S17 E42: Bob Summerwill on Ethereum Classic & Bitcoin's Fork Season

0:00before Cover Episode 3 Hey, hello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is season 17 episode 42. We are live with the veteran of Forks, a master of stewarding, a fork of a popular project. Who is here to talk about the upcoming forks that Bitcoin is going to get?

1:04Actually, one of them is live. That's the Blake2Look-Dash Jr. fork. But the Paul fork, the Bipri-101 using drive chains, is coming out on the 31st of October of this year. So Halloween, which is also Bitcoin's 18th birthday, is going to be very eventful. This episode is sponsored by Orange Rock Lear 2 Labs, Cakewallet, Sight Shift, and Brains Hatchpower. And in the chat, you can already start typing numbers for the contest. Bob has written, yes, his name is Bob Summerwill. I haven't said that yet. He has written a number on a piece of paper, which we're going to reveal in about one hour. Welcome Bob. Thank you. Let's be here. So you have been with Ethereum Classic since 2016, when the DAO hack happened. Well, as an active job and role at the ESECORP,

2:06I actually started at the beginning of 2019. But yes, I was certainly a frontline witness to that forking in 2016, to show you. For people who don't remember, there was an exploit in a contract. And basically, the community in Ethereum was split between just leaving it as is, deciding that code is law. And it was their fault. I mean, the developers fault, which is the Ethereum Classic side, or hard forking to return the money to the investors. And that was the ETH side, which from a philosophical point of view, they were wrong. But I guess more of their lead developers and founders were on that side of the fork. So it's part of a reason why it became the successful one nonetheless. Yeah, I mean, it was certainly a very interesting kind of scenario.

3:13So I was actually working for the Ethereum foundation at that time. I was working on the C++ client, which Kevin Wood had started, and the very beginning of the project. And so the main net has been live for just under a year. And then you have this project called The Dow, which came about, it's through a company doing a project called Slokit. So Slokit was smart locks. So the idea being that you could do kind of like Airbnb things, or bonnet rentals, or any kind of lock box thing, and have those connected with on-chain transactions.

4:14So you could do these things in a decentralized autonomous way, where if somebody could have a pay crypto for an Airbnb style rental, and that could be used in a small contract. To unlock a box of what happy. And so for Slokit, they were doing fundraising for like launching the project. It was sort of the very beginnings of the ICO era, but you'd already had some pretty bad ICOs that did not deliver. That were like, thanks for the money. We think you promised to do something, but there's no means of enforcement. So what the Slokit guys decided to do, and this was announced at DevCon 1 in November 2015,

5:23was that they were going to do a down from the very beginnings of Ethereum. And prior to Ethereum even beginning, you'd had these ideas going round about decentralized organizations, decentralized companies, I mean, various Bitcoin adjacent projects, looking at that, back to the earlier days. I don't know if it was the case that like Mixabo maybe thought of some of these things. They were certainly a very hot topic around that time of November 2013 when Ethereum white people was running. So anyway, they're like, well, okay, let's go and do one of these. There's been lots of talk about that a smart contract platform would let you do some of these things.

6:25So let's stick with that and actually do one of them. But as that was going through, other projects were sort of thinking, well, okay, like if someone's written this sort of stuff, maybe we could do it as well. So it warped from something specific to that project into this, like let's make a down framework that multiple projects can use. And it just got bigger and bigger and bigger. Because it was such early days on Ethereum that there weren't a lot of applications. You're certainly no DeFi. Nothing very big happening yet. So this sort of ended up being the first sort of bigger project that people could engage with. You know, actually use smart contracts, actually do a real thing. Because a lot of people have just got their ether from the sale and they're just sitting on it and nothing had happened. You couldn't do anything.

7:28One of the features of that down contract was that they got this mechanism called Child Madale, which were used really for two purposes. Say within a particular setup, particular community, maybe some people are like, right, we want to go off and do something slightly different, right? You know, out of a fork, a fork of the people in the community and the purpose. So you could go off and basically make your own sort of thing. The other thing that you could use that for was if people started like voting for shit things that you didn't want and you're like, okay, this is like nuts. Some stupid thing is going to pass and it's going to like lose all the money and it will be terrible. So what you could do is say, well, actually, I'm going to go off and like basically like move my funds into this child down, right? I'm kind of opting out.

8:32And then there was an exit strategy where after about a month or so that you could basically like get your e-fear back. It's like, okay, I pull the out into the side. Nothing's happening and the money goes out. So anyway, that was presented by some people as the Dow being risk-free. It's like, you know, if anything, you know, you don't like it. Well, it's fine. You can get your money back, right? So it's almost like, you know, a risk-free sort of like sovereign bond, you know, you kind of go out, you can't go wrong at the bottom end. So what that led to was just a huge number of people like putting their ether in because it's like, well, like, you can't lose, right? So and I can't do anything else. There's not a lot of other apps. So sure, why not? The other thing that they did was there was no cap on the raise, you know, so a number of the ICOs even earlier had

9:38set a cap, you know, this is the maximum amount that we want to raise. But they didn't do that. So it's just uncapped whatever anyone puts in, like there's no top. Both because you've got this, well, you can't lose. And also because you've you've got this pattern of saying, okay, it starts it out being slock it, but this is anything. So it's like, okay, this is basically going to be like the fund for ecosystem development, right? You know, maybe a lot of other people are wanting to build things and we kind of, you know, we can provide them funding out of this. So it's kind of like, sort of like, here's it, an ecosystem fund for the whole of Ethereum, you know, ended up being very big and broad. And as this was going through, I mean, I, a couple of major reservations I had,

10:38firstly, like, is this even legal? Will it be seen as like, you know, money laundering or you know, like an illegal security, which it did actually turn out to be like the SEC after the fact did retroactively declare it a security, but it ended by that and so there were no consequences. But the other thing was actually another two, another two, you had a whole bunch of people who who were, you know, the primary known people specifically in the Ethereum foundation, put forward as they call them curators. So what they were meant to do is as people sort of made proposals and the proposal would include like a smart contracting to run for their stuff, the curators were meant to sort of verify that people were, it was what people were saying.

11:38Not necessarily they weren't making judgments on what, what could or couldn't go in, but they were sort of seeing this seems legit. And on the website for this, those people were all front and center. It's like, you know, Darrell Harb, you know, Gavin Wood, Ethereum, well, Parasite, you know, the Talik Ethereum foundation. And so all of these people, it looked like it was basically their project and it looked like it was an Ethereum foundation project. And so my concern was like, those individuals have probably got like personal liability for this thing, fucking up, you know, they haven't got a legal entity within them. They've not got any of these levels of protection. It's just like, okay, it looks like it's a Ethereum foundation project. And it looks like you guys are the ones that are doing it. So, you know, a bunch of these people potentially having big liability. And then the other concern I had as well is it's like,

12:43so you've just got like a big load of money. It's like in the real world, how's about this for an idea? Anyone can just pull money into the bucket. You don't know who they are. You don't know what their judgment is, what their experience. And then we'll just like vote on what happens with the money. It's like, how an earth is that a good idea? You know, just here's a bunch of randos and they're just gonna like make some decisions and you kind of have to go along with it. It's like, okay, if the goal is to build the ecosystem and the other thing was with these proposals, it was like, they were meant to be like money making, right? It's not, it was like, here's our business plan of how we're gonna spend the money and how that's gonna like make funds back for you. So those are my concerns. It's just gonna be all fucking shit, you know. It's not

13:45gonna be a good way of achieving it. But actually ended up happening is that, you know, there was a there was a bug in the smart contracts and somebody basically drained, drained amounts of funds. I think it was, I heard it was like 14% of the market CAD was put into that, you know, it was a significant chunk of the whole money supply went into that smart contract. And you know, so somebody worked down that there was a you know, that there was a particular sequence that you could have of reentrancy where the smart contracts could have like called back on themselves. And it was, you know, it's like an accounting issue of saying like, here's an ATM and you're like, we're drawing the money. But it doesn't

14:47actually like change the balance in the database before the end. It's like, okay, can I withdraw some more and withdraw some more and withdraw some more and, you know, it's like it's not accounting for that till the end just because of this issue. So yeah, you ended up with this situation where basically somebody's, you know, effectively like run away with a giant chunk of the money supply. And it's not a bug in the platform. It's a bug in a particular application built on that platform. But the the other difference that you had because it was a, you know, a particular application was because of this like child like withdrawal mechanism thing that was time locked. The person had not run away with the money instantly. You know, it's and friendly enough to just

15:48think in the last few days. The thing with liquid, right? It's kind of an analogous situation where liquid did not have a ton of lock. So, you know, somebody could find this bug and basically just instantly run away with that money. You know, and that's obviously very problem-massive because you haven't got any time to act, right? It's done, right? It's gone. The money's gone. I mean, I guess a number of its chain chacks or other things are of this nature. But what you had with the Dow was that there was an opportunity to decide or to try and talk through what would happen. So, and what you had at that point was this real schism of the community where

16:49the minority side was really, you know, typical cipherpunk original mindset of saying, well, the whole point of the blockchain is to have an unutable database. And if something's happened and, you know, the money's got stolen or what have you, well, tough, you know, it's just just suck it up. You know, that's unfortunate. But if you start interfering, you know, you're really undermining the whole, you know, the whole ethos and purpose of a blockchain. So, I mean, that was certainly my immediate reaction is like, of course, you don't do anything like what are you talking about. But you also had

17:53many people which in the end to them to be the majority, probably 80 to 85% of people. And their view was if you can do something, you should do something, you know, that you can have this kind of situation and unlike any other prior point in history, you don't have to appeal to authority. You know, you don't have to go and talk to the police. You don't have to, you know, talk to a government or regulator or any of that stuff. You have the ability to change the situation just within, you know, that people can constantly collaborating within that community. And I think for that group, especially, it was felt that way because the intention with a lot of that money was to build the ecosystem, right? That money was for building things,

19:01you know, it's it's always like community money. It's almost like you had a treasury. I mean, it's not a centralized treasury, but logically, it's close to that. And a reaction from a lot of people with that mindset would be, okay, so this is a theft, you know, someone stole all my fucking money, like fuck you, man, what what are you doing? And and if there's an opportunity to, you know, to stop that happening, then, you know, we should take that opportunity, right? That's a mindset of saying, you know, maybe this thief assumes that there is such rigidity of thinking that we're just going to let you run away with the money. Like, no, another, another thing there, the way I saw that explain, which, funnily enough, I saw from

20:05Charles Hoskinson. So Charles had a, had a talk at Ethereum, sorry, ETC, summit in 2017, where he said a lot of people would say that there were there were two ethereum's from the time of the fork, but from his perspective, there were always two, the theorems from the very start in that multiple visions were presented and were appealing to different groups of people. You know, so one of those being Bitcoin with smart contracts, you know, that you that you had a, I mean, prior to Ethereum was basically had Bitcoin, like Bitcoin was was everything that was, we have, you know, some, some other small projects around it, but essentially Bitcoin was like

21:05everyone was a Bitcoin. So Bitcoin with smart contracts is just like, okay, well, yeah, I want Bitcoin, but I want some, I want more progen mobility, but, but still seeing ETHER as money in the same way as Bitcoin is money, but, but you can do more. And if you are of that mindset, then yeah, you know, you don't want interventionism, you know, the immutability is absolutely sacred and like, of course, you don't change anything. But there was another chunk of people which ended up being the majority in the end who did not view ETHER as money that for that group, Ethereum was a decentralized application platform, you know, more analogous to like his Android or I also Windows or the web or whatever,

22:07you know, here's a platform that you build applications for. And the applications are what is important, you know, it's not primarily money. It's like, yeah, Bitcoin's your money, that's fine, we don't need, we don't need another money as well, but we do want to build a whole bunch of other applications. I mean, messaging that you would have from the project and from the foundation in those early days was explicitly like saying that, sort of saying ETHER is, it's like, it's oil, right, it's a commodity, it's not, you know, it's not, a currency, it's a commodity and yes, there's value in that commodity, but it's also consumed, you know, it's fuel for the engine, you know, you're using it and spending it to do that computation. But that's the primary characteristic, right, it's not primarily money.

23:07And if you're of that application mindset, then you're like, okay, well, this is a bug, you know, there's a bug in the platform. And yeah, it manifested in a particular application, but the end effect is that like end users are getting damaged. So we're going to fix it and you could say, well, you're fixing in the wrong place, you know, why, you know, but it should be fixed in the application, but I mean, the fact is if you're a software engineer or you've been around the tech a long time, you know, that like hacky fixes happen all the time, you know, like some some little horrible patch put in, which is not in the right place and it's some kind of special case, but the outcome of it is, you know, that you that you fix the fix the thing.

24:08So many of you think of Windows, for example, you know, the Windows applications like from decades ago will still work. And the reason for this is that, you know, Microsoft just wanted to keep them working, right, it's kind of been this kind of user pledge of saying, we're going to keep all this old stuff like runnable, like forever. And how that is going to manifest is, you know, in Windows, there'll be a whole load of shit that's just like if application version is Office 3.1, then, you know, return a different value and then you would normally because that fixes some hackle, or whatever. So, so yeah, for people with that application mindset, you know, there's a bug and you can fix it, like, of course, you're going to fix it. And also, you know, it's like someone's stealing money so fucking as well, you know, if, you know, the if you've got this assumption that

25:12someone's going to just be allowed to get away with it, well, no. So, you know, that kind of discussion, you've got, you've got sort of basically a full month in which that was what that was happening, both between people at the foundation, client teams, the multiple client teams, some outside of the foundation, some within community members, you know, application developers, project people, like everyone, of saying, well, what's going to happen here? So, you have immediately, as it was happening, this sort of request, hey, exchanges, please stop trading, oh, we work out what's going on. Okay, if any guys, please stop trading. It's a very famous course, Vitalik in Samayur, C-Turbed. Yep, that's right. I think it was actually from George Hallum, not Vitalik himself, but yeah,

26:13that message went out. I can't remember it. Well, one of the one of the the, uh, uh, attempts of one of the exchanges also said, you know, I regret trading the shit coin, what a forget disaster, this is kind of thing. Um, and yeah, you had proposals, okay, well, maybe you can be a soft thought that's, like, black listing, black listing, these extract, you know, particular addresses, it's like, okay, well, maybe we can just do this, right? It's just like freeze it, you know, it's just going to get black listed and stuck forever. That was one of the first proposals, but they worked out fairly quickly that that would become a denial of service thing. And that was just not viable that it would be problematic that way. And then the other proposal was, uh, was a hard fork. Um, and that hard fork, it didn't rewind anything. You know,

27:18it wasn't that kind of like go back to an earlier block kind of thing. Um, instead it was, what was called an irregular state transition. It's quite a good, good, euphemism. But what that did was, um, it basically changed the smart contracts that were deployed at particular addresses. So, all of these, like the down and the child down, all of the, you know, basically all of the infrastructure that being put together on chain for the down, all of those just got turned into refund contracts, you know, really simple refund that's like saying, okay, just call this contract and it will send your, your ether back to your original address. And, you know, it never happened.

28:21Um, so, so yeah, not undoing, but basically staying okay, that stuff, it's not going to continue, it's just, that's interesting because the narrative about the situation is that there was a rollback of the blockchain. Yeah. And yeah, in terms of previous state before the DO hacked, the DO hack happened. Yeah. So that is not what happened. I, you know, I've seen that as a common kind of misunderstanding. Um, often from Bitcoiners who didn't really like know about smart contracts or anything, you know, we're just like, hey, Ethereum's a scam and, you know, smart contracts are useless. So not really caring to understand those details. Um, I mean, one funny consequence of that is users had to take this action to get their refund. So even now, there are some of those

29:23that have still not claimed their refund. You know, people, I guess, who didn't have their eyes on the ball or just never bothered or whatever, but yeah, you've still got some of this stuff just like hanging around, but potential future refund. So yeah, it was not a trivial flip back at all. Um, but it was a, a breach of immutability because it was changing, um, whether that's that else on planning state. And we did another thing I guess to say about that is that it was effectively changing ownership of coins without Christ, without use of a private key. So again, that that's kind of your breach is that the fork was changing those,

30:23that those semantics and that ownership because it was taking ownership away from the attacker. You know, so there was some kind of message that came that was published, supposedly from the hacker or maybe it's just a complete, you know, crawling, saying that if there was a hard fork, that he intended to take legal action, um, on that basis of saying that his, his funds were being stolen from him, that he had, um, you know, found a feature of the small contracts and he just used that feature, um, of gaining this money, um, and saying, well, look, I didn't, you know, I, I just used the code as written, you know, I didn't, I didn't do anything wrong. You know, I didn't

31:23infiltrate anything or steal keys or anything, I, I just used the small contract as published. Um, so these funds are mine, you know, if you are doing this, you're stealing my property, just, yeah, kind of, I guess, you know, it's not, it's not completely, uh, like, irrational, because another thing that they said, as part of the, um, the, the Dow launch, was code is law, you know, this, this really strong like, you know, code is law, ethos of saying, um, we're building this new thing, right? This, this Dow is, it's a new type of thing in the world, right? You know, this is a, a, this has never been possible before, right? It's, it's kind of like, uh, when corporations first happened, right? You know, here, there's this new thing, you can make this corporation and it's kind of like a person, but it's in auto, but it can sign contracts and,

32:31you know, here's a new thing. So really saying that this, this Dow was this, this new kind of thing, uh, which was, code is law, uh, it, you know, it, it, it was independent of the people, you know, got third parties involved, it's, it's, it's this, this new kind of thing. And also then, at saying explicitly, our textual descriptions of this thing are ultimately just informational, and if you participate in this, the actual reality is the code on chain, you know, in case of dispute or disagreement, the code on chain is the ultimate truth, right? That is the contract that you're, uh, that you're participating in, you know, and for the first time ever, it's a, you know, an executable contract and you've got this duality of, of, of, of, this is, these are the rules,

33:38and this is the implementation and, and they run. So then it's like, well, if you actually really say that, then any bugs like they're on you, right? That, that's what you did. That's what you publish. That was the contract. You explicitly said that was the contract. So if there's a bug in somebody text advantage, well, like they're not actually doing anything illegal, they're not hacking, they're just using the functionality you made, right? And maybe it isn't what you intended, but you know, well, tough shit, you didn't have any disclaimers. You literally said this is, this is the deal. So yeah, you know, some really kind of interesting, uh, hans and consequences and this overlap between technical understanding and, you know, the social pieces and, and that. So, so yeah, how, how that then manifested is that

34:38ultimately you had new, uh, client software releases, which had this, this hard fork in it. And and but they supported both ways. So it's really like here's a vote, essentially, you know, here's some new software. You don't even have to run it at all. Like you can run on, you know, stick on existing software and nothing will change or you can use this newer stuff with, you know, support hard fork on or off command line settings. And you know, we're going to see what happens. There will be an activation block and people are going to run what they're going to run, you know, ultimately that's the, that was the decision making. You know, you did obviously earlier have polls, various polls that people did coin votes, minor votes, just whatever, you know,

35:39Twitter, you know, and variety of different, um, polling and just ongoing discussion, most of which was on Reddit. But nobody really knew what was going to happen, you know, it kind of looked like there was this, you know, majority in favor of it, but no real certainty as to what would happen on that activation day, you know, would, would people be running this, um, you know, do not hard fork mode, would people be mining on that, you know, would there be miners mining that original chain or would ever go, um, but what ended up happening was, I'd say probably, you know, 80 to 85% of, um, of that hash rate, um, but also just, you know, of, of people running clients and just involved on, on social channels, but you did have this strong majority in favor of the hard fork.

36:45Um, and, you know, it's not like, oh, Vitalik was the dictator that forced that, or even, you know, the Ethereum foundation, like, you know, forced that decision or anything. Um, from what I saw, it was very, um, open and consensual, that you just did have a very large chunk of, of the Ethereum community that had quite a different mindset than, than the Bitcoiners that, that they had come from, that, that you had this large chunk of people who, you know, had, had really quite different, um, priorities or, or thoughts, uh, and were not that hardcore enough for that to override somebody's stealing all the money. Um, and on the ETC side, I mean, Ethereum, you know, that naming came a little bit later.

37:50I'd, you know, maybe some people were starting to say classic, but, um, you, you, you, you really had that, that minority and some people mind it. So, you know, the chain, the chain kind of kept going. I think it was a bit sort of stop, start of first little while with, like, difficulty adjustment stuff, though the difficulty adjustment on Ethereum is a lot, um, more rapid than on Bitcoin. Um, you know, like you saw with a bit 110, you know, utterly stalling where you had that softwa, right? And, and, and if being a very minority, uh, of the, of the hash rate, which, which mind a bit 110. So it's effectively the chain ground to a halt. So I think you had that a little bit on ETC, but, um, the adjustment is an awful lot faster. So, uh, if, you know, we, you have people minding it and off you go, you know, it, it continued and then, uh,

38:54fairly soon after that, you had an exchange listing as well, um, with Poloniax, um, choosing to, to, to list it. And then, there you go, you know, you have a, uh, a minority chain that survived. And to my knowledge, that's the first time that had ever happened. The received wisdom at that point was you would have a winner and a loser. You know, I guess, like, this, the quote from Satoshi Wright about, uh, you know, it will go very badly for you. If you're on that, uh, on that side, but yeah, what you had with ETC is, oh, right. So that, that, that can work. You know, if you, if you have a situation where you have got these irreconcilable differences, uh, you know, you don't have to stay together in misery, you know, you can get a divorce, uh, you can succeed from the union. It's, it's kind of okay. Um, and that was, that was a learning. And, and, you

40:02know, I remember at the time, just thinking, you know, well, what a wonderful thing that is, it's like, well, great, you know, you, uh, you know, everyone can have what they want. You know, and you, you don't even have to pick a winner. You know, just, just hold both sides. If, uh, if, if you want, or if the other solid, you know, whatever, discuss to you so much, well, sell your coins at some free money. Like, you know, you've, you've lost network effect in that split. Um, you know, it's not, it's not like a zero cost thing to have, to have that split. Gileman, if you think of it in terms of, you know, like a country, if you think of that, whatever, Texas, seceding from the union, all of a sudden a bunch of things that were done federally, you've got to do yourself. So you have that kind of analogy as well here on Forks. Or say with just with open source projects, you know, nothing to do with crypto, you know,

41:03whatever, different Linux distros or, you know, any of those kind of applications. If you split, well, yeah, okay, well, you, you're going to have to set up a, you know, set up your website and your communication channels and laws of motion, you know, there's a bunch of things that you've got like redundant costs from. Um, but, you know, people do this all the time, you know, that you, this is the, the pattern of, of, of countries and groups and everything is, um, you know, things, if you, if you've got differences after a certain amount of time, you, you know, you, you can't make it work. And so I mean, the fact that you can do that with blockchain projects was, was great, you know, that was a, like a learning at that time, if, well, okay, that, that's fine. Yeah, something that I do like to argue is that Forking is part of the Nakamoto consensus. And you can have friendly Forks where everyone agrees that this version of

42:08the code is not fitting or does not work anymore or it should be left behind for some reason. And then everyone moves to the new version. That's one way of doing it. But another one, which is quite, I guess, more common is one where you leave behind some people who don't want to upgrade to the latest version. They own like the new rules. So they're going to be like a different faction going forward. And we're going to see some of that in Bitcoin. Before we get to that conversation, I just want to acknowledge that sell the agarist was in the chat like 30 minutes ago. And he said that he got wiped out in the Dow hack. And he still supported ETC, the one true Ethereum. And I think this is not an unpopular opinion. The first episode that I did of the Bitcoin takeover podcast, which I remastered like a couple of weeks ago was with Donald McIntyre was a collaborator of Nick Sabo's and his wife Elaine Wu. I'm not even sure if that's public or not,

43:12but I've heard people talk about this. I think even Tim May and his last interview ever he mentioned and did. So I hope I didn't reveal anything secret. But my point is that a lot of these cipher punks were on the side of Ethereum classic trying to make it work. And for a long time, there was also some funding that was given to Ethereum classic because there was a long term bet that this fork is going to be the one that takes the miners once ETH is going to switch to proof of stake. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, famously, Barry Silbert purchased some ETC at the time of the fork and said, you know, that's my first data and non-bick coin digital asset that I've been involved with. And he said, I don't know if he said like he thinks there's a 50-50 chance or 25% chance that ETC

44:17would, you know, would would would would would become larger market capman Ethereum in the end. And then from that grayscale side, they had that I think was their second fund that they had, you know, in this in this period where you had private funds before ETFs, you know, happened. So for a long time and even now, they had a fund holding ETC and a proportion of the fees for that were given to the ETC cooperative, which I was later the executive director of for six years. With the idea that they're being if you if you have funding for doing development and building that ecosystem, then that's going to have a good upside on the price that then benefits those

45:21those holders, you know, so again, it's a kind of is sort of almost like a treasury in protocol funding kind of thing, apart from not not in protocol, you know, with an auction on top. But yeah, you you had a decent number of people who haven't participated really within the Ethereum ecosystem to that point, but that they felt that that's ETC flavor was aligned with their interests, you know, that if you did have an Ethereum flavor, which was which did not have the Ethereum foundation sitting on, you know, ICO funding and that you you did have this strong immutability conservative ethos, you know, basically like, you know, Bitcoin philosophy, Ethereum technology that that was something that was that was appealing to the

46:28so yeah, I mean it's you you have a stronger conservative flavor arising so yeah, it's it's not like yeah, it's kind of like which group is leaving I guess you could say, you know, is it the wild child been thrown out of the house or or is it, you know, a group of people moving on to do something exciting and leaving the people who don't want to participate behind. I had a shared house at one point in my early 20s where there were five of us just random people, you know, would not meet me to make each other before it was just like, you know, renting rooms in a shared house kind of thing. So, you know, we all turned up and nobody knew each other, but, you know, we're all at the beginnings of our careers, not a lot of money and you know, just just

47:30doing that. And one of the girls that was there, she was so weird, she was just like really weird, really sort of like, anti-social like, like you'd be sitting in the living room and like, she comes in the door and then just like pisses off straight to the room, you know, without even saying, heart, if not anything. She'd like put like marks on the milk bowl, she's like, how much milk is there? I'm putting my marks so that nobody can steal my milk. And she was just really weird. And so the other four of us, we just went and got another house, we didn't even talk to her, but we're just like all left. We're just going to go somewhere else and we're, I have a shared house, but without you. So just leave someone behind, you know, and that can happen. Or a party, right? You know, some weirdo turns up a party and he's just completely wrecking it. Well, you

48:32don't have to stay, you can just go off. It's interesting that usually it's Dean Toulor and one remains. And it's the same ones that leave for some reason. Yeah, and I mean, maybe it's just as simple as being proactive versus being reactive is, you know, some people, they do take things in their hands and they're active and they go and do stuff. So yeah, maybe that's not so surprising as if you're sort of a frontier adventurer, you know, off into the brave world, well, you know, you're going to be moving around. You're not going to be staying. So yeah, off you go. Something similar happened to me in my 20s, except that I was renting an apartment like everyone had their own room. And I had my own. And at some point, one guy showed up and he was friends with someone else and he said, can I sleep at your place

49:35until I find a job and we're all the same age and we're like, sure, man, you can stay with us whatever. And then he ended up being the the freeloader type. Like he hasn't left. It was like three months. He got a job. He wasn't paying for anything. He was eating our food from the fridge and whatever. And then he had no shame. And actually we had a PS4 or something. And he was playing on it all day. And I was like, what's happening here? It's like we have this parasite inside our place. And the only solution to actually get rid of him was to move to other things without him. So it's very similar in this regard. But yeah, I do want to ask you on the topic of forks. Like, why do you think that Ethereum classic, despite being the more sane version of the fork, the one that actually respected the cipherpunk tradition, the one that had support from these guys who are actually veterans in the field and having a fixed supply, which is something closer to Bitcoin and

50:37trade to stale in a more conservative way with I think for a while, the conversation was to have side chains. I think there were called strata or something. Yeah. I remember interviewing Egor Artimono and he was mentioning that this was sort of his project. So in spite of all of these, somehow ETC ended up just copying Ethereum, ETH, like just porting Metamask and whatever, trying to keep up. And also it did not succeed. So where do you think the tipping point actually was? And what was it that actually prevented this from becoming the dominant Ethereum fourth? Because this is also relevant for what's happening in Bitcoin today. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think on the simplest level, it was because you had such a vast majority in support of the fork.

51:38The foundation just ceased funding the ETC side. I think a criticism people had is like, oh, the foundation is picking the winner. And it's like, right, you're cast out. You've got a rebellious teenager and you're like, you know, get out of my house. I'm never speaking to you again. And it's like, okay, that's not that's not great parenting. You know, maybe this kid doesn't want to talk to you and hates you, but you know, still keep saving the money for him. Keep supporting him, right? So that that is not what happened. It was really like, okay, well, the fork has happened. That's the winner. We've got a trademark as well. You know, so the foundation determines what's Ethereum because you have a trademark associated.

52:42And yeah, like no funding is going on that side. But you also had the major project then deciding, okay, well, we're just, you know, we're going to stick on Ethereum side because that's where most of the people are, where the IGOLs are, the users, you know, all of our peers. So you didn't have a lot of application development left on that ETC side. And I think a misconception that a number of people had as well was, well, all of those applications, you know, they're going to be on the ETC side as well, right? You know, it's the same chain. We thought the same chain. It's all deployed. It's all the same. But for those to work, you have all of these social pieces that go with that tech stuff is, it's like, well, is there a website? You know, well, you've got to have a different version of that website that's points into a different chain.

53:45Maybe if you've got funds within there, well, like if the existing developers aren't like continuing, well, that stuff's a lot, right? They've got the private keys on both sides. And if they just don't want to carry on and participate, well, you know, the thing is stuck. And maybe you could, if those are completely open source, you know, somebody else could do a new instance of these things. But they're not going to be insane. They're going to be different. And we don't have any integrations. You've got of those into particular platforms. You know, there is need like redoing. So I mean, I guess it's the same on on these more recent Bitcoin forks is, well, you know, maybe the mining, mining pool code is going to be changing. The wallet code is going to be changing. And any kind of like online services that using those or integrations with payments or anything,

54:45everything has to be touched. And if the majority side people don't have interest in also having a deployment on this other instance, then it's, you know, it's just going to like die. So this assumption, oh, well, like, like, ETC is going to be, you know, a complete clone of Ethereum and have all of the same things. That wasn't actually true. So, so yeah, I think that combination of less eyeballs, less developers, basically no like no access to the existing funding sources. So, you know, what you had with Barry and others coming in, that was that was net new. And that was that was essential, but you you had significantly smaller resources and potential. And I think that's that's really the same for any for any fork. But if the initial ecosystem is

55:55really big anyway, even a tiny fraction that still be, you know, really significant. You know, so we have a look right now, for example, on Bitcoin Cash. So Bitcoin Cash is obviously like significantly, you know, that you could see that's that's, you know, the failed side of that fork, obviously in terms of, you know, adoption and usage, but the market cap is still 4.5 billion dollars. I mean, there are multiple factors in play. Maybe that's some BTC holders never claimed their B-C-8. So there are a lot of dormant coins that aren't doing anything. And that's part of the reason why the market cap is so high and the price held up. But also, I think it benefited from a lot of grassroots adoption. Thanks to Roger and a bunch of other guys went to some places that they

56:58knew previously because they were doing this for BTC. And they just asked them payments processors, exchanges, ATMs, whatever, they're supporting BCH also. And then time's of high demand or whatever, it's an alternative. Like I've developed this theory that I don't think Bitcoin is one unique project or one network. It's a greater idea that multiple projects are trying to achieve. And maybe that BTC will be the one that achieves everything, maybe not. But I don't care which one is going to be the successful one as long as we get the promised peer-to-peer electronic cash that works in a fungible way that scales, that has contract, that does everything. So in the end, I don't think it really matters. For investors, it matters a lot for people who put their money into this. But for someone who looks at this as a piece of technology and wants it to succeed from

58:00like a list of criteria that makes it successful, then that's going to be the one Bitcoin that we're going to have. Even if it's not called Bitcoin, if it's called something else, but it still achieves this goal. And of course, it can't be USDT or whatever because these tokens are centralized and they have a assure that can freeze your account and whatever. And that's very anti-Sytherponk and Bitcoin and I cash even like Chomyanye cash. That was never part of the intention or design. But I've been researching forks lately. I'm working on a magazine about forks. I did a presentation about forks last weekend and Amsterdam. And I've come to the conclusion that a lot of projects, if you just read the white paper and sit to issues writings and then you look at, for example, Litecoin, you're going to come to the conclusion that yes, Litecoin is a Bitcoin.

59:01It does share codebase. It does have some of the same features with small variations, but there's no 21 million cap in the white paper. And so she did not aim for 21 million coins. She just wanted 50 coins per block with this having schedule and whatever like it. It was kind of accidental that we ended up at 21. There is the older November 2008 version of the Bitcoin client that was tried by Halfinney and Raidelinger and James A. Donald and a bunch of other guys on the cryptography mailing list. And that one had 100 coins per block and also had much sooner having cycles. So if you added up everything it would give you like 20 million coins in total. So we almost had 20 instead of 21 people like I guess they created a cult of the 21 million. But on the other hand, like is it really that bad if we're going to have

1:00:02500 million or something but of different types of coins that achieve different purposes. And it's not created by governments but created fairly on the free market. Like I don't think that's a horrible outcome. But also if there's going to be just one network with 21 million coins that wins becomes like the number one global currency. That's also not a bad outcome. And if it's not the one in which I invested and which I spent most time studying, I'm not going to be mad about it. No, I mean the fundamental characteristic that you have in all of these systems is that you have individuals forming voluntary consensus. And it really is well what software do you choose to run? You know what you would describe as you know here is the protocol.

1:01:07If anyone can run anything, right, there are absolutely no constraints. It's utterly permissionless. Anyone can do anything they want. And the consensus that you get to on particular sets of rules is completely vantra. Nobody can pal, can compel anyone to do anything. Anyone can make their own fork, make their own. You know fork of the code or can make completely new implementation, you know like libid coin. You know you can do anything you like, but really nobody can compel anything to happen. But the thing is if you if you are making yourself changes which are incompatible with what the other people are running, well you know you're off on your own. You know you've got to persuade people to come with you and form and you can sense us.

1:02:09None of that can be mandated. So given that situation, well you know forks can happen anywhere, you know that splits of that of that consensus, splits of that community, any of that can happen at any time for any purpose. You know I guess we don't necessarily always think of it that way. You know there is more of this, well what is Bitcoin and I kind of I don't get to say what Bitcoin is, you know people are the people that do the Bitcoin are deciding that right and and feeling that you know the decisions are made there kind of follow through to everyone but ultimately anyone can do anything. So given that situation saying oh you know there shouldn't be forks, forks are bad, whatever. I mean that's just bullshit like it's completely not the case at all.

1:03:15What you're often saying there is you're basically saying hey you can't do this right and you're not allowed to do this like that's not what it's about you know I want to compel you to stop doing the thing that you're doing. So a simple thing you know saying with with Bitmontan, you know in Ordinals and you know data carrying is you can say you don't want these things to happen as much as you like but you know shut the fuck up it's the code you know the code decides what's happening you know the voluntary consensus that you part of that that's the rules and yeah you know if you don't like those well you know mix some new ones but the consequence of that is you know you're you're going off on your own new adventure and if you can persuade enough people to come with you to make that viable well you know great off you go but you know you're gonna end up with with Bitcoin Blake which is you know there's this tiny new thing with you know hardly any support

1:04:23or use but you can do it but but it's always strange to me this um but we're building this freedom technology and then you get these little dictators who are like yeah but not like that you can have freedom but but not in that bit you know that you have this very authoritarian you know allergic reaction kind of thing going on um which is completely inconsistent with how the things really work which is just straight voluntary consensus yeah in the case of the Blake fork I like to call it the block case sometimes just because of that key and peel skit with the school teacher so in that particular case it's very weird because these guys are obviously authoritarian and they do like to make changes and they pretend that it's voted by the community

1:05:24or whatever on discord but it's very hard to verify what or not these accounts are real people voting or what or not it's rigged from the beginning seems like a lot of the decisions are pre-made and then they put up a vote just so that they can justify making the change and to me it's very anti-bitcoin I don't know who came up with this ideology but they think that nodes are in control and therefore nodes form a democracy and they can fire the miners and they can tell the miners when they should stop mining or how much they are allowed to mine like they can set ratios or whatever it's crazy Bitcoin was always about competition between miners the way that's the tool she solved this issue of the double spending problem was with incentives and proof of work if you're going to make that secondary you just have what you call this a civil attack where

1:06:24you can spin up more nodes and then pretend that you have more users and more votes and that's how everything is going to collapse but I guess it will not be a problem in a situation where you have a clear leader who makes decisions and the voting is only a way to justify the decisions that were already made and honestly I wish them all the best but on the other hand it's very hard for me to identify with their movement it's very hard for me to understand why anyone who's been into Bitcoin for so many years would even consider that this is what they call the real Bitcoin because now they're fighting this cultural war of trying to appropriate appropriate the ticker and the name the branding everything of course nobody is really taking them seriously but it's a weird arrangement and on the other hand we have pulse fork pulse fork it's like postork false torts but whatever nice pun he's deliberately trying to distance himself from the Bitcoin branding

1:07:32and create a new GitHub repository new website new telegram chat new I don't know Twitter account everything with a different branding and he's trying to tell people that this is different from Bitcoin it is a Bitcoin competitor because it's gonna mind shot to 56 and it's also going to continue from where Bitcoin ends up at the moment of the fork so basically he's gonna serve the same holders but he's gonna try new technology I do like this juxtaposition or I don't know comparison between the two of them because they're like the polar opposites you have the BIP 110 or Blake or whatever you want to call it that fork which is reductionist and they're trying to make everything less useful they say well it should be money but on the other hand they reduce the block size they diminish the impact of the miners and they try to control it as much as they can without

1:08:38adding any useful feature and on the other hand you have pulse fork which is called e-cache the bit 300 one which is truly maximalist in the maximizing sense which means it's trying to do everything on site chains which is an idea that is kind of old to be honest and it's surprising that we never had that in Bitcoin or Ethereum for that matter like site chains have never been really used or tried to their fullest potential and it's good that this is finally happening it might be a bit too late for this in this industry or market because it seems like some coins are consolidating their position as that smart contract coin that whatever the privacy coin and then when you come up with something which is a necosystem that uses the same coin for older use cases across multiple chains it might be a bit too late for it i don't know if the market is gonna pick it but i still like

1:09:42it and i support pulse idea because i've been a fan of drive chains since i read about them like eight years ago and it's good that they're finally happening will the market pick them there's only one way to find out let's see what the market thinks about this i definitely see more value in this than in most of the other experiments out there yeah no i mean i like we're we know looking back a couple of years back to 2024 and especially around the the bit the m paper from rotting Linus um and and earlier there was there was a um bitcoin roll-ups paper that was written by john light a few months prior to bit via the void uh if i remember here yeah so basically like mapping out that that landscape where a theory had gone through so many different kind of ideas you know on

1:10:50the bitcoin side it it been like is lightning lightning's gonna fix everything not really no real work happening on anything else um where on the ethereum side and i think you know a lot that's because of the programmability of that base layer but also just the um you know the more developer experiment friendly kind of social side um that you have gone through um state channels or or painted channels which are basically lightning-like and then state channels similar thing but with with state just not balances and then there was a think of plasma and then you started getting like optimistic roll-ups and then zk roll-ups um but really that that kind of on the ethereum side of setting well look hey we can have this rich l2 ecosystem you know many many different approaches can be tried and you know this kind of works and that kind of works um but there in in early 2024

1:11:56you've got this well maybe this stuff can happen on bitcoin as well right maybe you can have this to read the needle of just having you know a little bit more programmability that that opens up this this like raft of uh of variable again opt in l2s you know it's this uh you're not forcing anything on anyone you're saying you know hey let's let's let's open stuff up and you can have all of these things happening so there you had this this real sort of feeling of oh yeah you know like what an opportunity there is here if you if you looked at the market cap there of liquid and stacks and rootstock um maybe a couple of others but if you look at the the market cap of those compared to

1:12:56the the market cap of all the ethereum l2s that the that I saw was um and I think this was from done done how um was that the l2s on ethereum were 30% of the l1 in terms of the market cap um and for bitcoin it was like between one percent something in it as like each lays in it um i was so that if if you did have a growth of coin like you know and the harm I think you have some signal issues with your internet because you keep cutting out i only hear half the words that you're saying

1:13:57i keep breaking up yeah and you're also delayed your video is moving like a few seconds later which is counter intuitive because the speed of light is faster than the speed of sound but on the internet you know the the audio is easier to broadcast takes less bandwidth yeah um give me a sec see if i can wire myself sure i will plug the ads in the meantime so check out site shift the place where you can swap your stable coins for sound money site shift is at sid shift.ai and they have a lot of trading pairs and also a lot of liquidity if you receive a payment in stable coins and you don't want to hold onto that you can just go to site shift you put your bitcoin address in there click the shift button and from there you're going to get like this stable coin usdt or usdc or whatever address where the

1:15:03payer needs to send the coins this means that you don't have to wrap your head around gas tokens or whatever you just copy that stable coin address you send it to the person wanting to pay you there's gonna be a swap in the middle and what you get is btc directly to your wallet check it out it's called site shift there is also the e-cache work that's launching and if you want to learn more you go to lear2lab.com or e-cache.com right now they are in their alpha network stage which means that get some free coins from a faucet or you can try to mind them yourself and then engage with the community to learn more about how this technology is going to play out it's very grassroots from this point of view i think that some of the drive teams were activated organically with just community members deciding to pick up the code and some miners wanting to receive transaction fees from them so it's still very early the official launch is on the 31st of october but you can still engage

1:16:04today at e-cache.com and there's some public telegram chats where you can join and ask for some free coins so you can play with the system there's a wallet that's called the cash wallet at e-cache.com and there's also a bit window on desktop which i think is the more advanced and honestly the option that i recommend check it out once again e-cache.com it seems like Bob left but he's going to be back i hope with a better connection there is also orange rock which is the place where you can trade without limits and without kyc and it's actually very cool they have an application for ios that's available it's called orange rock you can look it up today there are also going to be available on android and desktop soon and what this is is perpetual trading made specifically to not require any kind of information and without custody without kyc this is like the the future of trading the

1:17:10way that it should be there's some leverage there if you want to gamble but i don't recommend it if you think you're smarter than me you can use it it's your money not my concern not financial advice or whatever but if you want to trade without kyc go to orange rock.com and there's also brains hash power which is the company that is renting hash rate to you you set up an account you pay with your btc for the time that you're going to be renting the hash rate and then you can point it anywhere so you can mine btc you can mine bca you can mine bsv you can even attempt to mine the new e-cash fork i think around october when the launch is happening there's going to be a lot of this activity so it's better to learn how the tool works from now and then maybe use it strategically wisely whenever it is that you need it it's hash power dot brains with a double i dot com and last

1:18:12but not least we have the giveaway from cake wallet cake as i found out recently got more than two million downloads i was advertising it with the intention of getting it to one million because i think in july they were at seven hundred thousand but it seems like they hit one million and then the next million came very fast so this is like a celebration giveaway bob you wrote a number before started this interview and this is going to be the big reveal to the people in the chat who put some numbers in there drumroll you ready i'm gonna hit my rubik's cube which i've been spinning during this 96 or is that 69 that's 96 96 so if there's anyone who wrote 96 i'm gonna reach out to you i'm gonna give you a hundred dollars in any coin that you like that's available in cake wallet

1:19:13most likely bitcoin or monero or z cash it's up to you i don't see any 96 i see a 93 i keep scrolling 94 this is the closest one so far 95 let's see if there is actual 96 yes there is alison fd z 33 who said 96 and there might be someone else so if you're watching this and you wrote 96 please be here in the chat and clean your prize it's important to prove that you didn't just hit and run just log on within your account and then type a number i don't like that just prove that you're listening to this conversation and now bob let's let's talk some more about the forks because i think this is the main topic of our conversation and it's also a fascinating one because you would assume that the best technology wins and people follow the signal and the progress and the one that seems to

1:20:15have most money and most support but there's also very strong social layer where people even though they wear don't trust verify t-shirts and they say that they're true true cipher punks who follow leaders they do follow leaders yeah yeah i mean the the markets are not rational and humans are not rational and yeah you know the the best technology does not always win you know if you think of you know video standards so vHS tapes you know they were they were worse than the beta max that you had at the time but they they wanted one of the market but that's the classic example i think there's another counter example that happened later with HD DVD and Blu-ray or you can argue that HD DVD yes it was better because it was compatible with older devices but Blu-ray had more storage

1:21:22and i guess if you look at it from an evolution perspective like Blu-ray was better right all things of the web you know java script you know java script is terrible you know it's it's characteristics certainly in the early years as a language you know it's significantly worse than other things that were around at the time but you know but it was good enough or say like the seed language so you know even though numerous other things have happened since the vast majority of systems software and operating systems you know are written and see because again you know it was good enough in the early days and it got the network effect the same with Bitcoin you know what Bitcoin from a you know a coding perspective and you know the protocol itself you know there was never a written spec for the protocol there's a

1:22:24lovely you know a bunch of like weird oddities there but you know it didn't matter right you know overall what what you were getting as that and sort of a memetic call that attracted people you you know that that was that was good enough so um so yeah having the vast technology does not ensure you know that you that you come out on top you know i guess you see this in any kind of like tech projects or companies that the marketing and the narratives and the sales are you know they're hugely important and they can be more of a dominating factor than any particular technical characteristics um so for example um tether on tron you know tron you know is a is a nasty clone

1:23:30of a theorem that was just like hacked up to you know have more throughput or what have you at the cost of having a fixed that evaluators you know versus mining um tethered obviously like for the longest time you haven't like no kind of audits on the assets behind it still kind of a bit shady as to what they do have or don't have but those two together met a need that many many people in the world especially in developing markets had which was you know a lack of access to US dollar-based banking and payments and money transfer so you know that that kind of one and it's like on tron like what the but but but there we are um it's a lot more than just the tank yeah i remember when that happened and it was sort of a joke but the joke became something that people took seriously i think that tether even built their own layer two which was called polygon

1:24:36i think for the first purpose of trading tron on it right and it seems like for some reason of of trading tether on it i said tron i think for some reason tron became the most popular option even if it's not the best one it's not the most convenient one because you still need to buy some tron as the gas token when you're sending us dt but it doesn't have the nicest user experience of them all but somehow this is the one that became the most popular and people in the global south like in south america the middle east african i think they use us dt on tron a lot and it's surprising to me to find out every time for example when i'm in our gentina and i see people just saying well we accept tether here it feels bitter sweet when when i realized that this could have been bitcoin and then

1:25:39this could have been ethereum but it's really not and it makes you wonder what was it that happened in the background like maybe that there's something that we don't know as to the reason why tron became so popular because it i remember when it came out it was like the laughing stock of the whole market i think a lot of it is just it was cheapest it was just the cheapest and that you get that that was enough i don't think that's that cheap because the last time when i tried it i paid like three dollars for the fee really well okay it's cheap when you use tron but when you use us dt they sort of bump that fee or maybe it's the wallet that charges extra and they have some sort of smart contract in the middle where they take a slice of that transaction fee yeah but now i mean tron was was quite a joke i remember when i first saw it um which i think was in very early

1:26:412018 and it was just i think you know looking at coin market cat and there's like this thing just like popped up like number 15 or saying you're like i've never even heard of this like what what an earth is this thing i you know like that just appears and never heard of it and just look into it and they had um the um in the white paper there was just a bunch of plagiarized stuff from my pfs it's just like straight cut and paste like rip off um there was this talk about um tron is wed four liked wed three hey here's web four and they had a um a road map so maybe it was late 2017 they had a road map coming out to 2027 for the full build out of this web four vision

1:27:42i don't know how how much of that has been delivered it's like this nearly time i don't know what what happened but um and then they had trc 20 tokens you know so like ERC but for tron which again it's like okay but ERC 20 like the 20 was just like here's the 20th like request for feedback right it's not magic so it's like again you just it's almost like a cargo cult thing right i've just like copying ethereum but with a tron flavor you know that again it looks clammish because it's like you don't even know like what that spec or process or anything like you'd literally just turning up at the party and copying you know um but you know like i guess a lot of people just didn't care you know that that uh that maybe what what you had on that tron side um especially like in china and other asian markets was you know just a bunch of people a bunch of

1:28:47users and it's like hey this thing kind of works for us you know and we don't care about the you know about the philosophy behind it or the you know all the those who cite upon gorigins like or like almost anything it's just like hey here's this crypto thing and i guess also at that time you've got a real bull market so it's like hey you know get get hold of tron like you know the numbers are going up really fast and whatever just succeeded in a way that really was nothing to do with the tech well yeah i remember my 17 right everyone was about writing fancy white papers that was kind of the thing everyone was writing white papers and everyone was pretending to read them to understand what the project is about and somehow this white paper was considered to be a constitution of

1:29:47sorts like it was kind of taboo to change your white paper after you promised something to come up with something else but it sort of degenerated to the point where in 2021 it was all about well does it have a dog jpeg on it then let's buy it if it doesn't then well let's think about what this is but what i'm trying to say is that in 2017 there was already a chinese copy of iterium that was called neo and that one seemed to have like more credentials or be more serious about it it's just added faded it never went anywhere there was also eos which was the largest i see however and that it seemed to be like a real serious competitor to ethereum that never took off i think they found some consensus bug at some point and then it just faded into obscurity and there were a bunch of others like nem does anyone remember nem that was a thing for a while it was a top five coin i think at some point and what else was there i never found out whether eos

1:30:57actually stood for ethereum on sterileates or if that was an open myth i don't know i i never understood what it stands for i never knew if it's eos or eos but it seems like people sort of agreed that eos is the way to see it so maybe that the fact that they do pronounce it as eos means it's likely that it was meant to signify ethereum on sterileates yeah i i don't know i mean that the funny thing there is they so their braids like all billion dollars over a year it's just absolutely ludicrous i mean you know any kind of fundraising it's like you've you've got to have room for growth you know you however much you've raised you you've got to deliver more value than that right there's got to be potential for for those funders to get some return but you put in four billion i mean what the hell can you do that's going to like deliver value on top of that amount of

1:32:01money you know and they were quite clever with it where in the same way as a number of other ico's at that point you know they had language that's sort of saying you know our side of the bargain is that we're going to deliver the tech and we're going to make a light main net like that's kind of the promise and that's what they did but like they didn't need four billion dollars to do that and essentially bought one just sort of like ran away with the money they were like right main net's live bye thanks for the money they also got an SEC settlement you know the SEC did you know investigate you know were the sales to Americans of this you know that would have been in breach of regulations which the blatantly were I mean I was at consensus conference in

1:33:08New York there which I think I'm pretty sure is 2018 that was happening and you know you've got billboards in Times Square you know these massive big e-host billboards out out in the public and it's like you're not selling it to Americans like really but they got they got a total hand slap of a of a fine let's see what it was or it was a very small amount compared to the money that they raised yeah 24 million it's like nothing to them right even one percent no so they kind of got away with it then because then it's like oh we've had the settlement right we're legal you know other projects they've got this ambiguity like are they you know are they in the good or the bad the e-host were like oh yeah we've settled it's fine yeah for a while it was very uncertain whether or not even Ethereum is going to be labeled as a security or a commodity

1:34:14you know yeah and if it's going to become a commodity it's it's very ambiguous in the sense that as you mentioned about an hour ago people were trying to claim that this is not money and it's more like something else like gas that you pay for contracts and then they came back I think the top of this narrative was sometime in 2021 when there was saying that no this is ultrasound money they had this EIP I think it was one free three nine or something and that you decided to slash the no burn actually the two action fees yeah so it's not even having it burn adding it burns so that you it wasn't just like less inflationary for a while it was actually deflationary I mean that that's changed over time that yeah there was this real push of that kind of narrative

1:35:16on the Ethereum side and I probably tied in with DeFi as well right it's just saying oh look this you've got all of these DeFi things going on and like a more financial focus on Ethereum than had been the case prior to that you know in those earlier years it's like you know this is an application platform and you can build all these different things you know not just not just money but with the success of DeFi and of stablecoins as well you suddenly have this fresh push of saying oh actually like EFA is money you know and it's money that's that's taking part in this decentralized you know DeFi economy and saying you know hey this is really like the manifestation of of what a number of us were looking for earlier from from a digital asset which is a currency is

1:36:21okay well you can do like doing payments okay there you go you can like pay your money between each other and like that's always being there from the very start but but that's like table stakes and and here look what you've got with these rich DeFi ecosystems where you can do all of the sort of things that you do with money or financial instruments you know it's it's bigger and richer and okay you can do more than more than just money but but look hey here you can you can really do all these financial instruments and they work and stablecoin payments and everything you know it's here's the the full of vision so you have this push and I mean it's a bit a bit of a sort of like cheeky, dramatic thing of saying hey Bitcoiners you know you've you've you've been saying you know how important hard money is and how you know Bitcoin's digital gold and so on

1:37:25but actually you're more inflationary than Ethereum you know we're even sounder than you are because we're you know we're not we haven't got this inflation of the to the same degree for the blooper words also miss so about an hour ago or longer you said something about the Dow the Dow's purpose being that of for example enforcing contracts between someone renting their apartment on Airbnb or borrowing their bike or whatever I do miss the times when projects were more ambitious in terms of disrupting the real world and trying to do something at need space as opposed to just saying well this is for borrowing stablecoins against your assets and whatever feels like there used to be a time when everyone was more optimistic in this space and I've taken this feedback like two or three years ago from a photographer in Prague who was I think he's been

1:38:27the photographer of events at paralleling police for like a decade and I was just having a casual conversation with him and he told me you know I feel like this space is failing and I told him what do you mean the prices are up everyone's doing fine the projects are much more mature than they were in the past like what do you mean by that said well I remember when I first came to these events that everyone was talking about how to change the world and how they're going to revolutionize something and now they're just talking about very specific use cases but the ambition is definitely dialed down compared to what it was before and that was like a wake up call because I realized I got the perspective of someone who's not involved in the space actively just someone who's casually participating and just observes from the sidelines yeah and he was right in this regard like people used to be more enthusiastic about disrupting breaking stuff maybe it's because the banks

1:39:29have cut up and now we have the Venmo's and we have cash up and whatever all of these financial applications that make it easy to send money to people it's not as cumbersome as it used to be in the 2010s it's also easier to pay with your card in lots of places you just tap it with your NFC chip and that's it you don't have to worry too much about you know it used to be that you would swipe your card and then you had to sign a piece of paper after you input your pin or something so there's definitely some improvement here but I still think that we're missing out on some opportunities to provide value and real world use cases and maybe that would become more maybe not cowardly but more comfortable with this position on the market where we're just we're no longer a competitor we're just something out there which is experimenting with stuff

1:40:31yeah I mean I certainly agree with that I so February 2014 is where my Bitcoin journey began I was aware of Bitcoin in earlier years as well but I wasn't really interested because I was a gold bug and a silver bug I'm a software engineer and it's like I know how shit most software is so you know there's some dude we don't know it is and he's made like magical internet money it's like come on like come on this is like a scam right that like this it's this can't work you know I've got my bar of gold like what why would I be interested in this but I met a guy at pub and we have this most like wonderful conversation about what are the other things that you could do as well as money you know and just really thinking well hey you know this is a really a really revolutionary thing that we can like rebuild

1:41:34we can rebuild society right it's like you know I was really thinking well you know this stuff that had led me to be a gold bug was really like after the world financial crisis just wondering like how can this happen right how can it be that everything's like fine and then all of a sudden like it is screwed and we're like losing our homes and like everyone's out of work and like how are the nurses that makes sense right you know we've got the same resources in the world we've got the same people like you know what what happened here and then you know learning about money and central banks and inflation and and you know I guess like all kind of like levels of control that we've got within you know governments and so on so to me then you know having this conversation and realizing okay like yeah you've got money but like

1:42:36you can do anything you know got these sort of visions of sort of like robotic warehouses that are like you know moving stuff around and doing machine-to-machine payments and that going into life you know like your car you can move things around or whatever just just thinking that that with that means of payment or other decentralized applications that you combine that with what you already have with the internet all this sort of like commerce and all this voluntary transaction stuff can suddenly happen right and no one can stop it you know the banks the governments the credit cards like you know we don't need any of you you know like all these things can just like flop out of the way you know because you've got this unstoppable immutable sheep as well at the time like you know at the start they're on Bitcoin you could even do

1:43:39free transactions you know they're going to be slower but you know they did get picked up so you've got all this narrative as well as like you know this is like three or super cheap anywhere in the world you know like absolutely better than the status quo but also this like freedom tag from the very base and yeah I was utterly like thinking you know like this is going to change everything right this is like so revolutionary and all of these like drivers that we've had on humanity because of you know that the elites the powerful people you know controlling all the levers and you know constraining what we can do but you know like that stuff can go away and and yeah it's going to be like very uneven how that happens because you've you've got so much

1:44:43existing power and control but you know I was really thinking okay you know like maybe we've been at about five years you know maybe you can have some little country somewhere that's like you know the blockchain country and you know you're going to have this arbitrage between different jurisdictions but like that this tech is going to be so empowering that you know it's going to change how the world works I really thought that you know but yeah that didn't happen well we have Liberland and we have El Salvador which apparently is even difficult to pay with BTC if you travel there nowadays I've read some tweets from people who actually lived there that they want to deal zonte beach and the locals like if they're asked to pay with Bitcoin they're going to sort of comply with their request but it's not their preferred way of payment and some of them

1:45:47even they don't have a wallet anymore and they need to download it again or whatever so it's definitely a situation where you can tell that there's a regression I still remember I think in 2022 I was invited to go to the adopting Bitcoin conference in El Salvador I bought my plane ticket I bought my hotel and then I got sick so I didn't travel in the end what I remember is that when contacting the hotel I've asked them if I can pay with Bitcoin and they said please don't like just give us dollars yeah if you want Bitcoin we have an ATM nearby and you can go and withdraw some cash from there and pay but we would give you a discount if you paid with your card or whatever online like okay there's something wrong here and of course you can be an asshole about it turn into a Karen and say well I want to speak to your manager and I know that the legal tender law means that you cannot deny a request that I want to pay in Bitcoin I never did that but it was interesting

1:46:53from the beginning that they prefer US dollars yeah yeah I mean if you look at payments for things with Bitcoin and ATM's and everything I mean I'm sure that that was in a better state in like 2014 and now my kid it's it's it's worse you know I what I saw in that very beginning is you know you did have various like retail and coffee shops and things you know that they they did start accepting Bitcoin and it was like oh great yeah and you know like in in no time it will be like paying with crypto will be like just as common as as paying with fear right it'll just be like you know it will be just as simple whatever they'll work out the you know how best to do whatever apps and and stuff and you just you know that it would be just the same and then and then of course

1:47:53you know because it's better you know it's it's going to be cheaper for them they're not paying you know the fees to the credit card companies and like you know this will just happen right it will be life unstoppable like it's going to be it's absolutely better than what we have and it's also got this freedom benefit of taking away that control from you know from these these oppressive you know our oppressive overlords and you know a beautiful age of freedom will you know inevitably arise I don't think I've ever asked you the question about Bitcoin how you first discovered it and what was your first reaction you sort of gave small bread crumbs of your journey there but it wasn't in a complete response like do you remember of where you were what year it was and what was your first reaction um well I I will have first heard of it actually through Alex Jones

1:49:00so I had a a an exciting period shall we say which I do call my Alex Jones phase where having you know gone through this I think so it starts it actually because so I was working for EA doing video games and I'd managed to pay all the wonder you you couldn't see in the industry if you're watching Alex Jones like you you're not part of the typical profile of a video game developer nowadays no but anyway because you know it's pretty well played and we ended up paying off our mortgage and then it's like oh well shit like I guess I should like invest in some things I don't know what what I should be doing something now and and then yeah so I was learning about about money and like you know I've got like an exchange account you know start getting some stocks and things and and yeah so I started getting like resource stocks were doing really well and then that took

1:50:02me to like physical like mining stocks and then that took me to like physical gold and silver and and through all of that yeah I mean I was yeah I was watching a bunch of Alex Jones but also just a bunch of of like oh well you know what is money you know the evil overlords and build a bird group are like controlling us and you know the world bank and everything you know so you know very easily goes into quite a conspiratorial sort of mindset right and and then I was watching other stuff to be with like peak oil and you know whatever like we're gonna rare of oil and then like we're gonna go into someone like Mad Max like collapse and I was was dude sailing left since I'm like right I'm gonna get a boat and sail away in a disaster or whatever because all the roads are gonna be blocked I was learning to like learning gardening and growing my own vegetables and like stop piling like

1:51:10you know military rations and like water and grains and all you know boxes and boxes are shit in the basement of a got like a radiation like a guy get counter because you got like Fukushima it happened around there um but uh yeah like a whole bunch of of of of that and and yeah sort of people within that ecosystem either you know like guests Alex Jones would have or I started reading like um the the creature from jethyl island that's talking about the the birth of the fed you know how the fed came of out and income tax and all the best and and yeah oh oh oh and and max Kaiser as well you know before he turned into the monstrous right now you know when he was um he got his show on so like art or sat in Russian TV yeah russian today I mean I can

1:52:17argue that he was still sort of a monster in some ways because I'm Eastern European and I'm close to the Russian border and I do remember in february of 2021 or 22 I think it was 22 when the Ukraine were started that he was tweeting that there's no where in Ukraine it's all up side up it's a lie by whoever and I was at the airport watching how the Ukrainian immigrants are coming and everyone was freaking out because they had no idea what's going on and what they should do with these people and I was like well there's obviously something happening here and people are fleeing their country and this guy is telling me on twitter that there is nothing happening and there's no reason to worry and then of course he had to resign or he got fired I'm not sure but he sort of landed on his feet when he became the personal advisor of the president of El Salvador and he's like the main propaganda guy for him I'm getting the feeling that he's always done this to a degree except that for different masters or whatever I'm not saying everything that he did

1:53:24on russia today was horrible but he was obviously biased in some perspectives that deal with geopolitics yeah yeah um but yeah he would you know he'd he'd show up now and again watch some of this stuff and he so it was probably through had he ended being talking about bitcoin and other things because he had a max coin owner what year he did max coin think that was like 2014 max coins dart coin he should dash for a long time he had someone narrow people on yeah yeah so it's 20 yeah 2014 he did max coin but yeah he'd have been talking about bitcoin earlier than that I quite recently I saw an interview that he did with Amir Taki on his show there I don't know exactly what that year was but yeah Amir was on was on max's show way back

1:54:25way back well so so that I've probably been the era that I first sort of became familiar with it around around probably there 2011 2012 you mentioned Fukushima and that was 2011 also yeah yeah but yeah I mean it was just like okay there's a thing but yeah like I said it wasn't it wasn't very interesting to me um basically in comparison with physical metals it was just like okay um and I know at least one or two people I think of friends of mine who were a bit more involved at that time but yeah I it was only really when I had this you know Matt this kind of Parker who became a good friend who who really I guess opened my eyes up about um um about what at that point was really sort of been coined called you know bitcoin 2.0 kind of ideas

1:55:27you know what what are the other things that are brewing up around the sides so you um you'd have had big you know big shares um counter party um master coin NXT yeah these were some of the bitcoin 2.0 projects ironically it was the one that was launched by a teenager and a bunch of friends that became successful it's very weird it's very counterintuitive but this is the one that became successful out of the whole crop yeah yeah so I mean that there in February 2014 so that was three months after the white paper for a theorem so you I don't know that you I mean you maybe got a little bit of code some little bit of you know Tasmati a couple of things talking to each other but it was um I mean it was a it was a full year and a bit before making that happened on theorem so at that point the theorem

1:56:33was just one of many projects that you know there was discussion about like ripple was really big at that point as well you know like the original ripple um and and again you've you've got this much more open kind of mindset at that time so it's like oh you know there's this ripple thing which has got a different form of consensus and it's like oh right okay that's interesting yeah you know and you're not thinking you know fuck you ripple it's like okay you know okay there's another thing you know or maybe this is better maybe this is you know maybe this is useful you really got a um most people who were involved were pretty open minded because at that time it was such a frontier unusual thing that the people that were drawn to it that early you know they're not you know they're not regular people but they're very curious um you know risk risk tolerance

1:57:37brave adventurers so of course you don't like okay I found Bitcoin and now that's the answer forever right there you go we've we've we've got perfection everything else is is bullshit like no that like makes no sense at all you know it's just like even Bitcoin is it's like new and um obviously like a lot more can be done so yeah it was it is a different kind of world um but so that yeah so that was 2014 where I you know got got got really interested and started going to to meet ups and you know really like actively following along yeah I you know it wasn't why I was doing for work it was like an interest in a hobby and I didn't like whatever by a load of crypto or I don't have a lot of money at that time actually um or all the money I had it was in other things right I I did have some real estate for a while

1:58:38and then physical gold and and shares and you know just sort of conventional sort of stuff so it was more of a oh this is a really interesting technology I wasn't thinking in terms of all like you get rich here like and and and funnily enough that was that was the case for a lot of the people involved with Ethereum early as well is like at that time there was no certainty that the thing would even work that it even shipped that it will you know maybe it's illegal even um you know many many people who are around in those early days you know they it was it was doing it for you know for that philosophy for that interest for that technology it was not at all like for the speculation if anything you like you know you look at the people that are just speculating like you know you guys are fucking leeches like you're not doing anything right you're not helping you just like sucking off profits for yourself and you're doing nothing so um

1:59:44so yeah but it was it was 2015 that I you know really went all in in terms of my time and efforts um I was I live in Vancouver but I was actually in Toronto for six months uh doing a contract actually for TV security so working for a bank I had a bank job was my first time I'd ever like done that was 40 but I like I got this contract to to do that through an old friend and it was kind of like I guess it was just sort of interesting is like a how does like how do banks work like what what's it actually like on the inside um but while I was in Toronto that's where like most of the a lot of the Ethereum people were from right like Joe Lubin was there and Vitalik um and and various other folk and I'm Anthony Dioreo as well so while I was there I took the

2:00:47opportunity you know to go to their meetups and it's like all does the magnitude bigger and you've got like the main people there and I just really um got engaged and it was like the main net was launching so it's like all right so that thing I've kind of been following along on and off for a year like so that's like you're gonna ship and it's like this is a real thing and it kind of worked it's like wow okay um you know I can't not get involved you know it's it's kind of like whatever you meet you meet Tim Berners-Lee and he's about to launch the web or you meet you know Linus Torvall's and he's just started on Linux and it's like you don't get many opportunities in your life to you know to get engaged on something that's potentially really impactful and revolutionary and interesting and you know like you're there and you're talking to the people and there's you know there's any you know hundreds of people around you know involved in the whole thing

2:01:49or even smaller number of people like actually hands on and it's like you know I can't I can't not do this like I have to do it I don't know what what that means I'm just gonna start like volunteering and doing some coding and development and hopefully maybe I can get some work some paperwork for some startup that's doing something but I ended up getting hired into the Ethereum foundation so it's like right into the center of it and it was like wow this is like amazing I'm you know just got this opportunity to be involved in something you know something really big and the other contrast I think that there was for me is when I was in that earlier kind of like Alex Jones phase that was a really like negative destructive kind of mindset which is like things are fucked you know the whole world is fucked and we've got all these controlling things and where you know we've got no power and you know just God knows what's gonna happen you know we're gonna

2:02:55you know have another world war it's you know US civil war collapsing you know economies and just you know we heading into this like disaster and then the only kind of rational thing to that is like well I'll try and survive right I'll do my prepping I'll be good and I'll run away and you know we can close the walls have our cittabels or whatever and and if you like feeding yourself out a day after day and watching Alex Jones listen to the show for like hours every day of like it's fucked it's all fucked you're all fucked you know that you know led me to very deep depression and just you know despair and there's a guy called Michael Rupert who did a documentary there was a documentary with him that was called collapse and it's back pain out in 2009 and he was like

2:04:05a whistleblower on CIA moving drugs into the US and then he so he's doing all this reporting about like terrible hanging things happening in the world and so 9-11 is another one you know I was really into like you know 9-11's an inside job and he he talks about that a lot anyway so collapse was in movie where he was primarily talking about peak oil and basically like the collapse of oil supplies that nothing else was as good so you know all of the science he was utterly dependent on oil when that collapsed you know you know have this kind of hellscape anyway he was one of the ones I was following and he ended up committing suicide you know he was just like so despairing about the world in the end it's just like box and you know there's I might as well be dead and I think that was a real wake-up call to me of like

2:05:07that could be me right if I don't change the path I'm on here I'm just in miserating myself so much that you know I'm just gonna kill myself like that could totally happen to me and the timing of that just sort of seemed to be in with when I met this guy David Loey and it was like oh well maybe there's an alternate path here right maybe we can build better places to go right you know you can have an escape valve you know it's like a life raft here's the life raft where you know maybe we can build this better future right but that it's not inevitable that you're gonna have this horrible collapsing scenario where you're you're hopeless you know maybe we can build alternate systems that won't have this you know this sovereign debt crisis and collapse of money and you know these you know recessions or depressions you know maybe we can we can build this better thing and

2:06:13and I can help you know so daily I can be thinking of these positive things that I can be actually putting my skills to work of trying to help this will you know come come to fruition and maybe it's possible maybe it's not possible um but it's gonna be a lot healthier to do that so that that was where I was really coming in is like you know maybe there's a way better place that we can get to here and you know and I can help with that I'm not sure exactly how but this became dark very fast but then it became sort of hopeful like I'm happy you're still here you're building on something and you have high hopes for the future in regards to peak oil I remember that being like a big talking point I was in high school or something so that was before Bitcoin even me live it 2007 8 roundup time people were talking about

2:07:14well there's gonna be a point where we're gonna run out of oil and the whole world requires oil and the hope was that electric cars were gonna come around and just replace everything that runs on gasoline of course now I'm not even hopeful about electric cars now that I know what their batteries are made from and how cares this resource actually is so there's gonna be a point where if it all goes fully electric most of the people who own cars today will not own a car in the future and maybe that they're gonna share one like the concept for the robot tax or whatever but that's still dystopian and if you ask me the whole self-driving car thing is just opening up the market for assassination markets where you have young healthy people who can just have a glitch where they drive off a cliff and then coincidentally there's gonna be some on older and wealthier who needs their organs like I think about this sometimes and it gets very

2:08:19depressing when you realize that once you lose control or you teach a new generation of drivers to not have any responsibility you're just gonna have incentives for people to game the system and of course political dissidents whatever their screwed they get inside a car before this it used to be more complicated like you had to sabotage their cars or you had to have someone chasing them or something to drive them off the cliff now it's so easy it's just remote control like oh this guy poof okay it's like a video game it's not even real in some way you just control their cars it's crazy well is it gonna be like alarm and you're gonna have open source cars it's like yes I run my own car stack it's not online connected it's using a pre-trained you know model I mean I sure hope so but the adoption I suppose is gonna be a bit small

2:09:24for this kind of stuff people will like the convenience of Tesla or BMW or whatever where they pay a subscription to something and they feel safe about it and then they will say well it's like a .1% chance that you're gonna get into an accident I'm sure that there's gonna be like a legal agreement that nobody reads that people are just gonna click and agree and then who knows maybe one day they tweet something nasty about the government and then their local government decides that they're a person of interest and maybe that they tweet more and they become threatening to the establishment in some way and it's just better for the collective good and that this is like a direct quotation of dictators and people who read Russo and think that they're geniuses that they just take this person away take take take this person out not away take this person out that's the expression anyway I don't want to spend too much time on the dark stuff you

2:10:26did say that you found hope in this technology and you felt like Tim Berners-Lee launching the internet do you feel the same about the cash hard for it because I know that you're interested in this nowadays and you seem to like drive chains does it give you the same feeling that maybe Turium gave you more than a decade ago I mean I'd say less so because it's you know it's not a whole new thing right you know it's just here's you know here's a different kind of setup or configuration of the existing you know Bitcoin setup so it's a tweet on Bitcoin right rather than a whole new category of things but I think it's a very important project and the reason why I think is it you know it's kind of like tied into the Bitcoin L2 stuff I was

2:11:27talking about and then my you know goal goal screwed up the the internet there yeah I mean what and what I was just saying was that the the the figure that Dan Held has had was that Ethereum L2s were 30% of the market cap of the L1 whereas on the Bitcoin side L2s were 0.1% of the L1 you know that the added support supply that's I can't remember no yeah sorry market capables okay interesting um so yeah you know that added together like liquid lining rootstock you know like it's nothing like a rounding error but the actual usage of those things um so that if you could have had or you could have a sort of a growth of a similar ecosystem on top of Bitcoin that's like a 300x growth you know for that area so obviously there are huge incentives for

2:12:34people to chase that and you you saw that with all of the Bitcoin sorry all of the BitDN projects specifically that you know you've got this this this this chase chase to market of saying well you know can we can we bring EVN's EVNs on top of Bitcoin so that then you've got all of that same kind of you know you can pause existing smart contracts and projects um and I think I think that is a really necessary thing that the Bitcoin ecosystem has got very very stalled um where earlier efforts on those you know kind of just dropped off um all of the chips were all lightning you know lightning's going to say to everything um and what that really meant was that all that say if they're in a insight on Bitcoin to stuck with same tech base for 10 or 12 years you know with small exceptions

2:13:43uh uh of say where root um but yeah I mean I think I think chains are a great approach and Paul has spent many years you know trying to educate and persuade to move towards that soft fork activation on Bitcoin and it's you know it hasn't happened um and I think you know I don't know I mean do you think are they going to be any more softwares on Bitcoin? well there we have to be at least one hard fork to fix that time stamping issue that's like a few decades away so at least from this point of view there's going to be one I do see now with the cold card hack and with the liquid hack and the lightning issues people are starting to take vaults more seriously but I don't see any serious conversation

2:14:47about ctv in the same way that maybe we had it two years ago when it seemed more of a certainty that we're going to activate some covenant softwork and this was like the prime candidate for activation now we just see like some very scattered comments from people who are like well it would be good if we had some covenants involved for this it's just that I think sailor tweeted like a couple of months ago that covenants had complexity and also sailor is behind this think it was $50 million fund for development which has gone and kept money to developers and the head of chain code labs I forget his name he's a Schmidt or something like Schmidt Mike Schmidt he's going to be in charge of allocating the funds so I think it's obvious for a lot of developers in Bitcoin that there's not going to be any allocation for this particular idea

2:15:47the question of what's actually going to get funding is quite interesting because nothing right now seems to be happening if anything there is a regression of projects and even organizations like open sats are starting to remove funding from some projects which turned out to be very amateurish with spaghetti code and a lot of advertisement or marketing behind them or hype just because they're Bitcoin only and accomplishing something that sounds interesting so maybe it's good that there's a compression of projects and only the strong ones will stick around but the question is what will Bitcoin actually be used for and the obvious answer for the finance people is that it's going to be this asset that people use as a collateral and the speculative investment that some organizations will leverage for some purpose and that purchase is just to make more US dollars

2:16:51so it's easy to be bullish on BTC as an asset but Bitcoin the network seems like it's not going to get any significant upgrade at least not with the current mindset and for every vulnerability that people find they're like well it's so good that we never did this because if we did look we could have had more issues yeah i mean it's just very disappointing and depressing really when you compare that to you know for myself you know how i was feeling there back in 2014 it's like saying okay well Bitcoin is going to just like sit there and be like an asset it's like so boring it's so boring and it's not changing anything you know that isn't changing the world that there's no revolution there and yeah it's just a very to my mind very super conservative low risk

2:18:03like hopeless useless mindset um we know you know or something like obcat it's literally just concatenate two entries together on the stack like it's the simplest tiny little thing but you know you get people going well what you know we don't know what what the consequence of this may be and you know whatever it's just kind of introduce shit-coining and risk and you know we we don't know what the consequences that that are and it's like you know you know are you fucking jerky like that just means that you don't want new users to actually use Bitcoin and you can see this being reflected in the usage in the memple right now what's the average block size and what's the median fee I think it's very low you can actually get in the next block with a one-satoi-sipper v-bite transaction p right now which is depressing the the bet was that if

2:19:05you keep the blocks small there's gonna be lots of high-feed transactions and people willing to write a lot of money to settle their transaction on Bitcoin it seems like it's really not the case and then people will look at this and say see it was a bad idea to increase the block size because there is no demand for it but a lot of the industry moved somewhere else that's why there's low demand we have new networks that fulfill sort of the same purpose or they fulfill it faster or with different features that Bitcoin does not have and that's why they prefer to use something else but we could have had everything on Bitcoin and that was the true maximalism not the one that rejects use cases for sure like like wbtc you know on on Ethereum you know that's the significantly more Bitcoin in there than it's like a 120,000 btc that's locked on Ethereum in comparison to lightning which is like 3,000 4,000 it's just a lot of read across the cloud right most I never

2:20:11said anyone so I got to put this on record I've never heard anyone praising wbtc saying oh my god this is amazing it's the future of payments or whatever but it does seem to have more users and more accounts because that's what you have on Ethereum more accounts using it every day and more value that's being used there and of course the lightning defenders will say that well it doesn't matter how much how many coins you have locked in the network it's all about the number of transactions and right the economic activity that they enable and my joke about it is that you already know how many lightning transactions there are because you can count them in tweets and then no stirs apps every time someone makes a lightning payments they sort of announce it to the world by posting a picture or a video saying look I just paid for this with lightning yeah yeah yeah yeah um or then the other thing that you have is if it is just like an asset class

2:21:15you know you get the you get ETFs and and that companies so then a lot of the more conventional minded financier people they're going to use those you know they're not going to send a self-custody of course I'm not going to self-custody but then you know well what's left of the revolution not a lot and then the other thing is even if people are really wanting to to self-custody you know you can't do that in very sophisticated ways if you have you know a very simple scripting system that it's missing you know absolutely basic operations and the consequence of that is you know lots of the activity just ends up being custodial so what's the fucking point it's also crazy how Bitcoin self-custody was promoted as something so sophisticated

2:22:18so professional something for which you need to roll the dice a hundred times and whatever to generate your own entropy and then you have Ethereum users who are just using Metamask on a browser extension and they never lost their funds because they did some basic 2FA it's so stupid like self-custody is very simple but somehow people there's an entire industry of people trying to make this complicated and expensive right and then you end up with a cold card situation where people actually did everything that they were told and still they found a way to blame them for not rolling the dice a hundred times it's really crazy yeah I mean I think I think some of that on the Bitcoin side probably comes from the lack of programmability that in the same way as you had the public dialogue moving away from the developers to influencers I think in the same way on

2:23:28on the sort of the application side well you know it kind of all has to be wallets and payment stuff because you can't do anything else so like that's where all the churning's happening because you literally can't do anything else and then that becomes the only thing that you can like really settle is like well what Bitcoin business is either you know well there's there's ones that can custody for you like I guess mining services and then like wallet impayments he thinks like that's literally all the rids so then you've got a bunch of companies that you know trying to push those you know push that stuff and it's writing on it because because that's all they can do yeah it's very depressing when you look at it but the fact that we can still fork and we can still look at existing forks that do interesting things like during this whole madness when people were

2:24:29trying to define what spam is and they were trying to push for the activation of first it was called bip444 and then it became bip110 so during that time I found my refuge and just looking at zcash and now I was blown away like these people are actually doing stuff that I expected from Bitcoin or to do like look at developers fun development try new stuff try new cryptography fail a few times but still rebound and try to get this back on course like this is something that I expected from the Bitcoin project and it seems like it's getting off to them because they're courageous enough to adventure themselves in a new realm which has lots of pitfalls but is also exciting and the market seems to be rewarding zcash for doing this whereas in the case of Bitcoin I mean it's boring it's predictable some people like this about it but I just wish it was more of a cypherpon project

2:25:34yeah and some guys will say in the comments well you should go to monero I don't find it that exciting for various reasons the biggest of them all is that there's no real plan for scaling it's just bloating it's only growing eager and there's not enough room for everyone to be transacting so it in some ways the design choice is gonna keep it niche for a while until they figure out something else like layer 2's or whatever might happen to them I think zcash actually has a plan for this and they have been refining their zk snorke's to make them smaller they have been improving the propagation times for their blocks I mean they're actually making efforts and there's tachyon which is like client-side validation for there's zk snorke's and that will potentially change the win which people transact but with good user experience I think it's pretty bullish and it can teach us a lot of lessons I'm also bullish on policy cash by the way like I've

2:26:38been one of the first people to actually reach out to him and be like hey I heard you're launching a hard-for-how can I help and it's not just because he's sponsoring my podcast that's like just a sign of mutual respect that he likes my work I like his work and I've been really trying to help him with the marketing side and asking like various services like hey would you be willing to support this so if you get a DM from me asking about e-cash support it's probably not that my account got hacked it's just that I'm trying to help pull and I do want to see this play out I want to see how the market is gonna react to it I want to see how some of the various types of fud that were said about drive chains are gonna be addressed in a real market situation where there's real incentives for miners to steal where there's real incentives for the various side chains to be priced differently so if you're gonna have like an Ethereum, Ethereum, side chain maybe that the

2:27:42price of the asset is gonna be different from that of the base layer potentially I don't know or maybe that there's gonna be fast enough arbitrage so that it compensates for everything there's really one only one way to find out and that's by launching a live network no I do agree completely that you you know you've got to be brave and try things something which XR surface said to me in Prague I think it was in 2013 I gave it to all their HCPP titled jbnazfuck so I was feeling very sorry 2023 this okay makes more sense you couldn't be jaded in 2013 it was so excited I know no but just really I oh my god all these stupid things

2:28:45happening and whatever and and yeah what he said to me at that time is like everything is an experiment like everything is an experiment right we just don't know humans you know we don't know we we just try things you know we have theories we have ideas we try and build things we try and learn but ultimately you know everything is an experiment and you can't get upset at other people trying things because that's how they learn you know and you can say oh well that stupid it'll never work or or that you know that's already been tried like it how do you not know but often you need to do things yourself to to really learn and and I think there has been definitely massively insufficient experimentation experimentation in in the Bitcoin space and that wasn't the case at the start

2:29:50but you know a hard fork is it's one of the cleanest ways of of doing such an experiment and the reason why is it's completely opt-in you know your default is is nothing to happen if you have a hard fork people choose to participate right nobody can force you to do it again it's this like people run whatever software they want and so what you have with a hard fork is really you know some some people saying hey you know we want to try something different we're going to do a different thing you know we would love you to join us but we can't compel you to join us right so it is you know the opposite of that bit 110 kind of approach of like trying to change what what the active current thing is you know with a hard fork it's entirely optional and and you choose by actually opting into participation there and it is a positive some game you know

2:30:59you're not you're not taking away from something that was currently happening you you do me a new thing as well um and so say something like in the block size wars imagine like what I would have liked to happen in there if you didn't have that like religious kind of mindset is like okay so maybe block should be bigger well can someone just hard fork Bitcoin and do two meg blocks and like measure it see what happens I have many notes you have how you know how does that affect the growth you know not like trolley guess what's happening just fucking do it and and if it works great you know we've learned something you know that really worked okay well great let's you know let's increase the block size on Bitcoin and that one that was an experiment and it kind of can wither away or whatever like you know it's not economically important but it

2:32:05was an experiment a real world experiment that you actually like learn from so can you imagine like how much more progress that you'd make if people are in that mindset right not in a defensive mindset going oh this is an attack you're attacking Bitcoin you know no it's like an experiment like you know looks like we're running out with a fruit book okay well what would it be like if we tried this without without that like yeah that super defensive religious you don't need it's just an experiment it's just like you know hey we're trying to do just currency right so yeah so on on e-tash I think it's absolutely the right thing to do you know Paul spent all these years like trying to educate trying to persuade but um but yeah you know

2:33:07it's obviously it's not first-haul ground for these kind of experiments um you know and I think it's exceedingly unlikely that there's going to be um anything other than a handful of little soft forks that get pushed through on Bitcoin like I guess another one is quantum you know if if you have to do something for quantum that's obviously got to happen right you can't argue about that that you can argue about what it should be but obviously something has to happen um but yeah you know I don't pull it done on the the cash con website there's you know he's got his scenarios right of of of mapping out what you know what might happen you know if this is a success is if this is a failure if that like persuades people somehow that Bitcoin should do drive change and um and yeah so let's do it yeah yeah it's good to find something exciting in this space

2:34:12and something that actually can solve real world problems and experiments are nice like I think Luke's coin is like a social experiment with some ideas about well how do we stop spam from happening on Bitcoin and then how do we fire the miners like all these ideas which are more political than they are technical yeah in pause case it's like the extreme opposite of trying to solve technical problems that are sort of meant to minimize the social problems but they'll there are some social situations that emerge because he extends the game fury of how the miners will behave in certain situations I do like to see all of this stuff playing out and see what the market thinks about it because that's another aspect you promote an idea and people don't give or assign any value to it but then you launch like a product that's out there on the internet

2:35:14and anyone can invest and that's when you finally see how people use it how people trade it how people work on it because it does take a lot of work to get a project to mainstream adoption or at least to have it in the top 10 on clean market cap or whatever there's a lot of work and you know better you've been with the Ethereum plastic project for a long time and you saw what it's like to be the underdog and to be on the side of the fork that's not even acknowledged I think there are some moments when there was hope like for example when the coin based listing happened that was like a sign that maybe that the market is gonna care about this and it's gonna value it to its full potential there are moments when for example Ethereum switched to proof of stake and you guys were gonna get all the miners but there was another fork I think Ethereum proof of work if I'm not the

2:36:16yeah there were two of them actually there was one called Ethereum Fair and one called Ethereum Power yeah and Ethereum Power was really promoted by Chandlegaal who may remember he was he was around at the time of Ethereum ETC fork as well but one of the major Chinese miners but yeah like Ethereum Power it's a funny one because it was blatantly a cash grab you know it's like or you know we've got this transition point and so they spun up you know this this sort of narrative of saying miners are getting thrown aside by Ethereum you know they've provided all the service and now you know they're gonna be thrown away so you know we don't think that's right and we want to

2:37:17provide continuity for miners and they also said a bunch of stuff about you know the Ethereum Foundation being controlled and all of this like it was almost like their sales pitch was kind of like ETC it's like okay what you were saying if you believe that stuff that happened like six or seven years ago right it's called ETC if you want to keep mining mining ETC like it's just trivial for you to go you don't need some new project and so they just got all of this of rhetoric and it's gonna launch but it was it was a total scam other thing so firstly they didn't actually provide any of the software until after the transition point so it's like if you're narrative is we want miners to be able to keep mining well given pull software and everything like a month and advance right here's your software it's gonna

2:38:20activate that the fork and off you go they didn't do that so basically at the time it split they solo-mined you know I think it was at least 24 or 48 hours of thanks for the money we're solo mining there isn't even any release software that people could use and then they that then they did release it and it was like here's a fork of death with a single massive splatter set of changes on top there you go it also talking about the the ultrasound money stuff they changed the code for that so that on Ethereum power it didn't burn those fees but it sent them to an opaque multi-sig but they controlled you know to pay for costs in quotes so it's like thanks we'll steal the bunch of money from every block as well for us and we don't even know who

2:39:23us is we're not saying who the holders are or anything so they did that and then like after that there was zero changes ever it's like there's you changes here's the new chain thanks for the money fuck you we're not doing anything we've grabbed you know thanks for the cash grab and I mean even now was down to 27 million but like for the longest time it was you know it's like hundreds of millions like 200 million market count but something which is literally like a cut and paste and the edits are sent money to us thanks so but it did take away some of the momentum of VTM classic like it was waiting for this moment right it was designed to thrive in that specific moment yeah it was like thanks for the grab though yeah in the end it you know it it it it went small fast

2:40:29ETC got like a 10X on hash rate at that point so yeah looking at this so Ethereum power launched at like $60 per coin and it's 25 cents now so yeah down 99.6% so winner but somehow ETC is still a top 100 coin if you look at the top 100 on the Queen Market Cap Ethereum Classic is on the 68 position right now yeah it's getting now in it at bad given the circumstances no I mean so we don't market cap over a billion dollars and there was a there was a little peak in 2021 where ETC got up to think about number 15

2:41:30it was really really high yeah I think it was the I guess the top of Ethereum also when there was a lot of activity what DeFi summer and then the NFT mania yeah yeah why would you say like in the notch shell why would you say that Ethereum Classic did not become more successful was it the saboteur I just remember covering the story with ETC dev at some point which was like a developer team that was I guess sabotaged and then there was another one called I don't remember exactly what it was but they tried to take the developers from it and it's your play allowed take over yeah it does as it eats the lamps yeah so ETC lamps were funded by DFG which is digital finance group which is like a Chinese based I know like they invest in crypto

2:42:35kind of fame and ETC dev was the development team behind the the classic gap client that was carrying most of the network so eagle you know eagle was the tech league that you mentioned earlier dole work there is sort of business dev stuff Donald Macintoshire but yeah they they basically were running out of funding and DFG it sort of said to them all you'd see labs had you know don't worry we'll we'll be able to fund you so eagle stop looking for alternate sources of funding and then they stiff them basically so he had not got enough money to continue with that project and then basically labs kind of like hired all of the team apart from the golden Donald like all the devs everyone apart from those two went across to this new ETC labs core group so yeah they kind of I

2:43:44guess it's a little bit like the moving house rentals think that we were talking about is like okay eagle and Donald are like the the hard call strong ones that we don't want so like let's we'll make a new house and persuade everyone else to come across and leave the developers behind I just remember the say teen's project was called orbita yeah I said yeah I've called it's trata I think earlier in the center of you but no it's orbita yeah you're right but yeah so and yeah we had this period where ETC labs were kind of you know a main part of the ecosystem but they were kind of a bit rogue and untrusted they were certainly looking to like control and drive ETC and again I mean I think heading into the heading into that proof of state transition it was sort of like okay well we we would like to control and drive ETC right you know we feel that we can

2:44:51you know that there's a gap and an opportunity there we're heading into that transition you know ETC could be pumped up and could become a big ecosystem but they did that in a very messy nasty kind of way um I mean I don't I don't think they in particular like caused failure ETC but you also had the IOHK and Charles being involved at various times trust sometimes good and sometimes bad I mean I think ultimately it was just that um the weren't enough people who cared about that key philosophical underpinning more than they just cared about you know money and usability and numbers and things you know I think ultimately the market decided and you know in Ethereum was was the winner do you think that there's like a parallel universe where some

2:45:54decisions were made so that ETC could flip ETH or do you think it was always meant for ETH to win because every everything was aligned for it to win I mean I think I know there are some people sort of who have got a conspiracy or a mindset and saying you know ETC was you know was was stabbed in the back you know was was was made a failure by you know people who whatever didn't didn't want that to uh you know to happen and specifically there was a thing about defaults so on the on the get client a decision was made very very close to the fork that supporting the fork would be the default you know so if you're on geth it would by default it would support the hard fork and that was based on a coin vote thing which had happened

2:46:56just within a few days prior to that it was called carbon vote and um and that had happened on a very short kind of like timeline and there was one whale who'd like voted late and he was like 25% of the votes was just one person so that was Martin Beasy who was one of the Ethereum uh cordubellipers so some people were like um you know well this was like an outrageous like late decision and it went you know it was like the thumb on the scales that made the thing happen you know of course like everyone or like a lot of people would just use the default so all of a sudden it doesn't matter what the actual support was lots of people end up you know end the up pro fork just because of that default and I think that's that's all shit like because you'd have a whole month of the most like vigorous kind of like discussion

2:47:57about this right nobody could not know about this down thing in the fork like it's inconceivable that nobody could have this um and especially on the mining side you know it's like if you like end up on the wrong side as a miner well you've you've given away loads of money right you've you've got block rewards you're not having them anymore you know you you're just in the wrong place and also that to have the option even you'd have had to upgrade your software right and by default you just stick on what you've got so if you take the latest version that has this default like you're doing so willingly and and knowledgably and the same thing in the release notes and everything like I think it's like inconceivable that they look at accidentally make that choice so the reality I think is that you know 80 to 85% of people were in favor of that and uh you know that was that was the consensus so um I don't know that any kind of like different

2:49:04decisions would necessarily have made a great deal of difference on that is that just the majority of people wanted to stock some dude steeping the money like that was that was the reality and that they valued that a lot more than those pure philosophical cypherpunk you know ethic ethic questions if there is any piece of advice that you would you would give Paul now that he's launching a fork and you have so much experience with being on a minority fork what would it be um on i mean on the ecc side that you know the tinky pieces were um that the miners kept mining you know so you had you had that you know that network keeps churving along um

2:50:06and I think i'm right in saying right that that the plan for e-caches that the difficulty is going to look at not right down to almost nothing right is that right? well i'm not sure how Paul is going to approach this he's going to take some feedback from what happened with the alphanet waning right i don't think i mean he tweeted that he wants the difficulty to be one whatever that means that there's going to be chaos with thousands of blocks or whatever being mined in yearly yeah phase of the network until there's like an equilibrium but i'm not sure i'm not sure if it's a good idea to make it one i'm not sure if there is a good number for this? no but by i think it's it i think it's important that you have that mining earlier and that it's not like a completely rep network you know say your sawron bit

2:51:08one tan basically like no block production right and then it's like maybe you'll get one a week or something you know like i think that's a pretty disastrous scenario if you have that uh because for anybody other than those that are like you know deeply religiously committed it's like well this thing is useless like you kind of can do anything so like what the fuck have you made you know um so i think that's important that you have sufficient mining and that you've got um enough of the throughput that the network can be used um and then the second piece is i think you know exchange listings are key um and maybe now you can kind of get away with it's like dexas if you just got you know if you've got some dexbase mean of doing that you know maybe that's kind of okay but really you could use so exchanges or at least you know one decent profile one

2:52:12um because on the easy side that's what really like made the thing come alive was okay there's a there's an economic value here you know there's a market people are interested people are mining and selling you know this is this project is alive not dead so those i think are really the key things is you want it to come out of the gate working and alive and interesting that people you know are really watching and engaging and you know even something just as simple as like okay i want to like dump my coins that you that you know that you have a market for that you have liquidity and and that that exchange of of hands where that stock is moving more into people who do value it right so it goes

2:53:13from that airdrop place to okay let's swap hands and and and get a real market going like on E2C you had a real a real dumping sell-off um where especially the foundation but other big holders lots of them did just dump so the price on E2C you know like went down a lot at the start but you know that runs out pretty quickly you know the people who really want to immediately dump a load it's like done and then you've got a new hands and it can find now find a market find a real price so yeah you want to you want to go through that kind of phase early you don't want to have like a you know a a dead chain situation where you like oh yeah just wait a few weeks and new adjustments we'll get there it's like you know those weeks that the interest and the eyeballs have gone right

2:54:15it's just oh yeah it's a dead thing yeah and in this space even a week can mean a lot of time like think about the cold card hack and however everyone was hyper focused on that and searching for reasons why and then something else happened and they sort of shifted their attention to that new event and a lot of people forgot even though a lot of coins were lost and people hurt because of that the focus shifted something else and that's something that you you really don't want where users forget about this in the beginning like if you really want to be a historian a bit clean you're gonna say well Satoshi was solo mining for a while and the network stalled a few times because there was nobody else to mine with him I think it stalled like a dozen times in the first 500 blocks or something don't quote me on that but look it up the point is that we're we're not in 2009 anymore there's like a huge industry and there are lots of projects that

2:55:16compete with each other and if you don't get it right I mean if you get it to right you're not getting enough attention because everything works as expected so it's good to reserve something for later but also you don't want to be like the laughing stock of the market and be the one that everyone pokes fun at so there's like a middle ground that needs to be hit somehow and it's very difficult for Paul to cut through because there's a lot of noise the bit 110 fork seems to get more attention just because they're silly and they made all sorts of design choices that people like to make fun of but that means that they're in the news all the time and they sort of take the whole attention and that's very unfortunate when especially you have something that's technologically more interesting yeah yeah but I do want to ask you something before I let you go unless you

2:56:16want to continue this point yeah I'm going for a bit more you have it first drink some water you work that electronic arts and I think a lot of us grew up with the FIFA games and you happen to have worked on some of the best ones and I just want to get this on record there's going to be a transcript of it and whatever so I want to ask you like which was the first FIFA game that you worked on and then you sort of turn the project around because you told me this story in private that some of the devs that EA were actually playing pests pro-egregation song that one was actually more engaging and more fun than the FIFA games and then you sort of managed to make FIFA great again well I I I won't claim sole fame for that but I was part of that yeah so so yeah I mean the so I I did computer science at University of Leeds and I was lucky enough straight out of that to

2:57:20get a job in the games industry working for Sony Signosis so Signosis was best known for like they made Y-Pow which was like this like hover future driving thing it was a PlayStation launch title anyway so I worked for that as well I was seeing that launched Brantorism or later where I'm composing them no no Crunchyismus and other group but anyway I worked for them for two and a half years and then I ended up working for electronic arts in the UK actually working on a couple of football management games it was like Stanley League manager two different ones of those and then a Harry Potter game but yeah in which one? What's Harry Potter game? It's very important. It's that Changer of Secrets. Oh nice that's the best one. It's honestly I'm the PSC actually had that level that started at Run Weasley's family home. It was not on PC on PC

2:58:26you had the first level at the weeping what you call this like the tree. Yeah, Monting Willow. Exactly that that's where it started on PC but on PSC you had the bonus with like the tutorial that was happening at Run Weasley's family house. Yeah yeah going around. I think that's the boat. It's one of your two. It's our series and the gnome gnome tossing in the garden and that's how that one ended. You throwing the knowns at targets in a field outside there. Yeah that was fun just to argue a little the detour on that is so EA signed like the license for Harry Potter games just before the first movie was going to come out or maybe it was a while back anyway but the that first movie it was coming too quickly for us to

2:59:28be able to do again for internally. There was just like a few months or whatever between signing the contract and that coming out. So that first game it just got outsourced to some other company you know if I can put something together fast and I think it it was PlayStation 1 at that point and PC but then we basically started working on Chamber of Secrets you know in parallel with that internally so that it could it would come out at the same time as the second movie who was I think in late 20 2002 but we got to see some of that first movie before it was done and that was super interesting because I've never seen that is like it was it was only a couple of months before the movie was going to come out and they're got like scenes without the CG it's just like you know a big green screen that in the in it or there was like a conversation with a

3:00:30sentor and it was just like a static model and somebody saying and the sentor says but blah blah blah and you're thinking oh god like they're just like we are in the games industry it's like it's just this total scramble like nobody sees how utterly screwed and incomplete things are but like most of the time and then they just come together at the end so yeah we got to see some of them that first movie before it came out and also goodness me I forget his name now but the the guy doing the narration and the two actors for Harry Potter and Ron Weasley they all like came into the studio you know got to meet them and you know see the game that we're working on but yeah I spent so I spent two years working working on that and for the record so I did when you said psychnosis it did sound familiar and it's the studio that did Lemmings which is also yeah they

3:01:34published Lemmings yeah and there was another they did like a bunch of amiga games as well um so yeah what did they simplify this name as well games develop so yeah they did bombarian shadow of the beast was well known on the amiga but yeah Lemmings um wipe out bunch of wipe out so they did formula one games as well that were really very popular but um but yeah anyway so I worked on that for a couple of years after doing those those soccer management titles but the lorry probes who was the chairman of EA came to visit that UK studio for the first time in in 2002 there and they had like a town hall meeting with you know Q&A going as the questions at the mic and they they didn't filter any of the

3:02:38questions it's just like rock up a nasty what you like so yeah I I I went and I said you know there's a bunch of us here big football fans you know like we're playing we're playing it with supporting going and watching watching the matches we actually like worked on titles here as well you know that there was the the management title but we also did a a FIFA derivative that was called premier league stars so it was like a standalone game with only like the English premier league in it um and I said you know but none of us play FIFA like nobody here actually plays FIFA right we all play winning 11 we play canamis one just sometimes called pro evolution and sometimes called uh winning 11 there was also ISS International Superstar Star Star yeah I think they were all they were all like much the same um and uh you know so I was saying so I hear the team in vancouver you know they're

3:03:43just doing the FIFA every year you know on this really tight schedule they never get a chance to you know to fix these these quality issues so I was saying you know like are you aware of this problem you know any kind of like plans to resolve it and then I saw sat down and felt the blood draining from my face just thinking oh my god you know you've told a very rich and powerful person but their their baby is ugly and they're stupid it's just like I'm gonna get the shit kids out of me am I getting sat here like what what what have I done but um but yeah a number of us it ended up getting early releases it's like okay if you want to give feedback here you know you can see us we know that's kind of a bit pointless because it's like it's too late by that time but then just a little bit later um got the opportunity to to move to vancouver and so join the FIFA team you know that's kind of like if you're also clever you know do you want to go and like actually help and uh

3:04:48and yeah at first I was like oh no you know I'll just be like a cog in a giant machine and won't be able to do anything and like it you know it's just gonna get crushed to death by the machine you know but uh got this said okay well do you want to go to vancouver you know like see meet the team see what the city's like it's like okay do I want to have a free holiday sure yeah I'll do that and just sort of came here and it's like oh you know it's just really nice and you know met the team it's like all these Canadians they're really they're really good you know they're really nice and uh and yes I came out here and that was that was 23 years ago and so that the the first one that worked on there was was um FIFA 2004 um which was on uh PlayStation Xbox Gamecube and PC oh I remember that it was such a big game for my childhood

3:05:51the first one that I played was 2000 on the ps1 right then I played 2000 and no 2000 and two world cop that was another one that I liked yeah 2000 and free I didn't really like it it felt very weird but 2004 was kind of a big one for me because I had like a new computer that I could play it and it had this crossover with total club manager so you could the total club manager manager manager team and then insert this to from FIFA 2004 and you could actually play games which was really amazing up the game yeah so tcn was a continuation of that Premier League manager that I worked on so that was in 99 in 2000 that I I worked on those two and it actually got it actually got three different it was like a uh it was like the Premier League manager but you'd also got like a Bundesliga manager the journal was a the Bundesliga and there was a French one as well but they're all basically the same game but with different assets and teams but various times

3:06:58that that did be called was called like FIFA manager and then total club manager that that I don't know if it even still goes right now um but yeah there was there was some crossover remember um yeah well it looks like it's still going maybe there was the other one called football manager or something yeah well it was a championship manager originally so championship manager was a really big popular one but it was football manager later as well um but but yeah I mean what you had there really with FIFA is so FIFA actually started in 1994 it's like 30 plus years of it now um that's not even called FIFA anymore they call it football club or something yeah EA sports FC it is now yeah um I mean that was another case of FIFA the organization being

3:07:58awful and terrible you know that we see all the time like FIFA a not awful corrupt group but they at two or three years ago maybe they they were like right the the licenses up for renewal and they just tried to like try to get EA to pay you know some gigantic amount of money for that FIFA license continual um so EA are like well okay forget you know we're just not going to be FIFA anymore and I think I think what what what FIFA didn't understand is like FIFA wasn't a brand before the game like it's not like FIFA is some amazing like you know huge well-known great brand prior to the game it was the success of the game that gave like FIFA the the caches um so I think you know they they really didn't understand as well how much value that there was

3:09:01in that game and in the 30 years of iteration and development you know all of the effort that's gone into that game overall those years um and also the other licenses you know there's like hundreds of licenses within that game as well as FIFA you know because you've you've you've got different licenses for each league you've got licenses for particular teams you've got licenses for particular players um for authentic stadium you can have multiple different architects that made like the North stand in the East and the West stand and you have to do a license within you know so they really didn't understand like the depth of licensing that you have to have for an authentic game um but also just like 30 years worth of iteration on a bit of software you know like you think of something like Linux you know imagine a situation where it's like right um we want to do like a new deal with

3:10:04a different kernel like that anyone can make a kernel right it's just a thing in loads and files and memory or whatever right yeah we'll get different we'll just some other company will be able to do that right it's like you don't understand the cumulative you know work that's gone into that which there's also the other unique thing that used to be very important in video games in the 90s and 2000s which is the soundtrack like a licensed songs were really amazing I've discovered so much music through not just the FIFA games but Tillini Hawks Pro Skater and everything else it was just amazing a great time to be alive there's also my video editor in the chat I want to acknowledge him he says that he lived or maybe it's a typo and wants to say loved wipeout but maybe he lived right who knows yeah I mean the thing that was special about wipeout was um I get in talking about authenticity is and soundtrack is wipeout was one of the very first

3:11:09gang that that had like licensed soundtrack like real like club you know club kind of music so they did they had that and they had really authentic design like that there was designers republic who were probably still are you know a big line design a bureau or whatever for graphic design so it's like here's a game but it's got like professional graphic design and real authorised music you know in in this you know one of the first PlayStation games so it's like you've got this new console it's like wow look at this amazing graphics and you know the feel of the shit going round and the you know and then the design and then the music and then they did a bunch of like collaborations with nightclub so it's like right let's have a games room inside a club

3:12:10so you know that you got clubers turning up and then playing this game and the music and everything right that all of these things coming together so that was that was massively successful wipeout was um but yeah on FIFA I mean they've they've really fucked it by by not having EA I don't know that they do I don't think they've still done and a new FIFA right you know here's FIFA 2026 or whatever that that would be this new one I don't I think there's been like two two three years been happening but we started this thread which we did not finish about the FIFA games that you were working on you said 2004 was the first one yeah so 2004 so I worked 2004 2005 2006 um and then again eight eight nine and ten um and for the seventh one I was often a different role but yeah what what we had was um FIFA in 2002 I think was was in a really bad state and

3:13:22what had happened is it it started in 1994 what the story about that um but you'd have this real sort of like Asian and FIFA um where at that point EA a California income they got Latin and um an NBA and other North America we can that they didn't have the thought there's a new future world well your your idea was this rock singer again I'm not trying to just me but there there's something wrong with your internet I think oh can you hear me now yeah well let's see if this works anyway so they made the game in 94 and it was great but what had happened is that the guy Bruce Mcmillan who started that who was at Chelsea season ticket holder um had gone on to other things and you ended up with people running it who were Americans with no understanding of the sport so they kind of did this Hollywood

3:14:30ization a bit where it's like all of these big reactions shots it's like oh you know all these crazy like over reactions and like the shots it was like you know like bullet shots and like Superman diving around and just really very like unrealistic over overdone which one was now to find the other thing that was 2002 but it'd been built up to it over the over the last couple of years and you basically got like the push was not about like authentic gameplay and football it was like all these different modes and reactions and everything so and the worst part about was that the the ball didn't have real physics so it's like the ball is rolling in front of you right so you're walking around and if the player turns the ball would like rotate with them you know it's just utterly unrealistic physics on that and um so what they had was the sales was still good like

3:15:40but but the reviews like sucked and people were just not playing and so you know what happened is that you know I went there but lots of other people went there as well they're they're basically got told in heading into 2003 they got told right you've you've got to turn this around or we're going to take the game away from you you know we'll move it to the UK studio or somewhere it's going to be better it's like 2003 is your last chance um and yeah I mean you were saying you didn't like 2003 right I mean I've played it a lot because it was the only one that I had for a while you have to understand that in Eastern Europe we were pirate pirating the games so when you got your hands on something which is new it was like the holy grail but I remember not liking it too much it felt weird I really liked 2000 for some reason maybe it's just because it was the first one that I actually played and it was so such a novel thing to be

3:16:45able to play a football game that sort of looks like football on TV and you're able to control the players the thing with 2000 is that the goalkeeper was like a god it was very hard to defeat the goalkeeper you had to shoot the ball from an angle and once you figured out how to do it it was super predictable yeah same show every time you could score like a hundred goals in a game if you made it long enough and you could also just take you could do stuff with the goalkeeper I remember you could pass the ball to the goalkeeper and just dribble everyone with the field and then just score goals with him yeah it was kind of silly that this was possible and you could always I mean I think you could get a red card with the goalkeeper that was also funny yeah but yeah winning 11 was like way better in the FIFA at that point so it was clear that we like there was a real quality issue I can confirm that in a very isolated case I was going to this place

3:17:48that had like an internet cafe but they instead of internet they had PlayStation consoles and I was playing FIFA 2000 because that's what I knew to ask like you had a list of games that you could ask to play I was like yeah I'll just play some FIFA 2000 but the older kids were playing ISS doing saying that it's more advanced and it's more interesting I remember trying it but it was difficult to learn the controls FIFA was easier you're pressing X to pass circle to what's the name of it it was circle to shoot and the square to do the long pass yeah yeah and they're trying to yeah you know those dynamic games they were like way better at that point and I mean they and they didn't have licensing you know it was just totally made up team names and player names but you know it didn't matter but yeah what we had there was okay we've you know FIFA needs to be rewritten but how like is that going to happen like and there was the Xbox 360

3:18:55release happened in 2005 so the thought was okay well maybe when this new console comes in we can that'll be the rewrite right you've got more power you can do better animations you can you know we can we can make a new game but the rewrite stuff it wasn't ready still for that and then I think there was FIFA so that was yeah it was FIFA Road to World Cup it was the launch title and then you've got FIFA World Cup and then you've got FIFA 07 and all through each of these it was like the new AI is going to come in and it's like it didn't every year it wasn't quite ready so it was actually 2008 where the complete rewrite actually got delivered and it felt yeah it felt way different but it wasn't like well tuned or whatever it was like here's new one and it's obviously better but not

3:19:56really totally totally good and then through 2009 and then 2010 that got like super polished up to where it was getting you know like 1995 percent mechritic ratings so yeah it took like 70 years all in all for that stuff to really get kind of fits I mean another thing that happened through that that really made a huge difference was a there's a guy called Dave Rutter who is another British guy who came in as the as the line producer the guy basically in charge of the gameplay and the development and what he did was he said like every year 80 percent of the resources are going to be spent on the core game play so it's like passing shooting tackling right that's where nearly all of the effort is going to go is like the feel of those key pieces right just the core gameplay and experience so like you know figure out about different game modes or all that

3:21:00other bullshit like it doesn't really matter so I can make the gameplay great and focus on that for a number of years and then that happened so yeah I didn't work on the gameplay I would have loved to but I didn't happen but yeah I was part of the the team that was making that change that's so cool man I think a lot of people listening to this will relate to the fact that you worked on one of the most popular game franchises of all time in a time when we were kids maybe not kids teenagers or something or preteens but it was amazing I remember 2005 it was possibly the last one that I liked but not because it was maybe the best one or something it's just that I sort of acquired a different taste in video games growing up I was like I'm not watching football as much as I used to I'm just into other stuff I was playing

3:22:02basketball I was like a different person with different interests but I remember really liking 2005 and there was a time when the changes from one game to the other felt more consistent possibly because the technology was also evolving more after a certain point it felt more like there's more of a roster update and some minor changes with the menu but otherwise it's the same as last year's game I heard this from my brother he was like a prodigy when it comes to FIFA games he was eight years old at game fairs whatever where they were highlighting I think in 2003 or 2004 there was a wif a champions league game that came out from EA sports yeah that was on display at this thing this event and my brother just went there being eight years old and he was beating everyone right like adults walking there grabbing the controller and being like oh I'm gonna beat this kid

3:23:08and he was winning I have no idea how he was doing it he was like the pinball wizard in the who song you know just actually not blind because that that's kind of the song about a blind kid but the point is that he was young and he was able to make adults feel like complete idiots so he was very good at this he's more interested in FIFA games even today he plays and when he was in university he was going to tournaments with other students but yeah he I guess he knows much more about these games than I do I'm more into RPGs but FIFA is an RPG but that's like a different topic for another time yeah yeah but yeah there were two there were two a year and I don't know if that's still the case but you had so you had the main FIFA game every year you got World Cups so World Cup is every four years the UEFA European Championships is every four years offset from that and then you had Champions Leaks in the gaps so it was like World Cup Champions League

3:24:14UEFA Champions League World Cup and then the and then the FIFA's so you're trying to sell two games a year I mean now it's obviously like a bunch more ultimate team and card games and just like ongoing updates but yeah yeah it's too bad that too I mean I'm happy you left the video game industry because it seems like everything got worse since then but you're also very wrong about Nintendo when you said that well they should just give up and launch their games on PlayStation like right now they like the only real video game company out there all the others are trying to do something else yeah so that I had a notorious tweet that I just forever on the listening where I tweeted Wii U is crap and a series of other things I mean it sort of was for its dear like it was not as

3:25:14ambitious as the PS4 or whatever ex-bound in one Nintendo were always so far behind on hardwath you know they are absolutely not leading edge but yeah the Wii U in particular was absolutely terrible but the Wii was great Wii U that was a mess I mean they were sort of ahead when you think about it the the super Nintendo was better than the Sega Genesis the N-Ryze D4 had more processing power than the PlayStation but lower storage capacity the GameCube was more the most powerful of them all I think graphically I'm not sure about the Xbox but it was more powerful than the PS2 but it had the tiny DVDs that wasn't the case like when when we were doing one of those like the GameCube was worse you know it was worse than PS2 when Xbox we put we put very little after into the GameCube one it was basically like a scaled down version of the PS2 or Xbox yeah

3:26:16but I think it was because of the storage if you look at the RaspBex I think it could do much more I don't think so but maybe I'm wrong we didn't do a lot with it but yeah the I think GameCube there was probably like the last time it was kind of nearly here like everything else it's been they've been kind of old and underpowered as they launch in Switch now is so old you got the Switch too obviously I have the Switch Geno I love it yeah mine that's well for your old left Switch as well it's so convenient you have two questions in the chat and then I'll let you go okay the first one comes from Alpha Arc 84 who says you've appeared on Bitcoin podcasts talking forks while being the Ethereum guy have you ever considered just showing up wearing a professional kiosk agent name tag so yeah I'm I'm I'm a pluralist shall we say I don't really try and fit

3:27:37into any particular religious niche so I mean you and I I guess glad really like got to know each other at proof of work summit oh yeah how come I haven't said anything about that you you did two of the coolest conferences ever with the proof of work summit in 23 and 24 I'm sorry I couldn't contribute more to keep this alive because it was such a cool concept yeah well thank you so yeah I so I hosted two conferences there proof of work summit and those were really bringing together all the different proof of work ecosystems so they're big coiners it was a collaboration actually with the Litecoin foundation but we also had for the 24 event it was the collaboration with the Lakewing both of them really it was more evident in the second one yeah yeah but you know we

3:28:40have people from an arrow dark foie I meant to get some big coiners doge put yeah with doge people as well but yeah I mean that was that you know the thought there really was that you know you various of the sort of Ethereum conferences ended up being like Ethereum and friends really so it's like not not just purely Ethereum but it's like you know you whatever you end up with with people from all all sorts of other you know other chains as well including you know Bitcoiners in more recent times when you were at Denver yourself right last last February no it was this year yeah well yes it was this year sorry for me last February it means last year right so yeah five six months ago there you go you got a bunch of Bitcoin things happening at that so yeah it was really well why you know why

3:29:45would you not have that on the proof of work side as well you know we're all doing these similar kind of things you know like you're spoken about all that of the different bitcoins and obviously like you know Bitcoin Maxis would not initiate such a thing you know that the horrified by such a thing um but yeah that's what we ended up doing and uh you know those were really really enjoyable events to me um just looking I mean look at some of the speakers we had the second year so yeah Phil Zimmerman and I goes thank you for that one because if you didn't have him I couldn't actually meet him in person and interview him in 23 it was surreal I spent like an entire day talking with him what was even funnier was that the next year when I met him at the proof of work summit he had no idea who I was I guess he meets so many people that he doesn't feel number but to me it was

3:30:46like a big deal and if you did not organize the proof of work summit I guess I could never have him on my podcast and to me that was like one of my favorite interviews just because I got to sit down with this guy and learn some of his stories so thank you for that and that was great yeah so he was a keynote speaker both years I was just really delighted to get him I used to lovely old guy you know just sort of like a grandfatherly you know kind you know interested soul guy and yeah James and Locke spoke both times as well Charlie Lee um so so Joe Lerner came in 2024 oh yeah he came with that whole team with the Rutzard guys and they did their presentations and it was amazing that they chose to come I think they had a choice between your conference and Amsterdam or something I think it was BTC Proud BTC Proud exactly so they chose to come to the proof of work summit as opposed to the larger Bitcoin conference which yeah was sort of big yeah it was great so uh

3:31:56and yeah and then that 2024 there was a there was a big focus on Bitcoin layering so he had uh Yattos and Auckland from uh from Citrier and Alex from Bob and Yago from Sovereign seen like a bunch of different uh of those people and then they could go to the cat. It's funny to talk about and so this was only two years ago and it's used like it's another lifetime or another time way none of this stuff actually took off not yet. And I mean yeah and and actually Paul was mainly speaking as well um both times but yeah he uh he ended up having to fail on that um but yeah he would have been a very interesting worst to have had that. I say you also have a story with Charlie Threm or something oh yeah he was meant to be a speaker that first year and but

3:32:57he was a he was meant to be remote as well and somebody who was organized and this didn't work out the time zones and it was like he was scheduled early in Europe so it was like you know middle of the night in North America so that yeah that just dropped out but yeah he was uh he was meant to speaking he did agree to it it was our fuck up it wasn't him um but yeah he uh but uh I don't know if you've spoken to him I've never met him in person myself. I don't think we were ever in a place where we could meet each other but I did have him on my podcast twice right right and he's an interesting character. Unfortunately still living off his 2011 or something fame and trying to capitalize on it but yeah he's he's still around doing stuff.

3:34:02I remember you also had Nick Spano's or something who did not show up. He was meant to he was meant to come and he just goes to this. Yeah I was hoping to interview him I think that was in 2024. Yeah yeah but yeah in terms of the chaos agent yeah I mean I've just been in all the buckets really I'm not part of Sam. I mean it's funny I really got more interested in Bitcoin during my time at ETC and I think the reason for that was you know when I was starting this sort of 2020 2014 Ethereum journey that was kind of my first reactive thing like I was actively an Ethereum person like I kind of jumped over Bitcoin at the start because that history and you know some of the receive wisdom I guess I got from some of the other people I was working with there was like

3:35:08Bitcoin is obsolete right it's like Ethereum can do everything Bitcoin can do one more so you know Bitcoin has just got the you know the lead but when that ends like it will be over for them you know it's like as soon as Ethereum has got more market cap than Bitcoin well you know Bitcoin's finished that was the first generation of Ethereum's the second one and it was really when I was working more actively on ETC that I really got the understanding that you know it is more than just the technology you know you have got all of these other elements and that you don't have to be like the leading tech project to be you know to be leading in terms of usage and you know being in a good place uh it took me a while to to to see that because of the history so then yeah at that point I really opened up a lot more I think to to possibilities across many projects

3:36:14last question it's from someone named Aaron ZDax or something if you had a time machine and could only give one piece of advice to 2015 Bob would it be about Ethereum about career choices or just by more GPUs earlier um I think it would be look after your private keys better because my my sad crypto story is that I got a grant um in the very start of 2016 which was $10,000 worth of ether and I kind of like was like okay I'm not going to do anything with it and I was using the computer for other things with development and I ended up like wiping it by mistake so I lost control of those funds so that would be I don't know a couple of million maybe

3:37:14so look after your keys if you are self-customing you have quite a responsibility on you to be careful crazy I guess this was before bit 39 became standardized in Ethereum you had to store a file yeah yeah there was I think it was like a JSON file and the passwords something like that no comment there I'm happy that we have better self-customy solutions nowadays but still be careful out there everyone listening to this take care of your keys yeah so I have to be retired I could be retired but that's not going to happen you still got to work now I don't think you can retire with or maybe you can depending on the country but yeah

3:38:15anyway I also want to have my mortgage paid off and I would be working as I wished shall we say what I want to say in closing is that I got to meet Donald McIntyre for the first time in person thanks to your conference which was the proof of fork summit 2024 and that's where he traveled for the first time in a while to conference in Europe it was because of you and that that was so cool and unfortunately he did not get good news because at the end of the summit you announced that basically ETC co-op which was I'm not sure if it was a company or a larger developer nonprofit nonprofit so it you announced that you guys were ran out of funding and it's the last proof of fork summit and also everyone working at ETC co-op will have to find work and I remember

3:39:15trying to get to convince Sergio Lerner because he's also Argentinian just like Donald I was like don't you want to hire Donald he most likely already understands all the technology he's a bit cleaner he's into Ethereum it's like the perfect profile for someone that you would want to hire you know I don't know what happened afterwards all I know is that Donald is not with us anymore and you're the one who told me about it last year and I feel happy that I remastered and publish an article about our interview because his knowledge is preserved and we have the most of it on I think it's still up it's called it's Ethereum plan no it's ETH plan ETH plan ETH plan ETHERBLAN I think it's a dot com yeah I think the website is down but you can find it on its own archive yeah I mean this guy was obviously very smart shared his knowledge to the world

3:40:23and there's still a lot that you can learn especially because he was such a novice color of Nixabos and he was reading all the articles and trying to make sense of them and publishing his own articles with summaries or just extensions of what he learned and yeah this one's for you Donald hope you're somewhere out there and you can hear us we love you and did you release a new video of that then on YouTube yes that's really mastered yes yeah it's on YouTube I mean it's not recorded at the time I was only doing audio interviews so it's just static graphics that I put there but yeah yeah well I will share that with his family because yeah I got to went to went to his memorial last last year so it got to me his ex-wife and his sister and her family

3:41:27but yeah he was good to also I want to thank him since we're at this stage he sort of set me up for an interview with Nixabos like he actually was nice enough to connect us by email and then Nixabos was like oh that's cool but I'm going to remote location and I don't have stable internet and we're going to have to do this like you send me the questions and maybe I will record myself answering to them and then I sent the questions and I guess I overwhelmed him it was like 20 long questions and maybe he was like oh I have time for this and then he he ever answered again I almost add Nixabos on the show thanks to Donald McIntyre and then you go yeah they were close now I'm not even sure how he can get a hold of him well Elaine who you'd mentioned Elaine who Elaine who is she's one of the she's one of the directors of the DC Corp which is it's not it's not dead yet by the way

3:42:31it's it's gone along for the last couple of years just without me but essentially that to support the last quarterbellar who's still working on the client but yeah Elaine is one of the directors that she's his wife so I have her email if it's possible I could connect you I mean I would be interested to get Elaine also she's been doing some interesting work and I'm past the point where I care about purity or whatever I mean honestly my first episode season one episode one was with Donald so you can argue that this was never like a purely toxic maximalist show maybe I fell down that hole for a couple of years but yeah I've always had I've had Igor later I've had Vlad Zamfir and it's funny because when I had Vlad Zamfir I think that was season nine Donald told me that I should delete the episode with him because he doesn't want to

3:43:36be on the same show as this guy and I told me you know that I'll just wait for a few years and you're gonna see that in like in perspective you're you're gonna regret not being here and I never deleted the episode you're like no but I once you removed whatever you know how he was very stubborn and I'm happy I never deleted that and it's still there for anyone to listen and then I've had the talik that was surreal for the first time I could not read the chat anymore because it was just like stream a cascade of messages yeah people ask them for stuff or promoting their own tokens or whatever and I'm like I don't know how this is gonna happen but it it happened for three hours and I sort of respect the talik much more right now is I realized that he he's not overrated like he really knows what he's talking about he really is a genius in his own way

3:44:37and he sort of like he's one of the smartest people I've spoken with for three hours and I was like okay this guy really like yeah there are these a lot of he's crap that that's being talked about him in the Bitcoin circles but he sort of earned his place yeah and I mean he's very humble with that and he's very giving with his time is you know he's selfless and you know he's not he's not arrogant or you know anything like that you know he was more edgy if you think about it like 10 years ago the tweets that he was posting like you can actually cherry pick some stuff like when he said that owning some you know sexual material is not as bad as doing heroin or whatever like he he was trying to be edgy in some ways a few years ago now now he's more I mean he's matured a bit he's dirty or something I mean I think some of that stuff is just like autistic you know lack of

3:45:40social cues kind of stuff you know he he got so caught out a little bit saying doing weird things or whatever but it's you know it's sure it's more more autistic than nothing else but yeah you know I just read from yesterday that the biggest challenge in this place is to tell what's autism and what's genius or it's both of them which one is like the dominant feature yeah yeah yeah and I mean the other thing with with the talent that maybe some people don't know is you know he's not like a tall materialistic like he doesn't give a shit about money that's all you know he's just like a dude who walks around the world with his cat pack on his laptop you know like no madding around you know I then think he owns a house or a car you just you know he's just a geek walking around doing shit you know I mean for his own security it's possibly the best choice

3:46:46when you think about it yeah yeah I mean he's just being doing that for the decade of so now that's just how he is yeah to it feels like Ethereum turned out to be the best Bitcoin side chain whether or not some people on Bitcoin like it that's another conversation but there's 120,000 BTC on Ethereum and there's nothing you can argue against from this perspective like people chose that as the place to store their Bitcoin or use it for other stuff it wasn't liquid it wasn't lightning it wasn't root stock it was Ethereum yeah yeah yeah yeah I mean something we didn't talk about the mentioned who are really going to go into it much as I've got this cycle the early days of Ethereum which is a history project basically so profiles for everyone involved in the early days I've done interviews with a bunch

3:47:52of people I think I'm about 14 of them now talking especially to people who are involved in sort of 2014 2015 so yeah that's been a lot of fun I started some of that in like 2017 kind of put it aside and came back to it more recently especially with AI assisted development I was able to you know gather together some notes into a to a pretty detailed site and that's you know that's enjoyable I do know where the bodies of bodies of Barrett you know what I was around early and I know most people and for Asdember this year that we mentioned you being there I did a collaboration with Jessica Angel who's the creative director there to do with think all the the museum of Ethereum so that was a mixture of physical and digital artifacts so again you know some of that profile

3:48:53stuff and some historical photos but also talking about forks I had a project where I revived an old fork of Ethereum so it was back to Homestead as of 2016 so I rented GPUs and I mined that old fork back to life and then reduced the hash power there from multiple GPUs down to less GPUs down to CPU so you could actually CPU mine a this this old fork of Ethereum and run like 10-year-old client software and the wallet software there and you could send funds back and forth between those machines that were running their own you know extension of of that network so that wasn't a fork it wasn't a test net it was a continuation of a prior fork you know it's so I called that the

3:49:57the Ethereum time machine so that was that was a lot fun I'm looking at your website which is early days of eth.org and there's this grid section where you can see how people who are involved it's amazing to see that in the white paper phase of it there are four romaniens that I counted which is pretty amazing yeah I knew about me high who is like a co-founder he also co-founded Bitcoin magazine with Vitalik but there are a bunch of others and the other interesting discovery is Eric Lambroso a Eric is one of the architects of Segwit like there used to be a time when participating in other projects was not like a toxic tribal kind of thing it was just dev work or maybe just another interest in something else oh well the circle also which is amazing I hit this was a crazy thing I found out was so there's two of them there there's Ralph Merkel and

3:51:05who's the other dude Paul Snow no though Paul Snow is an interesting one because he works on Factor right so you know another another deep Bitcoiner being involved there um yeah it's right from Merkel but there's another mathematician dude um oh my goodness wazzy god that's fine and anyway so with Ralph Merkel so that was a funny one because I saw at some point like just on the Ethereum website so okay internet archive was so valuable here for looking at this stuff um that Ralph Merkel was listed as like a team member like advisor or something and I was like yeah fucking right is is Satoshi and advisor as well Ralph Merkel but he really was like Ralph Merkel and another dude who I bloody lost track of now but you know another famous cryptographic

3:52:12breakthrough person they were both advisors for a short time oh Neil co-blit that's it who was the co-inventor of a lettic of cryptography yeah it's very hard to argue that Ethereum is not a safer pond project like looking at all of this stuff the other people involved of course someone didn't got rich and there's a lot of hatred for the rich among Bitcoiners for some reason like were socialists or whatever yeah but I see a lot of people who went on to build something successful afterwards or people who became Bitcoin Maximists afterwards and that was not even aware like there is Chelsea Palmer and I remember her from Twitter that she was very anti-Euterium yeah but she seems to have been involved in 2014 yeah well I mean through this

3:53:20decontrol which is a co-working like meetup space yet but yeah I mean it you could not be involved really like you know it was an earlier time and you know you may have made not like particular things but you didn't have that hard line you know well you can talk to each other you know so you created this page to celebrate oh there's also Peter Todd here to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Ethereum what would you say that wasn't that wasn't a driving thing for it I we the conversations if you look here so the first there were basically three videos that got done in 2023 which was primarily memories from the the founders of block apps that company I ended up

3:54:21working with these last couple of years but basically saying you know they aside from the business that they got together they were involved with Ethereum really at least they were writing down you know they wanted to basically make some podcasts and remember you don't have there get those memories down and I ended up being a guest on the third one and you know making cogeous notes out of all of these so then last year when I was actually working at block apps we decided to revive that series so firstly we're talking to Taylor Garing and then to to tax too and and then really with those interviews I was like oh I have actually got a lot of biographical information and timeline information as well from earlier efforts and it's like okay I'm going to combine all of these into a single project you know have some AI assistants to put together the website and they and the structure here so then yeah if you if you click on individuals in that

3:55:23grid for example you will find like a bunch of cross links and then back links at the bottom so that's kind of a really pretty rich wiki structure I found Amir Taki here and it's yeah the fight because nowadays he's bullish on Ethereum and he says that it's actually something good and he's trying to punch like a competitor to Ethereum which is doing zero knowledge proofs and smart contracts but there's a quote from him here and I think it's very funny in the context he says when Ethereum was being formed Amir Taki was asked to be the lead developer he declined saying they did ask me to be the lead Ethereum dev but I just didn't I was like we can build this on Bitcoin why do you need a new thing yeah because I know you can build it on Bitcoin yeah yeah it's a very common mindset at the time 2014 so it wasn't like alien or

3:56:23foreign that people were hostile or at least technically how should I put a challenge to build this on Bitcoin there was counterparty and mastercoin so you have these two that sort of try to compete by being protocol some Bitcoin we also had the upper turn worse which is another interesting history episode for Bitcoin like when the core devs decided that they don't want to support arbitrary data in tokens on Bitcoin that's what led to the legitimation of Ethereum and NXT and whatever bit shares was around at the time because if you wanted to be serious about this and build decentralized companies with tokens and shares and whatever or trade commodities with automated market makers or something you needed something else that had smart contracts and enabled tokens and where people would never tell you to not use it no no I mean it's you know from what came out

3:57:27of that it was very clear you know this is a this is a hostile area for for innovation really that's sad anyway cool page early days of eith dot org check it out I know I'm gonna have some funds scrolling through these names like Gavin and Reese and is here David Johnston he was on my podcast I know that he was doing some master and coin stuff and you dress into an opulence he'll actually wrote many years later mastering Ethereum and people were so hostile to him when he launched the mastering lightning book which was like the next one in his series that he sort of rage quit he was like I can't please these people I'm just gonna do something else yeah yeah in hindsight like if you look at these names you would guess that Ethereum was gonna be a big deal

3:58:30just because it had the social layer being involved I hope that 10 years from now we're gonna have like early days of ecage or something but the people who made the success of the Bitcoin hard fork actually a thing yeah well I should buy the don't really yeah but yeah you know you got to do things right you got to try you got to try that that's a good way to conclude our conversation unless you think that we missed something no subscribe share what Bob how can people follow before you go what's the best way for anyone listening to this to keep up with what you're doing yeah so I'm Bob some will on Twitter on X so some will is like some are like the season WILL my personal website is bobsomeworld.com so you'd mention there illegal is a best

3:59:32org so yeah probably most active on on Twitter I can never bring myself to say X meaning it's so weird thank you Bob you're good enough everything thanks to the sponsors once again layer two labs they're launching ecage check out ecage.com site shift which is the place where you can swap your stable coins for sound money or something that cannot be taken away from you brains hash power that you can use for mining bitcoin or ecage or whatever shots of 56 chain you like orange rock where you can trade without kvc and cake wallet which did the giveaway and has a very cool wallet that you should try I think they're gonna support ecage too soon it's coming thank you very much it's been four hours of fun and learning and I'll see you in the next one cheers around