Building, Upgrading and Documenting Ethereum w/ Ben Edgington (Consensys)

Transcript

[Music] thank you hello and welcome back to the strangewater podcast thank you for joining us for what I'm excited to say is our 10th episode and we definitely have something special to celebrate double digits I've been a huge fan of Ben Edgington for a long time now in fact he's one of my secret weapons every time I need to understand how ethereum actually works whether it be for a Twitter thread research project or for a consulting job I navigate over to Ben's website slash book upgrading ethereum Ben describes upgrading ethereum as a

passion project but for so many in this community it is so much more it is basically the only way for people who are not writing the code to understand how ethereum works have you ever wondered what is ethereum's proof of stake actually entail good luck getting an answer without referencing upgrading ethereum or some work derived from it but Ben is not just a writer or an educator Ben has all this knowledge because he has dedicated his career to actually building ethereum he leads the teams at consensus that build the software that run ethereum this conversation covers a lot of ground Ben's background and transition to

ethereum listening to your heart and advocating for your career how to understand ethereum and the ethereum road map and so much more I know you'll enjoy it one more thing before we begin please do not take Financial advice from this or any other podcast ethereum will change the world someday but you can easily lose all of your money between now and then all right on to the episode all right Ben Edgington thank you so much for joining us on the strangewater podcast hey Rex it's nice to meet you

it's nice to be here thank you for the invitation no well I very much just appreciate the opportunity and the time and you know as I mentioned before we started recording like you're a celebrity and an inspiration and I really uh you know accredit my career so far in my like brand too just like basically taking what you've written in the E2 book and making into diagrams in Twitter digestible so um that's very kind I do enjoy your Twitter threads they are epic so uh well done it's good stuff thank you thank you so um Ben I would love if you could kind of just give uh the audience and myself a little bit about your background and especially your background uh pre-crypto and you know now with the superpower of

hindsight you know just give a little bit of context to like what kind of jolted you um out of the system and into our like crazy little World um and how'd you get here yeah uh well we should probably start with where where I am where is here um so I um I I work at consensus which uh most people will know but it's a one of the largest software companies in the in the ethereum space responsible for metamask inferior and other things um specifically I work with techu which is our formerly known as eth2 client is our ethereum staking client and we also have Basu which is the execution client so I sort of founded techu I don't know four and a half years ago something like

that and we we started building it uh in late 2018 um and uh I am now product owner I guess so that's that's my sort of organizational position um going a bit before that I I became fascinated with ethereum in 2016 early on that's when I got uh sucked down the rabbit hole as it were and at the time I was working for um huge Japanese multinational one of the the immense household name uh companies and uh was a very small Cog in a very large machine and I'd been doing that for 20 years or so um uh and I left there in 2017 and joined consensus at that point

um yeah what was the journey to that point I mean I initially I thought I was going to be an academic um I studied mathematics I did some post-grad degrees I sort of thought I might be a lecturer researcher ended up in climate modeling climate forecasting stuff but yeah I just realized that yes science wasn't for me I was far more fascinated by the computers uh we were using some of the world's largest supercomputers I was far more fascinated by that than I was by the science um and that um led me to me to leave Academia um and move to uh the uh the Japanese company Hitachi and you can look it up

it's on my LinkedIn uh who were big in supercomputers in those days I spent 10 years or so as a supercomputer engineer uh involved in lots of pre-sales which involved just making people's code run fast uh pre-sales and support um and so I got um this is a thing about super Computing and this is the link to ethereum right um it's a resource constrained environment and it seems weird to say that when you've got a room full of computing kit you're thinking hey unlimited resources is fantastic but but it's not like that the point is we're trying to solve the biggest problems in the world and you never have enough iron uh and so let's say it costs uh 50 million

um dollars pounds Euros whatever it is if if I can save if I can make your code 10 faster through optimizations compiler optimizations whatever algorithmic optimizations then uh you can run 10 simple code on that 50 million Hardware or we can just Supply you with 45 million dollars worth of hardware and and faster code and and and you know it's a is a good deal all around and so we were always looking at micro optimizations um and memory optimizations and so on because of this resource constraint uh on there um and yeah cutting a long story short um after a sort of 10-year detour in management and technical management

product uh uh management and all of that good stuff uh just coming across ethereum was with this Computing in this resource constrained environment I thought I can do that I know how to do that and you know I was surrounded by software Engineers who'd only ever work with managed code who had you know effectively um a modern PC is effectively unlimited resources and um a never seen hexadecimal and any of this stuff and and I was looking at evm optos and thinking I know this you know I can do this um and it just seemed very familiar and attractive so that was the the kind of initial hook that uh the the that

grabbed me and made me think yeah this this is really fascinating yeah you know sometimes it's it's hard for me to have these kinds of conversations about either entry into ethereum with people like you who entered at a time um when things were still so young and so I so unknown and you know I have you know either the privilege or the curse depending on uh your time scale of entering in the 2021 cycle and um you know just something I so vividly remember at the time and believe until now is just feeling like oh we once we reach the merge like the important parts of um ethereum have been de-risk and like a lot of that is about

um well we can talk about ethereum um when we get there but I just uh for me there was always this sense of like oh my God like um look at what we can already build and look at what's coming and that's why you know the ethereum road map has always really excited me and um you know I think some of the ways that our brain works together um like I I'm a huge believer in Enterprise and big business and so um what ethereum has to work for those kinds of groups too but anyway I'm rambling so well it is a little bit pertinent I mean you know when when I joined in 2016 I reckon you could learn what was going on not only in ethereum basically in all of crypto uh by

spending an hour to two hours on Reddit every day and you know that you'd be across everything at that point um it really was so much smaller than than it is now um and I found that very attractive I I I'm a bottom-up kind of person if you kind of look at what I've written you can see I'm I'm only really interested in the nuts and bolts I'm not really interested in the sort of end product so much um and getting to that bottom layer there aren't that many Industries you can do that you come to AI today or something like that and it's already the foundation's already built and it's all massively complex it's huge um and and getting into that that at that base level is is hard and uh I've heard you know this blockchain thing was

something when I saw it and I thought this is so early and I can you know start from the foundation and work upwards which is is rare um in in Industries uh these days so that that just chimed with me as well no I mean I I think um I for me like ethereum is two things has always meant two things and one of it is um we haven't talked about yet right but it is like distributed computing and like how do we um create systems that are like truly decentralized and like there's a lot of interesting stuff down that but the other thing is like to me ethereum is like almost very simply The Logical conclusion of Open Source and the open source movement and it is this like

manifestation of not only is this like backbone of the internet something that we have all built together but it is something that anyone in the future can deploy on and we will all benefit from it and so you know I think that it my background real quick is I study computer science at Stanford from 2009 to 2013 and then never did computer science professionally but um but so like I I learned like just what open source means even for the professional community and to see like first Red Hat was was what open source could um produce and like ethereum is like no

no this is really like the end game of Open Source yeah yeah that that's yet another attractive aspect of the of the whole thing I mean I spent so much time at Hitachi arguing about intellectual property and all of that and as a company policy they were very reluctant to use open source software because it's always there like who do I yell at when it goes wrong I mean you always had to have if you were supporting a product you had to have an accountable entity who was going to fix it for you and that just doesn't exist in open source right and so it was all proprietary all in-house uh whereas I constitutionally I'm very much drawn to this open Community um and you know again a bit of a

contrarian um I yeah for years I was the only person in in we in the European headquarters who who ran uh Linux as a daily driver um I had to find obscure plugins so that I could use the exchange server and you know all of this and um everyone was exchanging you know office documents Microsoft Office documents and the solutions available on Linux in those days were very very poor and uh but you know just bloody mindedness to kind of made me wrestle with this and just make it work and eventually it just got too exhausting but yeah I capitulated and I run Windows today I'm sorry I'm sorry but but yeah absolutely and I love that you know

techu that we we do um and and the book right I mean technically consensus owns the copyright on on on all my writing that's in my contract is unavoidable in a modern Employment contract you know they they own all my IP but yeah I spoke to lawyers and said look I'm writing this thing um and let's work to Joe Lubin and I I want to put a liberal license on it so people can take it they can translate it they can do you know lift the diagrams using whatever um and I just want to make it open and and transparent and freely available and they were they were totally cool uh with that and that was uh for me was um yeah Joy a real Joy yeah I um yeah I think there's a lot of things that are really

special about ethereum and um you know I I think the in its very nature the blockchain is that like it's about composability right and and that's what it enables and that's what makes it magical and cool and um like by its very nature things have to be open source or else none of this can work and so I think that that you know puts us in a very specific fundamental mindset and so anyway let's try to keep some structure so you're at Hitachi like what is the moment that uh how did you get over a consensus and you know for context if 2017 um where correct me if I'm wrong but we're at a point where consensus is

um like a pretty like real substantial uh company and you know like while it's still small and still Scrappy and they're still very much a risk it's not um running out of a a garage is that correct yeah yeah yeah a funny story really so I mean so when I was at Hitachi in my final um uh in in 2016 uh I was running sort of technical operations for hours for information security division um and so our teams of people you know teams of pre-sales people teams of uh developers and so and so on um and there came a point in early 16 where uh all the sales guys were coming back from client meeting saying look Ben

our clients only want to talk about one thing it's something called blockchain uh do you know what it is no idea what this thing is so I um I did some research um I had previously read the Bitcoin white paper I thought yeah it's kind of interesting but this is I don't know I don't know what to do with this information did you have the same reaction that I did when I first read it which was okay like internet money like cool I like this yeah like moving on I mean I I I downloaded a wallet I made an address I looked at getting old some Bitcoin way further than me but yeah that time the only application was like Silk Road and it just seemed um knowing what I know now I mean in

Bitcoin is like 300 at the time but yeah um but uh this was pre this is about 2014 or something but anyway it just seemed to me yeah didn't really get it uh but coming to 2016 um and coming across ethereum all the use cases our clients were um wanting to discuss and uh all of that it just was exciting uh at that point so um I just got sucked further and further down down this Rabbit Hole so um consensus had just established a London office in 20 summer 2017 I was more and more spending you know all evenings all weekends doing ethereum

stuff I would really lost interest completely in the day job um at that stage and was just exploring what was going on the ecosystem um and um I'd I'd done I'd written some things about ethereum and uh consensus was hiring busily at the time so it was about 350 people when I joined um and grew to about 1200 over the next nine months we were hiring like two people a day I mean it was it was absolutely mad I spent the the my first like four months there just interviewing people it was uh it was mad um they're like tell me about the culture and you're like I could not

[Laughter] it was yeah changing changing so much um yeah yeah but I mean so funny funny story uh my last business trip for Hitachi I was I got the offer from consensus um and I was you know this leaving beside a 20-year career leaving that behind you know very comfortable trajectory to retirement um and yeah all I had to do was wear a suit and and sit behind a desk doing Excel spreadsheets for 10 years and you know I'd I'd I'd do well um and going to this Scrappy startup um at least in my mind was was very difficult decision and I agonized

about it so my last business trip for Itachi I took a flight to Denmark and coming back on the plane there's a British Airways business magazine uh I pulled it out and and there was vitalik on the on the front cover and uh so I read about that then flicked through it and there was Joe Lubin appeared as well I thought it's a sign I came out I took this thing and I came home and showed it to my wife and said right we're doing this so that that was that something so again my background very quickly after uh Stanford I um my day of graduation I got in the car and drove to St Louis which is was the headquarters of Anheuser-Busch in Bev which is um you know one of the it is the largest

beer company in the world it's um you know in the US it's Budweiser Bud Light in the in Europe it's Becks it's Stella it's um it's between 40 and 50 of all beer worldwide and so um you know I'm I was in um first like Technology Innovation and then um in uh treasury cash management and then in um like Financial Planning and Analysis and like you know so before I came to crypto into blockchain like I like really came from you know these these huge scale backgrounds of like how do you organize people how do you organize systems like how do you think in like scales that you know like for example my response

ability um at Anheuser-Busch at the cash desk was 20 billion dollars a year for us and Canada and um like these scales just make like our entire industry like seem as small as it is you know and so I think um people like you definitely like you who had a real career I only had five years of it just have a different perspective on like what it takes to build um you know like resilient like companies and teams and institutions and like we care about that not because like we're evil centralizers because like that's how you create good strong technology or at least that's what I believe and so um one I was uh do you have any Reflections um from your career

at like a big company and then coming into this like pretty chaotic industry and two um yeah can you share those with us if you have any yeah it's a very open-ended question I mean so leaving Hitachi and landing at consensus was was a shock in every way it felt like sort of therapy I went from a 350 000 person company to a 350 person company I went from a highly structured hierarchical organization um to what was self-consciously at that point trying to become a flat leaderless organization um uh the consensus has moved away from that since but uh but that at that time that was very much the the ethos

um I came from you know fairly rigid expectations on what what I would do with my time to a um environment whereas a lot of autonomy where we had uh basically freedom to carve our own path um through through the uh the mess um and honestly I thrived I mean it was it was a joy um absolutely loved it um I I think it was hard for people who had less experience who weren't so self-confident in in navigating their way through things uh I think you know um college graduate you know people at the start of their careers very little Career Development very little

hand-holding very little um um mentoring um you basically had to have the confidence and the knowledge and the skills you know the soft skills to navigate your way but but this was fine yeah coming from an environment in Hitachi Europe which was sort of sales LED uh I was one of the least connected people in in that environment I was a technical person not expected to be sort of front of house and you know my LinkedIn was you know just a few hundred and uh and all of that that you know coming into blockchain World um I was like a connectivity Superstar I mean you know I was building links with everybody all over the uh the place just

from this kind of skills I learned and it was sort of effortless which which was nice um you know um yeah I think yeah Dev world of devs that perhaps doesn't come so naturally so that that was that was great so um yeah I think no no I mean I think that's very well put um to a very open-ended question which is you know the later you come into blockchain which is an extremely uh unstructured space um with just like more you know career reps under your belt like the easier it is to navigate the career portion um and so you know I think I think that's that is what it is so anyway

moving on um so you're at consensus and you know I think um it based based on the literature or um my understanding is that like taku is the um the ethereum consensus client for Enterprise and like even going a little further back in your career you worked on um the technology that is now known as Quorum which is the JPMorgan private blockchain so um I am like very curious to kind of hear um your thoughts and your experience on what it's like to work with like really and anything that you would call an Enterprise and like how I would Define

that acutely is like anyone with a legal or compliance Department that would be pushing back against the fundamental idea of even working with you yeah um I I'm going to um subvert to the question so um so you know story time again um because of my background I did actually so my my day-to-day job of being dealing with Enterprise you know that's all we did all day every day and I'd I've worked with every Bank in the city of London and um uh plenty of institutional uh players over the years um you know peer companies and under all of that so uh coming into consensus the

expectation is that that would effectively be my role and we were building Enterprise ethereum E Enterprise ethereum Alliance has started consensus is a big player in that we've just started building the Enterprise ethereum client which um was called Pantheon at the time it's now called Basu lots of private Network support um and you're right I mean after a couple of years we acquired um uh the Quorum from JP Morgan um and so that was my expectation that was kind of the company's expectation and so I joined in October and I spent the first three months working on quorum uh and you know visiting I spent time with uh Hewlett Packard and you know big Banks and all of this stuff just doing

the rounds wearing a suit shaking hands uh handing out business cards and all of that and I hated it I just hated it I loved being at consensus and I hated the work and over that new year period I did a lot of self-reflection and I I remember going out for a long walk with my wife and saying look I I'm not sure I haven't made a mistake here um everything here is Enterprise focused and that's that's not what brought me into the space what brought me into space was passion for the decentralized community the open source all the things we spoke about earlier um and I I need to tell consensus there so I need to tell my colleagues that that's what I need I must work on and and uh and if if

they're not up for that then they're not gonna have to leave um and we'll find something else um and so I went with some trepidation back to business it was Pegasus in those days that was the protocol Engineering Group in in consensus and uh said to my I mean what passed for a lead at Pegasus Dan Heyman at that time we were non-hierarchical remember um and uh and I said to him you know I I can't work on this Enterprise stuff it's not what drives me I'm not excited by it um I understand that's the direction of travel that's a business imperative um will you allow me to set up a mainnet practice um and there was that was super great about it so this is fantastic um yeah we didn't know how to do this

um and uh and now you've mentioned it the your your ideal um get on with it um and so that and so that was the beginning of January 18 and ever since I've been fully focused on mainnet and I've got this massive blind spot where Enterprises so that might deflect some of your kind of questions around this and you want to talk about how to sell ethereum to Enterprise I have no idea whatsoever so that's not my world I think that's like incredibly interesting and um you know as you were telling your story I I definitely thought kind of the resolution with consensus was going to be along the lines of like Ben totally understand that like we want

you to be able to build what you want to build here like right now we have a business need in this Enterprise stuff and so like you know help us like over the next year and we'll transition you over to the projects you want um but you know welcome to like ethereum or crypto or whatever consensus where like things just happen like a lot quicker and a lot more frankly than even that yeah absolutely and you know what gives me uh real Joy now Rex is that yeah five years later the whole company has now pivoted beef fully um may not open uh we we basically don't do Enterprise anymore um at all so this yeah for me um has been a a huge win um but you know I just followed that

wasn't strategic on my part I was just following my heart um but I'm I'm super glad to see it no well yeah again I think that's very cool and like a lesson for um a lot of people out there like myself included but I also think that um you can look at the questions that I sent you earlier back when we're done but um how I was going to move this conversation was essentially to my belief which is the end game for like blockchain Enterprise like is ethereum right the at the end of the day like it and there's not really a purpose of using blockchain technology unless like you're settling down to ethereum and

like that's a provocative big statement like we can have debates about that that's fine but like I just truly believe that like whatever JP Morgan's doing like whatever any of the banks or the hedge funds or whatever like you're either going to be just like some like centralized app which like you might as well use AWS it's like a lot easier and cheaper or like you're going to like care about these properties and like you're going to be like an app chain or a roll up and um be associated with ethereum and so um I guess like I need to know more about consensus I didn't realize that like consensus had done like a pivot off of kind of Enterprise entirely but um you know that that is like why I'm

here and like the future that I believe in and like I think if you believe that ethereum is inevitable like I do like that that is how this all works yeah yeah absolutely um yeah I think Enterprise ethereum just never made sense to me um and but also Enterprise working on mainnet ethereum was difficult for all sorts of reasons so I think we've got a huge opportunity with Roll-Ups um and they can offer the features like um privacy and so forth and permissioned um networks be built on the secure base layer of ethereum which which actually makes sense finally

um so uh I hope that will become a fruitful area um I think I'm sure it will over the years to come it will it is inevitable as you rightly say um uh but yeah yeah that's for others to to to work on uh not I and one of like the things that I you know one of the analogies that I use to try to express at least like where we are in this technology is like look like imagine it's 2004 or whatever and um we're at Harvard right and I say I'm gonna give you a billion dollars and you can go higher Mark Zucker and like here's the business plan for Facebook and like you guys are gonna go build it here's the

one catch HTTP has not been invented yet like we're really just at like the primary stages where all you can do is send like one character or one emoji at a time like I don't really care how much of a head start I give you like what you build like is just not going to work in the same way that it will work like when the protocol knowledge is done right and so I like really believe that like we're we're at us we're at a very unfortunate place where like regulation and like a lot of like political nonsense is keeping Enterprise out but like as a technologist and like as people that are working on the protocol it's kind of a

little bit like all right well we're not done anyway yeah uh I keep reminding people that this is a uh decades-long development effort this is not um months or years um crypto or you know crypto economics the whole system will not achieve its potential uh full potential for decades and you know I've been around long enough um uh I I was reflecting on sending my first email sometime in 1987 I think uh sitting in front of a green screen monitor at College um and it was ex unbelievably clunky and um primitive

um and yet in you know less than 40 years 35 years I now carry basically the world's knowledge around uh on on a device in my pocket and can instantly access any of it in full color and sound I mean the it's just extraordinary uh how things move and we are in the uh early 90s stage of internet in terms of blockchain you know we are at the um using gopher to find things out um you know we haven't even reached HTTP yet you know I remember using Mosaic web browser and seeing my first picture on the internet and whoa

you know and we're not even there with blockchain yet I mean it's the the trajectory from here is is up only in terms of technological capability um and we just as I could not possibly imagine in 1987 having a a device that's always connected that I could you know um message people around the world instantly on uh I I can't imagine how how this will be in in in 20 30 years time but it will be fundamental to to the way we live our lives just as you know our the internet our phones are today well I mean normally I would like kind of wait to get this like Galaxy brain to the end of

the podcast but since we're here might as well um hover over it a little bit I guess um you know for me like part you know there's like very specific things in the ethereum road map that are ahead of us that are like we can go on YouTube and watch lectures about like we know that they're coming and like the things that I'm referring to not to be koi right are like dang sharding and light clients and um well you know basically um ZK access into like the state so that um you know and we I won't uh bore the audience with explaining what all those things mean

what point is is that like if you understand like those things and like a few more upgrades that are coming like you can start to really see like what ethereum is right and like for me it is like very very simple right like when we've been inventing these communication technology like going back to Gutenberg but like let's just say radio video um internet right where we're transferring like text and then photos and then video and like what ethereum is is we're figuring out how to transfer value right and so um and and like have identity and like in this world that is falling apart whether it's you your country in the UK or mine in the U.S like absolutely just

like falling apart like I we're watching our systems of coordinating like not working anymore and so like as the internet is to your point like I don't have quite as many years as you do but like I remember like getting in fights with my mom over like the internet connection because like I wanted to play Warcraft 3 and she wanted to like use the phone um but like I I just um for me like the more you understand about ethereum the more you understand like this is just like how the world works with like computers and the internet of things and digital identity and like this is just like how I don't know it to me it's just it's pretty clear

um and so anyway I'm rambling for sure but um my question back to you is like what when you think about like this 10 plus year journey of what like crypto and ethereum is and what the world looks like because of what that enables like what are some of the outlines of the world that you can conceive interesting question so uh you're asking how do I see um things in 10 years from now in terms of how ethereum would have changed things yeah like you know much more long-winded and pretentious way got it um yeah it's hard to predict right I mean we get this wrong all the time um and you know predicting D5 summer uh and all of these things I mean it shows

how incredibly prescient vitalik was in the in the white paper the most of the stuff he outlined there has come to be in one one shape or form or another what would I like to see I would like to see Financial autonomy uh being much more accessible across across the world um yeah this is a dimension uh we haven't talked about but it's the kind of what is the the social or the impact dimension of blockchain technology I mean I love the tech it's cool and and so forth but it has a purpose and what's the purpose and um for me one of the the big things has always been about financial inclusion um and and we're not there yet um partly because

the bandwidth you know the the cost of transacting on ethereum is just not at a level but um the the people who need to use the technology can use the technology but um that I'm convinced with our scaling roadmap that will will change and uh depending on how effectively we managed to bring that about then then I would like to see um a much I'd like to see it reaching uh the the excluded that for me is is a big deal if if we remain a gambling game for Wales and wealthy people um for the next 10 years you know um I I'm out

um I'm you know it's fun while it lasts but it's not it's not why I'm here you know I I actually would would like to do something which is world changing which actually liberates the the oppressed in in some meaningful way yeah and honest I'm not um sure which specific or press you're referring to and I'm not even sure it matters um but I feel the exact same way um and like for me like you know behind this behind the curtain right my fiance is Russian like moved here when she was 15 but her whole her move to the US when she was 15 but her whole family is still in Moscow like um I'm understanding the consequences of like geopolitics that you have no

ability or influence or like even like desire to be a part of and like how it can like tragically transform your life and you know it it doesn't have to be something like this like topical and new right like we've been doing this to Iran and for generations and it's just um you know I think for me I would totally totally agree with everything you said except for um actually it was on some bankless episode but vitalik blew my mind when he he dropped like the fun fact that the like he was in South America or maybe Argentina and he was like so everybody there is using crypto to store their wealth can you guess how they're doing

it and like the bankless guys were like oh I don't know you want to swap the ledgers and they're like no they just used yeah and so like part of me is a little bit like you know what um for the people that really do need this um it's there and in the powerful impactful ways and like whether we're talking about like being able to like flee or like send money back to like like devastated regions or we're just talking about like you know Reserve protocol is like a great example where in Latin America people like hundreds of thousands of people are using an app that is backed by like e-us or whatever their stablecoin is to protect their

wealth from inflation like that's a real use for real people in South America that um they're not really touching the chain but there are like for the ways that matter you know and so I do agree with you that there's so much more to come but like I am the more I travel and the more I like learn about the people that are like doing God's work and not just creating more like proof of liquidity chains of like ponsonomic digital like the more encouraged I am about this space yeah you're absolutely right Rex uh there is a quiet Revolution and we're much more interested in the uh the noisy stuff and the scandalous stuff but actually

um uh it would be good to surface more of this stuff about the the reality of how uh crypto is um is reaching parts of the world which uh which are not mainstream I gather the the the the biggest user of crypto in the world is is Vietnam uh in terms of its population proportion of the population using crypto I don't know what they're using it for but I that that's fascinating I'd like to hear more about that yeah no and I um I what I I say to all my American people and I'm pretty sure that this is relevant to basically anyone in the developed um or like over developed economy which is you know crypto's like real use cases um are just not like applicable to us

and so like we can only really understand this through the lens of like technology and through like speculation but um like you know this like satoshi's true Revolution is like already underway um to be uh you know romantic about it yeah that's encouraging to know and uh it's good to remind oneself of this from time to so that's motivational for sure for sure so let's talk about um actually working on ethereum and like what it's like to be developing like at such a core piece of the protocol and so I guess um first for the audience can you just

in like two or three sentences explain what a client um what a consensus client is what an execution client is um and then um I guess like my fall my next question for that is going to be what is it like developing these pieces of technology in conjunction with independent teams that are developing the exact same technology but different yeah sure so uh the network is sustained by individuals or organizations who run nodes we call them so I run software node is just software so I'm running nodes here at home I've got a consensus node and an execution node and these nodes they talk to other nodes on the

network so this is why we have this this network and the idea is it's AS Global as possible it's distributed as possible and it runs across as many different types of hardware and in as many different types of networks as possible to to be as diverse as possible so that that's the goal um the consensus node which is like teku and there are four others that are currently sort of um production so let's take you there's prism there's lighthouses lodestar and Nimbus um they they are responsible for coming to agreement on the state of the network so they talk to each other they exchange messages constantly

um they build blocks and they decide what is the the what are the blocks that that remain in in the blockchain now those blocks contain transactions so if people are sending coins or exchanging on user swap or whatever those are user transactions they're handled by the execution client for historical reasons um these are separate currently so you have the execution client which is maintaining the record The Ledger everybody's balance and the state of every contract and uh all of that um on the blockchain and so now we've done the merge we've got ethereum on to proof of stake these two clients the

consensus client and the execution client work in lockstep with each other they're connected together um and and collaborate to to build this chain which is consensus blocks and execution blocks together so just to like kind of recap on that um would is it fair to say that the if you think of like ethereum as I don't know this term is very polarizing but if you think of ethereum as the world computer or um you know if a shared Computing platform that the execution client is that like Computing space whereas the consensus client is the like system that um like kind of uh protects it with this

crypto Economic Security that is derived from proof of stake yeah yeah that's a reasonable distinction and uh we we used to talk in terms of eth1 nodes so they were they're effectively exactly the same as they used to be they have been for the last seven eight years uh with proof of work turned off and what we've done is we've taken this proof of stake layer which is these kind of eth2 clients and we bolted them to together so it no longer uh runs this proof of work algorithm to to secure the chain but now plugs into the the proof of stake layer to do so and there I should say the number of execution clients um there's there's Geth is the big one but there's uh Basu and another mind in

error on as well so we have like nine clients as you said for historical reasons um and we're not going to get into it it's not even yeah but for historical reasons it's two clients and now to be an ethereum node um like I run a rocket pool node which is it's just a regular ethereum node and what that means is I run both of these clients together at the same time and they communicate and together okay they constitute a node and were you kind of hinting that maybe in the future um a like no a node would have a single client or do you pers do you think that we'll always have these like two kind of

independent distinctions and then like two sets of options that um that you'll be able to like pick and choose from yeah a bit of product management Alpha I suppose I mean I I see a direction of travel where uh where the two become unified I mean it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to maintain this distinction between the execution client and the consensus client and we maintain it in the specs and there's a logical distinction but effectively they they are tightly coupled today um and you know at consensus we have a Java uh execution client basically we have a Java um consensus like teku

um and you know we talk about uh converging them over a period of time so that they become um less and less separate and eventually might just run as a single instance on the jvm um for me that that makes a lot of sense great uh user experience and so on um the and terrific for the sort of individual home Staker right because it's one piece of software and you just um uh you're just running one thing and it just does everything for the more sophisticated user or the the large staking Enterprise um stakers institutional stakers they prefer the modularity so they can do failover and you know have separation of

concerns and so on and so they might run actually a stack with execution clients consensus clients um validator clients and remote signing software um and then there's all the Mev stuff as well and all of that so um so we try and keep it modular teku you can kind of well speaking on behalf of Ben and not on behalf of consensus or on behalf of like any specific product roadmap like what do you think the appropriate thing for ethereum is to build towards this interesting question I haven't thought about that at all and one of the things which I really fascinates me about this space is that we are prepared to explore all these different directions right so uh and there are some really interesting

experiments going on with um you know Geth uh implementing a minimal consensus client so that um uh I can't remember exactly what the rationale is for it now but these lines are getting blurred uh um all the time Eragon is working on something similar as well putting consensus client into Aragon but people are exploring all sorts of different options and this multiplicity of stuff like your rocket pool node or the DAP node or different ways where you can just get a bundled you know press a button with a GUI and uh and it will spin up a staking environment for you or all of this stuff is is terrific and I didn't really

envisage it when we started out on this journey like four or five years ago um and I just love the inventiveness of this space so I don't want to constrain it by saying oh this is there is one way to do this and this is this is the vision and we're not going to deviate from it because people are endlessly inventive there's one thing I've learned in this space is that people are extraordinarily creative um and you know we let's embrace it and I think like that we again the more you understand about the ethereum roadmap the more you realize that there are really important changes that we need to make um that are going to require some like major major redesigns and like the one off the top of my head is like single

slot finality but like there's a ton of them like Merkle trees is another one and so you know I think that at any of these like turning points um you know the merge was the big one but um we still have these like major turning points to make some like really like thoughtful design changes and like maybe we decide that this is too much complexity it's a historical reason that we have two clients let's try to unify them all or maybe we decide like yes it's complexity but like because we know that all five of the each clients like all these permutations work that means that we do have like a more resilient system and so like yeah you touched on some good points um I mean it's blessing

and curse right I mean We've Ended up with this um a lot of Legacy stuff I mean this whole thing going through the merge you know so this is what I'm trying to document as I write and I just continually just like great segue so yeah so let's talk about the eth2 book and as I said when we started like um that is like how I originally know you and how um I have like gained so much like respect for what you're doing because um for uh for you know I'll let you explain it in your own words um can you please describe to us like what is the eth2 book yeah we shouldn't call it that really um it's uh I I call it upgrade I I I hosted at eth2book dot info which was a bit of a dig at the ethereum foundation

when they when they told us all we're not allowed to say eat two anymore so um but that was my Petty Revenge um but I call it upgrading ethereum because it's it's about fundamentally initially about ethereum's transition to proof of stake um so uh yeah you're somebody who writes about ethereum and you've tried to gather information and put it together uh in your inevitable ethereum side which is awesome and we're incredible resource uh it's a gold mine there and um and I'm trying to do much the same I mean it's it's my observation over the years was that information is scattered it's fragmented all over the place uh the quality is very

inconsistent and it's very poorly maintained and stuff goes out of date within three to six months in this ecosystem uh so if you're reading a document that's over three months old you're like well is it still true you got no idea and I I tried to maintain for a while a sort of curated list of good resources to go to but it just you know the bit rot on that was was High um and my passion really was to write the comprehensive work on this which would be you know consistent in terms of quality um but also comprehensive and also well maintained which is a massive rod for my own back um but

what I wanted to do was not only to explain what we do you know how does the protocol work today but how did we get here and why um and for me the why question is really important um so many design decisions are informed by sort of nebulous ethereum related goals which are almost sort of they're sort of folklore right they're sort of um Collective Agreement they're in the air but they're very rarely stated sort of written you know documented anywhere but we sort of implicitly understand them as core devs but you know in two three four years time when the next Generation

comes along will they share that that law um so I'm I'm trying to sort of document um the reason that we made this trade-off you know why are we using a hashing routine there's half the speed that you know less than half the speed that that a good hash would be you know localization I mean it's terrifically inefficient um but while we're doing it because that makes like lions really really efficient um and you know there's stuff like that um and uh so yeah just trying to bring it all together with rationale um and I I almost feel like I'm too late I mean I I started in Earnest about a year just over a year ago

um and already stuff is fading from my memory and documents as sort of like dropping out a sight and you know people are not around who who were involved and I'm feeling like um already losing some of the early um insights and things but try trying to capture them uh in any case so yeah this is this is my quest it's been on the it's been going on the back burner for for a year and a half or so a year uh yeah just under but um consensus has been super supportive of me writing this it's a passion project for me is no value to consensus as an organization uh to speak of but that's not that's just objectively not true and I think

so um like I think just to again give the audience just like a little more context from um how so when you go to as Ben said eth2.info like the way you experience this book or why you would be looking at this book is because you are trying to understand like how ethereum actually works without like digging into code and like before this resource like I I promise you I've spent a lot of time trying to like figure out a lot of these questions that are like super basic right but also like for example everybody knows that um maybe I'd say like probably 50 of the

people know that um like an Epoch is 32 slots and um once every Epoch every validator votes once and a vote is called an attestation right like that's pretty basic I'd say like a good decent chunk of people know that but like if you want to know why or like how or you know how does ethereum like decide um which like you know validators are going to test to which slots and like there's really not a way for you to understand that and like look I think like what you're doing has like huge like applications to um you know developers that like want to

come work for or build on top of or like contribute to consensus in some sort of way but like for me it's like why this book is so cool it's like ideological right which is it is so cheap and easy to say like oh it's all open source it's all out there anyone can read the code like like that then you can trust it that makes it trustless yeah and like come on like I went to whatever maybe the best computer science School in the world and I studied computer science and I took intro to number Theory from Professor Dan Bonnet um I could not audit any of this at all you know and just like that it's so

important for this to have any value that like we have like in ramps into people understanding what's going on and like to um to show people that like this is a system that makes sense and like that they can like create we you then like what you're doing is creating trustlessness and like the way that like actually matters and so um you know again I that's not a question that's just um I guess that's like a pushback to you that like how dare you say that you what you're doing has no value to consensus Yeah well yeah we have to distinguish consensus the company uh which is what I meant but the uh

um I yeah I I essentially I'm writing it for myself right this is a niche I've got a scratch um and you know I find myself you know maybe 30 years ago I could have contributed to The Cutting Edge of um blockchain research but you know cognitive decline is a thing and uh these days I you know I do what I can um and for me you know I want to leave something substantial behind and and this is this is it for me um so that that's the main reason but you know if other people derive value from it that is super cool I'm hoping that it yeah people who for some people it will be that entry you know I when I first got into when I

first discovered blockchain stuff I picked up a a pre-print it was on the online a PDF of uh I can't even remember who the authors were but it was about digital currency and it talked about blockchain stuff it had a brief chapter on ethereum uh and then mention of proof of stake uh and that just it led me through by the hand and it captivated me this mentioned a little mention of proof of stake that that you know it had all been about mining equipment and all of that and then it said you know there is there is an idea we can cut out the hardware uh just just remove that and and um virtualize the hardware as a stake in the system that captured me at that point and um stayed with me and drove me

to you know begin the techu project and get get help get ethereum to the merge and all of that and you know maybe uh it it will have some useful effects you know my writing will in turn have some useful effect on capturing somebody else's imagination down the line for us that would be super I mean again I I you and I are at very different points in our career and like what we're trying to do but you know like a very concrete motivating factor into like um when I was like creating Twitter content and like you know between you and me and the audience like I stopped creating Twitter content because because like I'm not willing to continue to invest like my brand in my career in like such an unstable platform as it's

become and so like another selling point for ethereum right but uh soapbox for another time um like like why I was creating that content and decided to move it over to its own website was because like I really really believe that every single one of my friends um who like work for Facebook or you know used to work for Google and went to like business school and now like are doing um like that that kind of route to like really can't even talk to me about crypto because it becomes like too heated and emotional and how they think that this is all like Voodoo in a scam like I very much believe that you know it whether it's like two or five or ten years like they'll realize that this is

inevitable and like I just want to have the resources like ready for them to get up to speed so like we can go out there and like we're ready to start companies or like whatever needs to happen um like I just am creating resources to get like my guys up to speed when it's time you know and that's like always been my driving motivation um and um you know I I don't know how much that like resonates with you but I do think that in order to be crazy enough to like build these kinds of this kind of content for no Financial purpose like you do need to be um driven by something yeah yeah uh absolutely I mean it is driven this

um I I think I I I don't think too much about who is going to read this I mean I'm bad bad bad product manager you know I have no user persona but I'm I'm thinking of as I sit there writing I I'm writing for me um and I write what I I think I would like to read um and if people find that useful then you know that that's great and I I um uh that uh is definitely um propels me um uh in that so something I I had in mind but it's uh uh it's gone now but um it's a big project it is I'm doing so much I mean I I was trying to find out today is historical right so the initial

version of the consensus protocol was called uh immediate message driven ghost and now we use lmd latest message driven ghost the internet cannot remember what immediate message driven ghost was um and uh but I feel it's an important part of narrative why why did we take it up why did we abandon it you know it briefly was going to be ethereum's consensus protocol I spent most of today trying to track down resources on RM uh IMD um and for a while it was called reversive proximity to justification which I'm just trying to you know spending a whole day winkling out this kind of stuff

um without resorting to have to having to DM vitalik is uh um you know you have to be somewhat um uh mentally unbalanced no and I think like you are just reinforcing your point even more because like again like I um consider myself like incredibly well researched in this stuff and I didn't know that that even like I thought it started with lmd ghost you know and so um I just I think that you know there's so much value and like for historical purposes but again like also what I just watched poetic on on like the like fundamental like properties of like what open source like need not only like

means but has to actually like be in practice in order for it to have any value and like um you know if you've followed me up online at all over the last six months you know that like I'm a huge believer in like sriram Kanan and what he's doing with eigenlayer and like I really think that like why why that's amazing is because it's really like predicated on the fact that like the point of ethereum is to create like trustless trust and we should make eth the asset of trustless trust and then build from there but like it's people like you that give like ethereum that base case like like that based property and like give that

Bedrock to the value that like people like sriram and then the next generation of Builders can build on top of and so um you know with that with these last couple of minutes here um again I just feel so honored and so um so thankful for the opportunity to um like let you know how much your work means to me and how much it's like meant to me and just to say thank you thank you Rex I appreciate it be sure to buy a coffee when it comes out in print which is never gonna happen I think but that's the problem it's like I'll buy it and print like the second bit ethereum stops coming out with like new like hard Forks but I by that time like I don't know I don't know if that's like a time

to hope for or time to be afraid of exactly it's uh yeah um every every folk that we do it took me like three weeks to revise the thing for capella and the more it grows I mean there is a pdf version it's like 320 pages so far and I reckon I'm maybe half done I mean it's it's going to be enormous no and I think um yeah it I think it's an incredible project already and like you it is like ambitious because it will only grow in scope as um again we have talked about over and over again like ethereum is not done and continuing to grow and that's something we celebrate but Ben just so you know like it's gonna only get worse from here

yep I I understood well um again Ben thank you so much for the time I really appreciate it and um for the folks out there listening uh any any like social media or anything you want to shout out uh Twitter is my happy place crypto Twitter people complaining about it but so for me that's uh where you'll find me you can DM me DMS are open benjaminian underscore XYZ or Z depending on your preference um and um yeah happy to hear from folk um and uh yeah see you there Ben thank you so much and I'll talk to you soon thank you Rex been a pleasure to speak to you really has thank you