Ethereum AMA

Transcript

ah this is an incredible incredible venue I am very happy I have to say looking at y'all there's also like these the text is aggressive it's amazing anyway okay so I I'm Carl by the way optimism thingy um and uh we're going to go through a bunch of AMA questions sourced from y'all internet people um read it specifically so without further Ado I think we everyone's introduced okay let's Dive Right In so the first question when Moon so I think that this is talking about

when are we going to next step foot on the moon just a quick pull what year are we going to step foot on the moon starting with Brian uh if he has a mic the first person with a mic on the left side um I mean I think like uh I think the more interesting question is when when Moon math so like we're gonna get all the amazing things because I think just looking at prices is kind of boring I mean it cannot be boring but yeah um yeah like uh I think like I I'm very excited about um like about what is going to come over the next I think two to three years like the

upgrades that we have in the pipeline right now are going to completely change like almost what the ethereum what ethereum is at the base layer and um well I think it's gonna be amazing but I mean it's uh we will see I I hope it will be as great as as we all think it is and will actually enable billions of people to potentially use ethereum at a reasonable price lovely all right I don't know how to actually do the next question I assume I mean y'all jump in I feel like I don't I don't need to like call on people all right next up

what are we gonna do about Lido this is definitely a this is an interesting one and I'll just throw in another thing is ethereum proof of stake implicitly creating a reputation system anyway I mean one thing we can do with Lido is just wait uh because they're going to improve over time um like they have some some interesting ideas so uh for example one one of the things they're working on is having the uh Stef veto so even if uh the ldo token is like completely compromised in 51 attacked

um that's okay because you just fall back to to like a continuous veto um I think Lido is also looking to improve by um you know having just Anonymous people operating stake not necessarily like these in you know very professional staking pools um and also yeah over time you know they're gonna have more Lindy and be more decentralized but I think and another thing to to do is just like keep keep pushing for for competition and diversity so we've we've been so successful on the client diversity right we bought prism

from 70 to 35 and you will have like so much diversity and I think the the one of the next big battles is going to be operator diversity and jurisdictional diversity and a big component of that is favoring solo stickers so it is kind of this this kind of cat and mouse battle between solo stakers and and and and and pools and I think solo stakers have like these unique advantages over over pools which might mean that in the long term they'll win out and like one of these advantages is there's no fees right because you're self-operating you don't have to pay 25 to coinbase that's one interesting thing but there's also no

risk of an inside job right where the operator steals even the hotkeys the hot staking keys and then holds your efat Ransom um through like the a potential like slashing threat and there's there's also less of a risk of of things like like social social slashing where you know it's it's difficult for it it's it's relatively easy I guess to maybe compromise one single point of failure like a very large pool and then have that one pool be be socially slashed versus like a much more

independent and diverse solo stickers I realized that not everyone May understand this V what is like the tldr problem statement of like why it's kind of sketchy if Lido for instance has more than one-third basically one-third of uh stakers coordinating with each other are able to pull off a whole bunch of attacks against the protocol um so you know you can look with I think even like somewhere over like somewhere between I guess like a sixth and a third depending on what the network assumptions are I forget you can prevent the chain from kind of converging on us on a specific block um with uh more than one-third you can prevent finality for some time with a

like really worst case Network assumption you can cause two uh separate blocks to find wise and then if you have more than one half then it just becomes very easy to do those kinds of attacks and you can even like censor and like um and prevent um arbitrary blocks from anyone else getting on chain um and so to the extent that like why do as a system has kind of systemic risks that create the possibility that all White House takers will like participate uh might participate in an attack it's uh it's worrying if Lido has a large percentage um but you know in wider's favor it's also important to remember that why do having a third is a much less bad than um you know Miss Mr Joe random or having

a third because uh it's like Mr Joe randomer is one guy um and he can just like decide and you know go go to an attack whereas a lighter like ultimately still does have quite a bit of internal decentralization are y'all bullish on solo stakers like you said that solely stakers like there's a case to be made I'm curious like you know you know just kind of curious okay well there's two kiddo advantages that pools have one is debuted to stake with less than 52 Eve and the other one is the ability to have liquidity basically um liquid staking I think both of these things can can be done for solo stickers

um and then yeah it's yeah all right next up well how do y'all feel about ZK Solutions you know polygon Nightfall um and there's these privacy benefits there's modularity you know curious like what what are your y'all's opinions and I know that you know Brian and Barry are some juicy answers for this worst case you can use this um right so I'm not sure exactly what the question is like polygon Nightfall

is like this optimistic roll up that uses ZK roller for privacy Edge I'm not sure what Edge is um does anyone am I just really behind no you can I mean you can chill your ZK no but I have to love I just okay liberal interpretation of these questions yeah but like Edge is a thing I just never heard about um does anyone know Edge some centralized Microsoft thing with no connection to crypto oh okay so then like privacy stuff is good uh polygon knife all is a thing like okay so like the negative of doing polygon

Nightfall which is a ZK optimistic rollup you need to put more data on Jane every transaction you have to put a proof on chain the benefit of doing a ZK ZK Roll Up is it's it's cheaper because instead of having to put the whole proof on chain you just put like the diff the the the difference between the state before and the state after so so that's like the trade-off space here uh you also have like the the like optimistic delay for withdrawal and the the fraud proof but I think that that's like I think that a lot of the ZK space tends to think that those trade-offs are not good and the ZK trade-offs are good the ZK trade-offs being like uh more complexity in the implementation and chosen setup in most cases so so like

it's a trade-off I don't think that one is better than the other and in fact I think that like the best solutions would be hybrids where we have like a ZK and also an optimistic uh proof for for like a single chain I think that that's going to be the place where where I would have the most confidence about security so I'm not sure if I answered the question go for it Brian yeah I I also am not familiar with Nightfall or Edge so I feel like I can't say anything that would be particularly intelligent here I mean one kind of interesting I guess thought I have about ZK Solutions I mean assuming like we'll just throw out names that we know about um Aztec for example um you know ZK Oprah and like things in that category um are that uh one thing that we've

noticed in ethereum land so far is that like stock EDM really wins right like uh the non-etherium chains that are the most successful just like our copies of the evm right so uh actually the one um kind of uh you know day Factor ethereum collaboration that I think Justin forgot to mention is a binance smart chain right because you know they usually then they are evm um and you know it's obvious why they why these kinds of things win because you can just like Port over existing applications you don't have to like developers don't need so like retrain into different paradigms and you can just keep doing what you're doing with privacy or at least with a zero knowledge proof flavor of privacy there is no such thing and the reason why

there is no such thing is because zero knowledge proves by themselves have this property that like air in or every every state object has to be mapped to kind of some kind of logical owner where and which could be multiple people but like that owner would have to see the contents because you need to see the contents in order to be able to construct a proof involving those contents right um so everything like in order to make a proof using something so in order to create a transaction and modify some State object you have to see it it has to be decrypted to you right and um that even like requires payments to be done differently right because like in ethereum for example like um you know if I send you

um you know five denta coin I am increasing a a state entry corresponding to your Delta Dental coin balance I'm increasing a number that belongs to you without your consent right like that's what's happening at a technical level um and that's not possible to directly translate because in easy key world like if that's if that state entry is yours only you would have the decryption key and so so either you would have to like send me the key and let me see your entire balance forever or you would have to um you know do what else we actually do in practice why do some utxo thing we're basically create a new account just for you and then let you control it right so I think as EK applications fundamentally will just require more of

this kind of unavoidable like forcing developers to think more clearly like or differently about how their applications are built and maybe mood methyl kind of will improve on this eventually like I mean Zeke is dark so I had obfuscation the same issue in the same way but I think of this as like one of those factors that is going to make the the transition to Greater application mobile privacy more difficult for developers in the transition to application Level um layer 2 scalability I guess one one thing to not underestimate is the ability for engineers to to shoehorn things into the evm so I used to think that um you know doing a ZK VM was just crazy

right and surely we'd have a from scratch virtual machine and that turns out to be false and you know maybe there was a PR uh a case to be made that surely you know the whole blockchain Space will move towards them because it has so much better tooling and yet no we've built tooling for the evm um you know the same maybe could be said for formal verification right we're building like this security critical applications where even a single bug is is fatal and so we need basically a virtual machine which is extremely friendly to formal verification and that would mean something other than the VM yeah no all the engineers have built you know like formalization of the evm and can prove like formal statements about it and maybe something similar will happen for

for privacy as well hmm yeah I think I think that there's a nice happy medium here or like a short term medium where like you have privacy for like token balances when you leave the Privacy pool in order to do some execution and then you go back inside so like the Privacy benefits here is to have like you don't know who is doing what but like you you are able to make a good estimation about like how much money everybody has foreign cool all right let's keep going because we got a lot and this one is a fun one how do you get a job as a core developer and what is a core developer

well I guess there's nine clients right there's the four execution clients five um consensus clients and I I'm I think none of us here are cool devs but um maybe they're the only chord to have is I mean solomonie working on one of the the clients could be either a consensus or execution and if I think one success story sometimes is is you just start in as a volunteer you know you you submit a PR you find a bug you whatever you fix something and then over time you build a reputation and then people will will just want to work with

you full time I guess um and this is how it started for me as well right I just volunteered a few weeks of my time I wrote a new research post and then that's how I join different foundation and I think thank God similar story right um I I think it's yeah it's a good way to get started just volunteer your time I'll take the roll-up side here and say that to be a core developer on starknet you just gotta have a cool idea and develop your app on top of a decoy Roll-Up so go ahead and just code we're all core developers core developer is a mindset

laughs okay let's let's keep on going all right given the chance would you vitalik no make and make Eve have a Max Supply cap LOL um no lol anyone else that already kind of has it in place in Supply cop right because of like issue ones on the difficulty bomb and later it will have a implicit Supply cut because of like the merge or the 1559 and the issuance of the governance it has an economic Supply cap right but

but it's not a guarantee well there there's a guarantee of an existence of a cap we just don't know what it is the Quantum cap um but we'll see pretty damn soon what it is um and if you go on ultrasound.money you can play with the parameters and kind of try and estimate when when the the peak is reached and what the the long-time equilibrium is even if there's 0.01 of of fee burn you still get a cap and the reason is that you have this kind of constant issuance but then the the the burn is a fraction of of the of the total Supply and So eventually you

get an equilibrium 69 6969 ethereum does have a supply cap we just don't know what it is well I learned something today to be honest all right I guess next up all right why has it taken so long for ethereum to find a solution to high gas fees AKA why does it take so long to scale ethereum good Lord if I knew that answer please tell me doing scalability making a blockchain

scale without being centralized is like actually a hard problem and let me know we're actually doing the hard work to solve it and there is actual progress now but have we sold it though because like I go to ftps.info whatever and there's just no adoption yet of roll up so there's maybe a question for you called like when at when TPS just use it more no I think there are legitimately what you're saying what you're getting at is not only do we need to solve the gas problem but we also need to solve the demand problem and the demand problem is largely a usability problem because my God have you like

have you used crypto like it is still insane to use like I mean the high gas fees already invalidate most use cases but then just like managing your keys having like oh my God yeah I don't know one thing's not maybe oh oh one thing that I'll maybe add on here is like there are a lot of interesting parts of the ecosystem that have like indirect feedback loops with whatever mechanism produces like research or or innovation that like reduces gas fees so like one question you might ask is okay well what would you like what application categories are unlocked by an ethereum with 100x more scalability

it's not of like you know you can assume that if the throughput increases by 100x like we're in a happy like rainbows and unicorns land then we still have to actually like build stuff to make good use of that and I think it's it's interesting to explore application categories that uh like you know push the system in different ways from say like you know D5 or nfts or these like particular classes of users that have been like uh particularly just amenable to the kinds of applications that are built for a regime where like a transaction costs like x amount um so I think like you know games are interesting I think that like it's worth looking at what is happening on like side chains that have really low gas

costs uh even ones where it's somewhat artificially so just to try to predict this landscape that's huge alrighty let's keep going we've got a lot of questions to be honest okay with what y'all have learned so far would you have started ethereum from scratch would you have blank slate gone at it again making a blockchain from scratch is hard man and look I think we're we've we're actually surprisingly good at like

turning strategies that seem to require doing things from scratch like into strategies that are like very friendly to kind of iteration and keeping the existing ecosystem going like we did that really well with the merge and like it looks like we'll do that great with a lot of other things too and we can also have our cake and easy too because the move to post Quantum is a forcing function to rip out a lot of the internal cryptography and therefore rebuild from scratch and so we'll also have the benefit of hindsight we'll be able to learn from my mistakes kind of understand what the technical debt is and really clean that up in a couple decades I think a large part of the moved to like a role of centric roadmap is about

doing things from scratch that like I think the first step will be to recreate ethereum exactly and the next step will be to improve ethereum in ways that are like maybe different than the way that it is right now I think that some steps are already being taken for example the aip437 I think account obstruction so stocknet has taken its own as a native thing in its chain and I think that's a feature with a lot of potential use cases especially for wallets modularity not start from scratch anyway

all right what can l2s like Arboretum or optimism and starknet let's go um Implement when the merge comes out to continue okay wait yeah what happens how does the merge affect Layer Two huh oh I can it doesn't okay yeah okay that's it Don Crowder really has the answer it doesn't that much I mean it like means all the l2s are now much more environmentally friendly that's a really big thing that's actually legit um it also does probably increase the security of l2s because it's increasing

the security of the base chain um so all of those benefits but as to like what do end users feel when they like send a transaction things don't change all that much but that's a good thing you know like we're not trying to break everything we're just trying to improve things and the merge is a massive Improvement um so yeah we can I I think the environmental friendliness is probably number one though Coolio let's go so yes so if Amazon complies with the government um will ethereum what happens to

ethereum you mean they're going to shut down the master node oh no I don't know making the master node move to Baidu or something no no I mean I think uh realistically that the more this stuff becomes a problem the more like I will actually start seeing more um home staking and I have more like actually yeah robots than the distributed forms of us they can get adoption so I'm not sure that like that particular problem is anywhere close to fatal I mean it's a similar situation to to mining pools it's very easy to read just like it's easy to redirect hash rate from one pool to another it's easy to redirect your your valid data node or

any other node from from you know AWS to someone else including from home are there fun ways that we can like incentivize geographic distribution and light stack distribution of the you know POS of course the correlation thing but I mean even that's an interesting topic but uh Curious y'all's thoughts I think there isn't yet I mean it's a bit of a kind of spicy answer maybe but uh if if you if you prod governments enough and it's you

know that they that they say okay we've just Banning you from your jurisdiction similar to what China did for mining that you know you kind of de facto get better uh geographical distribution um and I think you know China made a mistake right they wanted to control you you know the bit Bitcoin it's much better to keep everyone on your territory and then uh you know do a 51 attack so that was a big um I guess misstep um and I think it would be like a similar misstep you know if I know the EU or you know the us or whatever became uh aggressive to to towards uh you know validation in a way it would just

it would reduce their power and make us even more stronger because now we've reduced this single point of failure and validation would be more decentralized in a different direction I think uh when we give grants to organizations that are intended to survive for the long term we can give the grants in the form of validators oh yeah yeah describe that the validator incentive program that is really cool right right this was a program that the ethereum foundation did where basically um every uh client team um got a bonus in the form of uh some amount of if that was in the form of like validator slots already on the beacon chain and so 144 body daters

right so for each client mm-hmm yeah so that's um what is it 44608 East I think it was um but uh yeah basically the Asia would only get that get that eth out um after the margin uh which draws happen but uh and also you know contribute a little bit of some Geographic decentralization I mean I'm curious like what is the importance of the client diversity you know that kind of decentralization as well because of course that's the other side of that client program right now I mean clients of our city is also important it's just to reduce the risk that like one software bug whether unintentional or intentional causes the

entire ethereum blockchain to break or Worse finalize something invalid um and so we have I think we have done a great job with um this client uh diversity but on the execution coin inside um I think uh non-get clients still have a relatively low market share and I think we're definitely hoping that like those numbers can improve over time and the guest team themselves are aware you know they they're aware of this and then they they think this is a problem so that's you know like with the speed of this decentralization or subtraction like we we like even if the cat team belongs to yeah like we doesn't really

matter we do care about the diversity well my take is that client diversity is one of the most underrated and under talked about topics in crypto because it is so much harder to Market your product if you not only have to Market your product but also get other people to build a alternative implementation so people like just want to like hand wave the client diversity thing so I just think that that is an incredible example of like ethereum really it's a Next Level anyway I think that we got through pretty much all the things and I think we're pretty much at time so

uh thank you Carl thank you thank you thank you Carl thank you Carl for joining us