EthCC

The main reason I went to EthCC was the Fort Mode event held by Ethereum. Here are some notes made by ream labs, and they are really interesting.

I took away several things from the event, both educational and personal.

The importance of Post Quantum now

Google wrote a paper — Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies against Quantum Vulnerabilities: Resource Estimates and Mitigations — in which they provide new resource estimates for breaking the "256-bit Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem". This hard problem is one of the most widely used security assumptions in many cryptographic primitives and infrastructures in Ethereum (and other blockchains), and that is why Ethereum should try to adopt post-quantum cryptography as soon as possible.

The power of open source

The reason I was eligible to join this "invite-only" event is that I contributed to one of the client teams. I was quite surprised they accepted my PR, and I was also surprised by how readily people embrace newcomers like me.

I met several people who are current mentors and former EPF (Ethereum Protocol Fellowship) fellows, and they told me that "as long as you keep showing up and contributing, at the end of the day they will accept you as a team member." This really encouraged me — at a time when I wasn't sure there were any opportunities for me — and it's why I kept showing up to the Lodestar standups as well.

I'm not a crypto bro

I used to think I might enjoy being a startup founder or a business guy — always energetic, ambitious, and with a lot to talk about. However, after this trip I found I'm more of a nerdy boy who stays in a place where everybody is smarter than him and discusses things that matter.

p2p

I talked to Kamil and listened to Raul's talk. Raul mentioned a new networking stack coming to Ethereum, co-existing with libp2p. It left me mesmerised by p2p and networking. I know there's still a huge gap for me to close, and I'll have to study hard to get there.