DevCon 5: A success, somehow

So, er, some people might have you think that Ethereum’s Devcon is short for Developer Confidence Game, but no, sadly, disappointingly, I can reveal it is just a Developer Conference. 

The venue for this year’s Devcon – a sprawling, multi-tiered, multi-coloured conference center 25 minutes drive from Osaka’s city center – had the hallmarks of a Wes Anderson movie set minus any semblance of charm. 4,000 attendees commuted between talks hosted on the WiFi-less basement and 6th floor, transported by two inappropriately modest elevators and a very confusing stairwell that I may or may not have briefly lost myself in.     

Conference rooms were continuously too large or too small. I can confidently attest that there are few sadder sights than rousing keynote speeches professed to auditoriums of empty seats and few more awkward experiences than repeatedly jamming a door into fellow attendees’ backs as I attempt to squeeze into the classroom-sized rooms reserved for more compelling presentations. Outdoor space, the preferred meeting location, lacked reprieve from a potent Japanese sun, forcing attendees to congregate by the shaded steps where they were greeted with an intimate view of the highway.  

Factor in a once-in-four-decades typhoon and one might perhaps come to the conclusion that Osaka’s ATC Hall was a suboptimal selection for Devcon 5’s venue. For a conference held in Japan, there was, like, a worrying absence of Japanese attendees. Meanwhile, severely jetlagged San Franciscans and New Yorkers and Europeans, fresh off enough flights to collectively mine several million dollars worth of Ether, were to be found yawning in abundance.  

But, I guess, ultimately, none of that really matters. The etymology of ‘conference,’ Google tells me, is the Latin ‘conferre’, ‘to bring together’, and in that respect Devcon was a success, attracting world-class teams of researchers and developers together, under one roof, for four whole days and nights. 

Yes, the livestreams didn’t work and the best talks were impossible to attend and concerns around cross-shard communication refuse to die down: but they weren’t supposed to and most material can be found scattered on ethresear.ch. Beneath the veneer of lectures and panels and announcements, Devcon is just an excuse to take time away from work, exchange ideas, catch up with old friends, and make new ones. My days largely consisted of impromptu meetings, Britney karaoke solos, eating copious amounts of barbecued meat, and pretending to know the difference between several sakes. And that somehow feels fine.  

If you imagine for a moment that cryptocurrencies are attempting to solve social coordination problems, Ethereum seems to be in rather healthy hands. Beyond some exciting technical developments and fairly rudimentary applications, the real marvel of Ethereum to date is the notion that, within just 5 years, a 20 year old boy-man named Vitalik Buterin has inspired so many strangers to abandon their very normal and respectable lives to attend international conferences and pursue a rather ambitious vision of building utopian-ish unstoppable applications, a feat that self-marketed competitors loaded with billions of dollars have, to date, struggled to replicate.