Welcome to The Third Web: A podcast about next-generation blockchain technology and it’s applications. I’m Arthur Falls. Today we’re looking at a range of problems and their solutions through the lens of a little known project: Gaze Coin. Under the Gaze Coin banner are a range of smaller projects. Among them, a virtual world of purchasable real estate, which serves as a content delivery channel. I first encountered Gaze Coin when founder Jonny Peters invited me to check out the project’s pilot content creation studio in Sydney. Jonny is an accomplished entrepreneur, who made his first move in the entertainment tech space in 1998. He began looking into transmedia and virtual worlds in the mid 2000s and hosted Crypto Coin, a cryptocurrency summit, in 2014. His vision for a narrative-vision virtual world and economy centres around one simple input: measuring users’ direction of gaze. Bok Khoo is the legendary Australian ethereum developer tasked with making Jonny’s vision a reality. This requires a range of tools and is the subject of our discussion today. Bocky Puba, Could you introduce yourself to the audience? Not everyone may know you, although you’re world-famous in Australia, that’s for sure!
Hi everyone, I’m Bok Khoo, an ethereum fanatic. Ethereum is my playground.
Tell us a bit about the Gaze Coin project?
So I know this guy, George Saman, who a few months back introduced me to Jonny Peters. And Jonny Peters has this vision of measuring gaze, the way you’re looking in the virtual reality world, to measure the gaze and to use it for advertising, marketing. You can tell exactly what a user is looking at and if an advertiser wants to pay for advertising it is a more precise measure. Gaze Coin is interesting because it allows me, myself, to test out a few different technologies from the ethereum ecosystem, while trying to merge blockchains into the VR world.
So can you tell us what the vision is of the Gaze Coin world and the virtual Amsterdam? I was in the offices a while ago and I saw the VR departments with parties and DJs going on, and storylines. The whole thing was really immersive and interesting and it was actually my first VR experience, so I was super impressed. Then to have this whole economic layer built in, that’s really interesting.
So Gaze Coin- the first use case is for advertisers to sell the advertising directly to users who are looking at their apps within the Gaze Coin world. That’s the first use case. But then it opens up a lot of different opportunities. One of the things that Jonny wanted to do is for people to create their own tokens within the Gaze Coin world, so you could buy yourself your own virtual apartment. You can then require people who want to enter your own virtual apartment to pay in your own token. And within your virtual apartment you might provide some music or a service. I see the possibilities as limitless. So the vision is for the Gaze Coin group to build to the initial Gaze Coin world and then invite other developers to hook into it. And the Gaze Coin itself, the token, will be the incentive mechanism for other developers to come in and develop something nice that people will want to visit and pay for.
So this is the classic two-sided marketplace deployment of tokens?
Yes. So once you have many tokens you need a decentralised exchange, so you’ve got to build that in. So you’ve got your virtual apartment, you’ve got other types of goods and services that you can buy or sell within the Gaze Coin world, so we’ll need to build a marketplace for these virtual goods and services. So I met Jonny in the studio and saw his green screen set up and yeah I had been told about the gaze and all that. So his main use case was advertising and managing to measure exactly where someone is looking and one thing to use tokens to incentivise for producers and advertisers to use the system, the VR system. But yes, there’s a whole load of uses that come into play with the tokens. So one of the big problems is you would expect that a lot of users in the Gaze/ VR world would not be familiar with cryptocurrency. So requiring them to use ethers to transfer tokens is super tedious. You’ve got 10,000 users and each of them need ethers to transfer tokens. That’s too hard. So the other problem is that if you are trying to measure the gaze and there’s going to be lots of people on at the same time, then you’re going to be generating a lot of transactions, so you would need to work out how to slow that down. To fit into the ethereum blockchain. Because the ethereum blockchain handles several 10s of transactions per second, so that’s one of the challenges. So this is a VR world where you have virtual assets, so you would need a marketplace. There are a few problems there that need to be overcome. This problem with the cryptocurrency, I’ve been thinking about it since the beginning of 2017 and it applies to mobile games, other marketplaces where you have non-crypto users. All we want the users to see is just a point in the system. Like one of the 1980s games, you just have a point. One of the ways of doing this is the ethereum message signing, which is being set up now. I’ve got the smart contracts almost written to send a signed message and a service provider can pick it up. And execute the transaction. The service provider sends the transaction fees and the fees for the users can be paid out of the tokens itself. That’s the Bok Khoo teleportation service. So that will solve the first problem where you have users who are not familiar with cryptocurrency to allow them to have a wallet on their phone or their app that accesses the gaze world services. And the users can pay for the service using their tokens.
So how do the users get Gaze Coin in the first place and load it into their wallet or application?
Initially there will be the crowdsale where people will receive Gaze Coin. These people will initially have ethers to contribute to the crowdsale smart contract so they should have ethers to transact if they need to. For other users I’m expecting that, as Gaze Coin gets built, we would be providing a fiat gateway, so you can use PayPal or a credit card and you pay fiat and you would receive your tokens into your account, so you don’t need ethers. Gaze Coin also a gateway in and out of these goods and coins as well as a fiat gateway. This is all part of the Bok Khoi teleportation service. Once you have it in your wallet you can jump into the Gaze world and the transactions will be happening behind the scenes. A user will create an account and it will be a button create account, and they would have a 24 word passphrase and using that we can generate the necessary ethereum account and that will hold the tokens. And the same accounts will then be used to sign the messages, which the service provider can pick up.
And so it’s by signing messages that indicate or validate future transactions, a little bit like a state channel, you can kind of batch send transactions, right?
So not quite like state channels, this is where the other part comes in. Micro eradon. So micro eradon is perfect for this kind of use case except that we might need to add a few more things to micro eradon but the source code is there. It should be released pretty soon so I’ll be looking into micro radar soon to see if we can utilise the infrastructure and to add on the Gaze Coin message signing technology to micro eradon. The other bit for the, so the measurement of the gaze to be somehow caged, and then periodically you send a transaction to represent a whole stream of gaze transaction data. So all that you see as an end user is just a number on the screen representing your tokens, and the numbers will increase and decrease depending on what you’re doing in the Gaze Coin world. And you don’t need to know that it’s a crypto token.
So forgive me for being a bit blunt but why has it taken so long? It seems like it’s a problem that’s been around forever and it takes a VR app to bring it to the fore. Quite seriously, Bok, in 2014 I didn’t even foresee scaling. I didn’t think bitcoin could succeed based on the scalability issues and yet still today, 2017 and we’re still messing around with addresses. In the case of ethereum it’s even worse because we don’t ever check if something’s a valid address, so you can actually mistype and destroy funds. It’s madness. Why is this only being fixed now?
Yes, I think that’s because ethereum has been quite focused on the developer ecosystem so far. So it’s only now that the end user kind of applications are coming out, so it’s just at the cusp of breaking out in the mass market.
But the same thing could be said of bitcoin, right? I mean that’s been around for a much longer time. So why has it taken so long?
Difficult question. I don’t know. You don’t see bitcoin or ether transactions happening in regular applications, do you? Usually you get wallets, your jacks, your MyEther wallet, but they’re not merged into a system like the Gaze Coin system.
So what’s the deal with micro eradon? It’s a phrase I’ve heard thrown around a bit but I haven’t had the chance to look into it, and for someone who’s looking to assess it as a solution is the perfect person to ask.
So micro eradon is different to radon in that micro eradon allows one service provider to create state channels to many individual users. Eradon proper allows many users to create the state channels so that you have a many to many relation, as opposed to micro eradon, which is a one to many relationship. Which is perfect in the Gaze Coin case.
So where can people find out more about Gaze and the Gaze Coin project?
Gazecoin.io. The Gaze Coin website. There is a white paper and there are several articles that are floating around the internet right now so if you just google Gaze Coin you should find them.
Thank you Bok Khoo. Always a pleasure.
