A Month Well Traveled
Three Things #62: April 2, 2023
I’m not thrilled with the quality of my writing recently. I’ve been at a series of events, on the road nearly full time for over a month, in some remote places. Constantly changing continents and timezones and being in unfamiliar places has taken its toll. In fact I’ve been on five continents in the past month! On top of that, we’re days away from the launch of the Spacemesh mainnet, so work has also been busier than usual. I’m behind on responding to messages on nearly every channel (and I’m embracing the JOMO of not even trying to keep up).
In the past I wrote here about events I attended, including last year’s ETHDenver and Urbit Assembly. I haven’t done that recently. I’ve instead chosen to write about an assortment of abstract, general interest topics, especially less technical topics since I’ve had less time and energy to write than usual. I’m not entirely sure why I haven’t written about the places I’ve been or the events I’ve attended. I think the main reason has nothing to do with writing: since I’ve been constantly on the go, I haven’t really had the time to reflect on each experience before I was off to the next one.
This disturbs me. A critical part of travel and of experiencing things is taking time to reflect on the experience, unpack it, and integrate it into one’s life and thought processes. I haven’t had much time to do that lately. I haven’t even done a good job of following up with all of the incredible people I’ve met and connected with recently.
So I’m going to take the opportunity to do a bit of that now. If there’s one constant theme in this space, as I jump around among continents and topics, it should be honesty. What I write here each week should reflect where I’m at as a person, and the place I’m at this week is reflecting on a month well traveled, as I finally wind down the continuous travel and head home for some much needed quiet, focused time.
Thing #1: Poland with Spacemesh
The Spacemesh team is fully remote. As such, our only opportunity to meet face to face is during team gatherings every few months. These meetings are critical for establishing trust and working out difficult technical problems with greater bandwidth. Around a month ago, we held such a gathering in Gdańsk, Poland.
I’ve been to its neighboring countries dozens of times but for some reason I had never been to Poland before, so I was really excited about the trip. As much as I travel, I actually rarely visit new places. Getting there was somewhat obnoxious since it required transferring in Germany, and the second leg of the trip was on a tiny airplane in extremely windy weather (funnily enough, precisely the same thing happened last year when I visited Prague for the same reason). I was impressed that the pilot successfully landed on the first attempt.
Upon arrival I was really surprised with the beauty of the city. We stayed right in the city center, on the river Martwa Wisła. My Polish colleagues told me that it’s a tourist area, which didn’t surprise me given how pretty I found the city center: colorful, tall, narrow old buildings stacked beautifully one next to the other, which reminded me equal parts of Amsterdam and Vienna. The Germanic history of the city is visibly on display.
Of course, it also has a character all its own. I was also struck by how good the food was: hearty, filling comfort food that was surprisingly familiar. We ate fantastic pierogi and burgers, drank soup and beer, and enjoyed local sweets. And I was struck by how friendly the people were. I don’t know precisely what I expected—I’m not sure I had any precise expectations, actually, other than expecting it to be cold and rainy and a bit dark—but in the event I found the place absolutely charming. It helped that we were in very good hands, with several locals among our colleagues who took us to very different parts of town, including to a seaside community by the Baltic where we learned the story of Wojtek the Bear and had a nice Italian dinner.
As someone who loves biking and runs every day, I unapologetically judge cities based on how friendly they are to runners and cyclists. My only complaint about Gdańsk is that it was nearly impossible to run in the vicinity of the hotel. There’s no running or biking trail along the river in the city center, which is a shame. The roads were uneven with lots of cobblestones, and a large swathe of the area was muddy and under construction. I ended up running on the hotel treadmill instead, which is never a great joy. But I more than made up for it with plenty of time with my incredible colleagues.
Overall, Poland stuck me as extremely livable. It felt safe, comfortable, convenient, and affordable. I’m aware that the political situation is complicated, but we hardly discussed politics. (This is part of the beauty of being a tourist and an expat: you have a great excuse not to pay close attention to politics.) We had a fantastically productive work week, with a bit of time to explore, get to know each other, and enjoy food and drinks each evening. As the center of gravity on the Spacemesh team has shifted towards Europe in general and Poland in particular, I’m hopeful that I’ll have another opportunity to visit again soon and to see more of the country, especially Warsaw and sites related to the history of World War II and Nazi Germany.
If I have one takeaway from my time in Poland, it’s that you can only really build trust face to face. Face time with one’s colleagues and the people that matter is as essential as ever. Also, you can only really understand a person when you understand where they’re from.
Thing #2: Denver for ETHDenver
Shortly after returning from Poland I headed to Denver for my annual pilgrimage to the biggest, craziest, and IMHO most important annual event in the Ethereum calendar. I’ve written about ETHDenver multiple times in past years since the first one in 2018, and this year didn’t disappoint. It was bigger and better than ever: I don’t know the final, actual number of attendees, and it’s almost impossible to know anyway given the number of side events, but there were definitely over 20,000 people there and there may have been as many as 30,000.
That’s 10x the size of the first ETHDenver and I’m pretty sure it also qualifies as the largest Ethereum event ever. The event is approaching massive scale and is beginning to feel like an all-out festival, like Burning Man or South by Southwest. Like those events, ETHDenver this year was totally overwhelming: the main venue (which is much, much larger than the venue in previous years) was massive and crowded, and I actually didn’t spend too much time there, relative to the time I spent at side events and catching up with friends in small groups. But I like optionality and there’s something for everyone in an event this size. If you’re new or looking to network, you can go to the main event, hang out around the venue and meet people to your heart’s content. If, like me, you’re there to learn and reconnect with old friends and colleagues, you can do that at smaller events and over meals and drinks. In terms of content, there were six or seven parallel tracks running at the main event, to say nothing of the #BuidlWeek content leading up to it and the hundreds of side events, so there’s more content than anyone could consume.
More than anything, ETHDenver this year felt a bit like Burning Man. In fact, it was the same size and scope and ran for a similar number of days. I had the same feeling of awe, wonder, and astonishment, and of being totally, completely overwhelmed. Like Burning Man, you could have experienced ETHDenver ten times with ten different intents and had ten radically different experiences. For instance, you could’ve gone there to hack, or to network, or to speak, or to party, or to meet your team, or to socialize or to consume content—and among content you could’ve chosen to focus on DAOs, DeFi, Infrastructure, Gaming, etc. ETHDenver is massive.
In spite of this, or perhaps because I felt so overwhelmed, I found myself quickly exhausted and retreating to a more familiar schedule. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I passed on parties and late night events this year and took it easy every morning, exercising and working before heading out each day around lunch time. This is the only way I can manage intense conference weeks these days—and, reflecting now on my time in Denver, while I had a blast catching up with friends and I enjoyed the main event, some of my fondest memories are from the solo runs I took each morning, exploring the running trails along the river and canal and reflecting on some of what I’d seen and heard the previous day.
I was also very focused on contributing to content this year. I helped organize a privacy-focused event with the Universal Privacy Alliance during #BuidlWeek, which meant going a few days before the main event, so it was the first ETHDenver when I spent a full week in Denver. I gave a talk on consensus mechanisms, which required a lot of preparation in the days leading up to the talk (I wanted to avoid what happened last year, when I wrote my talk hours before delivering it!). And, along with some amazing co-organizers, I helped run a mainstage session on privacy at the main event on Saturday night. Preparing for all of this took up most of the time during the week when I wasn’t socializing, running, or working.
To me, ETHDenver feels schizophrenic. On the one hand it’s cozy and comfortable, since I’ve been attending for so many years and it’s a chance to see close, old friends. On the other hand it’s also insane and overwhelming due to the scale and the number of folks who now attend. I like this, because I can switch back and forth between the two modes, cozy and frenetic, based on my energy level and goals.
While I didn’t get to attend the ski events following the main event, and didn’t make it into the mountains at all this year, I really enjoyed my week in Denver, exhausting as it was. I saw friends, learned a thing or two, and ate a lot of delicious burgers (since that was the only convenient food I could find most of the time). I find Denver both livable and a great conference town since things are relatively close to one another and it’s a relatively easy city to get around.
If I have one takeaway from ETHDenver this year, it’s that the Ethereum ecosystem is thriving. It’s as healthy as ever in spite of, or perhaps because of, the market situation. Events like ETHDenver are a great reminder that Ethereum is more than a single chain or even a single community. It’s a social and technological movement focused around building, innovatively and creatively solving human problems, and fun—all of which were on display in Denver.
Early Sunday morning I headed to the airport with a couple of fellow travelers to make my way south to the next destination.
Thing #3: El Salvador for Urbit
I’ve been to El Salvador twice, and both trips have been unique and memorable. The first time was about a year and a half ago when the Bitcoin Law went into effect. On that occasion I traveled around the country with friends, visited Bitcoin Beach, interviewed locals about their experience with Bitcoin and their sentiments around the Bitcoin Law—and tried to spend bitcoin as much as possible. Given that that was a year and a half ago and lots has changed since then, I was very keen to visit again and see what has and hasn’t changed. The Bitcoin-related headlines have been pretty grim, but are people actually using Bitcoin in their day to day lives? I didn’t properly set up my Lightning wallet before the trip and subsequently failed to use Bitcoin on my first two opportunities, at the airport and to pay for transportation to the city, but I’d get more opportunities.
Having said that, this time I wasn’t strictly visiting for Bitcoin. I was attending the Urbit Volcano Summit, a developer conference being held—yes, that’s right—on a volcano. It’s a pretty bold idea and I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I kept an open mind and looked forward to catching up with friends that I hadn’t seen since Assembly a few months ago. I wasn’t thrilled that the event immediately followed ETHDenver, since I was already exhausted from the week in Denver and was already missing family, but I also didn’t want to miss the Volcano Summit since literally every Urbit event I’ve been to has been extraordinary. In the event, the Volcano Summit didn’t fail to impress.
A bunch of us arrived on the same flight, including a few other folks heading down from Denver. We rode to town together and spent one night in San Salvador before heading to the summit. We joined an Urbit meetup held at a massive, beautiful property in the hills above town where several Urbit developers work, experiencing a taste of El Salvador expat hacker life.
The ride up to the summit venue the following day was long, slow, and bumpy. El Salvador is not known for having great roads, the traffic is atrocious, and the further you get from the city the worse the roads become. The final mile or two to the hotel was on a rutted dirt road and the buses couldn’t make it safely while fully loaded so we actually had to get out and walk. This might’ve been an adventure if I were feeling well, but by this point the fatigue of Denver had finally caught up with me and I was unfortunately feeling under the weather. Nothing is worse than being sick on the road, especially when you’re at an event, busy, and constantly moving around. I quite literally had no time to rest and recover. But I was also thrilled to be back in El Salvador and surrounded by like minded network friends, so I made the most of it.
The accommodations were pretty rough and I felt awful for the first couple of days. I was further frustrated because I couldn’t run, both because I wasn’t feeling well and because there was literally nowhere to run even if I had been feeling well. In the end the event venue, the people, the content, the food and the coffee (the venue was a coffee plantation!) more than made up for it. I took it as easy as possible, refrained from drinking, and by the third day began to feel better. The venue was stunning, with a spectacular view over the volcano and Lago de Coatepeque. It felt like a superhero’s lair, a perfect place to plot a new (technical) world order. The talks were excellent. We learned about low level technical details, high level user space improvements, and the legal and political climate in El Salvador. I ended up giving a long talk on lessons the Urbit community should learn from Ethereum. Just as at Assembly I learned a lot from talks and conversations and took pages of notes. Unlike most conferences the talks weren’t recorded, which was refreshing because people were more open and honest, and it was a good excuse to be present and pay attention. It was also a great opportunity to talk about Spacemesh and about the intersection of Urbit and Web3. I deeply appreciate how excited and supportive Urbit folks are of Spacemesh.
We had fun, too, including a boat trip and a party on the lake. El Salvador doesn’t have the best food (and you can only eat so many pupusas!), but the steaks aren’t bad, and we ate a lot of those. I enjoyed the meals mainly for the camaraderie. There’s something magic about holding a conference in a difficult location—like on top of a volcano hours outside the nearest city in a country that until recently was one of the most dangerous in the world—that leads to a self-selecting group of people who all experience shared struggle together. It also allows an unprecedented degree of focus on the topic at hand with relatively little distraction and imposition of the outside world. Urbit is an aesthetic and a social movement as much as it’s a technology, as I wrote about after Assembly, and part of that aesthetic and culture is taking the hard route, which sometimes means (literally) climbing mountains together. One takeaway from the Volcano Summit was appreciation for how much the choice of location and venue impacts the sort of event you host in a place, and the sort of people you attract. Another is that Urbit folks are legitimately curious, outside the box thinkers unafraid to challenge the status quo and ask hard questions: about technology, society, and pretty much everything else.
What about Bitcoin? I did eventually get to use bitcoin a few times: to pay for entry to a national park, and for coffee and drinks. I was able to use it to buy a meal at the airport on the way home. Most of the locals we spoke to about Bitcoin are still quite skeptical of it, and most feel that it doesn’t solve real problems for them. (Their problems tend to be straightforward: poverty, lack of work opportunities, security.) I don’t think Bitcoin has changed the lives of average Salvadoreans yet, but there is definitely more awareness of Bitcoin and the trend is positive.
The El Salvador trip was stressful, but it was magical and a lot of fun, and I’m grateful for the experience. I got to spend focused time with an excellent group of people, and that’s what matters the most. By the end of the week I was very, very ready to go home for a few days before the next trip.