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

0:00stirred 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 Woodard 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's stolen all my fucking money, like fuck you, man, what are you doing? And if there's an opportunity to, you know, to stop that happening, then, you know, we should take that opportunity, right? That's the answer, 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 had, you know, some, some other small projects around it, but essentially Bitcoin was, like, everyone was a Bitcoin. So Bitcoin with smart contracts is just like, okay, well, yeah, I want Bitcoin,

21:14but 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, you know, here's a platform that you build applications for. And the applications of what is important, you know, it's not primarily money. It's like, yeah, Bitcoin's your money, that's fine,

22:19we 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. And 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

23:21particular 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 it 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 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 fix the thing. So 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 has wanted to keep them

24:23working, right? It's kind of been this kind of user plan, you're 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 stealing money, so fucking as well, you know, if, you know, the, if you've got this assumption that someone'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, that was happening.

25:27Both 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, but yeah, that message went out. I can't remember it. Well, one of the, one of the the, uh, attempts of one of the exchanges also said, you know, I regret trading the shit coin,

26:28what a forget disaster, this is kind of thing. 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, was a hard fork, and that hard fork, it didn't rewind anything, you know, it wasn't that kind of like go back to an earlier block kind of thing. Instead, it was what was called an irregular state

27:29transition. It's quite quite good at euphemism, but what that did was, 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 Dale, 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. So, so yeah, not undoing, but basically staying okay, that stuff is not going to continue, right?

28:30That's interesting, because the narrative about the situation is that there was a rollback of the blockchain. Yeah. And it would turn into a previous state before the deal, the deal, how it happened. Yeah, so that is not what happened. You know, I've seen that as a common kind of misunderstanding. 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. 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 that 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

29:34just like hanging around, but potential future refund. So yeah, it was not a trivial flip-back at all, but it was a breach of immutability because it was changing where that was on the state. And 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's kind of your breach is that the fork was changing those, that those semantics and that ownership because it was taking ownership away from the attacker. You know, so there was some kind of message

30:36that 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 on that basis of saying that his, his funds were being stolen from him, that he had, you know, found a feature of the smart contracts and he'd just use that feature of gaining this money. And saying, well, look, I didn't, you know, I just used the code as written, you know, I didn't do anything wrong, you know, I didn't infiltrate anything or steal keys or anything, I just used the smart contract as published. 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,

31:42it's not completely, like, irrational because another thing that they said, as part of the, the Dow launch, was code is law, you know, this, this really strong, like, you know, code is law ethos of saying, 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, 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, you know, here's a new thing. So really saying that this, this Dow was this, this new kind of thing, which was, code is law, you know, it, it was independent of people, you know,

32:47got third parties involved, it's, it's, it's this, this new kind of thing. And also then, 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, 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 and this is the implementation 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's what you did, that's what you

33:50published, that was the contract, you explicitly said that was the contract. So if there's a bug in somebody's 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, patterns 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 ultimately you had new client software releases, which had this, this hard fork in it and, but they supported

34:52both 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, Twitter, you know, and variety of different 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,

35:55you 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, 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 have them go? But what ended up happening was, I'd say probably, you know, 80 to 85% of that hash rate, but also just, you know, of people running clients and just involved on on social channels, but you did have this strong majority in favor of the hard fork. 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.

37:00From what I saw, it was very open and consensual that you just did have a very large chunk of, of the Ethereum community that had quite a different mindset than the Bitcoiners that they had come from, that you had this large chunk of people who, you know, had had really quite different priorities or thoughts and were not that hard call enough for that to override somebody stealing all the money. And on the ETC side, I mean, Ethereum, you know, that naming came a little bit later. I'd, you know, maybe some people were starting to say classic, but you, you really had that that minority and some people mined it. So, you know, the chain, the chain kind of kept going.

38:06I 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 more rapid than on Bitcoin, you know, like you saw with a bit 110, you know, utterly stalling where you had that soft fork right and, and they're being a very minority 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 the adjustment is an awful lot faster. So, if, you know, you had people mining it and off you go, you know, it continued and then fairly soon after that, you had an exchange listing as well with Polonix choosing to list it. And then there you go, you know, you have a, a minority chain

39:10that 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 St. Toshi, right about, you know, it will go very badly for you if you're on that, on that side. But yeah, what you had with ETC is, oh, right. So that, that can work. You know, if you, if you have a situation where you have got these irreconcilable differences, you know, you don't have to stay together in misery, you know, you can get a divorce, you can succeed from the union, it's, it's kind of okay. And that was, that was a learning. And, and, you know, I remember at the time just thinking, you know, well, what a wonderful thing that is, it's like, well, great, you know, you, you know, everyone can have what they want. You know, and you don't even have to pick a winner,

40:18you know, just, just hold both sides if, if you want, or if the other solid, you know, whatever disgust you so much, well, sell your coins at some free money. Like, you know, you've, you've lost network effect in that split. 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, whatever, different Linux distros or, you know, any of those kind of applications. If you split, well, yeah, okay, well, you're gonna 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

41:20redundant cost from. But, you know, people do this all the time, you know, that you, this is the the pattern of, of countries and groups and everything is, you know, things, if you've got differences after a certain amount of time, you, you know, you can't make it work and so I mean, the fact that you can do that with blockchain projects was great, you know, that was a, like, learning it at that time with, well, okay, 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 the 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

42:20one, 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 gonna 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, but I've heard people talk about this. I think even Tim Tim may and his last interview ever he mentioned in this. So I hope I didn't reveal anything secret. But my point is that a lot of these cypher punks were on the

43:25side 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 ever non-Bitcoin 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 would, you know, would win, 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,

44:35you 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 those 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, an auction on top. But yeah,

45:37you 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 so yeah, I mean, it's you you have a stronger conservative

46:39flavor arise and so yeah, it's it's not like, yeah, it's it's kind of like which group is leaving, I guess you could say, you know, is it 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 meet 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 were just just doing 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

47:43like she comes in 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 having 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 know, you don't have to stay, you can just go off. It's interesting that usually it's Dean Tolar and one that remains and it's the same ones that

48:44leave for some reason. Yeah, 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 is if you're sort of a frontier adventurer, you know, offensive of 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 until 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

49:46like 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 trade to stale in a more conservative way. But 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

50:52Artimono 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 on the simplest level, it was because you had such a vast majority in support of the fork. The foundation just ceased funding the ETC side. Like I think that criticism people had is like, oh, the foundation is picking the winner. Right? And it's like,

51:59right, you're cast out. It's like, 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 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. And 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

53:04didn'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. Maybe 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

54:07open source, you know, somebody else could do a new instance of these things. But they're not going to be the same. They're going to be different. And we don't have any integrations. You've got of those into particular platforms. You know, there was need like redoing. So I mean, I I guess it's the same on on these more recent Bitcoin forks is, well, you know, maybe, you know, the mining, mining pool code is going to be changing. The wallet code is going to be changing. And, you know, any kind of like online services that using those or integrations with payments or anything, right? Everything 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

55:08Ethereum 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 really big anyway, even a tiny fraction that still be, you know, really significant. You know, so let me have a look right now, for example, on Bitcoin Cash.

56:10So Bitcoin Cash is obviously like significantly, you know, that you could see 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 knew 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 self high demand or whatever,

57:11it'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 contracts that does everything. So in the end, I don't think it 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 like 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,

58:14it 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 I Bitcoin anti-e-cash even like Chomuni 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 in Amsterdam. And I've come to the conclusion that a lot of projects, if you just read the white paper and sitoshi's writings and then you look at, for example, Litecoin, you're going to come to the conclusion that yes, Litecoin is a Bitcoin. It 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

59:16block 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 Halfiney and Radelinger 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 add it up, everything it would give you like 20 million coins in total. So we almost have 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 500 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

1:00:18one 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 a voluntary consensus. And it really is, well, what software do you choose to run? You know, the what you would describe as, you know, here is the protocol. 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

1:01:20sets of rules is is completely vauntry. 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 Libbitcoin. 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 a new consensus. Like none of that can be mandated. So given that situation, well, you know, forks can happen anywhere, you know, that splits of

1:02:23of 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 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 it's completely not the case at all. What you're often saying there is you're basically saying, hey, you can't do this. Right, you're not allowed to do this. Like that's not what it's about. You know, I want to

1:03:27can tell 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 and new ones, but the consequence of that is, you know, you're going off on your own new invention. 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 going to end up with Bitcoin Blake, which is, you know, this tiny new thing with, you know, hardly any support or use, but you can do it. But, but it's always strange to me this

1:04:32that 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 not in that bit, you know, that you have this very authoritarian, you know, allergic reaction kind of thing going on, 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 or 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. It seems like a lot

1:05:34of 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 you 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

1:06:37a 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 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 Paul's fork. Paul's fork is like, Paul's fork, false darts, but whatever. Nice pun. He's deliberately trying to distance himself from the Bitcoin branding and create a new GitHub repository, a new website, new telegram chat, new, I don't know, Twitter account, everything

1:07:40with a different branding. And he's trying to tell people that this is different from Bitcoin. It is a Bitcoin competitor because it's going to 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 going to serve the same holders. But he's going to 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 adding any useful feature. And on the other hand, you have pulse fork, which is called

1:08:43decache, the BIP 300 one, which is truly maximalist and 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 ecosystem 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 going to pick it, but I still like it. And I support pulse idea because I've been

1:09:45a fan of drive chains since I read about them like eight years ago. And it's good that they're finally happening. Well, the market picked 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 agree. I'm looking back a couple of years back to 2024. And especially around the bit, the M paper from Rotten Linus. And earlier, there was a Bitcoin roll-up paper that was written by John Light a few months prior to Bitfeeham. Yeah, the volume is that, if I remember here. Yeah. So basically, like mapping out that landscape where Ethereum had gone through so many different kind of ideas. On the Bitcoin side,

1:10:50it's been like, is Lightning? Lightning's going to fix everything. Not really no real work happening on anything else. We're on the Ethereum side. And I think a lot of that's because of the programmability of that base layer, but also just the more developer experiment-friendly kind of social side that you have gone through state channels or painted channels, which are basically lightning-like. And then state channels, similar thing, but with state, just not balances. And then there was a thing called plasma. And then you started getting like optimistic roll-ups and then ZK roll-ups. But really, that kind of on the Ethereum side of saying, well, look, hey, we can have this Richel2Weco system. Many, many different approaches can be tried. And this kind of works. And that kind of works. But there in early 2024, you've got this, well, maybe

1:11:58this stuff can happen on Bitcoin as well. Maybe you can have this red the needle of just having a little bit more programmability that that opens up this like raft of variable, again, opt-in L2s. You're not forcing anything on anyone. You're saying, hey, let's open stuff up and you can have all of these next happening. So then you had this real sort of feeling of, oh, yeah, you know, like what an opportunity there is here. If you looked at the market catware of liquid and stacks and read stock, maybe a couple of others. But if you look at the market cap of those compared to the the market cap of all the Ethereum L2s, that I saw was, and I think this was done, done, held,

1:13:08was that the L2s on Ethereum were 30% of the L1 in terms of the market cap. And for Bitcoin, it was like 1% something in it. It was like, those things that I was so that if you did have a growth of the coin like, you know, and 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. I keep breaking up. Yeah. And you're also delayed. Your video is moving like a few seconds later, which is counterintuitive because the speed of light is faster than the speed of sound,

1:14:11but on the internet, you know, the audio is easier to broadcast. Takes less bandwidth. Yeah. 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 sidshift.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 on to 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 payer 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

1:15:13wanting to pay you. There's going to be a swap in the middle and what to get is BTC directly to your wallet. Check it out. It's called site shift. There is also the eCache work that's launching. And if you want to learn more, you go to lear2labs.com or eCache.com. Right now they are in their alpha network stage, which means that you can 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 today at eCache.com and there are some public telegram chats where you can join and ask for some free coins so you can play with

1:16:13the system. There's a wallet that's called the cash wallet at eCache.com. And there's also bit window on desktop, which I think is the more advanced and honestly the option that I recommend. Check it out once again, eCache.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 future of trading the way that it should be. There is some leverage there if you want to gamble, but I don't

1:17:14recommend 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 orangerock.com. And there's also brain 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 BCH, you can mine BSV, you can even attempt to mine the new eCache fork. I think around October, when the lunch 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 but not least, we have the giveaway from cake wallet cake. As I found out recently, got more than two million downloads, I was advertising

1:18:22it with the intention of getting it to one million because I think in July, they were at 700,000, 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 their drum roll. You ready? I'm going to 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 going to reach out to you. I'm going to give you a hundred dollars in any coin that you like. That's available in cake wallet. Most likely Bitcoin or Monero or Zcash. It's up to you. I don't see any 96. I see a 93. I keep scrolling 94.

1:19:22This is the closest one so far. 95. Let's see if there is actual 96. Yes, there is Alison FDZ 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 with a new 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 have most money and most support. But there's also very strong social layer where people, even though they wear don't trust verified t-shirts and they say that

1:20:24they're true cipher pongs who follow no leaders. They do follow leaders. Yeah, yeah, I mean the markets are not rational and humans are not rational. And yeah, the best technology does not always win. And if you think of video standards, so VHS tapes, they were worse than the beta max that you had at the time, but 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. I guess if you look at it from an evolution perspective, Blu-ray was better.

1:21:29Right. All things are the web. JavaScript is terrible. It's characteristics, certainly in the early years as a language, a significantly worse than other things that were around at the time. But it was good enough. Or say the C language, even though numerous other things have happened since the vast majority of systems software and operating systems are written in C. Because again, it was good enough in the early days and it got the network effect. The same with Bitcoin. From a coding perspective and the protocol itself, there was never a written spec for the protocol. There's a bunch of weird oddities there. But it didn't matter. Overall, what you were

1:22:32guessing as that sort of memetic call that attracted people, that was good enough. So so yeah, having the vast technology does not ensure that you come out on top. 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. So for example, Tether on Tron, you know, Tron is a nasty clone of Ethereum that was just like hacked up to

1:23:34have more throughput or what have you at the cost of having a fixed that evaluators versus mining. Tether, 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 kind of one. And it's like on Tron, like what the, but there we are. 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

1:24:35Polygon, I think, for the purpose of trading Tron on it. And it seems like for some reason 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 USDT. 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, Africa. I think they use USDT on Tron a lot, and it's surprising to me to find out every time, for example, when I'm in Argentina and I see people just saying, well, we accept Tether here. It feels bitter sweet when I realized that this could have

1:25:37been Bitcoin and then this 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's something that we don't know as to the reason why Tron became so popular. Because I remember when it came out, it was like the laughing stock of the whole market. I think a lot of it was cheap. It was just the cheapest. You go. That was enough. I don't think that's that cheap, because the last time when I tried it, I paid like $3 for the fee. Really? Well, okay. It's cheap when you use Tron, but when you use USDT, 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 quite a joke. I remember when I first saw it, which I think was in very

1:26:40early 2018. And it was just, I think, looking at CoinMarket Cat and there's like this thing, it's just like popped up, like number 15 or something. And he like, I've never even heard of this. Like, what on earth is this thing? You know, like, it just appears and never heard of it. I'm just looking into it. And they had the 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. There was this talk about Tron is Web 4. Like, Web 3? Hey, here's Web 4. And they had a roadmap. So maybe it was like 2017. They had a roadmap coming out to 2027 for the full build out of this Web 4 vision.

1:27:42I don't know how much of that has been delivered. It's like, this nearly time. I don't know what happened. 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 request for feedback. Right? It's not magic. So it's like, again, 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 literally just turning up at the party and copying, you know. But, you know, like I guess a lot of people just didn't care, you know, that maybe what you had on that Tron side, especially like in China and

1:28:43other Asian markets was, you know, just a bunch of people, a bunch of users, and it's like, hey, this thing kind of works for us. You know, we don't care about the, you know, about the philosophy behind it or the, you know, all the those, those type of punk origins 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 out 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 J peg 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 Ethereum that was called Neo. And that one seemed to have like more credentials or be more serious about it. It's just that it faded. It never went anywhere. There was also EOS, which was the largest ICO ever. 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?

1:30:55I never found out whether EOS actually stood full Ethereum on steroids or if that was an urban myth. I don't know. 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 steroids. I don't know. The funny thing there is they raised all billion dollars over a year. It's just absolutely ludicrous. Any kind of fundraising, you've got to have room for growth. However much you've raised, you've got to deliver more value than that. There's got to be potential for those funders to get some return. But you put in four billion. What the hell can you do

1:31:58that's going to like deliver value on top of that amount of money? They were quite clever with it where in the same way as a number of other EOS at that point, they had language that's sort of saying, our side of the bargain is that we're going to deliver the tech and we're going to make a light mainnet. That's kind of the promise. And that's what they did. But 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, mainnet's live. Bye. Thanks for the money. They also got an SEC settlement. The SEC did investigate, were the sales to Americans of this,

1:33:00you know, that would have been in breach of regulations, which the blatantly would. I was at consensus conference in New York there, which I think I'm pretty sure is 2018 that was happening. And you know, you've got billboards in Times Square. These massive big EOS 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 slapper 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. Is that even 1%? No. So they kind of got away with it, and 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 EOS were like, oh, yeah, we've settled this one.

1:34:06Yeah, for a while, it was very uncertain whether or not even Ethereum is going to be labeled as a security or a commodity. You know, you know, and if it's going to become a commodity, 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 they were saying that, no, this is ultrasound money. They had this EIP, I think it was one, three, nine or something. And that decided to slash the, no, burn actually, the transaction fees. Yeah. So it was adding, adding a burn so that you, it wasn't just like less inflationary.

1:35:06For a while, it was actually deflationary. I mean, that's changed over time. But yeah, there was this real push of that kind of narrative on the Ethereum side. And I'd probably tied in with DeFi as well. It's just saying, oh, look, you've got all of these DeFi things going on. And like, I'm more financial focus on Ethereum than had been the case prior to that. In those earlier years, it's like, this is an application platform and you can build all these different things, 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, ETHER is money. And it's money that's taking part in this decentralized, you know, DeFi economy and saying,

1:36:06hey, this is really like the manifestation of what a number of us were looking for earlier from a digital asset, which is a currency is, okay, 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 been there from the very start. But that's like table stakes. 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 bigger and richer and okay, you can do more than just money, but look okay, here, here, you can really do all these financial instruments and they work and stay with quintailments and everything, you know, it's here's the full of vision. So you have this push. And I mean, it's a bit of a sort of like cheeky, pneumatic thing of saying,

1:37:14hey, Bitcoiners, you've been saying, you know, how important hard money is and how, you know, Bitcoin's digital gold and so on. But actually, you're more inflation-readin' ethereum. You know, we're even sounding than you are, aren't because we're, you know, we're not, we haven't got this inflation of the year to the same degree for the blooper words. I 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.

1:38:15Feels 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 the 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? He 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

1:39:16the 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 have cut up and now we have the venmos 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 cards 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 we've become more, maybe not cowardly but more comfortable with

1:40:20this 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. Yeah. 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 Goldbug, a Silverbug, Amos 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, come on. This is like a scam, right? This can't work. I've got my bar of gold. Why would I be interested in this? But I met a guy at a pub and we have this most wonderful conversation about

1:41:20what are the other things that you could do as well as money and just really thinking, well, hey, you know, this is a really revolutionary thing that we can like rebuild, we can rebuild society, right? It's like, I was really thinking, well, you know, this stuff that had led me to be a Goldbug 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's screwed and we're like losing our homes and like, everyone's out of work and like, how illness does that make sense? Right? You know, we've got the same resources in the world, we've got the same people like, you know, 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,

1:42:25governments and so on. So to me, then, you know, having this conversation and realizing, okay, like, yeah, you've got money, but like, you 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 going into life, you know, like your car, you can move things around or whatever and 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,

1:43:30you know, because you've got this unstoppable, immutable, cheap as well at the time, like, you know, at the start, they're on Bitcoin, you could even do free 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 free or super cheap anywhere in the world, you know, like absolutely better than the status quo, but also this like freed attack 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, the elites, the powerful people, you know, controlling all the levers and,

1:44:30you know, constraining what we can do, but, you know, like that stuff can go away. And yeah, it's going to be like very uneven how that happens, because you've got so much existing power and control. But, you know, I was really thinking, okay, you know, like maybe within 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 liberal land and we have El Salvador, which apparently is even difficult to pay with BTC if you'd travel there. Nowadays, I've read some tweets from people who actually live there that they want to

1:45:31deal 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 even 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. Yeah. Okay, there's something wrong here. And of course, you can be an

1:46:38asshole 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 from the beginning that they prefer US dollars. Yeah. 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 than now. It's it's it's worse. You know, I what I saw at that very beginning is, you know, you did have various like retail and coffee shops and things, you know, that 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'll be just as simple whatever

1:47:44they'll work out, the, you know, how best to do whatever apps and stuff and you just boom, you know, that it would be just the same and then and then of course, you 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 where you were? What year it was

1:48:51and what was your first reaction? Um, well, I, I will have first heard of it actually through Alex Jones. So I had a, a, a, an exciting period shall we say, which I do call my Alex Jones phase, we're having, you know, gone through this, I think it, 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 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,

1:49:52you 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 me 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, 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. And 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 going to rent a oil and then like we're going to go into someone like Mad Max, like collapse. And I was, was dude sailing left since I'm like, right, I'm going to

1:50:55get a boat and sail away in a disaster or whatever because all the roads are going to be blocked. I was learning to like, learning gardening and growing my own vegetables and like stop piling, like, you know, military rations and like water and grains and all, you know, boxes and boxes are shit in the basement of, of, I got, I got like a radiation, like a guy get counter. Because you got like Fukushima at Hathen around there. But yeah, like a whole bunch 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 the, the, the creature from Jettel 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

1:51:58this and, and yeah, owned a Max Kaiser as well, you know, before he turned into the monstrous right now, you know, when he was, got his show on, like art or something Russian TV. Yeah, Russians are they. I mean, I can argue 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

1:53:01or 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 on Russia today was horrible, but he was obviously biased in some perspectives that deal with geopolitics. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, he, you know, he'd show up now and again, watch some of this stuff. And so it was probably through had he did being talking about Bitcoin and other things because he had a Max coin. I don't know what year he did Max coin. Think that was like 2014 Max coins, dark 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'll have been talking

1:54:05about Bitcoin earlier than that. 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 Max's show way back way back well. 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, 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. Basically in comparison with physical metals, it was just like, yeah, okay. 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, this kind of

1:55:12pupper who became a good friend who, who really, I guess, opened my eyes up about, about what at that point was really sort of been called Bitcoin 2.0 kind of ideas. You know, what are the other things that are brewing up around the sides? So you, you'd have had big, you know, big shares, um, cancer policy, 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, they're in February 2014. So that was three months after the white paper for Ethereum. So you, I don't know that you, I

1:56:14mean, you maybe got a little bit of code, some little bit of, you know, Tastnetti, a couple of things talking to each other, but it was, I mean, it was a, it was a full year and a bit before making that happened on Ethereum. So at that point, Ethereum was 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. 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, you really got a, most people who were involved were pretty open minded because at that time, it was such a front

1:57:20here 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, you know, risk tolerant brave 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, 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 obviously like a lot more can be done. So yeah, it was a different kind of world. But so that, yeah, so that was 2014 where I, you know, got, got, got really interested and started going to meetups and, you know, really like actively following along. 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,

1:58:26buy a load of crypto or whatever and have a lot of money at that time actually. Um, or, or the money I had, it was in other things. Right. I, I did have some real estate for a while and 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 I can get rich here. Like, 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. But it even shipped that it, you know, maybe it's illegal even, um, you know, many, many people who were 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

1:59:30that are just speculating like, you know, you, you guys are fucking leeches. Like, you're not doing anything, right? You're not helping. You're just like sucking off profits for yourself and you, you're doing nothing. So, um, so 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 TD security. So working for a bank, I had a bank job. It was my first time I'd ever like, done that. I was 40, but I, 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. It's 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,

2:00:36like, Joe Lubin was there and Vitalik, um, and, and various other folk and I'm Anthony Diorio as well. So while I was there, I took the opportunity, 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, gotten 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 going to ship and it's like, this is a real thing and it kind of worked and 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, Tim Berners-Lee and he's about to launch the web or you need, you know, Linus Torvolt 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

2:01:41and, 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 or 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 going to 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, well, 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

2:02:42things 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 going to happen, you know, we're going to, you know, have another world war, you know, US civil war, collapsing, you know, economies and just, you know, we're 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 now I'm 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 a very deep depression and just, you know, despair and there's a guy called Michael Rupert who did a documentary, there was

2:03:48a documentary with him that was called Collapse and he's back paying out in 2009 and he was like a whistleblower on CIA moving drugs into the US and then he, so he was 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 and 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 and when that collapsed, you know, you know, you have this kind of hellscape anyway, he was one of the ones I was following and he ended

2:04:53up committing suicide, you know, he was just like so despairing about the world in the end, it's just like, box and you know, this might as well be dead and I think that was a real wake-up call to me of like that 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 it's not inevitable that you're going to have this horrible collapsing scenario where you're hopeless, you know, maybe we

2:05:54can build alternate systems that won't have this sovereign debt crisis and collapse of money and you know, these, these, you know, recessions or depressions, you know, maybe we can build this better thing and 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 to fruition and maybe it's possible, maybe it's not possible, but it's going to be a lot healthier to do that. So 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,

2:06:56you'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, we live here 2007, eight round up time people were talking about, well, there's going to be a point where we're going to run out of oil and the whole world requires oil and the hope was that electric cars were going to 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 going to 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 going to 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

2:07:59is 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 going to be someone older and wealthier who needs their organs. Like I think about this sometimes and it gets very depressing when you realize that once you lose control or you teach a new generation of drivers to not have any responsibility, you're just going to 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 to just remote control. You're like, oh, this guy, okay, it's like a video game. It's not even real in some

2:09:01way. You just control their cars. It's crazy. Well, is it going to be like LLAMS and you're going to 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 model. I mean, I sure hope so. But the adoption, I suppose, is going to be a bit small for 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 0.1% chance that you're going to get into an accident. I'm sure that there's going to be like a legal agreement that nobody reads that people are just going to 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

2:10:06and 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 a way. Take this person out. That's the expression. Anyway, I don't want to spend too much time on the dark stuff. You did say that you found hope in this technology and you felt like Tim Bernersley launching the internet. Do you feel the same about the cash hard fork? 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 Turion gave you more than a decade ago? I say less so because it's not a whole new thing. It's just here's a different set up or configuration of the existing Bitcoin set up. So it's a

2:11:06tweet from Bitcoin 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's kind of tied into the Bitcoin L2 stuff I was talking about. And then my goal screwed up the internet there. What I was just saying was that the figure that done held as bad 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. That added to the support supply. That's I can't remember. Sorry market cap models. Interesting. So yeah, the added together like liquid lining,

2:12:07root stock, it's nothing like a rounding error that the actual usage of those things. 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 for that area. So obviously there are huge incentives for people to chase that. And you saw that with all of the Bitcoin, sorry, all of the BitDN projects specifically that you've got this chase to market of saying, well, can we bring EVMs on top of Bitcoin so that L1 you've got all of that same kind of you can pause existing smart contracts and projects. And I think that is a really necessary thing. The Bitcoin ecosystem has got very, very stalled

2:13:12where earlier efforts on those kind of just dropped off. All of the chips were all lightning. Lightning's going to say to everything. And what that really meant was that all of that's a theory inside on Bitcoin to stuck with the same tech base for 10 or 12 years with small exceptions of a big root. But yeah, I mean, I think chains are a great approach. And Paul has spent many years trying to educate and persuade to move towards that soft fork activation on Bitcoin. And it hasn't happened. And I think, you know, I don't know. I mean, do you think are there going to be any more

2:14:17softwares on Bitcoin? Well, there we saw it. Like for good. There has 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 you, 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 about 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 and vaults 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

2:15:22this. I think it was $50 million fund for development, which is going to keep 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. The 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 SaaS 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

2:16:25around. 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 speculative investment that some organizations will leverage for some purpose. And that purge is just to make more US dollars. So 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 put 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 for myself, how I was feeling there back in 2014. It's like saying, okay, well, Bitcoin is going to

2:17:31just like sit there and be like an asset. It's like, it's so boring. It's so boring and it's not changing anything. That isn't changing the world. There's never a revolution there. Yeah, it's just a very to my mind, very super conservative low risk, like hopeless, useless mindset. We know something like opcat. 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, we don't know what the consequence of this may be and whatever it's just kind of introduce shit-coining and

2:18:32risk and we don't know what the consequences of that are and it's like, you know, are you fucking jerky? 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-satoishie per V-bite transaction fee right now, which is depressing. The bet was that, if you keep the blocks small, there's going to be lots of high fee 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

2:19:38they prefer to use something else. But we could have had everything on Bitcoin. And that was the true maximism, not the one that rejects use cases. For sure, like WPTC, you know, on Ethereum, you know, that's the significantly more Bitcoin in that. It's like 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, a crystal ball run. I never asked 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

2:20:43they 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 payment, they sort of, but else it's to the world by posting a picture or a video saying, look, I just paid for this with Lightning. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All then, the other thing that you have is if it is just like an asset class, you know, you get the, you get ETFs and that companies. So then a lot of the more conventional minded, finance people, they're going to use those, you know, they're not going to sell a self-custody. Of course, they're 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,

2:21:44even if people are really wanting 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'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, so professional, something for which you need to roll the dice 100 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. And 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

2:22:50up with a cold card situation where people actually did everything that they were towed. And still, they found a way to blame them for not rolling the dice 100 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 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 churnings 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 businesses are there, you know, well, there's there's ones that can custody for you,

2:23:55like I guess mining services and then like wallet and paymenty things, 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 iterating on it and because that's all it 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 trying to define what spam is and we're 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 Bitcoiners to do. Like look at developers, fun development, try new stuff, try new

2:24:56cryptography, 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 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. 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 going to keep it niche for a while

2:25:57until they figure out something else like clear twos or whatever might happen to them. I think Zcash actually has a plan for this and they have been refining their ZK snorke to make them smaller. They have been improving the propagation times for their blocks. I mean, they're actually making efforts and there's Taki on which is like client side validation for their 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 been one of the first people to actually reach out to him and be like, hey, I heard you're launching a hard for a 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,

2:27:00would you be willing to support this? So if you get a DM from me asking about eCash support, it's probably not that my account got hacked. It's just that I'm trying to help Paul. And I do want to see this play out. I want to see how the market is going to react to it. I want to see how some of the various types of fun that were said about drive chains are going to be addressed in a real market situation where there's real incentives for miners to steal or there's real incentives for the various side chains to be priced differently. So if you're going to have like an Ethereum, EVM side chain, maybe that the price of the asset is going to be different from that of the base layer potentially. I don't know. Or maybe that there's going to 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's how

2:28:07you've got to be brave and try things. Something in which XR surface said something in Prague. I think it was in 2013. I gave it to their HCPP titled Jbead As Fuck. So I was feeling very 20-20-20... sorry, 20-20-23. It makes more sense. You couldn't be jaded in 2013. It was so excited. No, but just really I owe all these stupid things happening and whatever. What he said to me at that time is, everything is an experiment. Everything is an experiment. We just don't know. Humans, we don't know. We just try things. We have theories, we have ideas, we try and build things, we try and learn.

2:29:09But ultimately everything is an experiment and you can't get upset at other people trying things because that's how they learn. You can say, oh, well, that's stupid. It will never work. Or that's already been tried. How do you not know? But often you need to do things yourself to really learn. And I think there has been definitely massively insufficient experimentation in the Bitcoin space. And that wasn't the case at the start. But a hard fork is one of the cleanest ways of doing such an experiment. And the reason why is it's completely opt-in. Your default is nothing to happen. If you have a hard fork, people choose to participate. Nobody can force you to do it. Again,

2:30:14it's this like people run whatever software they want. And so what you have with a hard fork is really some people saying, hey, we want to try something different. We're going to do a different thing. We would love you to join us. But we can't compel you to join us. So it is the opposite of that bit 110 kind of approach of trying to change what the active current thing is. With a hard fork, it's entirely optional. And you choose by actually opting into participation. And it is a positive, some game. You're not taking away from something that was currently happening. You do me a new thing as well. And so say something like in the block size wars,

2:31:16imagine what I would have liked to happen in there if you didn't have that 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? I like measure it. See what happens. I have many notes. Do you have how, how does that affect the growth? Not like trolley guess what's happening. Just fucking do it. And if it works, great, we've learned something. That really works. Okay, well, great. 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 was an experiment, a real world experiment that you actually like learn from. So can you imagine like how much war progress that you'd make if people were in that mindset, right? Not in a defensive mindset,

2:32:19going, oh, this is an attack. You're attacking Bitcoin. You know, no, it's like an experiment. Like, you know, it 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 this. Chul 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, but yeah, you know, it's obviously it's not first-haul ground for these kind of experiments. You know, and I think it's exceedingly unlikely that there's going to be anything other than a handful of little soft forks that get pushed through on Bitcoin. I can guess another one is quantum.

2:33:24You know, 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. But yeah, you know, Paul had done on the e-tash on 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, if this is a failure, if that like persuades people somehow that Bitcoin should do drive change and, and yeah, so let's do it. Yeah, it's good to find something exciting in this space and 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

2:34:27from happening on Bitcoin and then how do we fire the miners like all of these ideas which are more political than they are technical. Yeah. In Paul's 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 do 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 and 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

2:35:30adoption 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 Classic 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 Coinbase 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 mistaken. There were two of them actually. There was one called Ethereum Tha and one called Ethereum Power. And Ethereum Power was really promoted by Chandlegaal

2:36:30who may remember. He was around at the time of Ethereum ETC fork as well, but one of the major Chinese miners. But yeah, Ethereum Power, it's a funny one because it was blatantly a cash grab. It's like, oh, we've got this transition point. And so they spun up, this narrative of saying miners are getting thrown aside by Ethereum. They've provided all the service and now they're gonna be thrown away. So we don't think that's right and we want to provide continuity for miners. They also said a bunch of stuff about Ethereum Foundation being controlled and all of this. It was almost like their sales pitch was kind of like ETC. It's like, okay, what you were saying,

2:37:37if you believe that stuff, that happened six or seven years ago. It's called ETC. If you want to keep mining, mining ETC, it's just trivial for you to go. You don't need some new project. So they just got all of this sort of rhetoric and it's gonna launch. But it was a total scam other thing. So, personally, they didn't actually provide any of the software until after the transition point. So it's like, if you're narrativeless, we want miners to be able to keep mining, well, given Paul's software and everything, like a month and advance, right? Here's your software. It's gonna activate that the fork and off you go. They didn't do that. So basically, at the time, it split. They solo-mined, 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. Then they did release it. It was like, here's a fork of gas with a single massive splatter

2:38:47set of changes on top. There you go. It also, talking about the ultrasound money stuff, they changed the code for that so that on Ethereum, PAL, it didn't burn those fees, but it sent them to an opaque, multi-sig that they controlled 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 us 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 your changes. Here's the new chain. Thanks for the money. Fuck you. We're not doing anything. We've grabbed, thanks for the cash grab. Even now, it's down to 27 million. But for the longest time, it was like hundreds of millions,

2:39:55like 200 million market cap, 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 Ethereum 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 went small fast. ETC got like a 10X on hash rate at that point. So, yeah, looking at this, so Ethereum, Pau, 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

2:41:02Queen 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 little peak in 2021 where ETC got up to, I think about number 15. It 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 nutshell, 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

2:42:09called, I don't remember exactly what it was, but they tried to take the developers from it. And it's, you're playing a loud takeover. Yeah. It does a big ETC lamp. Yeah. So, ETC lamps were funded by DFG, which is digital finance group, which is like a Chinese based and no, like they invest in crypto kind of fame. And ETC dev was the development team behind the classic GAT client that was carrying most of the network. So, EGLE, you know, EGLE was the tech league that you mentioned earlier in Dold work. There is sort of business dev stuff, Donald McIntyre. But yeah, they basically were running out of funding and DFG had sort of said to them, oh, you'd see labs had, you know, don't worry, we'll, we'll be able to fund you. So, EGLE stopped looking for alternate sources of funding,

2:43:15and then they stiffed in 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 EGLE, 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 guess it's a little bit like the moving house, rentals, think that we were talking about is like, okay, EGLE and Donald are like the, the hard core strong ones that we don't want. So, like, let's, we'll, we'll make a new house. And this way, everyone else to come across and leave the, leave the developers behind. I just remember the Sighteen project was called Orbita. Yeah, I said, that's it. Yeah. I've called it's Trata. I think earlier in this interview, but no, it's Orbita.

2:44:16Yeah, 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, you know, as a gap and an opportunity there, we're heading into that transition, you know, ETC could be pumped up and could become the big ecosystem. But they did that in a very messy, nasty kind of way. I mean, I don't, I don't think they, in particular, like caused failure of ETC, but you also had IOHK and Charles being involved

2:45:18at various times, trust sometimes good and sometimes bad. I mean, I think ultimately it was just that there 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, an Ethereum was the winner. Do you think that there's like a parallel universe where some decisions 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 say, you know, ETC was, you know, was stabbed in the back, you know, was made a failure by, you know, people who

2:46:27whatever didn't want that 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 just within a few days prior to that. It was called carbon votes. And that had happened on a very short kind of like timeline. And there was one way or who'd like voted late. And he was like 25% of the votes was just this one person. So that was Martin Beasy, who was one of the Ethereum quarterbellypers. So some people were like, you know, well, this was like an outrageous like late decision. And it went, you know,

2:47:32it was like the thumb on the scales that made the thing happen. You know, of course, like everyone will, like a lot of people will just use the default. So all of a sudden, it doesn't matter what the actual support was lots of people will end up, you know, end the up pro fork just because of that default. And I think that's that's bullshit. Like because you'd have a whole month of the most like vigorous kind of like discussion about this. Right. Nobody could not know about this down thing in the for like inconseivable that nobody could have this. 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 given away loads of money, right? You've you've blocked rewards. You're not having them anymore. You know, you, 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

2:48:35that has this default, like you're doing so willingly and unknowledgeably and main thing in the release notes and everything, right? I think it's like inconceivable that only accidentally make that choice. So the reality, I think is that, you know, 80 to 85% of people were in favor of that. And you know, that was that was the consensus. So I don't know that any kind of like different decisions would necessarily have made a great deal of difference on that is that just the majority of people wanted to stop some dude streaming 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's who's launching a fork and you have so much experience with being

2:49:38going on a minority fork, what would it be? On the ETC side that the tin key pieces were that the miners kept mining, you know, so you had you had that, you know, that network keeps churving along. And I think I'm right in saying, right, that the plan for ECASH is that the difficulty is going to get knocked 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 mining. I don't think, I mean, he tweeted that he wants the difficulty to be won whatever that lines that there's going to be chaos with thousands of blocks or whatever being mined in the early phase of the network until there's like an equilibrium.

2:50:47But 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 I think it's important that you have that mining earlier and that it's not like a completely wrecked network, you know, so you saw on bit 110, 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 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, so I think that's important that you have sufficient mining and that you've got enough of the throughput that the network can be used. And then the second piece is I think, you know, exchange listings are key. And maybe now you can

2:51:53kind of get away with it's like Dexas. If you've just got, you know, if you've got some Dex base 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. Because on the ETC side, that's what really like made the thing come alive was okay, 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.

2:52:57That you, you know, that you have a market for that, you have liquidity and that that exchange of hands where that stock is moving more into people who do value it, right? So it goes from that air drop place to, okay, let's swap hands and get a real market going. Like on ETC, you had a real a real dumping sell-off where especially the foundation but other big holders, lots of them did just dump. So the price on ETC, 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 go through that kind of phase early. You don't want to have like a, you know,

2:54:04a dead chain situation where you're like, oh yeah, just wait a few weeks and new adjustments will get there. It's like, you know, those weeks that the interest and the eyeballs have gone, right? It's just a whole yet. It's a dead thing. And in this space, even a week can mean a lot of time. Like think about the cold card hack and how 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 the focus shifted to something else. And that's something that you really don't want where users forget about this. In the beginning, like if you really want to be a historian, a Bitcoin, 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

2:55:10we're not in 2009 anymore. There's like a huge industry and there are lots of projects that compete 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.

2:56:12Yeah, yeah. But I do want to ask you something before I let you go unless you want to continue this point. Yeah, I'm going for a bit more. You have parts during 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 turned 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 won't claim sole fame for that but I was part of that. Yeah. So yeah, I mean,

2:57:13so I did computer science at University of Leeds and I was lucky enough straight out of that to get 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 them as well. I was seeing that launched Gran Turismo later where I'm composing them. No, no, Gran Turismo is another 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 Stamila League manager took two different ones of those and then a Harry Potter game. But yeah, in which one? Which Harry Potter game, it's very important. It's a Chamber of Secrets. Oh, that's the best one.

2:58:16It'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, you had the first level at the weeping, what you call this, like the tree. Yeah, Montingwell. Exactly. 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, going around. I think that's the both of our series. And no, no tossing in the garden. That's how that one ended. You throwing the knowns at targets in a field outside there. Yeah, that was fun. Just to give you a little detour on that is so EA signed 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

2:59:23that first movie, it was coming too quickly for us to be able to do again for it internally. You know, 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. If I can put something together fast. And I think it was PlayStation 1 at that point and PC. But then we basically started working on Chamber of Secrets in parallel with that internally so that it could, it would come out at the same time as the second movie, which 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. So 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 got like scenes without the CG. It's just like, you know, a big green screen in it. Or there was like,

3:00:28it was like a conversation with a centaur. And it was just like a static model and somebody saying, and the centaur says, but blah 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 that first movie before it came out. And also, goodness me, I forget his name now, but 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 and I see the game that we're working on. But yeah, I spent, so I spent two years working on that. And for the record, so I did, when you said psychnosis, it did sound familiar and it's the studio

3:01:31that did Lemmings, which is also, yeah, like a couple of Lemmings. Yeah, and there was another, they did like a bunch of Amiga games as well. So yeah, what did they, similar famous names were games to Fallen. So yeah, they did Barbarian, Shadow of the Beast was well known on Amiga. But yeah, Lemmings, Y-Pow, a bunch of Y-Pow, they did Formula One games as well. We're really very popular. But yeah, anyway, so I worked on that for a couple of years after doing those, those soccer management titles. But the Lurry Props, who was the chairman of EA, came to visit that UK studio for the first time in 2002 there. And they had like a town hall meeting with Q&A

3:02:34going as the questions at the mic. And they didn't filter any of the questions. It's just like rock up and ask what you like. So yeah, I went and I said, there's a bunch of us here, big football fans, we're playing, we're playing it, we're supporting going and 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 FIFA derivative that was called Premier League stars. So it was like a standalone game with only like the English Premier League in it. 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-edolution and sometimes called winning 11. There was also ISS, international superstar star. Yeah, I think they were all,

3:03:35they were all like much the same. And you know, so I was saying, so I hear the team in Vancouver, you know, they're just doing the FIFA every year, you know, on this really tight schedule, they never get a chance to, you know, to fix 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 sort of 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 going to get the shit kids out of me. Am I getting sat here? Like, what, what have I done? But, um, but yeah, a number of us ended up getting early releases. It's like, okay, if you want to give feedback here, you know, you can see us, 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,

3:04:36um, got the opportunity to to mute at Vancouver and so join the FIFA team, you know, it's kind of like, if you're also clever, you know, do you want to go and like actually help? And, uh, and 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 going to get crushed to death by the machine, you know, but got the 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 first one that worked on there was, was FIFA 2004, which was on PlayStation

3:05:45Xbox GameCube and PC. Oh, I remember that. It was such a big game for my childhood. The first one that I played was 2000 on the PS1. Right. Then I played 2000 and no, 2000 and two world cops. 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 on and it had this crossover with Total Club Manager. So you could the total club manager, manager team and then insert this to from FIFA 2004 and you could actually play games, which was really amazing. Yeah. So TCN was a continuation of that Premier League manager that I worked on. So that was in 1999 and 2000 that I worked on those two. And it actually got, it actually got three different. It was like, uh, it was like the Premier League manager, but you'd also got

3:06:45like a Bundesliga manager. The journal was a 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 that did be called, was called like FIFA manager and then Total Club Manager. I don't know if it even still goes right now. But yeah, there was there was some crossover, remember. 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. 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. That's not even called FIFA anymore. They call it

3:07:48football club or something. Yeah, EA's sports FC is now. Yeah. I mean, that was another case of FIFA, the organization being awful and terrible. You know, we see all the time like FIFA, a not awful corrupt group. But they, two or three years ago, maybe they were like, right, the licenses up for renewal and they just tried to like, tried to get EA to pay, you know, some gigantic amount of money for that FIFA license continual. So EA are like, well, okay, forget it. We're just not going to be FIFA anymore. And I think I think 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

3:08:51FIFA the cache. So I think, you know, they really didn't understand as well how much value that there was in that game. And in the 30 years of iteration and development, you know, all of the effort that's gone into that game over all those years. 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. 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. But also just like 30 years worth of iteration on a pit of

3:09:52software, you know, like we think of something like Linux. Can you imagine a situation where it's like, right, we want to do like a new deal with a different kernel. Like 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. When there's also the other 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 see loved Y-Pout, but maybe he lived,

3:10:55right? Who knows? Yeah, I mean, the thing that was special about Y-Pout was, I get in talking about authenticity is, and soundtrack is Y-Pout was one of the very first gang that had like licensed soundtrack, like real club, club kind of music. So they had that, and they had really authentic design. There was designers, republic, who probably still are, you know, a big 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 this, you know, one of the first PlayStation games, so it's like, you've got this new console, and it's like, wow, look at this amazing graphics, and you know, the feel of the shit going round, and then the

3:11:59design 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. So, 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, why that was. But yeah, on FIFA, I mean, they've really fucked it by not having EA. I don't know that they do, I don't think they've still done a new FIFA, right? You know, here's FIFA 2026 or whatever that would be this new one. I don't think there's been one two, two, three years without them now. 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. And then again,

3:13:02889 and 10. And for the 7-1, I was off in a different role. But yeah, what we had was FIFA in 2002, I think was was in a really bad state. And what had happened is it started in 1994, what the story about that. But you'd have this real sort of like, where at that point, EA, a California income, they got Latin and an NBA and other North America. They didn't have the thought there's a lucrative world. Well, your your idea was this rock singer again. I'm not trying to get it's just me. But there's something wrong with your internet, I think. Oh, can you hear me now? Yeah.

3:14:06Well, let's see if this works. Anyway, so that made the game in 94 and it was great. But what happened is that the guy Bruce McMillan who started that, who was a Chelsea season ticket holder, 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 Hollywoodization of it, 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

3:15:10these 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 so what they had was the sales were still good. Like, but but the reviews like sucked and people were just not playing. And so you know, what happened is that, you know, I went there that lots of other people went there as well. They're they're based that you got told in heading into 2003. They got told right, 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 that's going to be better. It's like 2003 is your last chance.

3:16:12And 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 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 new, 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 such a novel thing to be able 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

3:17:15pass 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 also mean that. So I think you could get a red card with the goalkeeper. That was also funny. Yeah. But yeah, winning 11 was like way better than 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 that had like an internet cafe, but 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

3:18:20what'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 say, yeah, you know, those Konami games, they were like way better at that point. And I mean, and they didn't have licensing. You know, it was just totally made up, team names and player names, but it didn't matter. But yeah, what we had there was, okay, we've, you know, FIFA needs to be rewritten, but how is that going to happen? Like and there was the Xbox 360 release happened in 2005. So the thought was okay, well, maybe when this new console comes in, 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 the, yeah, it was FIFA Road to

3:19:24World 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, 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 really 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, cent merit, a critic 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 guy called Dave Rutter, who is

3:20:27another British guy who came in as the, as the line producer, the guy basically in charge of the, the gameplay and the development. And what he did was he said like every year 80% of the resources are going to be spent on the core gameplay. 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 other bullshit, it might get doesn't really matter. So like 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 team that was making that change. That's so cool, man. I think a lot of people

3:21:27listening to this were at wall relate to the fact that you worked on one of the most popular game franchises of all time. And in a time when we were kids, maybe not kids teenagers or something were 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, grown up. I was like, I'm not watching football as much as I used to, I'm just into other stuff. I was playing basketball. 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

3:22:30with 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 2000 and three or four, there was a whiff champions league game that came out from EA sports. That was on display at this thing, this event. And my brother just went there being eight years old and he was beating everyone. Like adults walking there, grabbing the controller and being like, oh, I'm going to beat this kid and 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'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

3:23:34tournaments with other students. But yeah, 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 Cups 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 UEFA Champions League World Cup. And then the FIFA's, so you're trying to sell two games a year. So I mean, now it's obviously like a bunch more ultimate team and card games and just like ongoing updates. Yeah, yeah, it's too bad that you, I mean, I'm happy you left the video game industry because it

3:24:41seems 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 I had a notorious tweet that I just forever on the listening where I tweeted Wii U is crap and the series of other things. I mean, it sort of was for its dear. Like it was not as ambitious as the PS4 or whatever. Expensive. Nintendo were always so far behind on hardwaft. You know, they are absolutely not leading edge. But yeah, the Wii U in particular was absolutely terrible. But the Wii was great. But 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

3:25:44processing power than the PlayStation, but the 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 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, but I think it was because of the storage. If you look at the Raspbax, 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,

3:26:48as so old. You got to switch to, obviously. I have the Switch, you know, I love it. Yeah, my, that's all for your old love 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 chaos agent name tag? So, yeah, I'm, I'm a pluralist, shall we say. I don't really try and fit into 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.

3:27:51Oh, yeah, how come I haven't said anything about that? You did two of the coolest conferences ever with the proof of fork 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 had big coiners. It was a collaboration actually with the Litecoin foundation, but we also had. I think for the 24 events, it was the collaboration with the Litecoin. Both of them. Really? It was more evident in the second one. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, we have people from an arrow dark foie. I meant to get some big. Doge people as well. But yeah, I mean, that was that, you know, the thought there really was that, you know, you

3:29:00various of the sort of Ethereum conferences ended up being like Ethereum and friends really. So it's like not just purely Ethereum, but it's like, you know, whatever you end up with, people from all sorts of other, you know, other chains as well, including, you know, big coiners in more recent times. I mean, you were at FDAMVAR 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, you know, why, why would you not have that on the proof of work side as well, you know, we've we're all doing these similar kind of things, you know, like you've spoken about all that of the different Bitcoins. And obviously like, you know, Bitcoin

3:30:01Maxis would not initiate such a thing, you know, that the horrified by such a thing. But yeah, that's what we ended up doing. And, you know, those were really, really enjoyable events to me. Just looking at some of the speakers we had the second year. So yeah, Phil Zimmerman. And I go 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 like 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.

3:31:02And it was great. He was a keynote speaker. Both years I was just really delighted to get him. I used to love the old guy, just sort of like a grandfatherly kind, you know, interested to a guy. And yeah, James and Locke spoke both times as well, Charlie Lee, Sergio Lerna in 2024. Oh yeah, he came with that whole team with the Roodstar 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. 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 was sort of big. Yeah, it was great. So, and yeah, and then in 2024, there was a big focus on Bitcoin layering. So he had Yadda's and Auckland from Setria and Alex from Bob and Yago from Sovereign.

3:32:11See, like a bunch of different of those people and then they could go to talk about this. 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 actually Paul was mainly speaking as well. Both times. But yeah, he ended up having to fail on that. But yeah, he would have been a very interesting voice to have had that. I say you also have a story with Charlie Threm or something. Oh, yeah, sure. I was mentally as speak with that first year. But he 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

3:33:16he was meant to be speaking. He did agree to it. It was our fuck up. It wasn't him. But yeah, he, 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. I 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 ghosted us. Yeah, I was hoping to interview him. I think that was in 2024. Yeah, yeah.

3:34:21But yeah, in terms of the chaos agent, yeah, I mean, I've just been in all the buckets really. I'm I'm not part of Xan. 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 Bitcoin is obsolete, right? It's like Ethereum can do everything Bitcoin can do and more. So, you know, Bitcoin has just got the, you know, the lead. But when that ends, like, it'll be over for them. You know, it's like as soon as Ethereum has got more market cap than Bitcoin,

3:35:25well, you know, Bitcoin's finished. That was the first generation of Ethereum to the second one. And it was really when I was working more actively on ETC that I 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. It took me a while 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. Last 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

3:36:28buy more GPUs earlier? I think it would be look after your private keys better because my sad crypto story is that I got a grant 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. So 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.

3:37:35Yeah, yeah, 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-customing solutions nowadays, but still be careful out there. Everyone listening to this. Take care of your keys. Yeah, so I have to be reassigned. I could be reassigned, 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. Anyway, 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 work summit 2024.

3:38:35And that's where he traveled for the first time in a while to conference in Europe. It was because of you. And 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. Non-profit. Non-profit. So it you announced that you guys ran out of funding, and it's the last proof of work summit. And also everyone working at ETC co-op will have to find work. And I remember trying 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. Yeah. I don't know what happened afterwards. All I know is that

3:39:38Donald 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 published 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 ET Ethereum plan. No, it's EF plan. ET plan. ET HERPLAN. ET HERPLAN. I think it's.com. Yeah, I think the website is down, but you can find it on it. It's an archive. Yeah. I mean, this guy was obviously very smart, shared his knowledge to the world. And there's still a lot that you can learn, especially because he was such a navid scholar of Nixabos. And he was reading old articles and trying to make sense of and publishing his own articles with summaries or just extensions of what he learned.

3:40:40And 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 nasty. Yes, 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 his memorial last last year. So got to meet his ex-wife and his sister and her family. But yeah, he was good day. Also, I want to thank him since we're at this stage. He sort of set me up for an interview with Nixabo. Like, he actually was nice enough to connect us by email. And then

3:41:42Nixabo 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 overvaled him. It was like 20 long questions. And maybe he was like, oh, I have time for this. And then he ever answered again. I almost add Nixabo on the show. Thanks to Donald McIntyre. Then you can, 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, 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, it's gone along for the last couple of years just without me. But essentially, they're to support the last core developer 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.

3:42:50If 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 be on the same show as this guy. And I told me, you know, Donald, just wait for a few years and you're going to see that in like in perspective, you're you're going to 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.

3:43:56And I'm happy I never deleted that. And it's still there for anyone to listen. And then I've had the talent. And that was surreal. For the first time, I could not read the chat anymore because it was just like stream a cascade of messages. People ask them for stuff or promoting their own tokens or whatever. And I was like, I don't know how this is going to happen. But it it happened for three hours. And I sort of respect the talent much more right now. Is that realize that he he's not overrated. Like he really knows what he's talking about. He really is a genius in his own way. And 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 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,

3:44:58he's selfless. And you know, he's not he's not arrogant or 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 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 social cues kind of stuff. You know, he got so caught out a little bit saying, doing weird things or whatever it is, you know, it's sure it's more more autistic than anything else. Yeah, you know, I just read from yesterday that the biggest challenge in this place is

3:46:01to 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, he's 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 when you think about it. But yeah, I mean, he's just being doing that for the decade or so now. That's just how he is. Yeah, to be like Ethereum turned out to be the best Bitcoin site chain, whether or not some people

3:47:03in 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 wasn't Ethereum. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, something we didn't talk about that we mentioned, I don't know, we're really going to go into it much as I've got this cycle to early days of Ethereum. Yeah. Which is just a history project, basically. So profiles for everyone involved in the early days, I've done interviews with a bunch of people, I think I'm about 14 of them now, talking especially to people who are involved in 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

3:48:10came back to it more recently. Especially with AI assisted development, I was able to gather together some notes into a pretty detailed site and that's, you know, that's been enjoyable. I do know where the bodies of Barrett, you know, I was around early and I know most people. And for Asda and that this year that we mentioned, you'd be in there. I did a collaboration with Jessica Angel, who's the creative director there to do a thing called the Museum of Ethereum. So that was a mixture of physical and digital artifacts. So again, you know, some of that profile stuff 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

3:49:15that 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 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 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 Ethereum time machine. So 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 people who are involved. It's amazing to see that in the white paper phase of it. There are four Romanians that I counted

3:50:20which 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 Lombrozo. 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. Yeah. Oh, well, the circle also which is amazing. This was a crazy thing I found out was so there's two of them there. There's Ralph Merkel and who's the other dude? Paul Snow? No. Paul Snow is an interesting one because he works on Factor. Right. So you know, another deep Bitcoin being involved there. Yeah, it's right from

3:51:24Merkel. But there's another mathematician dude. Oh, my goodness. Where's he gone? 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 that Ralph Merkel was listed as like a team member like advisor or something. And I was like, yeah, fucking right. Is Satoshi an advisor as well? Ralph Merkel, but he really was like Ralph Merkel and another dude who I've bloody lost track of now, but you know, another famous cryptographic breakthrough person. They were both advisors for a short time. Oh, Neil Codelitz, that's it. Who was the co-inventor of a cryptography? Yeah, it's very hard to argue that Ethereum is not a safe

3:52:32fund project like looking at all of this stuff. All the people involved. Of course, someone even 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 maximalists 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 decontrol, which is a co-working like Mootup Space yet. But yeah, I mean, you could not be involved really. It was an earlier time and you may or may not have liked

3:53:36particular things, but you didn't have that hard line when you can talk to each other. 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 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 founders of block apps that company I ended up working with these last couple of years. But basically saying, they aside from the business that they got together, they were involved with Ethereum really, at least. They were writing down. They wanted to basically make some podcasts and remember, you don't have that. Get those memories

3:54:37down and I ended up being a guest on the third one and 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 texture. 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 the structure here. So then yeah, if you click on individuals in that grid, for example, you'll find like a bunch of cross links and then back links at the bottom. So it's kind of a really pretty rich, wiki structure. I found Amir Taki here. And it's the end of the fight.

3:55:40Because 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 foreign that people were hostile or at least technically, how should I put a challenge to build this on Bitcoin? There was counter party and master coin. So you have these two that sort of tried to compete by being protocol some Bitcoin.

3:56:42We 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, you need 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 from what came out of that. It was very clear. This is a hostile area for innovation. Really? That's sad. Anyway, cool page, early days of EF.org.

3:57:42Check it out. I know I'm going to have some fun scrolling through these names like Gavin and Dries and his here. David Johnston, he was on my podcast. I know that he was doing some master and coin stuff. And he addressed Antonopoulos. He actually wrote many years later master and Ethereum and people were so hostile to him when he launched the Mastering Lightning book, which was the next one in his series. That he sort of rage quit. He was like, I can't please these people. I'm just going to do something else. Yeah. In hindsight, like if you look at these names, you would guess that Ethereum was going to be a big deal. Just because it had the social layer being involved. I hope that 10 years from now, we're going to have like early days of eCa for 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.

3:58:54But yeah, you know, you got to do things, right? You got to try. You got to try. That's a good way to conclude our conversation unless you think that we missed something. No, that's great. Cheers. Bob, how can people follow you 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 Somal on on Twitter on X. So Somal will is like somewhere like the season WILL. My personal website is Bob Somal.com. As you'd mentioned there, illegal is a best.org. So yeah, probably most active on on Twitter. I can never bring myself to say X. Meaning it's so weird. Thank you Bob. Everything. Thanks to the sponsors. Once again, layer two labs. They're launching eCash. Check out eCash.com. Site shift, which is the place where

3:59:54you 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 eCash or whatever shots of 56 chain you like. Orange rock where you can trade without KYC and cake wallet, which did the giveaway and has a very cool wallet that you should try. I think they're gonna support eCash too soon. It's coming. Thank you very much. It's been four hours of fun and learning. I'll see you in the next one. Cheers.