[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, right, so, you know, proof of stake happens kind of over time, and then sharding gets added over time, and all these features get added over time. And so the experience for just a regular theorem user still feels very seamless, right? It's like maybe a little bit more complex than the hard forks that we've already done.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] From a user's point of view, but not by that much, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The big two things that are happening, right, these are what used to be considered the two flagship features of v2.0 and now they're just, you know, the flagship features of the, you know, the next devolution of Ethereum, you know, as a proof of stake and sharding.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, proof of stake is a consensus algorithm. It's a, the, or a consensus mechanism, I should say. Um, it's, the difference is that like, an algorithm is something that you run by yourself. A mechanism is like, it involves interactions between people, and it could even include incentives and all of that. Uh, so, a consensus mechanism, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So by which nodes in the network agree on, you know, which blocks came in, which transactions came in, in what order, make sure that once a block gets accepted, it can't get reverted and all of these things that we expect from a blockchain.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, so, existing blockchains, you know, including Bitcoin, including the Ethereum of today, and including a lot of them, the use proof of work, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The reason why we need proof of anything is bec- is because like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They serve this function that I call economic civil resistance. So that's obviously, you know, a big word for...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Especially if you've never heard of Sybils before. But like the basic idea is, right, that you have a network and you have lots of computers that agree on like which block to accept. And sometimes you get, you know, two blocks that get published at the same time and you just have to agree on an order. So there has to be some kind of voting game.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, but then the question is, well, in this voting game, you know, who gets to vote? Who gets to participate?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now, you can't say one person, one vote, right? The reason why you cannot say one person, one vote is because you need some kind of authority or some kind of mechanism to say, you know, who the humans are.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you don't have that, then a bad guy could just come in with a virtual machine or with a computer that has on it 10 billion virtual machines that have 10 billion, you know, virtual nodes and then just like say, look, I'm 99% of the network. I should control everything. Uh, so to prevent this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Proof of work and proof of stake both do is they basically say, well, the weight of your vote, like how much influence your, um, votes have in the consensus is proportional to like what quantity of economic resources you bring in.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So in the case of proof of work, you prove what economic resources you have because your economic resources are computers, and you prove that you have them by just running them 24-7 using these hash algorithms, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, this does solve the problem, right? Because in order to attack the network, you have to come in with more computers and like more money invested into computers and electricity than the rest of the network put together. And that's extremely expensive.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In proof of stake, instead of relying on, uh, people with computers that are just constantly cranking out hashes 24-7, you b-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As your, like, unit of economic resources, you just use, like, holdings of coins inside the system, right? So all of these blockchains, they have some kind of coin in them. Bitcoin has Bitcoin, Ethereum has Ether, uhm, you know, they all have a coin. So why not just use that as the economic re- the economic resource that you're using to, like, measure participation? Uhm, so,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's like the core distinction between proof of work and proof of stake. Uhm, I like proof of stake and I've liked proof of stake for many years basically because like it just requires much less ongoing resource consumption, right? Like with proof of work, you know, you have to like actually go and buy these physical computers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And these days, uhm, you know, they have specialized hardware, ASICs, application specific integrated circuits, you have to go produce them, you have to go buy them, and unless you have millions of dollars, you know, you have to buy them from one of these other people who creates them, and those other people often end up taking a huge cut of the profits themselves, uh, and then,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, you have to plug them in, you have to just, uhm, burn all of this electricity that's just running 24-7, so it consumes a huge amount of energy, right? And it can, and not just energy, it also, you know, just


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hardware is a very big deal too. Uhm, and you know, you need this like, this really big and powerful, very specialized hardware of no other kind that fills up these big warehouses. So, proof of stake, you don't really need that much electricity, you just need just a little bit to run a regular computer. Uhm, you can run proof of stake validators on computers that you already have. Uhm, so,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's just much less, um, resource intensive. And like this is good for a few reasons, right? Like one is, you know, the kind of environmental rationale that, you know, you're not breaking the environment. Um, the second is that you're not taking away electricity and like other resources from other people, right? Like right now there's,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think just today I saw a story about like Iran wanting to shut down some Bitcoin mining because it was just grabbing up so much electricity that it was, you know, outbidding the nearby towns and they just didn't have enough.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and then there is a, like, Chia that was the one that's doing proof of, uh, like, hard disk mining basically. It's just like grabbing up so many hard disks that there's a shortage.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Alright, so that's the second reason. And then the third more selfish reason is that because participating in consensus does not require so much energy expenditure, you don't need to pay people as much to participate, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So like Bitcoin and Ethereum, they both issue somewhere around 4% of the total supply every year right now to miners. So Ethereum is about 4.7 million Ether and the current supply is about 115 million.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But with proof-of-stake, like, we expect it'll be somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million per year.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I think GriffaStake is very secure, uh, because in order to be able to attack the system, you need to have, like, basically as much stake as the rest of the network, right? So that means, like, right now, for example, we have 5 million ETH staking, so you have to come up with 5 million ETH and then join the network.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The other, so 5 million ethos is a lot, right? It's like, how much is it now, like 15 billion dollars? So that's actually more than I believe the cost of attacking the Bitcoin network. And then the second thing is that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Recovering from attacks is much easier in Proof of Stake than in Proof of Work, right? Because in Proof of Stake you have, like first of all we have for many kinds of attacks that you do against this network.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We have this concept of automatic slashing, right, which basically means that in order to revert a finalized block, so if there's one block that's accepted by the network and you try to convince the network to revert that block and accept a different block,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In order to make that kind of attack, you basically have to have your validator, like a big portion of your validator signed to conflicting messages. And this is something that like once these messages are on the network, well, you can go and prove like, look, these people did it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so we have this feature in the protocol called slashing where you basically take all these people who provably misbehaved and you burn their coins. And you don't burn anyone else's coins.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now, there are other cases, like for example, if instead of reverting blocks, the attack just tries to censor everyone, right, then what you'd do, everyone who got censored would just like basically create the minority chain.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and then the community would basically have to do a soft fork, right? They would just have to say like, look, this chain is clearly attacking us, this chain is the one not attacking us, and so we're gonna join this chain.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then what happens is that on that new chain, the attackers also lose a lot of coins, right? So the difference between proof of stake and proof of work is that in a proof of stake system, like you can identify specific participants and you can say, you know, these, and like, this isn't like, you know, a human going in and saying, I don't like you, I don't like you, I don't like you. This is like automated, right? So the slashing process is automated.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, it is painful, yes. I think, uh, I mean, the one big unknown, of course, is like, if an attack actually happens, and like, if an attack happens that requires the community to actually choose one of these minority forks, then, like, what would the community actually successfully coordinating on this look like, right? Like, it's...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's definitely talking as well, uhm, I mean, like, we have to agree on protocol changes somehow, right? Like, there's Twitter, there's Reddit, there's, uhm, GitHub, there's, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All of the various Ethereum forums, Ethereum Magicians, Ethereum Research, there's just in-person communication, then there's just kind of like the hidden web of everyone talking to everyone on Telegram, uhm, or Signal, uh, so it's like sum of everything.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But I think, like, the thing to emphasize around, like, can you actually come to consensus on, you know, whether or not to fork the chain because the attacker is censoring some, everyone just for example, is like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Everyone who's running a node is going to see almost the same thing, right? Like they're going to be off by a few seconds and like maybe they'll be off by a few minutes, they'll disagree by a few minutes, but like if it's a serious attack, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] People are gonna know, right? It's not like one of those things where, you know, oh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] These are fairly untested mechanisms, but like at the same time, they're also untested mechanisms and proof of work, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And like in Proof of Work, it's even harder because in Proof of Work, you don't have the ability to like identify and say, like, you know, I'm going to, these miners attacked and so we're not going to let these miners in, these miners not attack, so we're going to keep them in. Like you have to pretty much, you know, either,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, take out none of the miners, or you do a fork that changes the proof-of-work algorithm, which takes out all of the miners, right? So,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The economics of recovering from attacks and proof of work, at least to me actually, do seem more unfavorable.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But, you know, I'm sure the proof of work people you talk to will give very different and contradictory opinions and that's totally fine and amazing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sure. How about after this one, we'll also talk about charting because it's amazing and it's part of YouTube.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, basically, okay, EBV, minor extractable value, uhm, it is not different in proof of work and proof of stake, right? So, like, if you wanna call it, you know, block proposer extractable value, like, it sounds a lot sexier, but, you know, we can call it BPATH instead of MAV, who cares?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you have the ability to choose which transactions go into a block and in what order, then you have the ability to like take advantage of that position for economic gain in a lot more ways than just collecting transaction fees, right? Like for example, there's decentralized exchanges on chain like Uniswap.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And like, let's say the price of ETH versus USDC was.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or, well, $10 times, you know, whatever the depth is, right? So, and so there's lots of little things like that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's also things, uhm, that involve, like, front-running other people's transactions. So one example of this would be that if someone sends a transaction that says, like, oh no, buy me 5 ETH for, uhm, what, what,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Exactly, so there's a lot of these different like arbitrage, front running, back running these different tricks that allow block proposers to


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Exactly. And the reason why this is a challenge is because uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's, like, first of all, it sometimes degrades user experience because users get less favorable trades.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But there are sometimes ways to like mitigate that for applications, sometimes it's not that bad.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But like, the bigger risk that I think some people consider more existential is that there's just much more economies of scale in figuring out how to extract all this revenue. Because if you're just collecting transaction fees, there aren't really economies of scale, there aren't really benefits to centralizing, right? Because it's a very simple formula, you just like grab up the transactions that pay you the most.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But with MEV, there's all these sophisticated algorithms, and if you have lots of money, then you can hire really smart people to make amazing algorithms, and then you can use the other half of your money to get a lot of mining power or a lot of stake, and you get a lot of opportunities to use your even better algorithms.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There is this risk that like as a result of this, mining is basically.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or even validating proof of stake is going to centralize. Uhm, so I think the ecosystem's best reply to this sort of risk, and it's the direction where projects like Flashbots are going already, is


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you can't eliminate the centralization, then you try to firewall it, right? And the way that you firewall it is you basically say, we're going to try to deliberately create a marketplace where people can just do the complicated work of creating what are called bundles, like bundles of transactions that are very profitable.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then at the other side of the market, you just have like block proposes reminders that are just dumb nodes and they go and ask the what are called searchers, the bundle creators, and they just ask like, Hey, like how much can you give me if I put in your bundle? And then they just take the highest offer, right? So you sort of separate out the task and you know, you have,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The easy part, and then you have the hard part, and you have like this special class of actor called a searcher that does the hard part, and then the easy part, uh, the people doing the easy part, which is just miners and validators, they kind of...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, this is also just, like, interesting, uh, an interesting example of, like, economic design philosophy, right? Like, sometimes you can't just, like, make centralization go away, sometimes it's inevitable, but, you know, at least you can try to kind of contain it, you can direct it, or, you know, you can even sort of firewall it away from


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's a, I mean, it's a risk, like there's obviously a risk that, you know, it's a very severe problem and that even this Flashbots approach has some fatal flaw or whatever, uhm, but, you know, I'm definitely, like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're definitely approaching it with the mindset of, you know, this is a problem and like, yes, we do have to do some work to solve it, but we're doing it and, uh, so far it's being solved. Okay, let's talk about the other


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And layer one basically means make the blockchain itself capable of processing more transactions.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By having, you know, some mechanism by which you can do that despite the fact that there's a limit to the capacity of each participant in the blockchain. And then layer two says, well, we're going to keep the blockchain as is.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But we're gonna create clever protocols that sit on top of the blockchain that still use the blockchain and still kind of inherit things like the security guarantees of a blockchain.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But at the same time, a lot of things are done off-chain, and so, you get more scalability that way. Uhm, so, in Ethereum, the most popular paradigm for layer 2 is rollups, and the most popular paradigm for layer 1 is sharding.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sure. So the way that I think about the tradeoff is I think about it as a tradeoff between making it easy to write to the blockchain and making it easy to read the blockchain. Right? So when I say read, I just mean, you know, have a node and actually verify it and make sure that it's correct and all of those things. And then by write, I mean send transactions.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think for decentralization, it's important for both of these tasks to be accessible, and I think that they're like about equally importance, right? If you have a chain that's too expensive to read, then everyone will just trust a few people to read for them, and then those people can change the rules without anyone else's permission.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But if on the other hand it becomes really expensive to write, then everyone will move onto basically second layer systems that are incredibly centralized, and like that takes away from, you know, decentralization and self-sovereignty as well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So this has been my viewpoints like pretty much the whole time, right? It's like, you know, you need this balance and going in one direction or the other direction is very unhealthy. In the Bitcoin case, basically what happens was that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Bitcoin originally, like at the very beginning, it didn't really have a block size, it just had an accidental block size of 32 meg, or block size limit of 32 megabytes because that just happens to be the limit of the peer-to-peer messages.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The, I put, you mean sneaked in there. Yeah, just like made an update to the Bitcoin software that made blocks bigger than one. I think it's a million bytes invalid.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I think the impression that most people had at the time is that, you know, this is just a temporary safety measure and over time, you know, as we become more confident in the software, that limit would be raised somewhat.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But then when the actual usage of the blockchain started going up, and then it started going up first to 100 kilobytes per block, then to 250 kilobytes per block, then to 500 kilobytes per block, you know, there started a kind of coming out of the woodworks, this opinion that like, no, that limit should just not be increased.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, you know, then there are all of these attempts at compromising, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, first there was like a proposal for 20 megabyte blocks, then there was the 2-4-8 proposal, which is a bit ironic because the 2-4-8 proposal started off being like a small block negotiating position. But then when the big block people came back and said like, hey, aren't we, aren't we going to do this? They're like, oh, no, no, no, no, we don't want them. We don't want the block size increases anymore. Uh, so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, there were these two different positions, right? The small blockers, I think they valued one megabyte blocks for two reasons. One is that they just like really, really believe in the importance of being able to read the chain. But two is that a lot of them really believe in maintaining this norm of never hard forking.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the difference between a hard fork and a soft fork is basically that in a soft fork, uhm, blocks that were


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Any block that's valid under the new rules was still valid under the old rules. So if you have a client that verifies according to the old rules, then you'll still be able to accept the chain that follows the new rules. Whereas with a hard fork like you have to update your code in order to stay on the chain.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Look, they have this belief that, you know, soft forks are kind of either less coercive than hard forks, which by the way, I completely disagree with. Uhm, I actually think soft forks are more coercive because like basically they force everyone who disagrees to sort of go along by default.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's more difficult to abuse soft forks to do really mean things like or that like completely violate people's expectations like increasing the supply, which is again, I think there is some truth to that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So because of, you know, these reasons, they just say, we're only going to do soft forks and we don't, we want to just not do any hard forks. And they eventually discovered this idea called segregated witness that allows for like a very tiny block size increase to like the equivalent of about two megabytes, um, with a soft fork. It's, it's just really like, pfft.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Weird and devious trick. Like basically what they do is they take the signatures of transactions and then they put them outside of the block. And then they add an extra rule that says that like every for a block to be valid, the block has to come with a separate, like basically extension block that contains all of the transaction signatures.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, the small block side was like happy with these very low levels of block size, and then the big block side wanted to expand to, you know, at the very least go to 4 megabytes, then, you know, maybe go maybe 820. There are those disagreements so within there as well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, I definitely was favoring the big side, uhm, the whole way through, as you can probably tell, uhm, but- Even though, so the argument against the big-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is that, uh, it, uh, makes things more centralized. Yes, because fewer people can run a node that verifies the chain and also because any of these things would require a hard fork and hard forks are inherently risky. Do you think there's truth to that?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, I'm pro hardfork. I think hardforks are actually like, in a, you know, political economic sense, they're better than softforks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's some truth to that. There's definitely a bit more risk of a split as a result of a hard fork than as a result of a soft fork. And the split is highly undesirable, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, it depends, like if it's a split because of a bug, then that's horrible. If it's a split as a result of political differences, then I think like a split is better than, you know, one side being forced to basically just like suck it up and accept the majority position even if it really hates it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It depends, and I think, like, well, for blockchains in particular, the costs of people being able to, like, peacefully do their, go off and do their own thing are much lower, right? Like, you know, okay, if you have a country and you have two groups, then, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like often enough, like fighting out the new rules requires, you know, a civil war requires everyone to move and so forth, but no, not on a blockchain, like, you know, the costs are lower and so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] disappointed with what happens with the big block side. Uhm, I think the source of my disappointment is that, like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One of the things that you notice when just looking at like these political disagreements generally, especially when you have


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Its entire culture is like designed around resisting much more and then it's designed around like, you know, actually debating serious policy trade-offs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I, I worry, or I guess not so much worry, because it's already happened. I, uh, unfortunately think that Bitcoin Cash ended up being a victim of this, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like uhm, first there was a split with Bitcoin Cash, and then of course Craig Wright came in, and you know, Craig Wright was this basically scammer who just keeps on pretending that he's Oshin Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin. Hey, Craig Wright's legal team, do you hear me? Yes, I still think your client is a scammer, so sue me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He says things that, like, play to the resentments that people have, and he says things that people want to hear.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like in the, in the wake of this block size war, you know, the big walkers did feel very disenchanted, like they felt that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, Bitcoin always had this vision that we were supposed to just keep increasing the block size and Bitcoin is peer to peer cash. It says so in the white paper. And then this group, this elitist clique of core devs just like came in and said, you know, no, no, no, we're going to impose this totally different vision. And if you ever want your scalability, you'll have to wait for us to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Create this totally unproven fancy technology called the Lightning Network that works under completely different principles.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you know, they were very angry at this, and I mean, I think, like, I think a lot of that anger is justified. Uhm, but...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At the same time, you know, when people are in that mental state, like it's very easy for you to just kind of like latch on and if you find someone who


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That just, it's a marketing strategy, like it sort of gives him more salience, like there's other big block personalities, right? Well, what's the difference between, with Craig Wright? He's not just a big, uh, a big block personality, he's potentially Satoshi.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He did say all the big block things, right? Like he talked about how, oh, the concept of a free market is fundamentally like economically wrong and it should be, it should be a free market and you should be able to have blocks as big as you want. Like he repeated all the talking points. And so a lot of people were kind of sucked into that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so he unfortunately was able to basically dominate a big part of the Bitcoin Cash community for a long time. And then.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Eventually, of course, uhm, you know, more and more people started to catch on. Uhm, he would just say technical things that are completely wrong, right? Like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One example of this that I, uh, remember is that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He mixed up the concept of 256 bits and 2 to the power of 256 bits.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right, uhm, so, you know, the difference is, it's like the difference between, you know, 80 and the concept of 80-digit numbers, right? Uhm, and because of this, like, he made this, made this argument that said that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That Bitcoin's elliptic curve is friendly to cryptographic pairings. Like you don't have to understand what that is, but if you want to know, I have articles on both at Vitalik.ca. Uhm, but basically he made this like technical argument that really hedged on this point, and then when people pressed him on it, it was like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yes, what, no, no, like what, look, exactly, the height is like what, 2 to the 256 bits, that's a very tiny amount of information. No, no, no, no, 2 to the 256 bits is more than the amount of information in the universe.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And like, you know, equivocated and kind of like preyed on people's inability to understand that mathematical nuance. And I called him out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And eventually I even called him out in person at this conference in Seoul. Like I just stood up and asked the, you know, hey, you know, conference organizer, why are you letting this fraud speak at this conference? And I remember even some big blockers at the time getting angry at me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Are they going to add a developer fund where they redirect 12.5% of the revenue from the minders to the devs? And according to the libertarian non-aggression principle, is this technically theft?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It is, I would have definitely like wanted to see more of a kind of


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like the principled coin with a, that like tries to be Bitcoin, but, but you know, follows consistent big block values. But I know maybe I should just like stop expecting projects that I have no involvement in to care at all about what my values are. And you know, like maybe a theory I'm just like is.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So to summarize that big, long tangent that we just went into. It's a beautiful tangent by the way. It's an evasive tangent, and I think like crypto is just...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One of the most underrated aspects of crypto is, I think, how you can, like, analyze the, you know, the sociology and the politics and the anthropology and the, yeah, and I'm sure Dan Carwood would have fun exploring the space at some point. But, like, the core trade-off, right, is that if you scale blockchains the dumb way just by increasing the parameters,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then eventually you just make it harder and harder to participate as a node and you end up with a system where there's like 20 computers running the whole thing and it's just very centralized. So sharding basically says, well, instead of just increasing the parameters, what we're going to do is we're going to change the blockchain architecture in such a way that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Each individual node in the blockchain only needs to store a small portion of the data and only needs to process a small portion of the transactions.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So you can think about it as being, like, inspired by Bitsorrent, right? Like, on Bitsorrent, there's no such thing as a Bitsorrent full node that has every movie, right? You know, the work is, like, split up among a huge number of computers, and, like, that makes sense. That's, uh, you know, the only sane way to scale a system like that. Uhm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And if they actually tried making a version of Bittor that required full nodes that store every movie, then, you know, it would have like zero censorship resistance and it would just like, you know, be dead in an instant.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The challenge with taking that model and applying it to blockchains, right, is that blockchains aren't just about like spreading data around, they're about agreeing on exactly what data was spread around and ensuring that everything that you agree on actually is correct. And so you have this paradox where let's say you want to have a system that supports


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Ten thousand transactions a second, but each computer in the network can only personally verify


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A hundred transactions a second, so how can each computer


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the idea behind random sampling is, like, let's say for simplicity, this is a proof of stake chain, and you have 10,000 validators. Validators are like, you know, stakers. And like, for simplicity, we'll assume they all have the same number of coins, right? If someone has more coins, we'll just kind of split them up and pretend they're 10 stakers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then, you use, you do like some random shuffling and you basically say, these random hundred validators are assigned to validate this block. These random hundred validators are assigned to validate this block. These random hundred validators are assigned to validate this block.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so each individual computer only gets assigned to validate like a small piece.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But then the way that the information about what's valid gets passed around, right, is that when these hundred participants validate a block, they all sign a message basically saying like, yes, we agree that this block is valid. And then like they combine that signature into one, and then they broadcast that signature.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then everyone else, instead of verifying the blocks directly, just verifies that signature.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right, and so if I see the signature, I'm not directly convinced that that block is valid, but what I am convinced of is that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then because it's all randomly selected, you know, the attacker can't just like force themselves into one committee. And so, you know, the attacker is going to be evenly spread out too. And so if, you know, the entire set of validators is mostly honest, every committee is going to be mostly honest. And so like bad blocks are not going to go through.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So that's like one simple form of sharding. There's also other more clever things that you can do. So for example, there's this concept of zk-SNARKS, might not call it zero-knowledge proofs. So this is the idea that you can make a cryptographic proof that says,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Verified, or I ran some complex computation on this piece of data and I got this answer.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so, if you make these kinds of proofs, then, like if you see a ZK snark that says some block is valid, then you're convinced that that block is valid.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And even if, you know, everyone in that committee is evil, like they have no way of making a valid proof for a bad block, right? Like because the proof itself, like it is a proof that you did the computation where that proof is much easier to verify than just running the computation yourself.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, you know, the, there's once again, you know, super awesome mathematical cryptographic magic behind making ZK Snarks work. Uhm, so it gives you a little bit of a leg up.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Exactly. And like there's other hacks, right? Like there is another hack called data availability sampling that allows you to make sure that the data in the blocks was actually published.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, but like basically like if you stack a couple of these tricks on top of each other, you can create a system where like I as an individual participant can be convinced that everything that's going on in this distributed blockchain thing is correct without actually personally checking more than like a percent of it. So that's charting. That's charting.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So first, I think, like, the 64 can be hard-forked up over time, uhm, so we've, uh, set it so that, like, there's theoretically space in the data structure for 1,024 shards, it's just that 64 of them are turned on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There are challenges with having more shards because like you have to have logic that just like checks and manages all those, all of those shards. And if there's too many of them, then that becomes too expensive. Um, but you know, even still you can improve quite a bit. And then the other thing that we're doing is if what we're getting maximum scalability by combining rollups and sharding.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Theoretically you can have a system where like the aggregator switches around or anyone can be an aggregator. So, you know, it's still like permissionless to send things. Uhm, then what the aggregator does is they strip out all of the transaction data that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is not relevant to helping people update the state. So when I say the state, this is like, uh, this is a very important kind of technical term for blockchains. I mean, like account balances, code, um, like things that are like memory, internal memory of smart contracts, like basically everything the blockchain actually has to keep track of and remember, right? So you just put in a, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You take all these transactions, strip out all the data that's not relevant to telling people how to update the state. And then you take the data that's needed to update the state, and then you like really compress it, right? So like for example,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If we say, you know, I, Vitalik, have an account that's 0xab58, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it's 20 bytes, well instead we can say, well I have an account that is


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Instead of publishing all these transactions, you publish this like tiny compressed blob. So the amount of data that goes on chain goes down by maybe about a factor of 10.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right, and then the second thing is that you don't do the computation on-chain. Instead you do the computation off-chain.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And there's one of two ways to do this, right? One is called a zk rollup, which is you just provide a zk snark that basically says, hey, look, I did this computation and I have this proof that here's some hash of the result and it's correct.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then you stick it on chain and everyone verifies this one proof instead of verifying all these transactions.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then the other approach is called an optimistic roll up, which is basically made of the scheme where, like, first someone says, like, hey, this is what I think the result of the, of applying these transactions is. And then someone else can say, I disagree, the result is different. And only if two people disagree, do you actually do it on, do you actually just like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So if there's disagreements, then you just like run everything on chain and whoever was wrong, like loses a lot of money, right? So like disagreements are very rare and they're very expensive. And in a ZK roll up, you don't even rely on this like challenging game at all. You just rely on a proof.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the core principle is basically that instead of lots of transactions and everyone verifies every transaction, it is you take the transactions, you strip them down and compress them as much as possible, then stick that on the blockchain.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You do need to stick something on the blockchain just so that everyone else can keep up to date with the state so they know, you know, what all the contracts are, what all the balances are in all of this, but it's a very small amount of data.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then you use some, one of these other off-chain games, you know, could be this optimistic game, could be Ezeke Snark, to just prove that somebody out there did the computation and the result is correct.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, you're pushing like 90% of the work off-chain and then, well, 90% of the data ends at 99% of the computation off-chain and then you still have 10% of the data and 1% of the computation on-chain and so, you know, your scalability goes up by a factor of about 100.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So these systems are already live for some applications, right? So there's something called loopering, which is just a ZK roll up for payments, right? So you can have, you know, assets inside of the loopering system and you can go around and transfer them, but what you


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and you get like much lower transaction fees, right? Like instead of five dollars, you'd have to pay like less than five cents. Uhm, but the only problem is that this only supports a couple of applications right now. Like making one that supports anything that you can do on Ethereum just takes a bit more work.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's being done as well, right? So like within a few months I'm expecting, you know, fully Ethereum.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So then, so rollups, just summarizing, you know, do most of the work off-chain, put only a little bit on-chain, factor of a hundred scaling, sharding, another factor of a hundred scaling, hundred times a hundred, factor of ten thousand, you know, hundreds of thousands of transactions a second, and like, you know, there's your scalability.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think zkrollups wants you to accept that the technology works.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Are just like conceptually simpler and they have nicer properties. The reason is that they do not have this concept of a challenge game, right? Like as I mentioned in an optimistic roll up, the way that you ensure that the results are correct is that you let one person submit and like they just submit with no proof. They just say here's what I think the result is.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then if someone else disagrees, they make their own submission. And then if you have two disagreeing submissions, then you actually publish it on chain and you see who's right.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But for this to work, like, you need to actually wait for someone to disagree, right? So like, for example, if I have an asset inside of an optimistic rollup and I want to withdraw it, then I actually have to wait a week to withdraw it because, like, if the, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right, the CK stuff is just, like, you can, in a CK rollup, you can withdraw immediately, uhm, you don't have to, like, worry about the economics of proving as much, right, there's just, like, fewer issues.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, the reason why ZK Rollups are not winning everywhere today is because, you know, ZK's darks are still a crazy new technology, right? Like this is something that 10 years ago, you know, it existed only in theory and there was none in practice. Uhm, then, you know, eight years ago, people were just getting excited about it in Bitcoin conferences for the first time, uhm, like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's, it's new technology, it's crazy technology, it's admittedly scary technology.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you want to learn more, I also have an article about this on Vitalik.ca.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There is a really big and important difference in security models between rollups and sidechains, which is basically that rollups inherit from the security of Ethereum, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I have coins inside of Looperang or Optimism or Arbitrum or ZKSync.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, then even if everyone else in the world who is participating in these ecosystems hates me and wants to steal my money, I can still personally make sure that no matter what happens, I get my money out. It might be a bit expensive for me to get my money out and I have to do transactions on the main chain, but I'll be able to do it. Whereas in


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Polygon, which is a sidechain and so instead of being secured by Ethereum, it's also in part secured by its own, um, a proof of state consensus with its own token. So if 70% of the whole, or even 51% of the holders of polygon tokens wanted to take my money in polygon, they can, right? So,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's the pro- and like, to be fair, like, there aren't even, like, the, the supply I don't think is even that widely distributed, right? So like, potentially, you could, you could, you know, this idea of 51% of the, uhm, token holders coming together and stealing everything, like, it's, it's not impossible.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think in part, like I imagine, I'm not sure exactly what its capacity level is, but like I imagine it has a higher capacity because it's a bit more willing to take centralization trade-offs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then another thing is that like, if the Ethereum ecosystem, like even if it did not do that, right, if you think about an Ethereum ecosystem hypothetically scaling with sidechains, then, you know, you would have a hundred copies of Polygon.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you know, they would each have their own tokens, they would each have their own chains. And so even if each one of those chains was only as scalable as Ethereum, you know, you could still, like the total sum of them would still be a hundred times more than Ethereum.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, the thing that I want to say in Polygon's favor, just to be very fair to them, I really, you know, I definitely really respect the work that they're doing, so, you know, start with a bit with that word of, not criticism, caution, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That they made this kind of deliberate trade off for very pragmatic reasons, which is that the Ethereum ecosystem needs to scale now. And there are applications that want to do something now. And you know, if there aren't Ethereum friendly options for them, then like they're not going to just wait peacefully and do nothing for 12 months. You know, they're going to go to, you know, either


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Binance Smart Chain or, you know, one of some other system, uh, or, you know, potentially something that just has totally no alignment with Ethereum values whatsoever. Uhm, but whereas, you know, with Paul,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] With Polygon, like, the best thing that you can say in Polygon's favor and against optimism is that, you know, optimism is not live and Polygon is live, right? Like, it just takes more work to create a system that has these extra roll-up security features. And so Polygon just said, we're gonna be the system that makes the pragmatic trade-off, we're gonna go


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, you know, functionality first and then, you know, we can talk about adding back the security later. So I've talked to them and like in principle, I think there are,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Very, you know, open to the idea of like adding more, more security and becoming more, uh, becoming a roll-up or at least adding a polygon chain that's a roll-up, um, at some point in the future, which is definitely something I think they, you know, absolutely should follow through on. But like the fact that like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They exist now and so, you know, applications can kind of bootstrap now on a chain that, you know, even though it's security isn't perfect, at least it exists and people can go use it. Um, and then over time, you know, the chain matures as the applications mature. Like, you know, it's I think a very reasonable strategy and I'm definitely really happy that they're part of the ecosystem.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think the compromise that we've been taking within Ethereum is, like, when we have to take the crappy solution, we look for crappy solutions that are forward compatible with becoming good over time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like when you build the quick and dirty thing, you would still already have ideas in your head about what the more complete thing with all the security features added on would look like. Even if it requires a hard fork?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, yes, like even, so, you know, like for example, we're sharding, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's likely that the first version of sharding that comes out, like, is not going to have, you know, zk-snarks and data availability sampling, for example. But we know what these technologies are. We feel like we, you know, have wrapped our heads around them. And so we know how to build a system where we can put all the pieces in place so that it becomes very easy to bolt those components on in the future.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, so, like, if you do things that way, right, then at the beginning, you can have your system that has the functionality, but, say, has less security or less sustainability or less of something else, uhm, but then over time, like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's designed in such a way that it has this easy on, on ramp to adding those things, right? And if you don't think explicitly about like being future compatible, then you do often end up with the.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Expand pretty significant effort on, for example, removing features that we didn't realize that we actually can't sustain.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One big example is just increasing the gas costs, so like making some operations more expensive, because they should be expensive because they actually take a lot of time to process. So that's making something more expensive, kind of like taking some functionality away.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you can, like, be cognizant of where you're likely going into the future, and if you don't know, like, even be cognizant of both the most likely paths that you'll take in the future, and coming, like, thinking about your roadmap and coming up with a roadmap where you know that, like, if you want to do either of those things, then you have a clean path toward it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's probably the best kind of practical way to get the best of both worlds that we have.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right. So as you've said, right, the way that we have set up this proof of stake transition is that at first the proof of stake chain just launches on its own, right? And this is the thing that happened in December and the proof of stake chain has been running for


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Close to six months now, uhm, I mean by the time people watch this it might actually be six months. Uhm, you know, but it isn't actually coming to consensus on anything except for itself, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the idea behind that is to just give the proof of stake chain time to mature, time for people to build the ecosystem around it, time to make sure that there aren't any bugs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And just like, prove to the community that, you know, proof of stake actually is real, and it's, uh, and...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A full transition is realistic because you know, the thing that you're transitioning to already exists and already works.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then at some points in the future, you have this event called the merge where you basically


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's definitely gone through a few different iterations, like the earlier versions of this actually required more work for users and more work for clients. It was much more like, oh, there's this new chain, there's this old chain, and then everyone has to like migrate from the old chain to the new chain, and then at some point, we'll forget about the old chain. The new version is designed to be,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Every proof of stake chain block is going to contain a block of the, what we consider now, what we consider to be the Ethereum chain today, but we'll call it the execution chain.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then at the same time, to create one of these blocks, you're not going to need proof of work anymore, right? So basically at the same time, you would both get rid of the proof of work requirements for one of these blocks to be valid, but instead you require these blocks to be embedded inside of the proof of stake blocks, right? So you basically have like a chain inside a chain.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And this is, you know, from an architecture perspective, it's, you know, you might think it's a little bit suboptimal, but it actually has some nice properties and makes it easier to kind of think about the consensus and think about the, what we call the execution layer, like transactions and contracts kind of separately and upgrade them separately.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and it also just means that the upgrade process is extremely seamless, right? Because from the point of view of a client that's following the chain, you basically have to update nothing, right? You're still following


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The same chain and follows the same rules, except instead of checking proof of work, you'll switch to checking that these blocks are embedded inside of blocks of the proof state chain.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The new chain is not going to hold information from what happened in the Ethereum chain before the merge, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So it's not strictly important for any smart contract or applications that run on the blockchain. It can be important to users, and it can be important for some applications, but we're basically saying that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Maintaining and serving that is not going to be simultaneous with the responsibility of every Ethereum node. If you want that information, there can be separate protocols for backing it up.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And like these other protocols actually exist, right? Like there's something called the graph, which is doing some history retrieval. Potentially you can just take that entire chain and stake it on Bittorrent. Like there's...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Lots of ways to like archive it and create kind of customized search protocols for it. So what's your sense why?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think the biggest reason is just, you know, we've been underestimating the technical complexity. There's a lot of technical complexity in making a successful proof of stake chain. There's a lot of technical complexity in actually figuring out the transition process.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I actually think so. I think we've been very fortunate to not have too much social complexity around the merge.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, uhm, I think the, uh, the biggest part of the reason is just because we have been talking about Proof of Stake and Sharding as being part of the roadmap since, uhm, almost the very beginning of the project, right? Like, the very first Proof of Stake blog post is from January 2014, which was, you know, uhm, two months after the project started and like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Maybe even a day after the announcement. Uhm, so, you know, it was, proof of stake was


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Not something that we, uh, kind of put on anybody by surprise.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then when the Dow fork happened and you know, the people on the ETC side split off, I think it also just happens that a lot of the people that were not willing to stomach the Dow fork and then join the ETC side, they were


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The more bitcoin-y types, and the more bitcoin-y types do also tends to like proof of work more. And so, like that also sort of ended up, you know, sort of


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, purifying the communities on both sides, I guess. So, Ethereum Classic is not switching to Proof of Stake, and, you know, they're happy with their setup, and...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By the time that, uh, it came to the Beacon Chain launching and now I think the community is very strongly in favor of the Proof of Stake switch.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think early 2022 is the most realistic. There's definitely still an optimistic case of it happening this year, but the realistic thing to count on is definitely the very early part of next year.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, so the thing that we had last month is we had this online hackathon called Rayonism where basically a bunch of the different client developers that are going to be part of the transition, like, hacked together some test nets of the post-merge Ethereum chain.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So these were only test nets of, uh, what would happen after the merge. They were not test nets of the transition itself. So the thing that, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] People are working on now actually as the transition. Uhm, so having a, uh, full specification of both the transition and post-transition, and we have specifications now, but like, in a realistic way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Though probably needs to have a couple of changes and have things that continue to be ironed out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then have a, a test net that does both the transition and the post transition. And then like once you have a test network, then you just have to do a lot of testing and audit it. Uhm, and then, you know, do some, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Already significantly used, and if it works, then you can deploy the transition on mainnet.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I believe it's pronounced Medesha, it's a South American subway station, I forget where. But spelled with two L's. Yeah, yeah, cause that's, you know, that's how Spanish works, right? Like the two L's have a...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There was a consensus failure of some kind as I remember, uhm, like basically just different clients interpreting things in different ways and then one of them getting kicked off the network and then it ended up taking a while to actually like get everyone to get back online. Like a big part of the reason why it took weeks to resolve, right, is because, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's on a test network, like the coins are valueless and so there's not really this big push of any kind for people to actually, you know, go and download a new client so they can start participating again.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so, you know, it definitely took a while until the chain started finalizing again, uhm, but, and then also, like, there was, I think, another round of just not finalizing in October, as I remember.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There were definitely things that we learned, like there were a lot of things especially that client developers just learned about like optimization and how to


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's a lot that we learned from just like seeing the full life cycle of what happens when more than a third of the validators go offline and then finalization stops and then that kind of


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Weird, unusual state of the chain continues for a while and then eventually everyone who is not participating just gets enough of their stake.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We don't use the word slash, we use the word leaked for this, but like basically also burned, uhm, until, you know, the people who are participating go back up to two thirds and then the chain goes back to finalizing. So just seeing all of those edge cases play out live, I think actually helped a lot and probably helped to really contribute to, you know, making us feel better about mainnet.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So one of the lucky things there was that this particular bug only prevented proposals of blocks. It did not prevent attestations. Alright, so attestations is just a mechanism for voting on blocks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it's the attestations that are actually responsible for the chain finalizing, so like coming to this more permanent agreement on blocks, right? So the chain was actually quite stable all the way through.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So uhm, I think the thing that we generally learn from these experiences is just how valuable it is to have this multi-client network. So this is one of these areas where I think Ethereum distinguishes itself from Bitcoin for example, right, that in Ethereum we don't


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now sometimes when there's a bug, they disagree. And when two clients disagree because of a bug, we call this a consensus failure.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And consensus failures are pretty serious, right? And when you have, uhm, uhm, clients monoculture like Bitcoin does, then, like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's more rare to have consensus failures, though you still have them actually. Bitcoin had a consensus failure between two different versions of the same client back in 2013.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, but they're less likely to happen. But the interesting thing is that the multi-client architecture has actually, I think, saved Ethereum much more than it's heard it. So even in this most recent incident, right, like Prism was not producing blocks, but all the other clients were still producing blocks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's four others, right? Yes, it's Prism, Nimbus, Teku, and the Lighthouse. And then also Ethereum back in 2016 had this fun event that we call the Shanghai DOS Attacks. They're called that because the attacks started


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right on the first day of our annual conference, DEF CON, that happens to be in Shanghai that year.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, so what happened, like basically was that someone came up with a way to create blocks that were very slow for one client to process, but not the other client.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So at that time, there were basically two Ethereum clients. They were called Geth and Parity. Uhm, right now, I think the top three ones are Geth, Nethermind, and Besu. Uhm, but what happened as a result of us having two clients is that the attacker was just not able to come up with blocks that both clients were.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The chain kind of survived through that month of attacks as the attacker just like kept on hammering at our system and identifying all of the weaknesses.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That was another example. And then like as a counter example, so like something that also shows the point from the other side. Bitcoin had this bug in 2010, right? The balance overflow bug. Basically someone created a transaction that had two outputs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And those outputs had, were both of a few billion Bitcoin. So like about two to the power of 63 satoshis. And then if you add those numbers together, you go above to the power of 64. And of course, you know, computers, like once you go above to the power of 64, you wrap around.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so the Bitcoin nodes thought that there was enough money to pay for the transaction because it was asking for, let's say like a billion satoshis or something, but actually it was asking for to the power of 64 plus a billion.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so, you know, the attacker just managed to create like billions of Bitcoin out of thin air. And this was not only discovered and fixed after something like 12 hours. Um, but you know, if there had been, if Bitcoin had been a multiple implementation system, then, but what if,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Almost certainly happened is like one of the clients would have bugged out, but the other clients would have probably, you know, actually had to check for that, right? And so there would have been a consensus failure, but at least.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That would have, uhm, like, alerted everyone that there is a problem very quickly, and it also would have given everyone just like obvious social permission to go and, you know, pick whichever one of the chains is correct and solve the problem. Uhm, so, like, that's...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think a big learning that we've had from multiple of our experiences in the Ethereum ecosystem, just like validating this multi-client model. And to be fair, it's a model that we get criticized for a lot, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Bitcoin people talk about, you know, the risk of consensus failures that this creates. Um, VC types are like, well, you know, isn't it expensive and wasteful to fund three software teams where you could just be making, you know, one quote focused effort. You know, they love the word focused and like, you know, Ethereum is not that, but it's amazing despite not being that. Um, basically,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, so that was interesting, and then there have definitely been other


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Learnings as well just from like seeing the chain live and seeing what actually is the staking experience, like what are the actual incentives for all the different participants. So I definitely feel like we're gaining a lot from this sort of one year of trial running the chain before we actually make all of Ethereum depend on it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the thing that always attracted me about Bitcoin is, you know, these values of decentralization, creating these open, permissionless systems that anyone can participate in and that aren't just going to flop over and die if whoever created them gets bored and like, you know, that are resistant to


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Whoever runs them breaking the rules and all of these things, right? And I think that pretty strongly that these principles are like really valid in importance to much more things than just money, right? Like Bitcoin is the blockchain for money and Ethereum is built from the start as a general purpose blockchain, right? It's, you know, there is ether, the asset on Ethereum, but then


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You can also make decentralized financial things, what we call DeFi today. You can make like ENS, the Decentralized Domain Name System.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, you can put, make prediction markets on it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Make totally non-financial systems that just like keep track of whether or not some certificate was signed or whether or not some like cryptographic key got revoked.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This big long list of like, just interesting things that you could use about blockchains to do, right? Like basically, they are sort of the missing piece that uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Ethereum was like always from the beginning about that, right? It's about like, hey, this isn't just money. There's so much more that you could do if you could just go ahead and make any infrastructure or


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, digital institution or DAO or whatever you want to call it, where you, the kind of the base layer of the logic is just executed in this open and transparent way where everyone can see what's going on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or, you know, if you like your zero knowledge proofs, at least everyone can see proofs that prove to you that what's going on follows the rules, uhm, and, you know, you don't need to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think, like, I do think that, you know, there's a lot more wrong with the world than just money, right? Like, I'm not one of these people who thinks that, you know, if you get rid of fiat currency and you replace it with crypto currency, then suddenly wars are gonna go away, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, first of all, uhm, you know, like, seniorage revenue is only a small portion of government revenue, right? It's like, what, 5, 10%, something like that. Second of all, like, if,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You are the sort of uhm, this is one of the things I don't even get about their philosophy. Like, let's say you're the sort of person who is a


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] With your new, you know, magic, newfangled cyber currency that takes over the world, take away the government's ability to have seniorized revenue, and so you reduce the government's revenue by 10%.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If the government is that evil, which portion of its expenses is it gonna take that 10% from? Is it gonna stop the bombing people in Afghanistan or is it gonna cut welfare?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you think it's the first, you have a very optimistic view of the government, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I guess my perspective on like, why the whole, you know, we're going to save the world and create, and create peace by like denying governments the right to stealth


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's something that can easily be a big boon for people, right? There's a lot of places where the currency is much less stable than the dollar and


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, these people, like, they don't, like, well, if they use Bitcoin, then their only option is to get Bitcoins, right, which, you know, are also pretty volatile.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If they use Ethereum, then you know, they can get ether, but then they can also get stable coins, right? And you might think that, you know, oh, you're not being ideologically pure and now you're giving them stable coins, which are mirroring dollars. And obviously dollars are going to collapse too. But the reality is that dollars are vastly more stable than the Venezuelan Bolivar. Uh, so like.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There are really, like, meaningful and beneficial things that you can give to people by having a global and open financial system, but I think if you want to actually do that, like, you have to have much more than just a currency, right? And then if you want to go beyond financial things, then, you know, you have to obviously


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Have much more than a currency and then, you know, you also have to actually take scalability seriously because the non-financial applications, like nobody's going to pay $5 a transaction for them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Any cryptocurrency based on cats actually? I think there are, like there was cat coin, there was nan coin, for some reason they just didn't catch on as much as the dog coins did.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I definitely feel obligated to correct the record. I definitely do not fear the doge. Okay. No, I love the doge. Um, I actually visited the doge in Japan a few years back. It's a, uh, she's an amazing dog is still alive. Wait, the original doge? Yeah. Oh, wow. Um, so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, we accept Doge every year for our annual Defcon conferences.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I definitely don't think Ethereum is opposed to Dogecoin. I kind of want to feel like Ethereum is at least a little bit in spirit itself a Dogecoin. And then as I mentioned, I love Doge, I bought a bunch of Doge, I still hold a bunch of Doge.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On the scalability question, like the challenge basically is like the limits, uh, scalability as a, and the trade-offs with centralization, right? Like if you just increase the parameters without doing anything else, then it just becomes more and more difficult for people to validate the chain and just,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It becomes more likely that the chain becomes centralized and becomes vulnerable to all kinds of capture.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So does it need like some of the layer two technologies that we've been talking about?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, I mean, I personally think that, you know, if, uh, Doge wants to somehow bridge to Ethereum and then people can trade Doge thousands of times a second inside of a loop ring, then, you know, that would be amazing. Uhm, I mean, if they want to just, like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think if we can have a secure Doge to Ethereum bridge, then, you know, that would be amazing. And then when Ethereum gets its scalability, any scalability thing that works for Ethereum assets, you would be able to also like trade wrapped Doge with extremely low transaction fees and very high speed as well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's, it's definitely something that's in its infancy. There definitely have been some cross-chain interaction things that have been done before. Uhm, so one, the earliest is probably the concept of merge mining, right? When a chain just makes its entire, uhm, proof-of-work algorithm dependent on the proof-of-work algorithm of another chain.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so I think famous Dogecoin actually merged mines to Litecoin, which is, I think in retrospect not looking like a very good choice because now Dogecoin is bigger than Litecoin.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But uhm, you know, if there's potentially some way for Dogecoin to


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Merge mine with an ethereum proof of staking of some kind then that could be an interesting alternative. Uhm, if


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So that's one type of like chain interaction. As far as like bridges, like one chain reading another chain, early in Ethereum's history there was this project called BTC Relay. It's a smart contract on Ethereum that just verifies Bitcoin blocks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think people stopped really caring about and maintaining it because there just weren't enough applications that were actually interested in using it at the time and the transaction fees got too high to actually maintain it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, I think if we want to make a BTC relay 2.0 and that becomes cheaper because, you know, it uses snarks or something like that, then you probably could, but maybe now is the time when you actually


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But if you want Bitcoin to be able to do things based on what happens in Ethereum lands, then like Bitcoin would have to basically, well they can do everything with soft forks cause like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's their religion, but they'll do it that way. And if Doge wants to make a fork that allows for two-way transferability with Ethereum, then they could. I think that would be a lovely collaboration to make.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's interest. I think there might actually even be some multi-sig funds that has some, um, some funding. It's just a bounty for someone to make a bridge between the two.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, come on, he deserves to be number three. Or number two, and then Ethereum can be whatever that other number is.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I think, uh, it's definitely your


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Necessary for a smart contract so that you do a lot of things to use off-chain data of some kind, right? Like.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you want to have a stablecoin, you need a price oracle so you know what price you're targeting. Uhm, if you want to have some fancy, you know, crop insurance gadget, like I always, I think Etherrisk has been doing a lot of good work with that in, I think it was either Kenya or Sri Lanka or both, like they're, they're making a lot of


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so projects that provide oracles are definitely


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There are definitely different kinds of use cases, like Augur is more about events, and the Augur Oracle is designed differently from Chainlink.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Emphasizes the whole, you know, like we have a fast automated, uh, thing that just like gives you data quickly. Um, whereas Augur is more, you know, we don't give a crap about speed. Um, and look, we don't need to give a crap about speed because if you want to get your money out on a prediction market that where in reality it's resolved, you can probably just sell your coins for 99 cents anyway.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, I mean, I think Chainlink is definitely taking a good and important part of the Oracle Design Space, and I'm definitely happy that there's


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I personally would prefer the Ethereum base layer.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Stay away from trying to provide too much functionality because, like, once you have the Ethereum base layer making a claim about, like, say, the US dollar to Ethereum price, like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And at some sense, you're basically saying that like Ethereum as a base platform starts making what could be geopolitical statements, right? Like for example, you know, imagine if there was some


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like for just those kinds of reasons, I would personally prefer Ethereum itself to be more of the sort of pure platform that just analyzes transactions mathematically using


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Benefits from not trying to do everything at layer one and having this like very robust layer two ecosystem where you have all these projects doing interesting things.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I kind of want to let the various books about Ethereum speak for themselves, uhm, but, you know, I feel like, you know, since that time, I think, you know, Charles says that clearly.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is this going to be one of those things where everyone comes full circle and then 2030 Vitalik and Charles are best friends?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think such things are possible. Uhm, I mean, I think, uh, you know, people definitely absolutely have a right to and, uh, I think should strive to just constantly change and reinvent themselves.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's definitely interesting ideas in there. I mean, I do think Cardano takes a bit of a different approach than Ethereum in that, you know, they really emphasize having these big academic proofs for everything.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Interesting, I'm actually the sort of person who thinks DeepRigger is overrated.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, the reason why I think Deep Rigor is overrated is because I think like, in terms of like why protocols fail, I think the number of failures that are outside the model is even more important, is like bigger and more important than the failures that are inside the model.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right, so if you take selfish mining for example, like that original discovery from 2013 that showed how uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Bitcoin does, like, even if it has a 50% fault tolerance, assuming everyone's honest and only has a yeaah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 0-33% fault tolerance depending on your network model if you assume rational actors.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And to me that was a great example of like an outside the model failure, right? Because traditional consensus research just up until, but before the blockchain days,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, this, we're gonna make consensus between 15 participants and these are institutions. And if something goes wrong, then, you know, if it was, we can figure out whether or not it was deliberate offline and if they did something evil, we can sue them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But then at the same time, like there definitely are protocols that turn out to be insecure, that do have failures inside the model. Like this reminds me of the time when I think I found a bug in a proposed consensus implementation from either BitShares or EOS. This happened around the end of 2017.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, so that was definitely inside the model because like they had a very clear idea of what they were trying to achieve, they had a very clear description, and like there's a very clear mathematical argument for why the description doesn't lead to what they're trying to achieve. But ultimately, what you're trying to achieve can never be fully described in formal language, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The big discovery of, you know, the AI safety people, for example, right? Like, just having a specification of what you want is an insanely hard problem. And like, the more powerful the optimizer that you're giving the instructions to, the more you have to be careful.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, you know, I think there are kind of these two sides. And then the other thing is that a lot, a lot of the academic approach ends up like basically optimizing for other people inside of the academic system. And it doesn't really optimize for like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My case for why I, uh, like, tends to behave in ways that, you know, occasionally traditional academic types criticize as being reckless. Um, but, I mean, on the other hands, you know, there's the, I mean, there's definitely real benefits that come from.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just taking a rigorous approach, especially when you know what the specification is of what you're trying to get and you're trying to improve your way


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or provide protocols that actually provide that, like, you know exactly what you're looking for. I feel like realistically, you probably want to do both kinds of analysis.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And like sometimes you even want to do both kinds of analysis and stages, right? Like you have, you want to do more quick and dirty things and you even want public feedback on the quick and dirty stuff and then later on you formalize it more and then you get more feedback.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, in general, I guess I feel like the norms of research in the future, like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The internet has just changed so much, there's no way that it's not going, and you know, it's even changed like collaboration structures and like the patterns in which we work with each other. There's no way that the correct structure for collaborative research is the same as what it was 15 years ago, but like what


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So my impression is actually that this is more of a kind of far away impression, and it could be wrong, that it might even be that one of the challenges is that AI is not formal enough.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, because AI does, is very, like, practitioner-oriented, right? Like, it's all about, like, hey, I found a couple of hacks, and look, I ran them, and look, you know, they seem to improve classification accuracy from, you know, 0.684 to 0.773. Uh, so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A lot of the time there just isn't actual science behind why this hack works and why this other hack doesn't work. You just sort of trial and error your way into it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like I could see how that approach works, but at the same time, like that approach is not good for eligibility. For example, it's not good for like understanding what the heck is actually going on, like how these kinds of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Thinking about what's going on more explicitly, I mean, my understanding is that a big part of AI safety research is


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Whereas with crypto, or with traditional cryptography, you know, it's like very much not


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, I should quite say that. Traditional cryptography is this interesting mix of being very formal and being very informal because


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's very formal with given these security assumptions, prove that the protocol works under these security assumptions. The places where it's very informal is like, well,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How do we even know that there isn't an efficient algorithm for factoring numbers? Yeah, we kind of tried it for 40 years and then, you know, so far no one's found anything better than the general number field sieve and like, okay, fine, we'll just assume it's fine.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How do we know you can't find the discrete log between two elliptic curve points?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Did it a couple of decades, no one's found anything faster than like baby step, giant step stuff. Uh, so, that's...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And like, there's definitely ways in which that approach really makes sense, right? Because at least you can concentrate your analysis on a small number of building blocks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And like, you know, you do have some intuitive reasoning about those building blocks, but like at least there's a small number of building blocks and lots of people are looking at them. And then everything else just sort of gets formally built on top and you actually can like mathematically reduce the security of big things to building blocks, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like you can have mathematical proofs that say, you know, if you make a zkSynarch of a yes statement when in reality that statement is false, then you can use that to


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Extracts information out of elliptic curves that you know, it completely breaks the problem or something like that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then in blockchains and cryptocurrency, I think the one area where consensus mechanisms is still more an art than a science is that these aren't just like technological systems, they're crypto economic systems, right? And they make assumptions about people and which assumptions you can make about people is not something that you can prove with math.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Can you trust the 51%? If you can't trust the 51%, can you trust the other 49% to be able to coordinate on like making their own fork? What will happen to coin prices? Like how do people as human beings react to these events? Like there's all of these assumptions.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, at the same time, look, if you can write down the assumptions, then you can like do formal things with them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was definitely surprised by, like, NFTs in particular. Like, I even actually think


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I can't really relate to this concept of like spending a lot of money on a thing, like there's nothing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, there's no clear kind of understanding of why that thing would, uh, maintain its value.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I definitely, like, cannot really understand, you know, the psychology behind, like, buying, you know, paying $200,000 for original art painting. I'd be like, you know, if I had a mansion, just, like, give me photocopies of everything. You can hang three photocopies of, uh, the, the Mona Lisa. Why would I even have the Mona Lisa? I think I'd probably just, like, have some Nyan cats or something.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Exactly. But the thing that makes me very happy about the space now that it has happened is that, I mean, this gets back to the conversation that we had at the beginning, right? Like I'm interested in this concept of decentralized public goods funding, right? Like I want


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you don't have that, then either the public goods just don't get produced at all, or people make centralized versions that have some of the properties and try to be substitutes, but actually just like, concentrate control on a very small group. Right? Uhm, and you know, both of those things are not very nice.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The nice thing about NFTs would be, well, if you're an artist and you can just mint NFTs and this is a source of revenue, then like, great, that's another stream of revenue for, you know, creative work that often does still get, get underfunded. And that's amazing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think it's definitely a grey area, like there's definitely things that are really and actually scams, like, I mean, BitConnect would be one example of something that's away on the scam spectrum.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This is, it was this three minute 48 second video that was just of this guy, uh, making this totally crazy rants and it was at some conference in Vietnam where they were of course like trying to convince a whole bunch of people to buy this coin and they had these claims about how it would go to go up in value. That was definitely like the peak of these pure, uh, mm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Of things that are not completely scams, uhm, and then things that are not scams and that are technically totally fine projects, but where


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The, their community is just incredibly sketchy and then all the way to, you know, things that are where the community is nice, but maybe the project is just fundamentally incapable of achieving what it's trying to do or in the community doesn't realize. And then, you know, really good projects, right? So like if you want to go a step.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If that's 100% scam, then like, you know, what would I call like say 80% scam? Well, like Bitcoin SV is one example. This is a Craig Wright's work of Bitcoin.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Theoretically, it's a blockchain, right? It's a fork of Bitcoin. It has some, you know, 512 megabyte blocks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you really wanted to, you could use the blockchain, you know, it's a, it satisfies the properties that, you know, you can send transactions onto it. You can probably, you know, use it as, as a backup to store your files if you really wanted to, just because it has, it has so much space, you know, it might fail.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, it's, but at the same time, like, you know, as we basically said, like, Craig Wright is a scammer and like half the, you know, community is just totally batshit insane.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, like I think, you know, in the case of BSV, the humans, they make just completely wrong and just obviously wrong claims about like what BSV is capable of accomplishing and what it conceivably could accomplish. And like there's just a lot of aspects of it that make it feel like a money grab.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So that's one example. And then, you know, you gotta go a bit further and then, you know, you have like the trons of the world and like, you know, that's a platform, you know, you can use it, you can do, you can do stuff on it. But at the same time, like, you know, they did plagiarize the IPFS white paper and then, you know, they, so there's scammy qualities.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's people who call Litecoin a scam because they just like say, oh, look, you know, it has no fundamental use case and the concept of being silver to Bitcoin's gold, Bitcoin's gold is just like stupid and you know, like Millie Bitcoin is the silver to Bitcoin's gold.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At the same time, like, if you have these people who just, you know, they do seem to earnestly believe this, and, uh, like, they are trying to just, like, make Litecoin be Litecoin as best as they can, then, like, that's, to me, that's enough for it to not be a scam.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then, so, you know, I think the, the biggest gray area is definitely between, like, projects that are earnest and, but, you know, they have just all sorts of these, like, different combinations of flawed qualities to them, you know?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, it's definitely a very challenging space to navigate. I mean, you know, it's in some ways the reflection of the world at large.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like imagine like Mac versus PC wars if everyone who bought a MacBook had had 10 Apple shares inside of it and everyone who had a PC had 10 Microsoft shares inside of it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then you had, you know, the, the elites who bought their Macs back in 1983 and then they spent $500 dead and now they have $40 million and they just think that they're these gurus who understands the future of finance and geopolitics.