After 15 years I’m finally in Germany again, with a purpose.
I was an exchange student in Bonn. Besides drank enough beer to fill a swimming pool and took 30+ budget flights travelling around, I also studied some Microeconomics and Distributed Systems. “Too early” as Vitalik was still playing World of Warcraft and little did I imagine how game theories and consensus algorithms that I learned together with various technologies were going to transform our world.
Time flies, with detours in my career, I’m back to where I started and look for impactful, open technologies that I could commit my time to, and ponder what my role is in the rapidly changing world with all sort of new possibilities.
I came to the historic, rebellious city to pick up my memories and participate the “co-living” experience ZuBerlin, which is a 2 weeks mini-Zuzalu for online communities connected by values such as Ethereum’s coming together to materialize a mini-village in the spacetime.
For some reasons, Core Devs of Ethereum are named as Magicians, and indeed it felt like magics to me when I was attending workshops led by them, which are full of first principles thinking, holistic design and diverse opinions. Partly a research retreat, teams are working hard to work around complex challenges related to MEV or censorship-resistance to achieve low latency user experience with based sequencing & pre-confirmations. Truth to be told, I’m not a researcher and find it challenging to catch up all latest development from the gigabrains. Besides, every meal during the week I was sitting with founders, PhDs, overwhelmed by all the grand and wild ideas, abstract in technical or philosophical sense.
But that’s exactly why I’m here.
Excited that I got a chance to witness how Ethereum is being built. Decentralized, open discourses are conducted that welcome ideas and critiques. People with all sorts of background commit to build on Ethereum and some become leading contributors. Faces in recurring distributed calls met in real life to present ideas, jam on designs and implementations with solutions that work suprisingly well. Decentralization works, when, literally, so much is at stake.
Tired of conferences in this industry full of shilling and pumping which ironically never induce deep conversations, here offers plenty, with a diverse and solarpunk community rightfully condensed in this multicultural city, Berlin, where freedom is continually fought for. Young, bright, motivated folks try to build the next frontiers and experienced, accomplished or unfulfilled ones look for ways to reinvent themselves. People have different agenda, but what is common is you can tell they’re motivated by some strong beliefs and not money.
My magic moment of ZuBerlin, is however not during the talks.
It’s a peacful sunny afternoon. Vitalik, having just wrapped up a presentation on his brillant proposal with a satisfying geeky smile, was playing innocently with a kid (and made him cry), alongside the laughters from the communities who then move on to chat about their own great ideas and brillant plans.
Symbolic as it is, as an average individual who spent many of my waking hours overthinking on problems and anguishing over my trading position or social status, it is good to stop for a moment, discard my non-European expectation of “efficiency” and join the geeky but wise and thoughtful ones to embrace a bit of techno-optimism, to celebrate the beauty of mathematics, applied by clever engineering in AI & crypto, and to appreciate the communities empowered by technologies to shape a better world as “humanity is deeply good”.
That optimism, is what truly motivate us building here. Once again I’m convinced blockchain isnt only about technology, but also the culture, not just smart contracts but also the social contracts.
Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing sacred and the Ethereum ecosystem is a mess. But it’s a working mess, a permissionless, forkable technology that likeminds are building upon.
Frankly speaking, the logistics was far from perfect and algining expectations of a diverse audience fairly and transparently is fundamentally challenging, but that’s the point as we came here to join an experiment and tribute to the tremendous effort with all the good intentions in putting it together.
Identifying myself as a builder, thie trip won’t be completed without getting my hands dirty on new ideas. With the motiv of creating “Community Notes” to make the experience more inclusive, I ended up with a scrappy demo but pretty proud to have written code for the UI & smart contract on my flight back to Singapore without Internet, making to the submission deadline when I land in Singapore Airport. Can’t be more happy getting the “Silver Squirrel” prize covering my trip.
Probably I’ve watched too many eposides of “The Dark”, I wonder which year I’m in, walking along the platforms of Deutsche Bahn stations. From color palette of train schedules to the smell after a football match, as an revisiting outsider, Germany didnt seems to have changed much. Did I?
Allow me to have indulged in nostalgia, picking up memories from bookstores to supermarket, from the Reichtag to the Brandenburg Gate. I got a chance to have a dialogue with my younger self, pondered what I wished and feared. Different ambitions, still the curious and somehow idealistic person, perhaps. “Vorbei ist Vorbei”, I can’t change the past, but I’m gateful this trip helped me to reflect and reimagine what are paths I could be taking as I open a new chapter of my career and life.
There is a lot to learn ahead, and hope is what it takes for my redepmption.
I’m genuinely happy to be still alive, when my good old classmate and travel companion could ony live in my memories.