the scams and how tricky it is, because I feel that the use cases for it are so tremendous. That is we’re seeing at the seams with opportunity. So the minute a new use case comes up, it just explodes and goes crazy, and then it all dies down again and then everybody hates it again. And then a new use case comes out and then it blows up again. And it is going through the cycle. It’s a messy process, but it’s up to us to be the ones to develop these tools and to start changing our culture around the way we think about data so that when we build websites, we start to talk to our clients in this way, we start to say, do you want liability?
(39:20):
There’s laws around having this personal data. Do you want the legal liability? If there is another option, you can start talking in those terms of pros and cons and just let it happen in its natural state that we don’t, I’m excited about it. So I’m going to go punching through and make it messy and I’m fine with that. But in general, for our clients, we want to handhold and make them feel safe. And I think as this starts to emerge more and more, when people go to a website and then they start to see that they get to bring the reputation with them, it’s going to be annoying when a website says you have to start from scratch. That’s annoying. So I feel like that’s going to be the major hurdle that will start triggering everything. Yes, go ahead.

Audience Member (39:59):
This is so confusing to me. That’s not feedback. I feel like everything really basic, I read about this, I feel like I was when we moved to blockchain, is there a big, where are people talking about this in the way that it helped you understand all this stuff in a more palpable body way than I think you understand it now?

Jeremy Saxey (40:19):
Yeah, it took a long time, months and months and months before I felt safe. And I work in technology and I program and all that. It took me months and months and months before I felt safe doing anything directly on the blockchain. And that’s unacceptable. That’s not mainstream ready. So I get that. So you’re right to be confused, your right to your skepticism. If you have it, you should hold onto it. It’s healthy. You need it in this space. It’s messy. So the community that I was a part of, they were the key thing that helped really unlock a lot of this for me. And so there’s a website if you want to go visit them. And you saw what our purpose was, was to educate people on Web3. And they are dying to meet anybody who will willing and come talk to them, ask the stupidest questions possible, we would love to talk to anybody because we’re trying to educate people because we think this is revolutionary. We think it’s the solution to something, but it’s going to take some time and a lot of effort. So we want people on board. So if you’re ready and you want to come help, we need it

One minute. Okay, so maybe last question. Go ahead.

Audience Member (41:24):
Yeah, so the thing I was thinking about is the side where you’re coming to the site coming, opening your wallet and the level of control that you have data you can get, it seems like a wallet or some other form that would be good for you as the individual user to control what parts get

Jeremy Saxey (41:52):
Right. So are you basically asking if everything is in your wallet, then you’re exposing a lot of information by opening that up to a website?
(42:07):
Yeah, and exactly. And that’s one of the reasons why it’s not mainstream ready. And back to your point with when we talked about the account abstraction that’s happening, it works in a way that it’s much more obvious what you’re doing and what you’re granting, what it’s asking permission to do. And it makes it more of a usable human experience that you can interact in the ways that this is what I want access to. And you say yes, you get access to that only on top of that, if you want, you can have as many wallets as you generate, as many wallets as you want. A lot of times what people do is they have wallets for specific purposes, and on top of that, if you have a wallet, you have some NFTs in your wallet and you don’t want something exposed to this website, you can just send it over to another wallet, then log into the website and now it’s not part of that address. And it’s like that, it’s gone. And then after you leave the website, then you can just pass it right back. So it’s pretty versatile in that way. But for users to be able to do that kind of thing, it’s going to have to just be, I want access to this one specific thing, yes or no kind of thing. So I think we’re all done. Yeah, if you have more questions, come talk to me. I would love to meet more people. Thank you.