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3air weekly AMA, 9th March 2022 @5pm CET
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3air weekly AMA, 9th March 2022 @5pm CET

This is a transcript from our weekly YouTube live AMA:

Anita Mlakar: 00:28

Hello, everybody, dear ladies and gentlemen, dear members of our community, and those who are maybe with us for the first time, just to let you know we are here every Wednesday 5pm Central European Time from the end of October so we will be celebrating soon.

00:49

Anita is my name. And I’m the host of Ask Me Anything events. And I’m so happy to see that some of you are joining us every time to learn more about the project, the team behind it, and of course, asking questions, thank you for that. Stay with us. Click like, subscribe to our YouTube channel. Invite your friends to join us. hit the bell icon to get notifications. Please stay glued to the community and make sure you’re following us on our social media platforms for timely updates and become a member of our communities on Twitter, telegram and discord.

01:30

So, we will be inviting Sandi soon and we have a special guest coming up. I’m sure you know all about it. But you know what follows first. Of course, a short introduction of the project is every time.

01:51

3air’s mission is to connect Africa unconnected population to the rest of the world through blockchain based ultra-fast wireless broadband access. The lack of fast, stable and affordable access to the internet connection in most parts of Africa has economic consequences besides limiting people’s potential to grow. In fact, only around 46% of the African population has any form of wireless internet coverage, which mostly relies on edge or 3g Internet services, being slow for today’s standards anyway.

02:30

So 3air is here to make a change. 3air is the next generation company offering blockchain based wireless broadband access to predominantly internet underserved regions of Africa. And the 3air platform is a project of age long research into blockchain technology device to offer solutions to some of the world’s leading problems.

02:55

So, our goal is to be the medium through which people can actualize their dreams via uninterrupted broadband Internet access.

03:06

So, thank you again for being with us. And I would really like to welcome Sandi to join us.

03:11

Hello, Sandi.

Sandi Bitenc: 03:14

Hi. Are you okay?

Anita Mlakar: 03:19

I don’t know what happened but okay, I’m here. Everything is okay. Maybe I will need a glass of water later. Sandi, how are you?

Sandi Bitenc: 03:28

I’m fine. Thank you. Perfect.

Anita Mlakar: 03:31

That’s good to hear.

03:33

How was everything in Dubai? The weather?

Sandi Bitenc: 03:37

It’s perfect. Now it’s probably the best time to be in Dubai. I think. So. We just got a bit warm been coming in. So, during the night, it’s now really nice there. I think around 23-24. So, it’s like really nice that you can go outside with a T shirt. During the day it’s still okay. So, I like it a bit hotter. So, 30-35 is usually, it’s not a problem for me. I like that. So, we were today out for a quick lunch and we just set outside it was like really perfect. It’s nice.

Anita Mlakar: 04:19

I can only imagine because we do have sun but the temperatures are around zero. well, 23 It’s just sounds great.

Sandi Bitenc: 04:32

No, it’s really perfect. We were out for a birthday party yesterday evening. And outside, it was amazing. Really, the temperature that you can have right now.

Anita Mlakar: 04:46

Yes, you have this opportunity. And as soon enough I hope--- [connection lost, another stream started]

00:19

Hello, everybody, and we are back. I hope we are back. [network problem 00:24-02:52] I can see you now. Okay, I’m so glad that this happened right now, in the right time. We just had to call Rok on and now everything is fine. So, Ta-da! This is our guest today surprise guest. Rok, hello again now that we are officially here.

03:14

Sandi and Rok, hello and welcome!

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 03:18

Hello!

Sandi Bitenc: 03:18

Hello!

Anita Mlakar: 03:22

No, we just have to stay positive because when we’re positive then everything is working. Look at this. Now we have comments we have people coming on that’s what we wanted. And of course, now I will start with the subject that we are here today for- Sandi you were starting something earlier you were talking about where we are right now what is happening and then we had some problems with the stream. Maybe it would be okay if you finished it if you just in a couple of sentences tell us how we are how we are doing and what is happening right now. And then we will go to Rok and have some questions for him.

Sandi Bitenc: 04:03

I need to change my name, my name is strangely Anita, right now.

Anita Mlakar: 04:10

Okay, this is the first thing that you will do. Okay.

Sandi Bitenc: 04:17

Yeah, look, where was I? So, what’s new? So many things are actually new. Most of the things that we’re doing right now it’s on marketing. It’s on setting everything up for the token launch we are speaking to a lot of launch pads and to some exchanges and you met Domenik on the last call. So, he’s handling most of those things. And we’re making really good progress on that side.

04:49

But we still need to do a bit more marketing and we’re changing a bit the narrative we are adding some new features to our 3air platform, adding some additional stuff from DeFi and some financial services that we’ll be offering to everybody that we’re that we are connecting. And there are some things that are not really confirmed yet, but I’m pretty sure that we’ll go into the things that are really hot right now in the crypto space, and for sure, what we are also doing is we are going into the NFT space. And what we’re doing is developing a system where you can use a NFT that will enable you to get access to the internet through our platform.

05:49

So, and I’m pretty sure to Rok can tell us just a bit more about this on the technical side. What we’re also doing is there, there’s a lot of stuff happening right now in Dubai, it’s almost every day there is a conference or something like that, where we manage to acquire a partnership with African Chamber of digital commerce. So, in the next few weeks, there will be a lot of coming from there. So, I already got confirmed a few really high-level introductions and I was speaking to a partner, a big one starts with a G today. And let’s see, there must be something that we can combine some of our technologies also, I’ll be updating you on that one in the next week or two, probably. It’s a lot of stuff. Even after this, its past 8pm, where I am. So right after this, I still have two one-hour meetings planned. So, it’s like going from morning till evening.

Anita Mlakar: 07:10

Working, it sounds exciting. So, thank you Sandi for this update, just in a short way of course. And thank you, David and everyone else who is giving us feedback that we are okay, the picture quality, the sound, everything is okay. So, thank you very much for this information.

07:31

We have Rok Mihailovic Krpan here today, Head of Development in 3air. Rok, we are really happy to have you here because these days, we are hearing lots from the side of Meta mask. And there are services not being accessible in Venezuela. And we will of course get some information from you how did this happen? And it happened to any one of us, and so on and so on. But, you know, for starters, we will be talking about this decentralization and it’s very important also in the blockchain and crypto space. Could you just tell us Rok, what it actually is and why is it so important?

08:13

Yeah. Okay, so hi, everybody again. So, let’s talk about decentralization. So, when you hear about blockchain or when somebody talks about blockchain or anything like this, everybody talks about decentralization, they want the most decentralized blockchain, they want the highest level of it, that’s possible. So, what people don’t expect, usually is that at the end there’s always like, some point or some centralized API that’s connecting everything together. You know in the term of blockchain, you have like multiple nodes they span around the world. This is what the true digital decentralization is. So, there are multiple nodes, any node can crash, then the blockchain will stay online, you can cut the whole country off and the blockchain will stay. So, your data will be safe or funds will be safe. Everything is okay.

09:06

The main idea when the blockchain was created was like everyone could run a node in their home. So, if you have a spare computer, you have basically anything you can run as part of that blockchain yourself. So, you’re like, independent, you’re not dependent on anyone else. You can just create your own node connect to the network be able to send transaction have everything by you.

09:32

After sometime this became a big problem, because the blockchain is like really growing in size. I mean, every transaction needs to be saved. That’s the whole point of the blockchain. But as you can imagine, like when you make millions of transactions per second, and with the rise of the decentralized apps and everything, this is like really huge amount of data so it can be saved on a basic home computer of somebody. So what? like engineers and programmers and everybody wanted to do to enable these people that are not able to like to cause their own node to make some centralized API like, okay, we are going to create a node, we are going to host it and you can just connect to our services. So, with this idea in mind, the Infura was created. So Infura is like, they run the full Ethereum nodes. So, they have the whole connection to the network. And what they added they added the API’s, the different indexers and everything.

10:34

So, they said, Okay, here’s our URL. And everybody can use it to connect to blockchain without having to host their own nodes, which would be perfect, because you need don’t need to hold the chain, you can use the Infura app on your mobile phones, you can use it on laptops, anywhere. And but the only problem with this is that once Infura goes down, you can’t connect to the blockchain anymore. So effectively, if Infura decides to like whitelist, or blacklist some IPs, or disable their services for some country, like what happens now, because they made a mistake. Everybody that was connecting to them is like instantly loses the whole connection to the blockchain. They can’t connect to them anymore. So yes, you have multiple RPCs, you can connect to different providers, like, they’re not the only one, of course. But you know, you have the Meta Mask, the Infura is the default. So, when it first goes down, like you lose the connection to the blockchain, like it is the same, like someone would come and cut your cable to the internet, like, there’s nothing you can actually do about it.

11:47

So, this is kind of the problem that happened, now with the Venezuela and Meta Mask because you have multiple RPC’s, you have multiple connections that you can make, but it’s complicated process for some standard user, and you’re always relying on some centralized service.

Anita Mlakar: 12:07

So, you said Rok, they made a mistake, that was the reason for the cut.

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 12:17

This is the official, we can’t know exactly what happened. And where was the mistake, because if we have some access control is the block that who can access the service. It can like happen in, I don’t know, somebody clicks somewhere missing, or somebody wants to change something and just places a letter somewhere a comma or somewhere and the config is not working. So it can be like a mistake, it can be intentional. You can’t know. the point is that everybody thinks that how decentralized everything is at the end, you’re still reliant on one service that they go down, you’re like offline.

Sandi Bitenc: 12:53

Yeah, so it was a kind of mistake. So yeah, that’s the original and official, and I think it was a mistake, because I don’t know why they would really cut off Venezuela, and then just put it back on. Nobody was actually talking about that in Infura and Meta Mask weren’t working before, in the countries that are under sanctions. So, Iran, Iraq, and all those countries that are on the blocked the US list. They weren’t operational there. And just now because it was going into Venezuela, now everything is blown out of proportion, like it’s happened now for the first time.

13:43

And of course, it is a concern, while we are talking about decentralization, and nobody’s in control, and there is no single point of failure. It’s kind of true, but it’s also not true. So, if you know, what you’re doing, if you’re a software developer, and so on, and you know, this stuff, so you can always access the services, it’s not that they’re not there, they’re still there. But if you’re a user that relies on an application or something like that, then you probably won’t be able to access it because you don’t know how you actually need to do it.

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 14:24

The Meta Mask. It doesn’t have some, like redundant links by default. It’s like, once they switch off, a normal user doesn’t understand that. They could but like a normal user, you don’t go out you search for the RPCs. You don’t find the URLs you don’t search for full nodes.

Sandi Bitenc: 14:44

To be honest it’s not so hard to do. So, what you need to do, I think that a lot of Meta Mask users know that they can add additional networks. So, once you are adding an addition network, it’s just the difference in the URL that you need to put in. So, you need to search that URL and then you just connect it to another RPC. So, you know instead of Infura Everybody now was connecting to Alchemy, I think. So that’s another node. But it’s again, a centralized node. So, if they want to shut it down, also they can, I think the only way that you can really always access it, if you run your own nodes but that’s troublesome. I don’t think people will do it. But for me, it looks like, if you imagine that blockchain is this like, let’s say a huge city, you have only one door that you need to go through. So, if somebody closes that door, then you cannot enter.

Anita Mlakar: 15:47

And it is normal for us who are not so acquainted with this, that we are panicking or asking questions or doubting or asking, what about? what is now? what about security? Is that normal? Of course, it is, I think.

Sandi Bitenc: 16:04

Yeah, I think that’s in the human nature. And I think a lot of people like to spread the fear and doubt and so on. Of course, it happens. Although there was never a question of security, to be honest. So, it’s not that somebody was kind of seizing your funds or not allowing you to access your wallet or something like that, you need to know that meta mask is actually not your account, so that nobody took your account or prevented you from accessing it, it’s just a tool that you use to access your account. And you can use many different tools. So, you could always use the seed phrase and just import it to another wallet, and you would be able to access funds from wherever, also from the countries that were blocked there. And so that was never a question of security in that regard.

Anita Mlakar: 17:05

Thank you very much for explaining that I’m not really good at this field. I must admit, this is not something that I know a lot about but I went to read a couple of things about decentralization, because of course, I want to learn maybe there are more of us who would like to learn. And what I read, Rok, was that there is always a battle between security and performance. And it says that the more a blockchain scales up, the more secure it usually becomes. But the performance may suffer, what does that mean?

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 17:40

It’s usually because you have like, it’s one of the theorems that you can like only to pick two out of three options. Because once you’re scaling a blockchain, when you have two or three nodes, it’s easy to connect them like they know about each other. one node gets the data, it can immediately send it to other two and that’s it. But once you scale it up to like a global scale, you need to handle synchronization between them because let’s say user A sends funds in one part of the world. And then another user, let’s say with the same wallet, sends the same funds to the other side of the world. So, these two transactions can happen at the same time. I mean, they can’t happen. And you like need to synchronize everything.

18:27

And now when you go into the distances, everybody’s used from the games or from videos and everything that you’d like to get instant response and that you have a latency or ping of, I don’t know, 10 milliseconds or 50 milliseconds but once you scale this up to the world scale, like, I mean, even if you want to make a connection from the Europe to the Africa, like, for example, our office is in Sierra Leone, this is like 300 milliseconds, ping, this is like 30 times what the usual users are used to. So, you’ll get a problem because there are many computers that need to know everything about each other. So that’s when we come to the part that once you submit a transaction, it needs to propagate to the whole network, every node needs to know about it. Everyone needs to know what happened and after that your actual transaction is confirmed, which is, of course, much more safe, because it’s better to have a million nodes say that you made the transactions three of them because of course, it’s much easier to hack three servers than to pack a whole planet. But it comes as you said, in an expense to performance.

Anita Mlakar: 19:43

Okay, so now as a beginner again, I have another question. Is it possible to prevent this in a way you know, let’s say that we’re talking about 3air and 3air’s wallet, is it possible to prevent it or to you know, have more security with more wallets? or is that even necessary?

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 20:03

The actual security is not a problem at the end, because you still have your private key by you. At this point in time until we have some quantum supercomputers, anything, you can’t break the private key for now, it will take some million years to break it in with our computers. So, in the matters of security are safe, like if you press the button, I confirm that I want to send $20 to user B, this is safe, like it’s 100% sure that you press it. So, it’s not a problem with this. It’s not a problem in the other blockchains. It’s not the problem in our blockchain. So, I don’t think there is a problem of security.

Anita Mlakar: 20:50

Okay, that’s very important because this is what people were asking a lot also in a community. What does that mean? And, okay, security is not the issue here.

Sandi Bitenc: 21:09

As you’re asking about the blockchain trilemma, and there is the problem with security and scalability. And that’s actually not what happened with Meta Mask at all. So, this was not at all connected to blockchain, to be honest. So, it was beyond blockchain, it was just connecting to the blockchain. So, there is a service that you need to use. So, from that side, because before we were talking about that, that’s not at all connected in any way to blockchain security.

21:47

But to maybe expand a bit on what Rok was saying, it’s not only about that, the data needs to propagate and so on, the problem that comes up is also that all the computers needs to store all the data, so and they need to process the transaction. And the chain can always be only as fast as its slowest node. So, if you allow to connect all nodes, you know, everybody can run a node and connect to the network, then eventually, you will limit the number of transactions per second that you have. And you’ll also limit the number of nodes that can actually have the whole blockchain saved. You know, Solana is one of the really nice ones to look at it with a 50,000 transaction per second that they can do and so on, I think that they’re creating four petabytes of data each year. So, and that needs to be stored and then each node in the network needs to store that.

23:00

So, you can imagine that at one point, you just cannot store so much data anymore, it just becomes too expensive. You need to have like a house of hard disks or whatever storage you’re using to just store all the data that’s from the blockchain. So, this is where then centralization come into play because you cannot allow everybody to run a node anymore because it will slow down your network. So, you can only allow people that are validators that really have really good computers like almost supercomputers to run it. And then effectively, that limits the number of nodes that you can have. So, in that regards, are not decentralized fully anymore.

Anita Mlakar: 23:52

Okay, now Rok, you are the heart of development in 3air. Of course, decentralization and stuff that we’re talking right now is one of the subjects but tell me, what else do you do?

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 24:08

Okay, so we’re doing like, there are like a lot of fronts that we’re building on right now. As the Sandi said, before, we are implementing the NFTs, we’re like trying, what we’re trying to do is like have an NFT be an actual monthly internet subscription or daily or something. So, you can like buy NFT send it to somebody or I don’t know, redeem it by yourself. And like, we’re trying to make this connection.

24:36

Then on the other front, we’re dealing with the digital identities, because when we still wanted to build on the Cardano, we had the option to use the Atala prison which is already built. But now as we switch to another chain, we decided we are going to build the whole system by ourselves. I mean, we are still going to follow the standards that are allowed for the digital identities. But there like some complications that come with it. I mean, you need to store it somehow on the blockchain, from the digital identities you don’t like to store the whole identity on the blockchain you just like you store the signatures of them or ID so them the actual digital ID saved on your phone or some device. So, what we’re now trying to do like when the digital ID is stored on the device, there is a problem that if you lose your phone, it’s like using losing your ID or instantly without it. So, what we’re trying to do is like make a backup option, that you can save it somewhere or send it to someone. And also, like keep the security. So of course, we don’t want somebody else to run around with your personal data and your IDs. So, like we’re heavily invested on this front. And there’s also another front with the new wave of the Presale opening, we want to make some things better, we want to improve some things. We want everything to go smooth as possible. So, we have multiple fronts open, and we’re working on all of them.

Anita Mlakar: 26:13

Okay, Sandi, how are you satisfied with Rok and his performance? And how are you cooperating?

Sandi Bitenc: 26:20

You know, and Rok is just doing an amazing job. So, it’s really a pleasure working with Rok. Before when I was doing similar things, usually what the problem is explaining to the developers what you actually want. So, you’re explaining them something and then they do something and it’s something totally opposite, or you forget to mention one thing, and then it’s just not there, although it should be and it’s clear, they did not need to be there. But you didn’t explicitly say and then it’s not. So, there are so many things. And Rok, he really knows the project and that and we can really go along with each other. And we don’t need to explain everything into detail. And everybody knows what he needs to do. So, it’s how it should be.

Anita Mlakar: 27:19

Okay, you’re very young, aren’t you? I mean, you have all the skills as a developer, and a lot of experience already but you’re young.

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 27:30

Yeah, I mean, what can I say I started really early, got into a great company, got a great deal of experience, like building the whole telecom solutions from the start. So, I was like, dropped into water and like said, Okay, swim now.

Sandi Bitenc: 27:51

Rok should tell us a bit more about himself.

Anita Mlakar: 27:54

Yeah, I would really like to know, where did you get the experience and this enthusiasm, because you have to have it to do that.

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 28:01

Yeah. Okay, so if I like start from the beginning, I always liked computers. As you said, I’m a lot younger. So, from the beginning, I had the technology, I had the whole computers, mobile phones, everything it existed when I was born. So, I like everything. I mean, I started with programming, when I was 11 or 12 years old, something like this, when I first found it, so. And then I just like it expanded, I learned about the server. So, I learned about the network. I learned everything I could about the programming. There were a lot of challenges always because there were always some games, some websites, some things that you wanted to develop, improve, like, I don’t know, there was a game Minecraft that probably everyone knows. It’s a highly extensible game, like I learned half of the programming from it. Because you know, if there was something that you wanted to have, and it didn’t exist, and there were two options, either you won’t have it, or you’re going to make it yourself. So, I wanted to have it.

29:06

After that, I went to the high school, joined some robotics projects went to Robocop World Cups. So, we went there, then continued the college, which I still have not completely finished but some projects have priority over this. And yeah, then we started to work with the K3 telecom and everything and we had to develop like, multiple things like we needed, we had one TV solutions, but we needed like something better. we don’t live in a world of linear TV anymore. You don’t put an antenna out to the roof and that’s the TV. Like we wanted to go one step further in Africa and everything. We wanted to have video on demand. We wanted to have time shift so you can watch series from week before. I don’t know, we wanted APGs, we wanted digital boxes. So, we made a software for this, I was there from the beginning. So, I had a lot of opportunities to learn and be on the real projects.

30:19

Once you start, it’s really problematic to start and get the experience if nobody allows you to work with actual equipment. Like, if you want just like make some basic programs or something, you can do it at home but if you want to work with some big routers, or servers or something this day, that’s the equipment that cost, 100 or $200,000 the cannot test it from home, you need to telecom, the company to support it and everything. So, it was 50% luck and 50% dedication, something like this.

Sandi Bitenc: 30:58

Okay, there is another thing that Anita you don’t know Rok so well as I do, but I’m pretty sure that Rok has some good stories from Sierra Leone, when they were setting everything up, right?

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 31:15

Yeah, I and one of my colleagues were the first word. we actually set up the whole Sierra Leone, our testing ground, our project. We came there without like, we had the equipment on the ship there but we came there we went over the whole Sierra Leone, we watched the hills, we watched the towers. And now we had to decide where to put everything. It’s a really special experience when you go first time into Africa to do something. If you’re not from Africa, if you’re from the Europe or somewhere like this, it’s like a complete shock, the different people, the experience and everything.

31:59

We build a telecom, we came there, we said, okay, we want this tower and we want this tower, then we’re going to build something there. And then we said, okay, we need to have internet we need to pull the cables where they come from the sea, we need to connect there, we need to connect the people. And the conduit, they don’t expect it, there used to mobile phones and they have three gigabytes per month. I bought a five-gigabyte packet back then and then we come in, and said like, okay, you get five megabits and you have unlimited internet. And everyone is like, well, unlimited? No, what’s the limit? There must be a limit. People are not used to having unlimited internet. So, we build the whole Sierra Leone from the ground and then we expanded it.

Anita Mlakar: 32:58

Amazing story Rok. You have already so much so many amazing stories and experiences of course, but I do have a personal question if you don’t mind. they said that people are working in IT and working on projects and stuff like that they’re pretty much introverts are you like that?

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 33:25

Yeah, I think it’s kind of a standard

Anita Mlakar: 33:29

Really?

Sandi Bitenc: 33:32

I’m also so.

Anita Mlakar: 33:35

I don’t have that feeling with you people. there are really some people who don’t even like to communicate and I don’t know answer questions but.

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 33:47

that’s probably because of the AMA.

Sandi Bitenc: 33:51

We like to answer questions on development.

Anita Mlakar: 33:56

Oh, yeah. The subject. Okay, Rok but I did have to ask you a little bit about you and your life because we would really like to know more and I hope you don’t mind.

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 34:08

No problem.

Sandi Bitenc: 34:10

I hope I can show this is something that the team is actually working on right now. So, we do have the TV app there and that actually run directly from Sierra Leone.

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 34:26

This is TV app that I was talking about before.

Sandi Bitenc: 34:31

A lot of TV stations there and actually, I can put up the sound, I think.

Sandi Bitenc: 34:56

This is already operational there on the TV boxes and everything and we are now shifting stuff to the app.

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 35:07

You think about that the blockchain is complicated until you start working with TV channels. And then you learn that the blockchain is nothing.

Sandi Bitenc: 35:17

The good thing is that those things are actually running from within our own network. So, what you don’t need to use the actual internet for this. Okay, if you’re outside the network, of course, need internet.

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 35:35

If you’re outside, fortunate, but if you’re in Sierra Leone, or anywhere, where we actually will give our service, if we’re connected to our network, we don’t need outside internet. It’s not counting towards your limit.

Anita Mlakar: 35:52

Rok, this is great job. Great work.

Sandi Bitenc: 35:58

This was now live.

Anita Mlakar: 36:02

Amazing.

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 36:03

You can see the delay because I guess you’re in Dubai, where it’s a bit of delay until you get to Sierra Leone.

Sandi Bitenc: 36:13

It’s running directly from Sierra Leone.

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 36:15

It’s directly from their servers. So, this deviate from there.

Anita Mlakar: 36:22

We have a question. I’m sure you will know more about it than I. I will just read it. Okay. So, if you are building, the ID solution by yourself, shouldn’t you integrate into or work with Atala Prism? Or will you coexist, then and won’t this be a little bit confusing for the people?

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 36:44

Yeah, the whole situation with digital IDs at the moment, we’re still in a phase where there are multiple technologies and we’ll see who comes out at the topper. Not even at the top, it will probably depend on the country also, because Atala prism. They’re focused on some specific sector, and they’re focused on Cardano and everything. It’s not like they’re the golden standard, and the whole world will use them or something. It’s kind of like the blockchain. We can’t say that some blockchain is the top that all others are useless or something. There are multiple technologies, they all have their specifics, the good points and bad points, it all depends on the use case. We of course are focused on the things that we need for our system. So, we need the users, we need to connect them, of course, we need their digital IDs, basic things, but we’re also focused on the things that the telecoms need or something, Atala, I think mostly focused on some educational parts to get your diplomas or something.

Sandi Bitenc: 37:52

It’s kind of abroad also. The problem right now is that it’s still not functioning. So, we are still applied to the presidency, and we are struggling there right now. So, it’s just you know, waiting, you never know when it’s going to be live, actually, in the end is a standard. So, there is the decentralized identity standard. And then there is the verifiable claims standard. So, these two are actually standardized. it is a proposed standard, let’s say it like this.

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 38:32

It’s not yet confirmed, yes.

Sandi Bitenc: 38:35

In the proposal, but it looks like it’s going to be and once, it’s just a data structure, the data needs to be structured the correct way because those verifiable claims needs to be uniform, so that everybody can read it, actually, and everybody can use it. It doesn’t matter where the digital entity was issued. Everybody can actually read it, because it’s a standard, and it needs to be machine readable. So, you need to get a question from an app, and you need to get an answer back. And the app needs to understand the question. So that’s why it’s really important. And it’s good that those standards are actually laid out pretty well. It’s just you can integrate them in a few different ways. And it doesn’t need to be a public blockchain. It doesn’t need to really be a blockchain at all to integrate them. So, you can run it like from a private also.

39:36

There are other things that you need to think about beyond that, that are not really laid out and that’s mostly it’s about the custody because you are now in control of your identity and you need to take care of it. So, you’re also responsible of losing it or not. So, if you then switch your phone, so how will you get it to your new phone, if it’s stored on the phone, because it’s your private data. So, it needs to be stored on some device that you can access. And we really don’t want people to be dealing with their private keys. So, this needs to be in a sense managed so that you don’t feel that you have a private key that you need to remember or store somewhere or something like that.

40:29

Phones are for sure something that are really good for this because you can store on your phone actually, the phones have their own storage inside that, for instance, the data of your finger prints or other biometric data. And you can also store some other things there. And this is what we’re looking for. And then also, we want to encrypt those private keys with your biometric data so that even if somebody steals your phone or something like that, they won’t be able to access it and use it. And it’s a lot of things that you need to think about once you want to develop something like this.

Anita Mlakar: 41:12

Well, Rok, how does it feel to be a part, or to be someone who’s developing something that is going to change people’s lives also?

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 41:22

I think it’s connected to the experience I had when I was in Africa, it’s really nice. Like, it’s giving people something new that did not have before or didn’t even think they could have, they’re in Africa, they can just watch the other world advance while they’re still there. So, it’s really nice to be able to some advanced in these terms or maybe even make Africa more advanced in these terms regarding to the other world, right? I mean, if we’re first doing the blockchain there, maybe it will follow in the other parts of the world.

Anita Mlakar: 42:02

Yeah, well, such a mission, I cannot imagine. And to be a part of it to actually do something, it’s really amazing.

Sandi Bitenc: 42:14

Can I jump in once more, I just want to say one thing, and this is 7749.

Anita Mlakar: 42:24

Okay, thank you. This was smooth now.

Sandi Bitenc: 42:38

I can do this also. Now, you need rewind and listen to it again.

Anita Mlakar: 42:46

You know, I was reading in community, someone said, just you know, getting the code is worth being on AMA. So yeah, thank you, Sandi, for jumping in. Rok, my question was, did you gain your knowledge, education in Slovenia?

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 43:14

I got most of the knowledge from the internet and from the actual, like, online, it didn’t really matter when I was in the, okay, of course, there’s the basic education that everyone needs, of course, you’re not going to learn the things that you don’t like from the internet, you just need to, but everything regarding the technical knowledge, I got from the internet, I searched for it, I watched YouTube, I watched Stack Overflow, I watched every social media, I found all the blogs that I could, I got everything from there, because once I was in the high school, or in the college, I already had the knowledge that was needed for the fields there because I needed in some part in before, I don’t know, maybe you learn something in the fourth year of the high school. But as I said, we were at the robotics competitions in the first year. So, I couldn’t wait for the last year to come to learn the things, like you’re forced to. I mean, if you want to advance if you want to have some things that others don’t have, you need to do it by yourself.

Anita Mlakar: 44:18

And with this, what you’re doing right now, you’re opening educational possibilities for everyone, let’s say from Africa, who wants to learn, learn by themselves by himself, you know.

Sandi Bitenc: 44:30

Decentralized education, I would say.

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 44:36

This is really big thing. The whole knowledge that is available on the internet at the moment, it’s amazing. I mean, if you want to become an expert in almost anything, you can definitely do it with the internet if you want. It’s definitely easier to be systems engineer or a programmer or something that to be a doctor from the internet.

Sandi Bitenc: 45:02

I can tell you can learn a lot about that about health from the internet. It’s like crazy how much you can learn actually, I think the problem right now, what we need to teach our children is actually how to use the internet and how to distinguish, you know, facts from fake news, because internet is full of some fake information. And I think that’s the most hardest part right now. So, the school system currently is totally outdated. So, you don’t need to learn any more information, I think. So, you need to have the understanding and how to combine and search for information and how to actually then put them in practice, but it doesn’t make sense to learn anything by heart anymore, I think, okay, not anything, you needs the basics. so, you need to know so much that you can know where to find more information about it and that you have the logical to put things together.

Anita Mlakar: 46:10

Yeah, this is the advantage now, I’m a mother and I still see how my son is getting this, let’s say, learning by heart education, in school, and then coming home and searching for other knowledge, and coming to me with everything else, but the things that they probably learned that day, it’s not everything is bad, there are really good stuff, also in schools, but getting the knowledge, looking for it, searching, you used to do it in books, you had to had a lot of books or libraries, you know, to go and find information, now you just have to click, but it’s not enough just to go to the internet, but to really know where to find information. So, I think that another part that that is very important, also for the African people, because they’re not so into this right now, with all the possibility or non-possibilities that they have internet is to actually teach them also how to get to those information, that is another step. A very important one. Educating them right.

Sandi Bitenc: 47:10

Yeah, absolutely! And I do think that we are also missing a bit more financial education in schools, and how to deal with these things.

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 47:29

I can tell you, I went to elementary school, high school, college, and there was not a single minute spent on the financial thing. Nothing. It’s like, we don’t live in a world with money like we live in, I don’t know, villages who trade with I don’t know, meat and something.

Anita Mlakar: 47:51

It’s true. And attitude towards money. And everything is something that is really missing. And maybe about a blockchain right now. Because this is really becoming- not becoming, it is a reality. And it’s happening. And I see that the youngsters don’t have any knowledge about it or know much about it unless they go to the internet and search for the information themselves. And luckily, it is available.

Sandi Bitenc: 48:24

There are probably some technical educational material in some schools in regards to how it actually works. And you know, the security part so on, but I don’t think that there’s any part that’s connected to the financial thing that probably everybody should kind of learn at least a bit about.

Anita Mlakar: 48:48

Yes, I do agree. Rok, I do have another question for you because we’re talking about decentralization and I wrote it down. So, I’m not going to forget it. From your point of view, how decentralized are the chains right now?

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 49:06

The basic chains are like most of them are highly decentralized in this regard. if we take the few main chains, let’s take the Bitcoin, let’s take the Cardano, let’s take the Ethereum, by the chain they’re really decentralized. I think there’s no problem that somebody would like to come or shut down half of them are hack half of them or something like this. This will go to the actual chain is decentralized. The problem is that your connection to it is definitely not. So, it’s like we can compare it to the actual to the whole Internet. The Internet is decentralized. if one provider in the country goes down or the whole country goes offline, you still have the internet. There’s no real way to shut down the internet but there is I don’t know if there’s only one provider in your area, he can easily cut your wire or go offline. So, we can definitely compare it to something like this. there’s always that one entry point that it can fail. And also, like one road to the town, I mean, there’s only one road in the town is still there. But if you can’t access it

Sandi Bitenc: 50:25

I do think that the major chains are quite decentralized. The thing is that usually how system work is that they tend to go into centralization. So, with time, I think it’s going to be a problem. If there is not a really some good decentralization mechanisms built in, you know, everything tends to go into centralization. And we’ll see how this plays out in on the long run, but I’m pretty sure that we’ll find a really good base about it. If you then look down a bit more down to other chains that are not like really in the top 10 Or even some in the top then they become less and less decentralized and more centralized. So, we actually have some that are like 100% centralized, like, ripple, you cannot say ripple is decentralized.

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 51:28

If we look at from the actual, like, not from the philosophical side of decentralization and everything, but if we come from the actual side of usability and everything you need. let’s say about how much you need the actual decentralization. Of course, it’s needed, but not to unlimited point or something, there’s like a sweet spot between the performance and decentralization, because what you want with decentralization, of course, is that your funds are safe, and that nobody can shut you down. So, you don’t need like whole planet of nodes to do it. Like, if you can do it with 1000 nodes and like, make sure that they’re distributed and that nobody can shut all of them down. I think from the usability use case, that’s kind of enough. Like, that’s the whole point of it. I mean, the point is, you cannot shut it down. So, if you can achieve this with, I don’t know, 10 nodes or something like this. it’s okay.

Sandi Bitenc: 52:26

Yeah, that’s for sure.

Anita Mlakar: 52:30

Well, I’m so glad that I’m getting all this knowledge on the subject that I had never dreamed that I would be learning about. So, thank you very much.

Sandi Bitenc: 52:40

Anita, we need to get to know you a bit better. So, we are here every weekend, you’re always asking the questions. We don’t know anything about you. So, I’ll put you on the spot next time.

Anita Mlakar: 52:54

We will this special AMA but no stream anyway. Okay. This three won’t be working. I’m joking. I don’t have problems with that. Since I am in communication business. So yeah, maybe I’m too extrovert, you know, Rok. So, if you have any more questions, there in community now is the opportunity to ask because we are coming to the end of this conversation. Another question, maybe Rok, your profiles are huge. There’s a big demand on the profiles that you have a lot of people searching for head of developments or IT experts. But how do you choose the project that you want to work in?

Sandi Bitenc: 53:41

He cannot choose. No, he can’t choose.

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 53:46

Sandi forced me. He has my family. I can’t do anything.

Anita Mlakar: 53:52

So that’s how it is.

Sandi Bitenc: 53:54

Yeah, that’s a centralized decision.

Anita Mlakar: 53:58

Okay. But you can answer me?

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 54:02

Yeah. No, at the end, it matters. Like, what you want to do what you feel like doing and I don’t know how to really say, and then do end up with, like, what is nice for you. So, it’s not like stressful, it’s the field that you want. Like, you have some vision, what you want to do in the future, like what you want to do with yourself what you want to do in the world. And in the projects and the ideas aligned with that. I mean, that’s the projects everyone should pick.

Anita Mlakar: 54:34

is the team important?

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 54:37

Yeah, definitely. I mean, you can’t build anything without a team behind it because you can try you can do I mean, you can do a lot of things by ourselves, but at some point, you need the team behind you, someone who can help you or make some decisions with you and things like these. You’re not you’re not centralized you’re not like a central point that will decide everything. It’s nice to have people behind you, like know what they’re doing, help you with the decisions, like have someone who you can explain to? And you need to do this, this and this, and that they actually does them. Like Sandi said at the beginning, you need to explain to people, like it’s not to everyone obvious that if you have a webpage, and you have a user profile that he needs to make a login page, I mean, some people forget it. They just like, make a page, make everything when you’re logged in, you see everything when you’re logged in, but they forget to add like another Login button. Yeah, it’s a standard thing. It’s not something that’s not possible to make. It’s definitely possible. I’ve seen it too many times.

Anita Mlakar: 55:47

It was really great to have this conversation with you.

Sandi Bitenc: 55:52

One more important question that we need to ask in regards to you know, decentralization, centralization, and those stuff. And this is how we will handle things like, you know, Meta Mask going offline for our users. So, Rok, can you maybe just explain a bit what we are doing in that regards and how we are handling these things?

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 56:24

So, it’s like good because we’re not dependent on some defaults from the Meta Mask because once we switched to SKALE, we now have our own network of nodes, we have our own RPCs. Like we’re the ones that decide who can do it. And like, that’s the whole point. We need to do what’s best for our platform. So, we put everyone’s RPC isn’t, like simple. We don’t want our users to don’t have access to our platform.

Sandi Bitenc: 56:55

Yeah, absolutely. And we are not only working with Meta Mask. so, we’re implementing other wallets right now. So, Coin Base wallet actually works already. And we just need to change the button because it’s now only for Meta Mask.

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 57:12

yeah, we didn’t have time to check like every wallet that exists out there but the app is written like it should work with the most Ethereum based wallets. the good thing in the like this blockchain space, and the chains that are similar Ethereum or beta copies of it is that they have the same protocol like same RPC. So, we’re not dependent on one wallet, we can use Meta Mask when you can use coin base wallet, you can use any wallet that supports the basic Ethereum RPC. So, we’re not dependent on anyone. That’s like perfect. And the whole protocol is open source. I mean, if we want it, or if we will see a need for it, we can make our own wallet. It’s nothing stopping anybody to make his own wallet. Everything is open source, the code is there. Instructions are there, everything is public.

Sandi Bitenc: 58:14

Eventually even one our own nodes that will connect.

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 58:18

Yeah, that’s definitely yeah. Once we have a telecom ready, I can imagine that in every country, we open, we have a one node because this is like, perfect. We have five or 10 telecoms over the Africa, and every one of them hosts one node. This is like, perfect in terms of decentralization in terms of speed to the network and everything. Like you don’t need to go to the other part of the world to get the response to your request.

Anita Mlakar: 58:48

Well, thank you. Rok, when will be your next trip to Africa?

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 58:57

Don’t know yet. Actually, we’ll see how the plans. First is the trip to Dubai. And then we’ll see how it goes with Africa. I hope as soon as possible because I like really to like down there. I mean, the weather is nice. I like the cultural switch a bit. So, it’s nice to go there.

Anita Mlakar: 59:21

Yes, it is. Do we have to give any more answers or explain anything more before we finish it?

Sandi Bitenc: 59:32

From my side we are good. I don’t see the chat at all. So, I don’t know what was happening in the chat. Mine shows like, blank chat. stream took too long to respond. And I’m just I don’t want to refresh the page right now because then I’m offline, I think.

Anita Mlakar: 59:53

Yeah, well, there were some questions but we managed to I think answered them all. And I don’t think we left anything out. some opinions about Rok and his work and about the conversation that we have about education and stuff like that. So, thank you for cooperating. And thank you for commenting and for the questions. And of course, don’t forget to be a part of our communities. We’re always there on Discord on telegram and on Twitter all the time. And then on next Wednesday, we will be here again at 5pm Central European Time to give you more information and to be answering your questions. So, thank you very much for being with us. Thank you, Sandi. Thank you Rok. Have a nice day Sandi. We’re looking forward to all the information about what will be going on. And we’ll be live again next Wednesday.

Sandi Bitenc: 1:00:54

Thank you, bye.

Rok Mihailovic Krpan: 1:00:56

Bye.


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