What I think I'm doing when I'm working on blockchain

Since joining CKB Dev Rel (Developer Relations) in September 2024, I’ve tried several times to write some articles to get back into the habit of writing, but I’ve indulged in procrastination by saying that “I’m still figuring out what I’m going to write about”. It’s a good thing this procrastination didn’t turn into “stagnation” and I’m glad I didn’t have to start all over again.

The last time I tried to write something, I wrote:

I’m finally in a better position to try to “reflect on” ("to think carefully and consider the implications and effects ") this “journey”; it has already been two years since January 2023, when I got into blockchain by coincidence and left Creative Education in China.

First of all, the following is my personal experience, and I’m not involved in promoting any specific product. Since I’m a fifteen year depressed + adult ADHD survivor + sociology graduate + a bit of a narcissist, the writing style may feel a bit obsessive, so please bear with me. Thanks for reading!

I’ve thought long and hard about the blockchain journey over the past two years, and if I had to summarise the theme in one word, the most appropriate would be “liberation”.

This “liberation” is the most daily sense of liberation, not something too epic; to be more specific, liberation can be any form of greater freedom even if only a little bit: to be able to take the subway rather than a bus is a kind of liberation, to be able to use a dishwasher rather than only hand-washing is a kind of liberation, and to be able to read and understand the English article without translation is also a kind of liberation.

Of course, not having to go to work and being able to do whatever I want is also a kind of liberation, but I just can’t do it yet XD.

The liberation that blockchain has given me in these two years is not only the increase in income:

Because of blockchain, I have more choices of travel and residence, and I don’t have to choose to put up with the possible difficulties of my employer for the sake of my work visa, and there is less wear and tear on the international flow of money;

I found a direction that I can be the best of myself and somehow be relatively free from the waves of the times washing over me recklessly, so that I can have a new dimension of growth in my professional career;

my work allows me to jump out of the endless and despearte predicment of being a mediocre salaryman in China without the fear of being replaced at the age of 35 (which is a common Chinese myth);

my job allows me to be completely WFH and I can work at my own pace, so the typical symptoms of depression and ADHD won’t be affecting my performance too much;

To put it human words, more money, less drama, fun work, and a simple life.

Of course all of this liberation doesn’t come entirely from the blockchain, and a lot of it is highly correlated with my personal background, opportunities, community culture, connections, and support around me, as well as the fact that there are a lot of people who for a variety of reasons don’t have access to the blockchain at all, let alone benefit from it. But the fact that the impact it has already had (and is expected to have) is happening on levels that may be deeply rooted and long-standing makes me shy away from taking it for granted, and instead observing it with great prudence and try to understand it.

Every emancipation of any kind that I know of in history tends to have far-reaching effects that are specific to the era in which it takes place: the advent of household appliances, for example, has given progressive women throughout history more time and energy to devote to social movements and to fight for fair social rights.

I think the two most important realities in the historical context in which the blockchain has brought about, are AI and neoliberalism.

It would be too difficult to expand on these two, so I’d like to pick one point: liberation is getting harder and harder, the prerequisites of such liberation is more demanding than every, and it’s being held hostage by bigger players, which makes it even more obvious that this kind of liberation is no longer so simple and clear-cut.

AI, for example, has “liberated” the cost of employment, and finance, for example, has liberated liquidity. But for the vast majority of people facing these two forms of liberation, they mean a lot more as the fear of being replaced, the fear of being scammed, and the cost of learning AI or finance is far greater than learning to use a washing machine; when the liberation can only benefit a part of the people, or even kidnapped by this part of the people, for the whole society is a disguised further servitude.

The same is true of blockchain: arithmetic, the ability and cost of learning, connections, funding, policy, and even, say, Trump, can all be obstacles in some form.

It’s sad, but I think, and many other like-minded people like me feel, that the liberation that blockchain brings is unique: like so many other liberations, it spawns new industries and opportunities, and reduces the cost of social interactions, but the liberation that is at its core, is trust.

Space constraints make it difficult to explain in a single sentence where this trust comes from, but its impact is intuitive: people no longer have to need and rely on the assurance of an institution or a living person to believe in something; through knowledge and cryptographic algorithms, I can gain some mathematically reliable certainty in probability and game theory, giving me more resources and backbone to face " society" - a world where “uncertainty” is the only certainty.

This may sound convoluted, but the analogy can be made to the recent surge in gold: when Trump is messing around, people lost faith in stocks and the US dollar and chose gold because they believed that gold’s scarcity (at least in the distant reality of man-made gold) and universally recognized value could withstand the years and the waves.

For reasons that are well known, this aspect will not continue to be expanded upon. What I’d rather talk about is another one of the somewhat more meaningful liberation that blockchain brings - smart contracts.

In simple terms, smart contracts are programs that are executed automatically, but the execution of these programs on the blockchain has several characteristics: the environment and external data in which the program is executed are public and unforgeable, as is the specific logic of the program, so the results are also public, unforgeable, and irreversible.

Of course this is extremely simplified and based on a whole lot of premises; in the actual implementation, misdeeds in disguise are not uncommon, of which I may explore further in future articles.

Ideally, the mission of such a blockchain is to become the “public computer of mankind”, which is why the blockchain DeFi and BTC, ETH, SOL directly spawned a huge industry, because in the financial world, certainty is the most valuable thing.

But I think that beyond DeFi, the new paradigm of “trust” brought about by blockchain can bring about new changes in various scenarios throughout society.

One area I’ve been focusing on lately is zkLLM (Zero Knowledge Proof for Large Language Models): Suppose if we somehow run multiple large language models on the blockchain publicly, reliably, and efficiently, or prove that their outputs come from “a piece of deterministic input” and “a deterministic model state”, can we build a social insurance-like program on the blockchain with multiple big language models for arbitration? In that case, we may no longer need insurance companies, and we will not be in the same predicament as Luigi.

Of course, this is just a very naive idea: in fact, due to the lack of sufficient funding sources and human resources, these kinds of use cases are rare, and I can’t even cite a few decent examples. But I can sense that there are many people, including me, who are willing and able to explore this area to the best of their ability, and to realize their own value at the level of social well-being.

As I write this, I’d like to share with you my feelings about working at CKB DevRel in the last six months: I think that apart from the technical aspects, the culture and experience at CKB is very nourishing for a technical idealist (for a more specific discussion, you can Google “CKB Idealism”).

On the technical side, I probably won’t be able to stop talking about it once I start XD. To put it simply, CKB’s most distinctive feature is that it’s a UTXO chain with RISC-V as its base.

In human terms, it was built from the ground up on two things: a universal public computer architecture on which you can run any type of program, and a technical anchor to BTC, making CKB the Contract Kernel of Bitcoin.

A side note: the other day Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin posted a proposal to replace the existing EVM with RISC-V, mentioning that “the Nervos CKB VM has set a precedent for what is essentiallya RISC-V implementation.” But that’ s something he’s probably going to have to work on . "But this is something he estimates will take years to get going (and secretly, does that mean we’re way ahead of the game?).

In the last six months, I’ve put most of my effort into a project called SSRI: in short, it’s the last piece of CKB’s smart contract core, which allows for a higher level of abstraction in the interaction and programming paradigm of smart contracts. After this project, we at Dev Rel Team gradually felt that we have done enough infrastructure to invite more people to come to CKB to experience and explore blockchain and all the new possibilities it brings. My next focus will be on developer education, attracting and retaining more developers in various ways to bring more life to the CKB ecosystem.

I’ll continue to write articles based on my personal experiences and thoughts, and I’ll try to avoid the technical aspects (but feel free to leave technical questions, I’ll be happy to answer them!) So far I’ve been thinking about writing about how far it is to go from the traditional internet industry to blockchain (which may be a lot closer than you think), some of the projects I’ve been looking at lately, some of the views of Digital Nomads and WFH, and some of the views on switch to a programing career. Hopefully I don’t procrastinate too much!

Back on topic, I feel that blockchains of all kinds, including CKB, like all kinds of new information technologies, will bring all kinds of new liberation to humanity, but also new challenges; and among them, I feel that the most important on a practical level is that blockchains further allow us to test a new idea at low costs and low thresholds, to gather resources, and to bring about a new paradigm in information technology.

But in a deeper sense, blockchain is just a symbol. It symbolises that there is still some breathing room for some of us, amidst the unprecedented high pressure brought about by social unrest and the collapse of the social order in the context of neoliberalism. In the course of history, any form of social structure will always brutally and permanently confine a large portion of the population, leaving them to struggle all day long for only enough to eat. But if you are lucky enough to still have some room to spare, we can think about what we can do together, while taking care of ourselves.

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yes (always has been meme)

thank you for sharing some of your personal story and your deep thoughts about what we’re all working toward, getting to know each other better is a really important component of this because blockchains are a combination of technology and social dynamics (technosocial systems)

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Blockchain is still very dispersed with the individual parts very far apart from each other. CKB-AUTH connects the tokens in which individuals combine the beliefs and desires of and for technology with investments. Investments in thought and work and financial investments and social, through posts on social media and forums and at trade shows and dinner table conversations with family. Let’s bring our feelings for a brighter technological future closer together through the widespread blockchain universe. CKB has the liquidity and openness from the start. Ideas, concepts and wishes from people working in other fields and investing in other tokens can overflow. CKB has this power, it’s like the potential or the space between the individual projects standing on their own.

CKB = POW riscV Smart contract platform + staking DAO solution
If with Meepo transactions usually find their way into blocks in less than five seconds, the blockchain world will turn to CKB. From what it looks like to me, most transactions will be fixed between two and four seconds? Additionally, Lightning is coming as a second-layer solution that delivers transactions in fractions of a second. I think this is closer to mass blockchain adoption than we’ve ever seen.

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the block time of ckb is still between 7 to 40 seconds, this would be the minimum time for transaction inclusion. Off-chain systems like Lightning/Fiber can make transactions almost instantaneous though

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Hi @Alive24, thanks for the story, good to have you on board.

I apologize in advance if what I’m going to say sounds negative, this isn’t aimed at you specifically, to be honest, it’s probably aimed at @janx.

As soon as I read this part I thought of this tweet:

When I saw this tweet I knew it was written for CKB, even though the guy who wrote it probably doesn’t know CKB exists.

I think there needs to be a serious rethink on CKB’s developer onboarding plan which has been the same for 6 years and hasn’t produced any meaningful results.

I personally would like to see you and some other CKB devs build a showcase app that lots of people actually want to use before we continue down this current path of expecting random devs from outside the ecosystem to build some amazing game-changing app on one of the most complex blockchains in the world.

We’ve been told for years that CKB is truly different and I still believe this 100%, but we need ‘you’ to show us what it can do and we need it soon.

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I don’t think this is accurate. It has varied over the years, with various programs to incentivize and support developers, as well as different efforts to build products (token.city (I think it began as golden ticket), gliadex, Hadouken, celebrity fight thing, universal passport things with Godwoken, JoyID).

Product folks are a unique breed, it’s not surprising that previous efforts have faltered. Products are informed by a mastery of audience and problem/market fit and backed by a great deal of artistry when it comes to positioning and marketing.

Regarding demonstrating a unique architecture (the goal of Arjun’s suggestion), I would say Unipass, .bit, JoyID and Nervape products all showed this.

Arjun is well aware of CKB, there have been various conversations with him over the years (if you look he shouts out Khalani frequently). He is not building a blockchain and his team has pivoted frequently for the last 7+ years, always building different flavors of infrastructure.

A product team and client/infrastructure developers are completely different in every way. Directing a substantial amount of effort to building a product from these kind of teams has been tried multiple times in the past and at this point it seems like it would be irresponsible, an abdication of responsibility.

I’m assuming you’ve seen Quantum Purse, I understand this is probably not the kind of product you are looking for. Maybe Faros is better? (https://x.com/Faros_peer)

Is there a product from across the industry that you feel would be something to aim at?

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Hey Matt, some of those projects like Hadouken are more run of the mill crypto projects and not really CKB specific, even though they proved that it was possible to build those sorts of apps on CKB/Godwoken , which of course is good.

But you’ve brought up a point which I’ve wanted to say something about and is probably also a bit of me letting off some steam. This also feels like I’m hijacking @Alive24 's thread to have a whinge, so I’m sorry for that, but here goes.

These ‘internal’ projects that have been developed over the years highlight the lack of marketing that ever comes from Nervos.

And I’m not talking about marketing to the mainstream crypto market, which we all know is extremely difficult, but just marketing to the existing CKB community.

I never saw Kevin coming into Nervos Nation and talking about Hadouken. I knew he was involved, but that’s because I take a lot of interest in CKB and was able to follow the breadcrumbs that were left behind before I realised this was a ‘Nervos’ project.

Celebrity Fight - I never played and didn’t realise this was an internal project. But I 100% would have if you and Jan and other respected people from Nervos came into the community and gave us some encouragement to get involved and organised events etc.

I think the people like you and Jan and pretty much any of the Nervos team seriously underestimate how much the community would benefit from you guys leading the way and personally encouraging us inside the community groups to use the blockchain for things.

DID - Nervos invested who knows how much of the ICO money into this and then put in hardly any effort to promote what was at the time the flagship project on CKB.

Again, I’m not even talking about mainstream marketing, but community marketing.

I still remember when I said something about CKB on their Discord years ago and came back to find my post deleted, like they didn’t even want to be associated with it.

I understand the agnostic thing, and the idea behind people not even realizing they are using CKB, but jeez, sometime it feels like we are the only blockchain in the world that is embarrassed of ourselves.

On a side note: Khalani is another perfect example of this. They were funded fully or partly by Nervos and there’s never any mention of CKB or Axon, or the fact that they are forking CKB to build their own chain.(unless they are forced to talk about it by CKB community members)

This is just crazy from a business point of view and if I was throwing money at people to build things (that may not even have anything to do with CKB) then the number one string attached is that you better promote the hand that’s feeding you or you can go somewhere else for the money.

Back to DID, but every single CKB community member should have owned and displayed a .bit account, we were their entire potential customer base and there was never any real attempt to do this.

And I’m not talking about the occasional tweet or Nervos.bit having the .bit name, but real infiltration of the community, this is just basic stuff.

I know there were a couple of second level DID events, but this is no where near enough. I’m far from a marketing genius, but it seems obvious to me that if you can’t even get mass adoption within a small community like CKB, how are you going to take on .eth?

Joyid - Absolutely brilliant product and the best day after day, constant grind of both development and marketing we’ve ever seen from a CKB project.

But at the end of the day, this is a wallet and it needs activity on CKB specifically to drive adoption, so there’s only so much they can do.

Nervape - Like Joyid, the project as a whole and the DOB technology is brilliant and imo, it’s this technology that we should be putting a hell of a lot of effort (and money) into to drive adoption of CKB.

The fact that Nervape is still the only project on CKB using their open-source tech is a failure in itself.

This is the obvious path to bring in mass usage of the blockchain to CKB. From my little bit of involvement with Joyid, I’ve noticed that crypto users from certain countries we might call ‘3rd world’ are mad keen crypto USERS, they love it, anything that makes them do transactions on a daily basis, they can’t get enough of.

They also bring all of their friends and fellow community members using referral codes etc.

Just give them something to do and a reason to do it, like points and the ‘potential’ of a payoff one day and that’s all you need to grind every single day.

And this is for just mindless, boring transactions like point collections so imagine if you add some fun and actual on-chain interactions like is possible for a Nervape style DOB projects, but on a mass scale.

This is what CKB is made for! Just huge usage by hundreds of thousands of users all playing around with only a few thousand CKB each, just trading, swapping, minting and using DOBs - on Fiber, even better!

CKB doesn’t need (can’t sustain) financial apps at this stage, we have more than enough unused dexs, we want fun and activity, this will be what takes us forward, the price can and will follow when it’s ready.

Yeah, I’m a big fan of Tea and follow what he’s doing. I’ve talked about the need for a real working quantum wallet a while ago, so I’m 100% supporting him, but your right, this isn’t the sort of project that is going to bring users to CKB.

But all of these sorts of things pay off eventually, after we have the users. iCKB is also in this category, it’s an essential piece of pie, but until there’s a reason for people to liquidize their DAO deposits, it’s well before it’s time.

Faros looks cool and is the sort of thing that definitely could get some attention, but not really a CKB app as much as a Joyid app although I’m assuming they have plans to integrate Fiber when it’s ready.

To tell you the truth mate, I’m not closely following crypto much in general at the moment, so I can’t really point to anything specifically.

But what we need is something along the lines of Defi Kingdoms, an app which brought mega usage and excitement to Harmony a few years ago.

That sort of thing can transend blockchain loyalty and bring in users from outside, because it’s different (at the time), a bit of fun and of course a chance to make some money.

A game like that could be taken to another level using DOBs and CCC wallet technology and might even turn all of the current CKB holders into actual CKB users.

Sorry for the ramble on haha, but that’s my view on things.

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I think the same, well said, Yeti :clap:

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I agree. UX can still be agnostic, but that doesn’t conflict with posting CKB stickers everywhere and discussing it.

Well said :clap:

This one I disagree. Open-sourcing your code is a feat in itself, and promoting it is another challenge. Open-source projects allow for mutual learning and faster evolution, and new developers enter the new territory more easily by reading and adapting existing code. That’s where our strength should lie but not yet. Many CKB apps existed without open-sourcing their code, which not only undermines trustless and transparency but also fails to contribute to our common knowledge.

We as the CKB community should establish the culture to promote those open source projects enthusiastically and challenge those close source (including those claim to open source but not yet).

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Hi Jan, thanks for replying.

About the Nervape part, I’m not sure if we’re having a miscommunication here, or maybe I’m just not understanding your post, but what I was meaning to say is that Nervape’s DOB technology is open source (I think? maybe I’m not right about this.) and it is also in my opinion the best NFT technology and concept available.

There’s just so many cool things that can be done with the upgradeable, dressing/undressing concept, I just don’t understand how no one else has started another similar project and this is the ‘failure’ part I was getting at.

It was probably a bad choice of words, but the failure to me is that we haven’t pushed this concept hard to try and get some more projects off the ground, because I think it has unlimited potential.

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Having followed this discussion, I’d like to share some of eco fund current and planned initiatives that hopefully address these valuable observations and suggestions to some extent.

First, thanks Yeti, for your candid feedback, it really highlights areas where we need to improve. I completely agree with your core point that we need more showcase applications demonstrating what makes CKB unique and valuable. This is something we need to address more directly. I also resonate with Jan’s acknowledgments regarding brand promotion and project responsibilities.

We’ve recently launched several initiatives to strengthen community building and technology showcasing, which complement the great work Matt and Foundation are doing:

  1. CKB Tea Hour: This is our new developer/like-minded professional focused talk series. This month, we’ll be discussing the second fork with CryptoApe developers. (Hoping to invite Jan, Matt and others in the future!) Unlike last year’s marketing-oriented Spaces, these sessions bring developers to the forefront, helping the community understand the technical progress and thinking behind CKB.

  2. Highlighting Key Community Members: We’ve begun interviewing active developers and contributors, documenting their stories and work. Alive’s article is actually the first in this series. Through these stories, we hope to showcase the diversity and creativity within the CKB community.

  3. Spark Grants and Selected Projects: Beyond providing funding through Spark Grants for new projects, we’re planning to have our DevRel team evaluate existing projects and highlight exceptional ones as “selected” through interviews, articles, and social media. We aim to bring excellent projects, community members, and developers into the spotlight.

  4. Expanding University and Innovation Hub Connections: We’re actively contacting university students and innovation centers through Rock Web5 offline developer events. These groups often overlap with niche communities and small businesses that may have greater willingness to experiment with Web5 architecture products. Through these connections, we hope to nurture more developers and users who understand CKB’s value.

  5. Web5 Demo Applications: Eco fund devrel’s exploring how to combine CKB, Fiber Network, and open-source verifiable Web2 technologies to create Web5 demo applications. These demos need to demonstrate not just technical feasibility but also show people that “this isn’t just possible, but can create fun and engaging products.” Moreover, throughout the above work, like Spark grants, interviews, and selected projects, we can also identify gaps in community DAO governance tools and rules, like reputation systems, voting mechanisms, and better information and action flow tools. These insights also inform the direction of our demo development, ensuring we build applications that address real community needs.

I must recognize that all these efforts are still in early stages, with plenty of room for improvement. While I can’t provide specific timelines for showcase applications, I wish you know that I’m taking your feedback very seriously and will bring this discussion back to our team for more focused consideration. Your perspective on this is incredibly valuable as we shape our priorities.

Eco fund deeply values all our community’s feedback, and we look forward to working with the Foundation and the wider community to make meaningful progress in these areas.

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Hi Hongzhou., thanks so much for the detailed reply, it’s really appreciated that you have taken on board some of the stuff I’ve brought up.

I know I went off on a rant and was venting a bit of frustration, but this is just because I know CKB’s potential and I still fully believe it’s the best blockchain project in the world.

And I also notice what you personally have been doing over the last year as far as promotion of CKB goes and trying to get things happening, so thank you!

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Thank you @janx for taking part in this discussion, I can’t stress enough how important is for the Nervos Community to hear the opinion of the Nervos Founders and I’m really happy to see you engaging more and more with the Community on Nervos Talk :hugs:

Yes, please! :clap::clap::clap:

As a Community Developer I wholeheartedly agree with this! Just yesterday I was rambling that closed source projects not only make my life more difficult, but also that they have a tendency to betray user trust.

Successful closed source projects: JoyID, Stable++, UTXO Swap… There are many more that disappeared over time.

I would require for any project receiving grants to open-source everything developed using these grants. If not MIT, at the very least a license like Uniswap v3. (Idea for CommunityDAO v2 :thinking:)

It’s actually even trickier, we should also encourage real decentralization in contract deployment, for example:

DID is a blockchain-based, open source, censorship-resistant decentralized account system

And we all agree that most of their code is now Open-Source. The issue is:

  • How can I trust to build on top of their contracts when these contracts are deployed by type and frequently updated?
  • At their call they could potentially break anything I build on top of these contracts, cause they fully control the lock of the binary.
  • Not so decentralized there.

On the other side, iCKB is truly decentralized because, even if I wanted to updated them (for example to support SSRI), I cannot change the deployed contracts, cause they are deployed by Data1. Even more, the lock on the binary is a zero lock, so it cannot be unlocked.

In my opinion it would be nice if there was a way to make some contract deployed by Type owned by the community and updateable under the right conditions. Maybe a requirement for new Grants? (Idea for CommunityDAO v2 :thinking:)

Love & Peace, Phroi

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exactly. I support Nervos in many ways, but primarly only use the simplicity of CKB as a type of PoO(wnership). I don’t want to government copyright my works, I use DOBs because they have value, ownership, and are spawned on what I consider the best blockchain.

I also use JoyId as authentication for my WEB2/WEB3 app built in Azure. Again, nothing that is comparable to ‘innovation’ of WEB5,etc, but, I do things differently than the traditional modalities that are still lingering around on internet platforms.

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Nervos has sufficient liquidity to store digital currencies. With quantum computer-secure cryptography, according to current knowledge. And even to fix these against percentages in the DAO. I believe that this will be a killer argument as soon as the need becomes widely visible.

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