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**Paul Frazee:** I've been hearing that Mongo has really ironed out a lot of those bugs at this point. I don't know if that's true, I haven't used them, but that's the story they're trying to get out there. It's like "Yeah, we had growing pains", but you know, they made a lot of money, they got to be as big as they are... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** The real thing was just like for the longest time - and maybe they've changed this, but even after they added good transactional integrity and they could make those kinds of claims, it wasn't enabled by default. And as soon as you enabled it -- MongoDB is pretty slow, and one of the reasons why peopl... |
Some of them were quite absurd, though... I remember there was a blog post about how MongoDB is faster than Memcached for writes. The reason is because Memcached has a response when you write, and the protocol for MongoDB didn't have a response for write. You just write it to the socket and you're like "I bet it's stor... |
**Alex Sexton:** \[24:13\] UDP versus TCP... \[laughter\] |
**Paul Frazee:** Yeah, the UDP of databases... |
**Alex Sexton:** Stripe had a back-team for a little bit to do work on this, and for the most part he did this on his own. Kyle Kingsbury, better known as Aphyr, has a tool called Jepsen, and Jepson tests this type of stuff on databases, and it has a series called "Call me maybe." If you search for "Aphyr Call Me Mayb... |
Generally, the benefits it gives are good enough, and we're good enough at keeping it up and we run enough game days to know that when it goes down, we can \[unintelligible 00:25:51.11\] In 3.2 they swapped out the underlying subsystem for something or other, and I think that made a huge difference. |
**Break:** \[26:09\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, so now we're gonna dive into the Beaker Browser. Paul, why don't you give us some history here? I know that you've been working on this for quite a while now, so give us some history of why you started the project, what the mission is, and then we'll get into some of the more recent developm... |
**Paul Frazee:** Alright, cool. We started Beaker about a year and a month ago; we actually got started at the Decentralized Web Summit. Right before that, I had spent about two years working on Secure Scuttlebutt with Dominic Tarr. Secure Scuttlebutt is a peer-to-peer social network... |
\[28:16\] So Dominic had come up with this really cool, cryptographic network for exchanging different feeds of JSON, basically. The technology kind of feels like -- it's these logs of data, so it's almost like a Twitter, right? Everybody has their own feed, and they publish these JSON blobs, so we took that and said, ... |
So we got that to work, and we got a little community going, and it was really cool and definitely a great learning experience, but around the time - about a year ago - I was getting to the point where really one of the big goals I had was "How could we make it so other people could build on that tech?" Because the pee... |
So the stuff we had done with Secure Scuttlebutt was really cool, but it was hard for other developers to hook into the stack and start making their own apps. So I walked away from that and I was thinking "Okay, we have Electron now, and Electron is a really nice wrapper around Chromium", so it would be nice if we coul... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Alright, that was hilarious. |
**Alex Sexton:** If only Rachel could be here... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yup... |
**Paul Frazee:** Right, so that was the idea. And when I started on it, I said "I'm gonna branch out from just Secure Scuttlebutt", I'll take a look at some of the other protocols that were being worked on, and the Decentralized Web Summit was a really good timing because it was a bunch of different protocol teams gett... |
IPFS was there, the Dat Project was there, I remember Mediachain, a couple of different blockchain-based things, Zooko was there with Zcash... So I talked to a lot of people, started to try to gauge interest for this idea, like "Hey, what if we had a browser we could throw all these things into?" So that's how I got st... |
It took maybe like six months to get a browser UI on top of Electron, get all the basics working, and then I integrated IPFS and Dat, and then over time I just took IPFS out and focused on that, and kept on packaging it and fixing it up, and now we have Beaker. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome. You mentioned that there's a bunch of different protocols that people are experimenting with right now... Which ones have you gone down the rabbit hole of supporting and which ones have you kind of solidified at this point? |
**Paul Frazee:** \[31:40\] The three I could speak most authoritatively on would be Dat, Secure Scuttlebutt and IPFS. Dat and IPFS are basically variations on BitTorrent. They're really similar and they're both really solid technologies. I know about the different blockchains, at least like at an arm's distance I could... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And do you support both of those protocols right now? |
**Paul Frazee:** No, actually not at the moment. This is an interesting thing, and actually we're really open to hearing from other people about this... Dat and IPFS are really, really similar. They both use the same mental model from BitTorrent, which is this idea that you have crypto addresses, so either like a hash ... |
So they're so similar that for a while we supported both, but at one point we kind of stopped and said "How do we communicate to users which one they ought to use?", because maybe the biggest difference between them is that IPFS is really narrowly focused - or mainly focused, I'll say - on static pieces of content that... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It's almost like you're just waiting for someone to send a pull request. \[laughter\] |
**Paul Frazee:** Yeah, yeah. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Okay, that's really interesting. So you said that Dat is very good at data that changes over time... I'm a regular web developer, I wanna shove my application into Dat and host it on this network - what does that workflow look like right now? |
**Paul Frazee:** Well, from the perspective of using the software, it feels a little bit like using Git, it feels a little bit like using npm. You have this area that's like your local staging area, so you could work on your website... Your website is just a folder on your computer somewhere, so you'll be working on it... |
The point that we're trying to hit is that it feels just like using tools that we're already super familiar with, so that the peer-to-peer network by and large is hidden from you, and if it's working really well, it should feel pretty magical. |
**Alex Sexton:** So how similar would you say this is to season five of Silicon Valley? |
**Paul Frazee:** \[laughs\] You know, some pretty bad stuff goes down inside season five, I'm gonna say 99% same thing... We had to cover up a lot of scandals while we were working on this thing. \[laughter\] |
**Alex Sexton:** \[36:11\] It's the better internet, right? That's what the current -- whatever. Anyways... I guess we talked a little bit about the what and the how, but in your least tinfoil hat way, explain why someone would be interested in using it. |
**Paul Frazee:** Yeah, I think actually you've gotta throw away the tinfoil hat, right? Because the tinfoil hat version would be "It's censorship resistance, so the government can't take you down", or the other one would be -- I mean, there's some interesting things to be said about that, but the main reason that you t... |
That principle ends up actually being really interesting, because because it's so easy to make a website like that, it actually even exposes some web APIs. So an application that you're using on your computer can actually then use the peer-to-peer network to publish files or to consume files, and that's how you set the... |
You go to a Dat website, there's no service somewhere that you're having to talk to; you've got all the source code, so you can actually work that website and create a whole copy of it that you control, and you can just start modifying it right away. |
So the privacy story is really good, but so is the open source/open architecture story. If we can really flesh out that entire stack, we can get to the point where you don't have to use these databases that are on somebody's server somewhere, which is what you could call a data silo. It's somebody else's computer. Now ... |
**Alex Sexton:** Okay, what-- I -- I'm trying to-- Hm, that was a really good sentence. \[laughter\] If I am malicious - let's talk about that. How many people do I have to pretend to be before I control your content maliciously, or something? Is there a quorum type situation, am I GPG signing everything I write so it'... |
**Paul Frazee:** The key there is that there's no number of people that would start to do that. It's not like there's a civil attack or anything that you could do to take over somebody's website. The way it works is that each website in the Dat network has a key pair, and the public key accesses the address of it. So i... |
\[39:55\] Anytime that they change the site, the sign the update that they push out into the network, so anybody that's looking for a website and wants to make sure that it's an authentic piece of content from that website, they check the signature of that content against the address of the site they try to look up. |
**Alex Sexton:** I see. So the prime thing to know there is that the address is the public key, which means that you can't spoof a different private key... I mean, you could make a totally different website... So how recognizable are -- so if the website is just a public key, what stops me from, say, "Oh, here, go to P... |
**Paul Frazee:** That's an interesting question, because we actually could start to get into ring of trust, or other trust ideas at some point. What we've done at the moment -- first of all, just to answer the very basic of your question... The public keys are 64 characters long; they're hex strings so you're never gon... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, right. |
**Paul Frazee:** I would argue that that's probably usually been the case also for IP addresses, too; similar story - you never would send out -- |
**Alex Sexton:** Right, which is why DNS is so important, with SSL certs, right? |
**Paul Frazee:** Right. So we don't have anything quite like SSL certs yet, because that's a whole big social enterprise to have SSL certs existing... So what we've done is we do have a DNS solution, and it's kind of a hack. Let me think how to describe this well... We make you run an HTTPS server; so if I have BeakerB... |
**Alex Sexton:** So it kind of piggybacks off the centralized system just as a kind of verification system. It makes sense. |
**Paul Frazee:** Yeah, yeah. It gives us the security we need, it's relatively easy to deploy... We thought about doing something with DNSSEC, but DNSSEC doesn't really have the adoption or the confidence in the community that I think really would make that a good long-term solution, and you can only use DNSSEC like th... |
**Alex Sexton:** That's cool. That's a tough problem to solve. So what is the premise -- you do this full-time as a business and you sell it off? Did you get a grant? Do you just have a bunch of money from the lottery and you're looking for fun? |
**Paul Frazee:** No lottery yet. Actually, I'm gonna break that up into two answers. The first - Code For Science is the team that's actually building the Dat protocol. They are a non-profit, they're grant-funded. |
**Alex Sexton:** That's Max still, or...? |
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