What Is Ethereum?

Transcript

[Music] hey everyone um this is vlad i vlad stamp here i'm giving an edcon talk a retake of a talk i gave called what is ethereum which i gave kind of tired and sick and didn't really wasn't really prepared and now i'm much more well-rested feeling much better also not super prepared but the talk should go better just because i'm in a better kind of a headspace so the question is well the talk is you know what is ethereum like and uh that's the name of the talk and the

point of the talk is kind of to get you to come away feeling like you don't know what ethereum is like you have an opportunity to ask yourself and to develop your answer to what is ethereum um and to understand like your relationship with ethereum in a way that's maybe a little bit more realistic or a little bit less based in you know presumptions about what ethereum is that like it turns out after our analysis are aren't so good all right so aren't so reliable um so it's i'm one of them is called what is ethereum supposed to

be and the other is what people expect from ethereum and so what is what is the theorem supposed to be is kind of uh it's kind of a topic about what do people think that ethereum there's a bunch of theories that people have or the things that people say that ethereum is or would maybe think that theorem is but and so i'm just going to cover some of those and then see in more detail why they aren't really um why why why it may not be kind of as first meets the eye so you might think that ethereum is technology and this is the most common myth about the nature of ethereum or the

common most common supposition which i question about the nature of ethereum you know people think ethereum is technology they think of ethereans or like the core as being kind of fundamentally kind of in it for the technology for the way that we use can make use of the technology and certainly ethereum has technology i mean we're all kind of familiar for listening into this call about of something called the ethereum protocol and a particular deployment of the ethereum protocol that we refer to as ethereum um and you know this deployment of the protocol

is like a consensus protocol blockchain consensus protocol that's kind of public and find follows a variant of uh the nakamura consensus call that satoshi nakamoto invented for bitcoin um and and and you know bitcoin in ethereum to some extent look and feel like protocols because you know you can go to the github uh uh or you can look at the when you look at the source code and you can kind of understand to some extent what ethereum is by understanding the software that we can imagine is makes up ethereum you know there's like the ethereum virtual machine there's the

blockchain there's like y3 interface there's all sorts of stuff you know that you can access from any implementation of ethereum um and you might say okay well this stuff is clearly ethereum um but but whenever we're asking like what is ethereum we have to be kind of clear about whether or not we're looking at only like a narrow piece of the picture or or or not and this is and but even from this piece of the picture we can kind of quickly see that this technology doesn't actually make sense without economics like if you just deploy another instance of ethereum it doesn't really it doesn't really work in the same way unless the tokens that are being replicated by the

consensus protocol have a price right like cryptocurrency doesn't work without economics public blockchain protocols don't work without economics like ethereum doesn't work without economics and so you might so so we kind of expanded our story here from being like okay theory is technology but ethereum is kind of technology supported by economics or like together with some economics or together with some you know uh system or something that is providing security to the protocol because you know what we learned from doing blockchain and crypto analysis is that like these protocols aren't secure and without the tokens having a price without the because the token is giving you a price you know secures the network against an

adversary who can just spin up lots of computers um and so ethereum you might think is you know an economy this kind of like crypto economy and that that is like associated to and together with this protocol but even that too ends up kind of failing because if you start to look at economics really closely economics doesn't work without law the economic the crypto economics of these protocols don't work without assumptions about the way that the protocol is governed about the way that disputes about protocol definitions are

resolved you know the the for the economics of bitcoin is supported by the government's commitments to 21 million bitcoins initially in existence you know the govern the the economics and ethereum is supported by some kind of norms that we have that prevent uh an arbitrary amount of ethers from being created and destroying the economics of ethereum so if you if you try to understand it just in terms of the tech and its economics it kind of quickly starts to rely on on legal assumptions on governance assumptions about the nature of the blockchain the cryptocurrency and you know this not just its nature technically or

economically but from the point of view of law and specifically we think about uh crypto law in particular as being the kind of area of law that is relevant in particular to um to to to to making ethereum work so we try to think of ethereum as this kind of crypto blockchain technology plus this cryptoeconomics plus this crypto law but then still this doesn't you know you start you'll start to quickly realize if you start to do this analysis this you can't really explain crypto law and crypto economics

just in terms of the tech you have to explain it in terms of the kind of background culture beliefs the people that are using it right because tuition shows economics and ultimately so is technology um and so you could try to think of ethereum just in terms of these kind of component parts but those parts don't make much sense without understanding the kind of human side you know we have people in ethereum you know they're commonly called ethereans um and you know sometimes we refer to the ethereum community and certainly there are communities associated with ethereum

sometimes people think about like as if there's just one community normally referring to this stem community like science tech engineering community that's associated with the technology but there are many communities actually in ethereum and it communities kind of like take care of them that the ethereum ecosystem is as a whole just not right it is much broader than just the community um and and the ecosystem includes lots of different kinds of infrastructure it includes um people but also corporations and also you know non-profits and associations

and um you know forums and all all sorts of different kinds of you know infrastructure technical legal economic um that that helps support ethereum um but still if you think about if you try to think of ethereum as like okay this tech crypto economics crypto law plus a bunch of people it's still not actually a very good idea of like what ethereum is because you know ethereum is something that is kind of living in people's heads and has a con or in some way it's a some of the

theorem anyways it exists kind of in people's expectations and realities and plans and it's not just and then that stuff has structure it's not just a matter of arbitrary agreement or you know ethereum is whatever the ethereum community decides ethereum to be and that's sort of like an unsustainable view because ethereum has substance um and it like very much is something and it's not just kind of people's collective hallucination so this brings us now to kind of the second part of the talk which is kind of about

what ethereum is to people in the sense of what do they expect from ethereum what are the people why do they act like they believe in ethereum like what's their ask like what's their posture vis-a-vis ethereum you know um there are a bunch of kind of technical expectations that people have people expect ethereum to scale people expect ethereum to move stake people expect smart contracts to become better people expect you know oracles for their smart contracts people expect the blockchain to be like a property registry people expect d5 people expect unstoppable autonomous

software people expect that like the price of ether will go up and people expect that to compete with bitcoin and do much better than bitcoin people believe that ethereum is somehow more flexible and survivable than bitcoin which is kind of supposed to be more immutable um you know people kind of believe in upgrading ethereum in the way in a way they don't believe in upgrading bitcoin people have all sorts of expectations and all sorts of reasons that they have hope that ethereum will provide them with something that they kind of think that they want

or will benefit from or need you know ethereum is in some way okay you know we have a lot of expectations about ethereum and ethereum is defined somewhat by these expectations as kind of people try to make ethereum technically economically legally institutionally all different fronts better and better at serving kind of them and so people have a lot of expectations and they want a kind and and they kind of look for look at

ethereum um as a kind of you know tool or platform or community or all sorts of different kinds of stuff like you know economy like like like digital jurisdiction you know people have all sorts of different kind of um assumptions about what ethereum is that is going to help them build their great thing that is going to help them you know decentralize the world unbank the bank you know [Music] all you know like provide earning opportunities for people to do

good in in working downs you know people have um a lot of kind of things they want to do with ethereum a lot of promises they kind of expect ethereum to you know kind of implicit promises that they expect aetherium to satisfy um and i think you know in in kind of piecing all this together you know it'll it'll help us understand you know what is ethereum because ethereum isn't you know just technology it's not just economics it's not just crypto alarm it's not just uh an institution

yeah but it's also not just the people in the community and the ecosystem you know it it it has a and it's also not just defined by our expectations and use of it but all of these things make up ethereum and other things too that i'm sure that you know that i haven't named um and so ethereum is kind of really really complex and this actually makes it um you know super interesting not just academically or from an educational point of view but also as a basis for solutions and for doing things with ethereum that are actually useful in the world to like a world

far outside of crypto uh because if we regard ethereum as just being technology or just being crypto economics just being crypto large just being any kind of any anything that you can quickly and easily bound the boundary of you know we by defining if by by defining ethereum we kind of restrict the possibilities and therefore make it less useful and so i think you know and i so i think it's actually kind of incumbent on us to let go of some of these narratives that we have like false narratives about ethereum being just technology about ethereum being apolitical about ethereum being illegal and to kind of instead understand that

theorem is includes technology law politics all sorts of other stuff and not just in a way that allows us to do more with ethereum to have a more complex and rich relationship with ethereum and in order to develop the identity of ethereum going forward so that we're not kind of stuck in the past as the world moves anyways that's been my 15 minutes um thank you so much for listening and i hope you enjoyed the talk here and i hope you come away with questions and with the incentive or interest

in developing what your idea of ethereum is thanks thanks so much everyone really appreciate um being invited to speak at edcon and after being super helpful with my talk and everything thanks so much you