AllCoreDevs recap, Decentralized front-ends and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #431 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where i cap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host and this is designer until the 19th of august 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so the all-core devs call that i spoke about yesterday that was happening i guess yesterday um has happened and you can see this uh summary thread from tim biker here now this was the call where i guess like ttd was formally um i guess confirmed we all already knew what ttd was from the consensus layer call last week uh and that ttd being for the mainnet merge uh and there was obviously a bunch of other stuff spoken about on the cordov cordev call as well i think the two most important things that stuck out to me was the conversation around how shadow fork 11 went which i somehow

missed that that were that kind of like happened but it happened and i think we got like a 99 uh i guess um a successful shadow fork uh which i think there was only a couple of configuration errors um other than that everything seemed to go very very smoothly and that's obviously really really good because it shows us what we can expect with with mainnet now obviously well maybe not obvious to you but it's obvious to me that i don't think anyone's expecting a perfect merge and what i mean by a perfect merge is that every single validator on the network every single execution layer just works perfectly uh in a post merge like literally as soon as we merge and and block and the slots and blocks continue

it's kind of like i don't i don't expect the things to work perfectly i don't expect participation rates to say to stay exactly the same as they are now but i do expect any fall off invalidators to be correct uh quickly corrected because of that inactivity leak that we've um we've spoken about before so that was the kind of like first thing with the shadow fork the second thing was this long discussion around censorship resistance within ethereum obviously it has been a huge discussion i've spoken about it a lot so i'm not going to rehash my my points here but i i was only able to listen to about 10 to 15 minutes of the conversation it was very very interesting uh obviously this core devs recall is recorded or you can read tim's thread here for a for a summary of that but i'm very glad that they decided to

speak about it because look it is obviously a big issue uh within ethereum in terms of kind of like we need to talk about it as much as possible we need to kind of work around it on the technical and social level but i think with the core devs and the core researchers they don't want to ex you know explicitly give kind of uh i guess like anyone any kind of reason to uh uh kind of latch onto their words and think what they're saying is kind of like set in stone so to speak and an example of this is i saw a couple of minutes of the call get uh taken and put on twitter by a bitcoin maximalist and they were kind of like going on about how moving to proof of stake means that everything's going to be centralized because of mev boost now it was taken

out of context because with mev boost there is now going to be three different relayers one run by flashbots uh i think blocks routes is going to have three different types but it's still gonna you know it's still just kind of like one run by blocks route and one run by manifold and there's probably gonna be more so it's not like we're gonna just have one uh provider that is censoring for for it from any one relayer within mev boost that is censoring um to choose from we're gonna have multiple ones to choose from and you also have the choice of not running mav boost at all i mean if you really care about censorship resistance you don't have to run mev boost on your validators at all and to be honest if there's not one ready for for um uh for a time of the merge that doesn't

censor i won't be running mev boost i'm personally happy to give up you know a bit of extra revenue on my validators until there is a censorship censorship free relayer because i don't obviously want to be participating in any censorship on the network uh at all now the discussion went on obviously longer than that you can go read tim's thread for a summary or watch the video yourselves but i was very very glad to see that that was discussed because some people would you know i guess because the call is is usually pretty technical in nature and there's a lot of people on that call there's a lot of various different opinions on how to kind of like combat this and how to make ethereum better and this isn't like anything new this has been obviously talked about for years and years but it's kind of like

priorities now because when you think about it things like pbs uh and decentralized or i guess like censorship resistant relayers or proof relayers uh and uh cr lists and and shutter rise beacon chain and all that sorts of stuff that can give us better privacy and give us better censorship resistance at layer one that it was all kind of i guess part of the the splurge right the nice to haves in terms of get just delivering that kind of once we got these other more urgent things delivered such as scaling now obviously the priorities have shifted a bit here i think that not only are things like withdrawals probably going to be uh being chained withdrawals going to come faster than they otherwise would of

i do think the whole ecosystem is going to try and see what ways we can kind of both the technical and the social layer deal with this uh risk of censorship because the risk was always there like we always knew that there was a risk here we always knew that these networks were censorship resistant and not censorship proof and that goes for every network but we didn't have kind of like uh i guess uh an assault on if the ethereum ethereum's kind of like censorship resistance as we've had with these sanctions on tornado cache so because of that you you basically have this uh i guess a very big topic in ethereum right now where it's come to the forefront which honestly i'm glad it has because it means that we're going to become a more resilient network out of this and it's kind of pushed the entire

ecosystem to just base this head-on and the funny thing is is that i was talking about this in the in the discord channel today but from my view and obviously this is just my personal view it's very anecdotal but from my point of view ethereans will and i mention i think i mentioned this during the week but ethereums will definitely kind of like talk about the hard subjects they won't try and bury it they won't try and kind of uh you know put it under the rug or anything like that they'll talk about it and talk about it very openly and very be very public about it whereas from what i've seen in the in bitcoin land uh just as an example they seem to sweep things under the rug quite regularly and try to bury them and i think the clearest example of this is something that they

all or most of them call fudd and that's that dwindling block subsidy for bitcoin which means they've got a dwindling security budget which could in the next two harborings make bitcoin an insecure network now most of the people in the bitcoin community literally try to sweep this under the rug and call it fudd which i think is obviously wrong uh but they call it fud because it's coming from outside the outside camp right it's coming from the ethereums the ethereums are the first ones to talk about this and then some smarter bitcoin has uh started talking about it such as hazu and eric wall um and i think a few others out there but really i first started seeing ethereums talk about this uh and within ethereum like obviously bitcoin maximums have been talking about everything wrong with ethereum or what they see wrong with ethereum but like a lot of it is

fud but you know they're talking about the censorship concerns with ethereum right now and i guess they should be talking about it with every network but obviously they're just focusing on ethereum and they're right like they're right to be concerned we're all concerned we're all trying to work our way around it but what gets me is that they kind of like look at us discussing this in a very public manner like discussing it on all call debs calls and they look at that and they laugh at that it's like well i mean we're discussing it because we want to fix it we don't believe it's unfixable we believe that ethereum will be a stronger network when we kind of like make sure that we deal with all of this uh and make sure that we kind of improve the technology and and kind of like

improve the social layer as well but yeah i mean i i don't see that as a weakness so that's another thing that i've kind of just been paying attention to lately that really makes me happy to be in the ethereum community i'm very happy that we can kind of uh talk about these issues head on i mean i haven't personally shied away from this at all i've talked about it a lot on the refill in the last week uh you know it's probably up to an hour and a half of total kind of video time of me talking about this not to mention all the tweets not to mention all the discussions in the discord channel not to mention all the replies i give even trolls on twitter which i shouldn't even be wasting my time on uh you know i i've tried my best to kind of like talk about

this as much as possible and a lot of other people have as well so anyone who kind of says that that the ethereum people are trying to sweep this under the rug or are not kind of responding to the fud i mean we are and you know there are some people out there who are very persistent with their criticisms and they'll keep going on about not getting a reply it's like well okay not everyone can reply to everything like i personally can't reply to everything i'm sorry i just cannot i'm one person and a lot of the people who you want to reply to such as the core devs and researchers they're busy i mean we have the merge still coming up they're busy doing actual work they can't just be on twitter all day responding to your kind of like criticisms and uh there there have been

responses given to some of these people and they're still not happy because i think what they're searching for is not the truth they're searching for what they want to hear they're searching for people to i guess kind of give them the attention that they think they deserve for coming up with these criticisms and as i've said before i'm all for constructive criticism but if you're not going to take the answers that people give you on board and if you're just going to push back on them and continue in this just endless circle of debate then it doesn't become con it's not it's not constructive anymore it becomes very destructive to people's time and people don't want to engage with you if that's all you do on on whatever platform it is so whenever i see criticisms i i mean for me personally i look at kind

of like where the criticisms is coming are coming from if it's coming from someone that i know literally just hates ethereum and is a pure kind of like not even a bitcoin maximum but just hates ethereum then i'm less likely to reply to that because there's no point because no matter what i say they're going to still hate ethereum they have a biased against it whereas if it comes from a person that i consider to be an honest critic or i consider to be someone relatively neutral i'll take it much more seriously and do my best to kind of reply and educate to them and there's plenty of those people but those ones who just you know i know straight up don't like ethereum and hate ethereum like what's the point like no matter what i say it's just not going to change their mind so why even bother

right but anyway i'm going to leave that at that for now a bunch of other things to get through uh help i just wanted to actually notice uh note this that hell press uh talked about that there was only about 100 people watching the all core devs call confirming the ttd uh which means i mean as i've been saying for a long time the merge is not priced in uh so many people don't even know what's happening there a lot of people are focusing on the censorship resistance stuff which is which is fair enough but it's kind of funny how that's overshadowed the merge and the merge is still coming it's still going to be an extremely bullish event within ethereum but it's kind of funny how there's a large number of people that i guess have forgotten about that and they're just focusing on all the fun and

all the because there's just so much noise on twitter right now it's crazy but uh but yeah i know the price is doing what the price does i guess like i don't expect things to be priced in the short to medium term but long i guess longer term definitely i expect to eat to just kind of continue trending up as i as i normally do um but yeah i just wanted to note that uh next up i've got some more tornado cash news or i guess commentary so this comes from jake zyvinski who is a lawyer he starts off this thread by saying it's been a full week since dutch authorities arrested a tornado cash developer for allegedly concealing criminal financial flows they still haven't said he did anything but write code this is a grave injustice it is unacceptable full stop we deserve an

explanation now um and then he goes on to say dutch authorities have given an incomplete and indefensible answers in response to questions from the d5 education fund they agree that developing a tool is not prohibited but vaguely unfalsely suggests that tornado cash was created for the sole purpose of crime this should go without saying in a free country writing crowd is not a crime a country that criminalizes a writing code is not free it should be crystal clear that arresting and prosecuting software developers is antithetical to the civil rights that democracies must protect so i mean i completely agree with what jake is saying here as far as i know i don't think that he uh this kind of tornado cash developer has been charged with any with anything uh and even if he was charged with something it doesn't

feel like the charges would stick if this is kind of like the shaky i guess justification that uh the dutch authorities are giving and i've gotten some context on this from friends this dutch authority that arrested the tornado cache developer they're the fiod i don't know what that stands for but that is the acronym of the uh enforcement agency apparently they i mean there is an opinion here from suzuha who kind of like shares its opinion that uh it seems like they jumped to arrest alex which is the tornado cash developer with no real justification uh in an attempt to look good to the americans and are now realizing that they have no just cause for holding him and i believe this because uh there is a history of kind of like the dutch authorities are kind of like

the netherlands trying to suck up to the americans and five and the five eyes uh more broadly five eyes is kind of like this global spy alliance if you will um you can google it for more details on that um but then the netherlands isn't part of it i believe it's uh canada the us uh new zealand um i think australia's in there i can't remember the exact numbers but the five eyes five uh countries that share intelligence um and it seems like you know netherlands is kind of like sucking up up to them or at least what um what i'm kind of like seeing here um actually i want to know what those countries are just so i i have the right information here so it's uh yeah canada australia new zealand the united kingdom kingdom and the united states so those are the five eyes so obviously

netherlands isn't part of that but uh but yeah from the context that i've gotten it seems like they definitely uh kind of jumped here on this and it was kind of a knee-jerk reaction to the sanctions on tornado cash uh and it seems like they don't really have a justification for for for holding alexia which is extremely sad i mean when you look at this and you look at what jake has said here where he's just written code and that shouldn't be a crime because writing code and executing code are two different things if you're gonna write code and someone's going to prosecute you for writing that code even if it hasn't been executed or anything that's like prosecuting someone for writing words on a piece of paper and and it really is kind of bizarre when you think about that because if you

write on a piece of paper right uh it tells you say you're kind of writing a story and you say this this character killed this character right should you be tried or prosecuted for uh murder because you wrote a character that killed another character right so it's a loose analogy here but i i think i think you would see my point where if you write a piece of code that i mean tornado cash is a i guess neutral example here but say you wrote malware that's not illegal that's not a crime to write malware the crime is writing malware with the intent of using it and executing it on people's machines to steal their information to ransomware them to do whatever else right that is the crime and that falls under the computer

hacking and that kind of whole broad thing there the crime is not riding the malware itself if it was well that would be a very dark place to live and this is i guess in the u.s i don't know what it's like in every other country but this is definitely the way it is in the u.s so the the us as far as owner hasn't arrested anyone in connection to tornado cash whether that be the developers uh or anyone using it uh but they you know they may they may in the future and dodge authorities already have so we'll have to see if this sticks we'll have to see if they actually end up charging him with anything that sticks i i don't think they that they will from the looks of things but if they do i hope that uh fun gets set up

and we can kind of donate to uh the fund in order to get the get alex good legal representation because this is an injustice at the end of the day and we need more information on this and we need uh the dutch authorities to kind of update us on what uh he's been charged with and what hit crime he's committed not with this hand-wavy stuff that they've been trying to do so i'll link both jake and suzaha's threads in the youtube description you can go read those for extra context there all right so everyone's been talking about decentralizing d5 front ends lately well people are starting to do that so you can see here that this account on twitter which is qdqdqd.eth tweeted out by saying you know you can no longer access your favorite that's because your address has

been blocked question today i'm happy to announce pineapple a browser a browser extension that intercepts and mocks requests made by dapps to check if you are sanctioned or not i think this is ready to use on chrome chromium browser such as chrome edge and brave no configuration is required you just have to follow the readme in store and enjoy freedom again so it's available here on github and you can go check that out for yourself as well and then there's also a guide here from eduardo on how to run your own rv interface locally with just a few clicks so this is a proof of concept of how a ui can be generated and used locally in dap node from a github repo or a remote decentralized one and this is the result for rv so dap node is a kind of piece of software or i guess like an operating

system so to speak that you can run on any hardware uh and it allows you to basically install all types of blockchain infrastructure whether that be front-ends as you can see in this decentralized front-end as you can see in this image it allows you to run blockchain nodes and validators and all that good stuff there and you can buy an evado which comes pre-installed with dap note on it so you don't have to do anything else except buy the evado which is a piece of hardware have dap node installed on it and then away you go you'll be able to become much more self-sovereign and be able to use blockchains as they should be used right uh in a fully self-sovereign way but very very cool to see that people are already reacting to this they're already building tools that preserve people's freedoms and allow them to get around

these dumb sanctions and look the sanctions on the tornado cache addresses themselves like i get that whatever like that's a whole different discussion but people being blocked from accessing things because they've been dusted from tornado cache or because they interacted with tornado cache back in the day or because they've interacted with an address that interacted with tornado cache like that is not on that to me is a massive overstep but that doesn't make any sense and that should be fought back as hard as possible and that's exactly what uh we're doing by building these tools so very very cool to see these i'll link both of these in the youtube description below and you can check those out for yourselves all right so niraj here has highlighted this kind of massive verified account called crypto whale on twitter that is posting fake news to move the crypto

market and hiding anyone who is asking for a source so they posted this tweet that said the securities and exchange commission or the sec has just issued a seasoned assist order against tether and bit for next parent company iphone x sec says teleheart was artificially manipulating the prices of bitcoin and other emerging asset classes this is huge and there's a screenshot of a kind of season desist there and then a bunch of people are asking for the source uh and their replies are being hidden as niraj said here the reason why i'm highlighting this is because there is so much and i i hate using this term because it's been poisoned but there is literally so much fake news on social media guys like i i i the amount of that i see every day kind of

leads me to believe that most of the stuff you see on social media and just media in general is either a half truth misleading misinformation or just outright false now because of that you should never take things at face value you should always ask for a source or go to the source you should never listen to anyone not even me like don't that's why i link everything in the youtube description you go check it out yourself follow it up yourself uh any of the opinions that i give you can challenge in the discord channel get other people talking about it just don't like i mean i struggle to say question everything because you can drive yourself crazy like that but don't just like automatically believe something especially if it's something like this where if the sac did this this would be an explosive piece of news this would be

market moving news but they didn't do this it's fake right and they deleted this tweet apparently uh and then they kind of posted an old uh tweet about not trusting and verifying well i mean that's ironic for them to post this account crypto whale but yeah don't trust what you read try and verify it yourself if you can and if you can't verify it then don't trust it at all because there's not ever going to be just one source for a piece of information there will be an initial source that the information comes from a press release or something like that but then it'll be corroborated across the internet and even in some scenarios there can be a source that gets posted and then just repeated throughout across the internet and the source is actually fake news so you need to not question everything not make

yourself go crazy but you need to be aware of these sorts of things especially in crypto because of the fact that these these things can potentially move the market there's an incentive to keep putting out this bad information and of course there's the tribal elements to it as well where everyone gets trouble about their investments and uh they'll put out misinformation they'll put out outright lies just to benefit themselves and benefit their following and there's also this phenomenon of uh especially the bigger accounts on social media they have an audience that gives them engagement for certain kind of i guess like things that they say for example on my twitter account like if i tweet about ethereum i get much more engagement than i would tweeting about i don't know solana for example because my following is predominantly ethereum people whereas a bitcoin account or a bitcoin maximus

account they get a lot of engagement from on ethereum not even from talking about bitcoin just from on ethereum right because that a lot of them have that persona of just on anything that's not bitcoin especially ethereum so if they one day stop doing that and start appraising ethereum not only would they get cancelled cancelled in question marks right they would also uh their engagement would drop off and they probably lose followers so there is this kind of uh perverse incentives on social media where you depending on what you've built up an audience around you have to keep doing that it kind of becomes a flywheel effect where you're not going to get engagement if you suddenly change the way you kind of post content and the way you are on social media so that's just a perverse incentive that i think will always exist i don't think there's any

real way around that but i just wanted to talk about that a little bit to put it on your radar there uh yeah i mean i'll link this in the youtube description uh to see some just if you want to go check out some discussions uh on this one so aztec announced today that they will be co-funding aztec connect bridges alongside balancer to support private swaps and liquidity provisions the balancer grants subdial supports projects that build technologies or resources on the balancer protocol to accelerate development of the bell ecosystem as the connect as you guys know allows anyone to permissionlessly build bridges from aztec's private account system to ethereum increasing utility for private transactions to include defy this is really really cool in the face of i guess the tornado cash sanctions all the other kind of stuff around privacy on ethereum aztec and

balancer are doubling down here they want to give people as much kind of freedom as possible as much a privacy as possible which is awesome to see because aztec i believe is a us-based company i think uh which means that they're they're kind of probably a target as well but they're definitely uh i guess on the right side of history here they're not giving in uh and they're fighting for privacy because at the end of the day i mean they're building a whole company around privacy so why wouldn't they be fighting for it and i think you know with the tornado cash staff versus aztec versus other zk privacy things it's going to be a case-by-case basis i think tornado cache definitely as i've mentioned before i mean i'm pretty much convinced they got targeted because of the north korean um

uh connection there but that doesn't mean that a aztec won't one day be used by north korean uh you know uh the government the north korean government or other sanctioned entities so i don't know what's gonna shake out there i don't know how that's gonna play out because it i guess begs to reason that they're going to suffer the same fate and i hope they don't and i hope that we can work this out in the courts and make these regulators understand that these privacy preserving tools are not being made to cater to north korea to evade sanctions for example they're being made for the everyday person and honestly the sanctions all they did on tornado cash was hurt regular users because anyone with half a brain cell can still use these things through ether scan through their own node because tornado

cash is an immutable contract on ethereum so really it just kind of like killed tornado cash for regular users who wanted to protect their privacy which as i've said before is very much an overstep and very much i think i believe in the us unconstitutional and will be challenged in the courts but anyway good to see as second balancer doubling down on privacy especially in the face of all of those sanctions all right so the proposal for the gnosis safe token distribution is now live on their forums so if you are eligible to i guess get an airdrop of safe tokens you can now go to this google document here which i'll link in the description below and check if your address is eligible and there's also the eligibility

criteria posted to the forum here essentially this is what the token distribution looks like core contributors are getting 15 uh the safe foundation is getting 15 the ecosystem is getting five percent the users are getting five percent uh and the community treasury is getting about 60 percent here so i mean pretty standard by the looks of things uh um i guess uh uh distribution here i think the safe foundation in in it has eight percent for the strategic ray uh raised and seven percent for grants ecosystem so it means that eight percent of the supply is going to uh early investors which is actually on the better side of things than what we've seen 15 the core contributors also on the better side of things and it seems that the ecosystem

gets the lion's share here which i really really like but again most of these tokens are going into dows like the safe dale treasury and the nurses down treasury and then a joint treasury so you know they'll probably be pay paid out over time but in terms of what the users are getting uh in term right away or i guess like guaranteed is this 10 of ecosystem and user allocation here which obviously includes the airdrop so you can go read the forum post for full details on this and check your address if you want to see if you're eligible all right so git pop has announced their four million dollar seed round to continue memorializing your contributions and accomplishments as git po apps uh also today git pop is ready for any open source web 2 or web 3

project to use and you can start onboarding at github dot io on board now disclosure i participated in this seed round here i know uh one of the founders he is an awesome guy i met him in amsterdam and instantly became uh good friends with him he uh i love what kind of like they're building here with git pop and kind of giving people the opportunity to build out as i say here a decentralized professional reputation system using pop which i also love and i mean i'm sure all of you love as well so it's great to see them raise these 4.3 million from a bunch of kind of investors here such as inflection uh if yeah inflection here uh pull up protocol labs uh and a bunch of angels as you can see here in in the

tweet but also you can see it in the press release as well so if you want to learn more about git po up and about their raze and everything like that i'll link this in the youtube description below for you to do so uh but yeah i mean this will give them some nice runway to keep developing out their vision here always love to see these kind of i guess like teams getting funded and these kind of experiments playing out because again this is a not another non-financial use case that i think can be really big and i think can actually go somewhere uh other rather than the a lot of the non-financial use cases that we've seen that just haven't gone anywhere this is one that i'm i'm super psyched for definitely so definitely check that out i'll link it in the youtube description below

all right so speaking of pops just wanted to put this on your radar there apparently is going to be an ultrasound pull up at uh the post merge so you can see here there's the ultrasound money i guess emojis the bat and the loudspeaker and then there's the pop there i'm going to get my hands on this whatever it takes uh there's only going to be one five five nine of these pops i wonder what the eligibility criteria is going to be i hope that i'm just automatically eligible for the fact that i am number one on ultrasound.money uh in terms of um if you scroll down to the bottom here i'll actually bring up the website you scroll down to the bottom here there's the um join the the fam so put the uh the bat signal in your in your twitter name i'm

number one here in terms of the amount of people that uh follow me that have the bat signal in their name so i'm hoping i'm just eligible based on that because like that's all i got uh but yeah i really want to get my hands on on one of those uh everything got to do with one five five nine on the merge in terms of pull-ups uh in terms of like nfts i just want to get my hand on that's for sure but just wanted to put it on your radar there i'll update you when more details come out but i think that's gonna be it for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the disco channel and i'll catch you all next week thanks

everyone