Web Pioneer Legend Brendan Eich

Chrome and the rest of the corporate browsers. His name is Brendan Eich and he joins us to discuss the early days of the web, the mess that he helped create and how he is helping to clean it up and lead us into a decentralized web3 world. Join us for a discussion with this brave legend on our Pioneers. Get all the heroes. Episode number 653. Of the Bad Crypto podcast.

we know it, right? I mean, he invented JavaScript. He he was really early in Netscape, which Netscape was an evolution of Mosaic, which was the very first that I know of. Right. And then went on to create Mozilla Firefox. And then, I mean, embrace this. This is an Internet legend. He's a pioneer of Web one, Web two and now Web three. And we got him all that crypto and we're bringing him to you.

about the brave browser. And in fact, we've been talking about the brave browser for five and five years, I would say, of hot minutes as a alternative to using evil Google Chrome on your your computer. If you want to keep your data in your privacy is the way to go. This is not a paid advertisement. This is not a commercial. This is actual recommendations because we use brave, we like it. And what really excites us is today we have the CEO and co-founder of Brave, Brendan Eich

is joining us right now. And we're going to talk about all kinds of things. Brendan, welcome to the Bad

Crypto podcast.

called them add ons back in the day. So when I left was I sat for a long time thinking about two big problems. One is that browsers, if it gets access successful, tend to be captured by a big tech company, like a search company, which is really an ad exchange like Google or in the nineties by an operating system company, which is really a word in Excel.

The Sweet Company that was Microsoft. And I also wanted to help users have a direct say in not only their privacy but sort of economics on the Web and users, if they're just eyeballs to be counted in favor of, you know, ad traffic or ad revenue, they're not treated as as first parties or principals in the economics. They're just kind of. Farm animals that get sheared of wool every spring and shiver. And that's how people in the nineties talked about our users. They were eyeballs. You are

monetizing eyeballs. User attention was creating a new data economy. Data was the new oil, which is a nonsense statement of our third one. And with Brave, I wanted to do something that was much more direct. It put users directly in the revenue share for private ads if they wanted. It allowed them to directly transact on blockchains with other parties to send money to. You all support your favorite YouTuber. So, you know, being disintermediated, being creator, economy, that's what was

on my mind. And to do both of those things, privacy and I would say direct economic user first participation required thinking about how to marry cryptocurrencies and security including privacy.

you know, I remember AOL buying Netscape. I remember when when when Bill Gates didn't even think that Netflix and Netscape was even something to be concerned about, and they didn't even have a browser yet. So these are these are yeah, this is really early on. So you're you're you're really early on in Web one. I would almost say you were in Web point five right through Mosaic became net Netscape. I keep want to say Netflix. If I say Netflix just mad me, it's not intentional. So

it's like, what? What did that really early internet sorta teach you? Because you were like the chief architect. You were building stuff really early with, with with Netscape. So how did that sort of forming and, and, and maybe how did that get in the JavaScript? Because you create, you build some really kickass foundational things for the Internet that we all use today. Many of us probably take that for granted.

we needed JavaScript. But Marc Andreessen of Netscape and Bill Joy of Sun and I argued that we did for the same reason that Microsoft had Visual Basic as well as Visual C++ and its stack. So you had one scripting language that was dynamic and easier to use for a great number of people to use to glue things together, build apps, patch things. And you had a more expert language for the component builders. So that was the idea behind JavaScript. But to just recapture the feeling of the

early web web one days, the PC was dominant. We all sat in front of big bottle monitors. We played Quake right after Doom. We were on Lands. We we didn't necessarily have great home Internet connectivity. AOL had City bombed the country to get people online through dial up and people were starting to get faster, you know, the street multi-tool and whatever it's called.

So this was more of a of a user sovereign world. It was the world where you could do your own thing, you could upgrade your graphics card, you could try stuff, you know, you could participate in hacking on software for the PC. And when I did JavaScript, it became very easy for people to hack on websites in a way that was programmed. It was enlivened with dynamic responses, not just on the server side, but on the client side. And so what we were trying to do with Netscape

was make the web lively and useful. We wanted to have images that was done at Mosaic and maybe we wanted to have cookies so you could log into your bank and then navigate around your different account views without having to log in every time because the HTP protocol was stateless, so it would not remember who you were and there was no way without cookies to keep track of you. So in some ways you could say tracking was invented through the cookie, but it was a good

kind of tracking. It was. First party, the site you go to intentionally, the site you need to know is really your bank and not an imposter phishing site. And that's still true to this day. So that was what you to before we didn't think about and I'm going

to set Netscape a year late and people wanted to fix it, but it was too late. Was that between images and cookies, there was an easy way to trap users across the web and build up a profile.

the nineties, the image, the cookie and scripts, JavaScript. And so I created a monster.

back the Web and show that the browser was not going to be Internet Explorer and Windows forever, which is what people would say, Oh, you can't drive a new browser and get traction. Microsoft cornered the market and you should just give up. And they were wrong. We showed that with Firefox. We restarted the market. We showed Sergey Brin in particular and Larry Page of Google. And they they liked it so much. They made Chrome eventually and Safari at the same time. Steve Jobs saw the value

of the web. So Safari was around the same time as Firefox 0.9 or eight because that's.

That's what John and Tim called it. But the point zero, which is kind of nerdy revolution that was happening through JavaScript and Moore's Law and browser innovation like in Firefox and Safari and Opera, and they also missed mobile, right? Even though they were doing things with Nokia, they missed the iPhone. So Microsoft, in my view, miscalculated. But they definitely, after becoming a monopoly power with the browser, they just abandoned their explorer, they went to.

those are not going to die. So people sometimes complain preinstalled on chromium, the open source that Google runs to build chromium, but it's also what edge is built on. Samsung browser is built on it, Yandex Opera and many others. So my my point here is that they're successful sort of open source DNA and we all share it and use it. And some of it goes back to Mozilla. So it's not all Google and a lot of it

goes back to Apple Web case. But then there's what you do with the product that gives the user a fair deal, and that is something Google will not do. They're still talking about blocking so-called third party cookies. Those are the ones from the embedded invisible pixels and scripts that track you. And they they just kick the can down the road again, delayed when they get rid of third party cookies in almost every other browser. The browser out there now does protect you to some degree from

those tracking cookies. Brave does the best job, but it's become standard except for Chrome, because Google is fundamentally this big ad exchange business.

up here only Chrome was on. So I'm actually I'm on Chrome right now, but I haven't had the power

that Brave downloaded yet. But now I just got it downloaded. What what would you say to people as to why you want to get on this? What's that? What's that that action for them and why would they even care?

This is an ongoing research and development agenda. We do it and you see it in the product in the form of a rape shield. It's the lion's shield at the right end of the address bar. And that's that's the privacy part of Brave. Right next to it is the Bat logo. That's the basic attention token. That's the feeling the user in for Brave Rewards, part of a

great user value proposition. But we we made privacy on by default and the web standards didn't I'm sorry Netscape did we kind of missed about even if Firefox did not make browsing on by default Safari probably do the jobs did they did private windows as an option in Safari before they were added to Firefox and they're now standard in all browsers. These are windows that just forget your your history and you don't save any cookies after you close the window. And that's not enough. It doesn't

give you network privacy. It doesn't protect you from from this tracking and privacy threat that is out there through ads. So we've made privacy by default happen for all the tracking threats. This just blocks all the ads. We've watched the YouTube pre-roll ads. So Brave is the best YouTube

app out there. By the way. This is something people are starting to appreciate that adds more ads. Yeah, No. As they overload the ads to push you in the YouTube premium, people are saying, Hey brave, this is already I can block ads for free.

there's there's malware distribution, too. But just the privacy raid also hurts you because we hear about data breaches every year. So all these adtech vendors are trying to profile you for their own business, their own exit to some bigger company, their own return on the venture capital investment. Most of that's dying now and it's consolidated around Google and a few other big players Facebook, Twitter. But this privacy cost is not just that you might have a data breach

or you feel spied on. You feel targeted by creepy ads. It's also that those scripts that keep running to target you in place, those ads burn your battery, especially on mobile, because they're running the radio a lot more like 40% more than if you block them. And so you get a real performance winning page load and rendering. You get a real battery savings with brave. And this is measured independently by outfit UK called Green Spectre. In 2019, they

showed a nice chart on Android. Brave was the winner in terms of battery savings and our own research team study just came to the same results. So it's an honest result. We walk so many scripts and reduce the traffic on the net and this also plays into your data plan. If you pay for that and everybody does pay ultimately somehow that there's a real savings to the privacy. And privacy means power of battery savings. It means faster paid for it.

which is useful for next year. This is there's a lot of functionality. All I've only encountered, I think one Chrome extension that didn't work in my brave browser, but ever all the extensions for all my wallets and LastPass and all those things metamask, they all work great.

Google turns Chrome into spyware. They made it part of their ad business, and I can understand this. They have to do this as a public company, but that's the opposite what we want. So we ripped out all that that Google account tracking and that maybe what broke that extension.

their designs. Well, many have by now, but you have pages on mobile that will never load because of all this crazy scripting and ad tech. So we block all that and there's a huge savings to your battery. It makes the page load faster. It's much more responsive. We do a great job with YouTube, so I do my I keep an eye on the YouTube app just for misery and to see what the ad pre-roll ads are and keep up with the Joneses. But it's a bad app. So in Brave we have something, we'll bring it to Android.

It's already on iOS called Playlist. If you load a YouTube video or another video on a different site, you'll see a button up and the address bar on the right to add the playlist. And you can open that video on the playlist. And it for me seamlessly switches over to a custom video player. There's no ads and you can save it for watching later. You can play it when you're offline on a train. You can do all sorts of things that you should be allowed to do.

You cannot easily get the file out or pirated, but that's okay. You're just viewing it. This is something that any. Web browser should be able to deal with any web video that's put out in a standards way, conforming way without DRM. And that's what most of YouTube is. So playlist is something I encourage people to check out on iOS coming to Android. It's really great for YouTube. You can save it and playlist. Watch it later. If you get interrupted, you don't worry about losing where you were

in the YouTube mobile or web app. It's in your playlist.

that's super small. And so is that something you guys are going to be integrating or something similar to that? Because it's almost like the automatic resizing of things saves so much space.

So we've found, by the way, in doing something called Brave News, which is another one of those batteries included features and brave. If you scroll up the bottom of a new tab page, you'll see a newsfeed and it's matched on your device, just like the private ads and rewards that you can opt into. And that private newsfeed is based on RSS feeds from around the web. Remember RSS and it has privacy preserving properties. It doesn't just build up a dossier or a profile of you on

the server side, and you can customize that. You can add your own feeds, you can take out some of the feeds that we think might be good for you. But the way we curate those is not by profiling you, it's just by sending catalogs down to you. Same with the private ads and then letting local machine learning match or in this case, very simple logic, just match what your history seems to be against what you get in the news feed that includes all the news sources and

just picks the ones that match your history. And that that's part of our toolkit here is to block things and to use a smarter way of getting content to you. And one of the things that I wanted to mention about news that you you inspired there is we do try to keep the images from being too oversized. And sometimes we find news sites like you said, are shipping the 4K down to the phone for no good reason.

So we actually have around that. So part of our greatest toolkit is to be a muscular client that has a lot of sort of smart filter rules that we can update quickly in a day or two to shield your privacy to get the right image sizes to you to block things and save your battery.

which is why my brave rewards are new. I just looked at my my iPhone and on here my brave browser says 96,000 trackers in ads blocked almost three gig of estimated data saved an hour of time and and I've got rewards in my brave wallet as well so let's talk a little bit about that the the rewards the the attention token and how we do that and how it's used within the ecosystem.

felt like Dr. Frankenstein a bit, right? They had their kill on Monster because that was not only draining your battery and exposing to all the threats we talked about. You weren't a piece you weren't out in as a real person who should be given part of the revenue. So from the beginning with Brave, I wanted to deal the user in to show, not just tell, that we

put the user first. A lot of upstart browsers and privacy products will say, you know, our product is the best and we put the user first, but talk is cheap. If we actually pay you at least as much as we get from the gross ad revenue, then that I think aligns our interests and avoids these conflicts of interests that the big tech companies have where they become adversarial toward their users in order to serve their shareholders and their bottom line. So we do that with brave rewards.

It's an optional system. We started out with Bitcoin and this was in 2016. We built a system where you could bring your own Bitcoin and you could send it to creators, website owners really who'd signed up with us. And it was pretty much direct. It was through Multisig wallets that Bitgo helped us with. So there was good security and no, no, no brave custody in the middle.

It was like a two or three month scheme. But we found that between the Bitcoin block size issue and the congestion in 2017 and the fact that people want to hold Bitcoin because you had Bitcoin back then, if you don't want to send it to some random publisher, you want to keep it because it's worth a lot more now even with current market. So we realized we needed a new smart contract system in a new approach that included the browser as an element in the system.

Because you cannot do ads and attention and privacy on the blockchain public blockchains, unlike zcash with pseudo transactions, but in general, distributed public ledgers or decentralized public ledgers are public. And that means that you can fingerprint the user by looking at transactions over time. Chainalysis Does this people discover who was behind the Mt. Gox hack or where the funds went? Things like that. People are looking at where FDX got its funds and where they might have gone.

So there's a sort of problem for privacy if you try to do everything on chain. Also, like I said, it got expensive on bitcoin in 2017, got expensive on Ethereum after that. So we always included the browser as sort of a ultimate edge in our decentralized system, where each browser, each supercomputer in your pocket or your laptop can do a lot of local processing to match ads against the catalog and to mint zero knowledge proofs or

sign your blind signature certificates. And this is at low cost, but it can preserve your anonymity, it can keep you shielded, and yet your you into the revenue flow. And that's what we built with great rewards as an opt in private ad system. You can also add your own funds. You can tip or give a recurring monthly contribution to creators.

We've got, I think, 1.3 million creators signed up. A lot of them are YouTubers because they either never got monetized or they got demonetized without being kicked off the platform. But YouTube is still where the videos are hosted. Well, in the comments or so, we provide those creators an alternative means for their fans to support them. And that

is the fan, the creator, Direct flow I mentioned. And once you form a relationship with that creator, you can even go direct through your self-custody wallet to their creators, wallet on chain, on a fast chain with low fees if you want to do so, we're paving the way toward usable self-custody and direct peer to peer crypto through great rewards. We're getting users from a very large funnel up to 60 million. It's been fluctuating on the monthly active,

so that's kind of a difficult number. I can explain more and we're getting those users. Funneled into crypto and in winter or summer or nuclear winter, whatever happened to FCX? Whatever happened there is causing a real chill right now. We're bullish on crypto. We think in the long run this is the right way to advance the users interests above all the central powers.

the stress about this. I appreciate Instagram. Right? So how does Brave give people relevant ads to products or services that they need when you don't know anything about it?

you with the same ad over and over. That's called retargeting. What we do doesn't collect any data. We don't want to be a mini Google. Then we'd have a hard time convincing anybody to trust us, even if we did share revenue. So we make the matching happen not in the cloud but on your device. And the way to do that is not to have all the ads on your device because they're big and they're video or web pages. We send links to those ads with keywords next to them.

One Perot in a catalog, and this catalog updates a couple of times a day. And it's not that big. This doesn't use up your data plan. This is kind of like what browsers do to keep track of malware and phishing threats with, say, browsing lists or our own filter rule lists for the rape shield. We update these these data files. And in the case of rewards, there's a catalog of ads you can get identified by their location, their web address and some keywords. So then the challenges

do the matching with local machine learning. Only when you turn on rewards does happen. It's like keeping a separate history and all browsers keep history usually for two weeks with great rewards so longer because your value may extend back 30 days to come and look that period in attack. But the separate history can be cleared by you. It doesn't leak out to us. We don't follow that history. But the local machine learning and the ad agent can then say, Hey, you can look in your car sites.

I'm going to pick the row in the catalog that has the car or the making model for that matter keyword that our direct sales team already did a deal for. So we're we're out there doing direct sales and we're working on scaling this up to get more demand partners in, but always with privacy. Instead of surveilling you and pulling your data into our cloud, we push out the offers to the ultimate edge, the browser in your pocket, and that's where the matching happens. And then if you do

see the ad, we have to confirm that. But that's where that blind signature cryptography I mentioned comes in in the future. Zero knowledge proof. So there are great tools in the cryptographic tool kit. They've been developed since the nineties and they're especially being used in blockchain projects for keeping you anonymous, keeping your identity unbreakable from the particular things you viewed. So all we have to do is get honest counting of the views for an ad to

show the ad buyer that the ad performed. They don't need to know about you. They might like to because a lot of little nosy that way. We don't have that information in our servers. We don't want them to have it. We don't need them to have it. And if the outperforms, then they should be happy with what they bought and that's where we share the revenue with you.

Popups are brave from the system tray, but they hardly touch it. That's not a valuable user. So monthly active users is a tricky number and it's not really well defined. But if you get into the hundreds of millions, you're on Google's radar. You get 60 million around there like we have. You're on Google's radar.

This was good because a lot of users want readability and finally we could do it. I think it happened in part because of competition. I think it happened also due to some, let's say, moral pressure, not the politicians or all that moral, but much of Congress people on antitrust Committee sent a letter to Tim Cook, and in that letter they said you should allow users to make a different browser or mail app be the default. And by the way, Brave's policy guy helped draft that letter.

So there's a mix of policy and competition and finding the right partners that we can use to grow and to get a bit more fair play playing field. And that's on my mind as we get bigger, because the bigger you get, the harder it is to get on to the phones. To replace Chrome, you have to find partners who will help distribute you or offset the distribution cost. This is this is true, especially now. It was even

true back in the Firefox days. The hooks grew organically very big before Chrome finally, I think in 2011 started to pick. And by the way, Google has to pay for distribution, too, because on Windows, as you know, edges is equal to Microsoft. Mm hmm. So Google's in there distributing Chrome, somehow advertising, doing some sketchy deals to push it onto your hard disk.

yells at me when I'm not using it. And I'm like, Oh yeah, I need to get back on that. What am I doing? And so it's like, what? What are some of those things that excites you the most about where you're going?

state is going to do something dear to you. We also have Tor built in the desktop frame that I mentioned that Tor private Windows for network privacy. What excites me about Web3 is that I think crypto gets to go social and it needs to, right? If crypto is just a bunch of hex addresses and signing transactions and it's kind of low level and sort of complex. It's like the internet before the web browser, before Mosaic, let's say.

It's like the old command line I used in the eighties and, you know, email was around then, so it's kind of familiar, but using it, we kind of miss the quality of that. But a lot of that stuff like Telnet and FTP kind of died for most people. And that's, I think what needs to happen with crypto.

And it's not to die, but to be abstract and simplify it so you can do what looks more like an app interaction or compound transaction or meta transaction instead of doing these little detailed signing and confirming transactions with hex addresses and using people and trusted identities, pseudonyms as well as real names to interact with people and build up reputation is going to be super important, I think. It shouldn't belong only to Twitter. Sorry, it shouldn't belong

only to Facebook. This has to be something that's decentralized and it's it's hard to decentralize, right? My my best idea right now is that you actually don't want to try to compete with Twitter. I don't want to do a brave Twitter. I want to do a front end in brave. This aggregates social and then lets you re aggregate it sort of like that news, brave news I mentioned where the RSS feeds can be matched against your

interests locally. So I want my Twitter friends. If they moved to Mastodon, I want to keep track them through my private address book, which I have for my Mac OS and iOS. I want to even resurrect them on a thread where they seem to have disappeared because they left Twitter. I got kicked off Twitter. I can find them. I can superimpose comments from different sources. In some ways

you can imagine YouTube becomes just as video hosting. If it weren't for this social aspect where people comment and that could be lifted out of YouTube and into the browser and the comments can be stored in IP address or even on your Dropbox or iCloud because they aren't that big. The personal Twitter Twitter posts they do even with images, is less space than my home pictures, videos of my kids. So there's something to be said for

user first that uses all the tools. It uses your private cloud, it uses gifs, which is not a blockchain, but it is a peer to peer network. It uses blockchains, it uses the browser storage, it uses the browser's ability to compose and decompose or aggregates content.

some good eyes on this guy here. I mean, he's like all muscle.

I want to become a big trillionaire. And but instead he said, No, let's give this money back to the people. Let's build a better solution, and we're going to do it together. And to me, like this, dude, this is what I have here in my book. Yup. I can't see. That's like I just raised my heart.

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