Laura Shin: The Cryptopians – Uncovering the Secrets of Early Ethereum #386

Transcript

hi welcome to epicenter uh the story talks about the technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the global blockchain revolution i'm sebastian cuicillo and i'm here with felix ernst today we're speaking with laura shin she's a journalist she's a podcast host and she's been around the space for a long time and also the author of a new book called the kryptopians which i just finished reading and felika also read before we talk to laura about her book and all the juicy gossip that's in there i will first tell you about our sponsors this week dexes are great but they're vulnerable to problems like nav failed transactions and high glass costs cal swap tackles these issues head on and offers a new kind of trading experience it's built by gnosis and cal swap is a meta dex

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laura it's a real pleasure to have you on um if this is the first time you've been on the on the podcast surprisingly uh but yeah it's uh it's a good i think it's a good time now that the book has come out i'm excited to be here so give us a little bit about your background and story and what's your pre-crypto life like and what drew in and what what uh got you to where you are now so i have been a journalist pretty much for all my career not literally 100 of it but but nearly all and i was covering personal finance when i had been covering it maybe for four or five years and was feeling like you know kind of ready to move on and do

something different because i didn't feel like i was learning a lot that was new and so my forbes editors said hey we have an idea to do a forbes fintech 50 list do you want to head that up with another reporter and so she and i divided the list into subcategories and i took the category of digital currencies and became completely obsessed and fell down the rabbit hole as we all say and um about a year so that was almost seven years ago and then a year after that i launched my podcast unchained and that initially was a forbes podcast and after the first season they said we're not going to continue with this and so i

found my own sponsor to keep it going and that sponsor said that they would take out the exclusive ads on it for the year 2017 and that was the year that crypto totally blew up and the downloads on my podcast blew up and so they got um just like the seal of a lifetime and um what happened was that so and then during 2017 i got hired full-time at forbes to only cover crypto because previously i'd been a freelancer for them and um finally in january 2018 somebody who was helping me with the podcast said hey i have been doing research on a bunch of crypto podcasts and um

you know you you could make x amount of money selling ads on this and um you you have like way more downloads than everybody else so um i was like oh that's an amount of money that's more than what i make at forms um so i had always had an idea to do a book and i i or rather had the desire and because we had you know just been through this massive mania and bubble i felt like that topic would be a good subject for a book and so when i um so basically i quit forbes and i probably spent like i don't know maybe two days a week on the podcast and then the rest of the time on my book and the

book aims to describe how the 2017 ico craze happened but since ethereum was the main platform for that and you kind of need to understand the origins of ethereum and understand the dao and all that because that all really led up to the ico craze and was kind of um yeah just without that context the ico craze doesn't make sense so about three quarters of the book really is um kind of like a history of ethereum and how it got started and then at the end is when you see you know how this all blossomed into the ico craze very cool um yeah i remember when when your podcast came out like i i think we had we started probably about a year or a year and a half

before um unchained and i remember your podcast coming out and thinking like oh this is this is a person with like a journalistic background uh coming into the podcast space like you know i myself i i you know people would say like oh you're a journalist like you need to be objective about stuff and i'm like no i'm just a guy who's interested in crypto i couldn't care less about being objective about stuff and i thought oh this is a person who's actually going to bring some sense into this conversation and i i i really also appreciated the fact that you know because you know you didn't have this this technical background or you you came at the subject of crypto um from a much more kind of higher level visionary and also perhaps um

you know with with a financial background that it just framed conversations much differently than with epicenter so you know uh i would sometimes kind of like listen to episodes that you had done like prior to doing episodes on epicenter to kind of prep myself for uh you know for those episodes or like send people to the podcast where i thought like interviews that we had done would be too technical so yeah like laura shin's podcast is going to give you more of like um more like the business aspect of this or like this sort of thing so yeah i i've always really you know enjoyed your work yeah and i was doing the opposite i was listening to epicenter and prep in preparation for my own interviews to like understand the technical sides better yeah so you know the book just came out and

you know it's it's an interesting book because um a lot of the other books i think that came out you know recently um were much more like you know those like bitcoin billionaires for instance which which is more of like a fictional account of what happened and then you know camilla's book i think um uh also has a little bit more of that aspect although it is more of like a an investigative journalism type of piece but your book is is like a factual account of like what happened and i wonder if if this is the book that you had always wanted to write or if it just felt uh or was this the book that you felt needed to be written um or it's just more like your style like your more journalistic style that shines through

here oh it's probably my style um i very much wanted this book to be a history book in the sense that i want people 100 years from now to reference this book when they're trying to understand how did blockchain technology get started and how did crypto get started and so i really was striving for accuracy on every level and uh the book is very rigorously fact checked for that reason i had to hire my own fact checker to go through everything and that poor guy i mean i need i need to give him a shout out because he learned about blockchain technology in a month

and he um you know helped me fact check stuff where i i had to write about the technology in a way that i myself had never uncovered before like the kind of technical details that i had to understand to explain the dao and the dow hack and there's just so many things like especially during the da wars episode where the um white hat group was trying to rescue the funds and all that like that definitely was a level of technicality that i just had not encountered in my years of covering blockchain so for my fact checker to then have to go through that i mean granted of course we relied a little bit more on the sources at that point but

still i mean there was all that then there was the fact that the prices were changing throughout this whole period right and so for every transaction we were always in parentheses putting what the dollar value was and then it's like okay well then out of all the prices on that day right there's the open the close the high the low like which price did we use for the conversion and so you know just kind of walking through all that for each of those like figuring out what is the best price and then on top of that um you know there's a lot of people in the book and they don't all say nice things about each other and so you know just like if somebody says that they remember that this thing happened then you kind of go around all the other people that were there like do you

remember this thing happening or that person saying that thing and then if it's like a negative thing that somebody said about somebody then you like have to get their response and like i mean so it just was like an insane amount of reporting and fact checking like like i truly i called it a hazing and it this other interview i did and like that's what it felt like i there was a period of like about six months last year when i literally didn't do anything except he'd sleep exercise work and um then i left to do other things like five times in a six month period and two of them were my vaccine shots so like i just went like i was at like for the first pass of the fact check i was averaging a page an hour and my book is

like 400 pages and there were times when it would take me a full hour to do the fact checking for sorry it would take me a full hour to do the yeah the fact checking for a single paragraph like a whole paragraph which would just take me an hour so it was like just kind of a mind-boggling amount of work but um you know since i went through that i feel very confident about what's in the book you know i feel that um like most people who lived through these events and have read it have been tweeting like oh it feels very accurate to what i experienced so i feel you know very confident that i got the big picture story right that i got the little details right like you know i mean there might be a few things here and there um but you know that's to be expected just

from something that's huge but i don't feel that there's probably like anything majorly wrong or factually inaccurate and so so that feels really good reading the book it's very clear that it was this mammoth task i mean just the amounts of conversations that are kind of related in the book uh he said so and so he said so and so um why doesn't remember this conversation and and so on so basically obviously um a lot of um interviews actually went into this book can you give us can you give us an idea of how many people you interviewed and um how many times you spoke with them in total oh my gosh oh wow no so i can't i i so i

can tell you it was more than 200 people but you like for the number of interviews oh my gosh i mean for somebody like vitalik alone like i'd only remember it was like minimum eight and i'd have to look it up it's like minimum eight interviews and then um on top of that like a lot of text chats you know um or um yeah somebody like uh yeah griff green who helped me a lot with the dao section uh just constant stream of chats or like the the various people and companies that were helping me with the dao hack investigation like reams and reams and reams of chats and emails and google docs and i mean it was like

honestly i have to admit for some of the sources i was hounding them so much that i was just like these people are never gonna speak to me again like they're gonna hate me they're like and there would be certain people where they just would ignore me for a while like they just wouldn't respond um there was a moment where i think vitalik was unhappy with me and so he just was not responding to any of my emails her chats are like nothing and this was going on for months and i still had more questions so i saw he was going to be at east denver so i literally flew to denver just like show up in his face and be like hey so i have more questions and that worked he did finally you know agree to continue the interviews um

but yeah i mean it was it was like i it was a little bit ridiculous um and there were so many crazy things that happened so i did tell the story but i'll just tell it once more there was somebody who did not talk to me for years you know i sent them multiple emails and requests and whatever just no response finally i don't know what happened i think maybe somebody who who was interviewed for the book like encouraged him to talk to me or whatever i don't know anyway finally he's like okay i'm going to talk to you and then it was like stream of information just tons of information very talkative hours on the phone blah blah blah and i was like wow this is awesome you know i'm getting all this great information you know i can add all this color to my book okay and then he's like

okay jesse you know i have a hard drive with all kinds of material from that time i'm going to and you know decrypt it and like i'm going to give you all this stuff we're going to do this transfer of data blah blah blah and i was like awesome so we schedule this time to have to meet up and i'm there like waiting for him no response i'm like texting him i suddenly realized i am blocked on every single platform he has just completely blocked me everywhere and i never figured out what happened or like why suddenly he went from you know like not responding to then giving me just this fire hose of information to then completely cutting me off during the fact checking he did talk to

my factory he still wouldn't talk to me but um anyway so all kinds of crazy things like that happen in the reporting of this book um but yeah i talked to many many many people so i mean having been in the space for um a number of years before um before this book um you of course already knew um the history of ethereum at least in broad strokes so when you did the research for for the book what surprised you most about how it actually went down oh my gosh oh so many things i mean so to say that i knew the history of

ethereum and broad strokes is like really it's literally out so if i have like a million strokes in this book i knew like one you know what i mean i mean i i really barely knew any of what came through you know i mean as you read in the book um i did have an inkling in 2017 that people you know kind of were wanting ming to leave as executive director but i barely barely knew um like even just a fraction of it uh and obviously that's a story line that that goes over years in the book so um you know i really barely knew any of it and just whole entire story lines were

complete news to me um you know in terms of for instance like you know this issue about um kind of vitalik's inability to assert himself and how that created a lot of problems i didn't know any of that um this issue around like um difficulties you know trying to figure out who to trust and then at the end kind of this new group of people that were quasi helping him with that but then other people are you know unhappy about sort of who they are and the amount of control they have and influence they have or um you know like just certain of the actions of ming that are just really frankly inappropriate for an executive

director you know all those things i and and you know i have to say like i think like very early on when i started reporting people were talking about her in such an extreme and almost exaggerated way that it was like hard to believe you know like it just felt like unreal and unbelievable like not a real person and so when i was able to get the text chats and the logs and stuff like that then then i understood finally kind of like what they were talking about and so i felt like having that in her own words really kind of explained like how this extreme description can even be real um but but then once i saw that i felt like okay so they're not they're not

just like you know exaggerating or um making things up or you know what i mean it just felt like okay i have evidence and now i kind of understand what they're talking about um but yeah beyond that i mean there were so many more things like like so i don't want to give too many spoilers but you probably know that little subplot in the dow that was a huge shocker to me we won't go into that um but it involves a person who was not known to be in crypto as famous outside of crypto and they did come on my show but we didn't go into too much detail because i wanna i want people to be delighted and surprised by that crazy crazy crazy story um then also things with like jeff vilca one of the main architects of ethereum i didn't

know his whole story i mean there were just so many things i didn't know so yeah pretty much i was surprised throughout the reporting yeah i think for me too like i mean that was i was telling like uh before the interview that there are a lot of um moments in the book that you know where i felt oh i was there i remember that moment like i remember being at that party or like meeting this person or like interacting with this person in this context but there's a lot of things also that i hadn't followed you know just because you know i i wasn't in the in the weeds i wasn't working at an ethereum company or working at consensus or or any of this i think for a lot of people this is going to be eye opening to you know a lot of the stuff that was

happening behind the scenes i was curious so you know uh you were talking earlier about like all these skype chats and stuff that a lot of a lot of i think a lot of the information in the book that's interesting it comes from from these uh from these skype uh chats where did you get all these like i mean i don't have skype history from like 10 years ago or seven or eight years ago like how did you fall upon these uh great skype conversations so i can't reveal too much about you know where i got these things um but obviously i wasn't in these skype groups myself so um i was able to obtain this material from people who were willing to

share it with me you would save them yeah yeah yeah because a lot of uh the skype material from that era is has already been deleted but there were certain people who had uh records of it and and shared some of it with me so i frankly i think there's probably more that people didn't share but you know at least for certain things i was able to convince them to at least give me some so [Laughter] would it you know earlier talking about like how in a hundred years from now you want this to be kind of the historical account of what happened would you consider open sourcing some of the material and a lot of like like all of the interviews and stuff like that you did at some point in order to really have uh all the background also uh out

in the public space um i probably can't because one of the conditions usually for the interviews was that they would be mostly on background meaning that i wouldn't reveal who gave me the information so um you'll notice uh you know information is attributed to certain sources only in very specific cases and i generally would ask them like we would kind of negotiate like can i say that you did this or said this or that this information came from you like whatever or um you'll notice that other times it says things like you know um according to a source close to the matter or you know whatever um so so we we kind of negotiated all of

that language but yeah that means because because if i were to even release the interviews but without the context it would be very obvious who was talking so yeah i can't i can't really do that as you said earlier a lot of the book is about the very early ethereum days so basically vitalik pre-ethereum the white paper um the foundation the yellow paper um the launch of ethereum and so on so when we think back to the people who were involved in the early days of ethereum it it is somehow a pretty ragtag group i mean it's it's it's like it it's not

um it's not a very coherent cohort in a way so um i think it's pretty natural to kind of feel drawn to some people in particular um did you find yourself rooting for anyone in particular or did someone turn out completely differently from how you had imagined them um did i find myself rooting for somebody in particular that's a good question um [Music] you know honestly it's probably vitalik uh he so one when earlier when you asked kind of like what i knew in advance or what was a surprise to me

um one thing i didn't realize until kind of i had all the material was that the book would end up being a coming-of-age story for vitalik which i really think it ended up being but i didn't know that that was going to be part of the storyline until after i'd reported so much of it and um you know you see him in the beginning where first of all he's a teenager second then you see all these people being like oh there's there's gonna be money here and they kind of like descend and you know number of them are sort of self-interested and uh you know he's basically just too young to deal with this and he like doesn't understand enough about human nature and about like people who may not have the best interests of his project

at heart and so you just end up with yeah i mean people will read there's a lot of conflicts but frankly you know imagine that this had happened when vitalik was like 26 then it just would have been so different because he probably would have been more able to assert himself and do things like because initially he didn't want to pre-mine he wanted us to be more like bitcoin um but he was overruled by people who you know wanted to make sure that they got their allocation early on so um you know just a lot of things i think would have been different if he'd been uh able to to have a more assertive presence but he just was not capable of that and like frankly you know didn't

understand that some of these people may not uh be doing what was best for ethereum so when you when you kind of see somebody and i describe him in the book is sort of like being pure and naive and idealistic when you see somebody like that who is being manipulated or used in the way that he was um you can't help but want to root for them you know and um you know is he a perfect person by the end clearly from the way people were criticizing uh the way things were uh working at that time obviously not there were a lot of people who felt uh that by the end of the book which ends in early 2018 that a lot there were still a

lot of issues but at least some of the major issues early on had been resolved maybe not to everybody's satisfaction but in a certain fashion and to echo that i i think i remember an ama with vitalik maybe a few years ago when he was asked um what he would have done differently if he had if he had a do-over um for the early days um and he said um that he would handle the eight founders situation differently and he would be more selective about whom to actually take on as a co-founder which is interesting because as you know

you read in the book again that's more similar to gavin's views at that time um so it's just funny that he sort of came around to to uh what gavin had been advocating for from the beginning so well one thing that i found kind of fascinating about this whole story is that even though it was a very uh eclectic group of people who didn't have who who weren't interest aligned perhaps or like whose interests were so divergent and on top of that all the chaos with the foundation for a couple of years it's a wonder that like ethereum still exists like you know um how you know

how many near-death experiences did you count um in your reporting for this oh i think only two really um obviously the dow uh was the biggest crisis in ethereum's history just no question um but then the other one was you know uh before then i guess that was in the um fall of 2015 and then the early winter 2016 um the foundation looked like it was going to run out of money within a few months and so that that was another issue at that time but it very quickly got resolved and was like fine after that so i know yeah i don't know how much

that was in near death um because yeah it just you know it became clear very quickly that they were gonna have a lot of runway so um maybe maybe looking back to the founders again so basically if you look at the eight founders i mean obviously vitalik is still around um but gavin wood charles hoskinson and joe lubin they all went on to found their own multi-billion dollar companies i mean statistically that's super unlikely even in this space right um so what do you think or do you think it's unlikely and basically if if you look at the founders as a group what set them apart from you know most people did anything set them apart i you know honestly my opinion is that

what set them apart is that they were just early i mean yeah frankly i i just feel like anybody who is involved in crypto at that time they're all extremely wealthy i i just i don't even know if you need to like have done anything that special um obviously gavin has really strong technical chops there's no question like even the people who dislike him in the book which you know there's a fair number of those they um all would say like okay he's brilliant and like a really strong coder and um you know even even when they kind of didn't like if he was constantly trying to force his way they would even admit okay you know often he was right

um like he had a lot of forsake he you know so they'll they'll kind of like grudgingly admit like he's very strong technically as for charles uh people you know they had more personal issues with him um according to them he was constantly telling tall tales um just yeah that's that's like a big theme around charles in the book uh you know as for whether or not he's technically strong nobody really talked about that um so i can't really say i will say that now my sources tend to not think that uh cardano is is the most technically interesting blockchain

i will say but um but i've yeah i i will just say for the period of the book the main themes that i heard around charles really were about his tendency we're really around his tendency to embellish um his stories and whether or not they're factually accurate is is it remains to be seen because uh no i don't think anybody's seen any evidence that any of them were accurate um but yeah the yeah my my take is really they they were just early so okay and you have since um been attacked pretty viciously from the cardano community um

about the light that you portrayed charles in right so basically the the pulling into question his credentials and uh basically painting him as highly manipulative and uh you know the funny thing is actually they're only so i don't even know if they're upset about the portrayal because i don't think they've read the book so i don't know if they know what the portrayal is they're just upset because i did a fact check on his education claims and i just pointed out that his claims about his education don't match the school's records and you know i consider the school uh uh like what we call an original source that's i mean i i checked it's not like i only checked charles credentials i checked everybody's because

that's what fact checking is you go to the original source and you know he there were other there was another person whose education claims did not match the school's records people can read the book to find out who that was but um you know since charles tweeted at me that my book was a fiction and uh many people told me that charles has told many fictions i thought that was a little bit um rich coming from him and then uh you know i had this evidence that the schools say he uh was an undergrad and dropped out from undergrad even though he has told not only me but multiple other media outlets and tweeted that he dropped out from a phd program but i would love to you know fact check uh with any school that could verify that he was enrolled

uh in getting a phd from them so well i think that remains to be seen very early on he was also booted from [Music] ethereum um after someone had compiled this dossier about him with um kind of uh claims on his background or it doesn't really say in the book do you know what's in the dossier because i i'm i'm dying to find out so i know what people say was in it but i can't say that people said that they did not have a copy of the dossier i definitely obviously tried to get a copy of it um but

definitely either people are not willing to share it or they really still they they really just don't have a copy um i i kind of frankly find that hard to believe in the age of you know like google drive and whatever um because even though these events were from 2014 uh in terms of like the internet the internet was like well developed at that time and so um it just surprises me that they wouldn't have a copy of this but you know people were like i don't have it i don't have it i don't have it so yeah i can't i could i can't even prove what what it said i i just know what they all say it said so another a big piece of uh i guess juicy gossip that came out in with this book is uh revelations about

the uh the dow hacker so on the so the book doesn't actually name the dow hacker but then on the day that the book came out there's an article that was published in forbes um with some video and like you know this well-produced article uh identifying the hacker um can you tell us so so at this point you know is it well established that this is the hacker has it been corroborated or is it still alleged has the hacker uh responded to your uh requests for interview or like what's give us the kind of overview here what's what's going on since um since this article came out

so i presented my evidence um my sources and i think that the evidence is very strong and the community seems to have accepted it uh people aren't pushing back the person that i believe is the dow attacker is somebody named toby honish who was a co-founder of 10x which had an ico back during the height of the ico craze and um he did send me a statement saying that he said your statement and conclusion is factually inaccurate and then he offered to provide me more details and when i asked for them he did not respond i asked her them multiple times i very clearly gave him a deadline um down to the hour in uh in uh you know as was in a specific time

zone um five different times no response and that was all for the book and then when we did the forbes article we reached out again because the fourth article has a lot more information than the book does um it i can i can explain that in a moment um but again no response uh to multiple emails with a very clear deadline so i think the one statement of denial is probably you know what what his statement is um and then just to explain why uh there's less information in the book than we released in the forbes article all of this happened very last minute like very very very last minute um so at the end when you when you publish a book you do what are called three

final passes and it takes place over the course of a few months where um you know the publishing house has it and they'll do things like legal and copy editing proofreading whatever and then they make their changes and they pass it back to you and then you kind of review the changes and like uh you know fix whatever kind of made things inaccurate or whatever it might be and then it goes back to them then they do another thing and you know so anyway so you do that three times okay so um i got new data that i wanted to explore more right before having to turn in the second pass and um i remember that my fact checker and i were like what should we do because so so just you know this the state of the manuscript at that moment was that

i had pursued an investigation that somebody at poloniex had started and they had identified kind of like a group of people and i uh followed everything through like you know what made them suspicious like what actually was happening at those moments like what did those transactions mean because they had kind of made certain assumptions or judgments about like what was happening with those transactions but i tracked it all down and kind of figured out what was actually going on and then i interviewed all those people and i included the information you know with my interviews um in the book and it was just going to be like a presentation like like kind of showing i did the homework like here's here's what the evidence is but not making any conclusion just like here are the

reasons why they came under suspicion here's what they're saying like you know whatever and so there came this moment where like i said i had extra new data that i wanted to keep like exploring but i had to turn in the second pass and my fact checker and i were like what should we do should we tell them that we want to keep you know investigating this or or what and so i did but of course the publisher was like no no no no they were like no more time like because actually at that point we'd already delayed publishing the book one once so the publication date had already been pushed and um i sent it on anyway to this other company that i was working with which was chainalis and this again was another one of those moments where i was hounding them so

much i was like chainalysis is never going to speak to me again because you know it's like i was i sent like four or five emails with no response and i was just like oh my god like like because they helped me so much with the book already they had given me like detailed information on like the state of the theory of multisig at any given time or just like all kinds of things like about all the different crowd sales and just i don't know just like tons and tons and tons of information so it's like oh my god i really did it now they're like never going to talk to me again um but they did finally reach out and um you know as you know i'm very grateful to them for this they claimed credit for demixing the wasabi transactions that the

hacker had um done to obscure the trail of their coins and then they tracked the output to four different exchanges and so this is a difficult part because you know exchanges have privacy policies so you can't just call them up and be like hey like whose name is on that account or you know whatever um however i i did manage to have uh one of the exchanges did confirm to a source what happened to those deposited funds and that was what led us to the identity of toby honest um but what i just want to say to fill in you know what i was explaining about why there's less information in the book um once i did finally have an identity and

it was like a really good one and you know this just seemed um it was definitely yeah i i knew this was strong evidence and needed to to be um in the book uh that the publisher was like okay it's so late in the process that what you have to do is you have to describe it all in the same number of words for the previous dow section so we're just gonna take out what you wrote and we're gonna like you cannot go over this word count and you're just gonna slot that in because it will change too many things if you make it longer like for instance they were saying like even um the the book jacket would like might be a different size or whatever if i if i added pages so they were just things like that and so then

when so they so they said you should release the news and also frankly book publishers they're not used to releasing big news um like that and so that's why also the name isn't in the book they were like you should release in a news outlet it's just going to be so much easier because they're well equipped to do that and we as a publisher are not because literally closing the book was like months before the publication date so then that just ran all kinds of risks like if that information was in the book and anyway so so that's why yeah uh it's uh it came out in two places at once basically that's super interesting um yeah and i mean there were actually several pieces of information that were i mean so basically i mean the identity to me it

makes perfect sense but i also didn't know that chain analysis can demix wasabi wallet transactions did did you know that i mean that was not generally known was it no so i did not know that and the funny thing is um i'm pretty sure this wasn't the first time they had done that kind of thing and so um you know there was a question of like are they going to clean credit for it um because if they didn't then i would have to um learn how to or not i would not learn how to but like so they did say you can recreate this and we will tell you how like back when it wasn't clear whether they were going to claim credit but then eventually

since they did that um i feel made everything better because otherwise i i kind of don't know how it would have gone down if it would have been like oh by the way i may i d mix the transaction like people might have been like what the hell um you know what i'm saying like it just might have gone down a little bit differently so i'm very grateful to them for taking credit of that uh for that step um yeah so that was uh it thankfully it was it didn't end up being too much of a negotiation i actually um you know i'm not sure what happened internally there that that made them be like this is a moment where we're going to reveal this but um i'm grateful that they did how did it feel to reveal this

information i mean because like you're you're revealing something that's like a critical point in ethereum's history that nearly caused aetherium to to to fall apart but a fork happened as a result of this like you know it it could have sparked like a lot of anger and um and so you know this is like a big responsibility to make these um accusations yeah what what what was your kind of reasoning behind it and how do you you know justify like making uh making this person you know um known [Music] well so i mean

i wouldn't have done it if i didn't feel extremely confident about the evidence and yeah i mean we can see from the response like people have been tweeting at me that i'm the goat like that day when i released news they were tweet like multiple people tweeted that at me and um there's no greatest of all time oh okay yeah and like people uh there's been no pushback nobody's you know saying oh she's definitely wrong she got this wrong you know i think people recognize like okay the evidence that i have you know on the other side of these um transactions the cash outs to get the identity that that's all very strong but then also when you go back to the moment of the

hack and you fill in like what was he doing at that time like how closely was he involved and oh like he was very you know involved in the dow he was looking at the code he identified some flaws in it he reached out to the uh creators about it he then was blogging about it like after the the hack happened he was tweeting things that were kind of like anti-fork and pro um keeping the hack like that kind of stuff like it's all it all just sort of fits right so um i think because the evidence was so strong that's why i felt confident about putting it out and you know it's newsworthy i mean i'm a journalist that's like that's what i do i so in that sense and and i got his response i gave him like plenty of opportunity to have his

side heard he did give me just the one um statement so i feel like you know i had extremely strong evidence i also felt that my process was unassailable like nobody was going to say like you didn't do enough to get his response or you know whatever like like i mean he had i don't remember maybe um because because so i i sent him maybe i forget like let's say four emails or so to request the interview then when i didn't get a response i sent him multiple emails with the fact checking like maybe i'm i i'd have to actually look maybe it's like another four or five um then when the forbes article came out again another round of emails like you know there were like dozens of opportunities for him to have

his side presented um and so i just feel like yeah for in every respect i didn't really have any qualms about about uh revealing the name what were the reactions from people close to him i mean people like julian um hosp the ceo of 10x or the whitehead hackers or the zlocket people what what was their reaction so um the the slakic crew um so christoph and luftharis definitely remembered him um left terrace even before so i i

i just kind of like asked him a little bit about this person before um mentioning like you know why and uh his first response was oh god i hated that guy like you know just kind of this like massive groan um sort of like oh he was so annoying he like kept reaching out to us about these problems but they weren't like urgent problems um and you know he like seemed to think that he like it was super important um and so left terrace kind of just yeah uh found him a little bit annoying um but then once he found out he was like oh wow he said you know he had every opportunity to set this right because there was a month after the hack when the money was kind of

trapped and he could have like returned it or he could have just set things straight and um and he didn't and so left harris was like wow that makes me really feel that actually this is kind of like a bad person you know because they they had plenty of opportunity to rectify things and then griff um you know pointed out oh he's totally screwed this up because if he had instead um saved the money sort of like like the samsung of 2016 you know kind of like you know the way sam right now will always identify vulnerabilities and then like rescue the money before telling the community what happened um like so griff said that oh if he had done that then he would have an amazing

reputation but now because he didn't he definitely doesn't have a good reputation um and and griff was like oh reputation is way more valuable than money and you know and and the hacker hasn't been able to uh really do anything without money there's a hundred million dollars worth of etc that is just trapped um you know if he were to try to cash it out like people would know what that money was that was stolen money um and then as for um wait i'm sorry so you asked me about the socket creators and the reaction from oh julian hosp yeah so that was funny because um uh when i went to write my finish that section of my book

i really debated whether or not to reach out to julian um but you know i saw that they had been co-founders at the time of the hack and so i didn't know was he in on it was he not and i knew that they weren't talking now but i didn't know if um saying anything to julian would like caught you know because already i ran the risk of toby himself doing something between when i finished the book and when the book came out right because you know i had to do all the fact checking with him but then i was just like oh julian's a much more out there person with like all his videos and whatever and so i just was nervous about like also doing something that would uh alert him if he had been on it or whatever because then it just creates an

extra wild card element so i didn't reach out to him until the forbes article came out and then hilariously we ended up having a three-hour phone call because the first two hours i literally spent the whole time kind of casing him like trying to figure out was he in on it was he not like does he know does he not and then i kind of sort of satisfied like he clearly doesn't know but you know i still asked um in a way where if that were the case then i you know would would know that um but no he was absolutely floored he was just like wait what he you know he kind of didn't believe me frankly and then he checked a bunch of his emails and then he he said oh actually i came across this this is kind of interesting and

then he did say you know actually the funny thing is i remember at the time of the hack when i asked him about it that he seemed to have more information about it than anything i'd found online so it was like pretty funny um but anyway yeah uh basically he definitely was shocked he didn't know and um yeah frankly now because they're not on good terms i actually think he is like very happy about the information so in the book you talk about uh the uh the etherium shadow government and i i thought this was the you know perhaps the the most like the juiciest part of the book um after the after the dow hack it has a it has a different taste to it

than the revelations about the diah hack uh so yeah what is the aetherium shadow government um and who's who's a part of it and uh what does it do so a lot of people who were working in ethereum at that time kind of late 2017 early 2018 um felt that some of the organizational issues in the ethereum foundation had to do with the fact that there were a number of people who did not have official roles at the ethereum foundation but had a lot of influence and could kind of like change decisions and

um and frankly just affect the direction of the ef even though um they sort of worked in the shadows as it were and so um the the main there's really one main person that they talked about the most who was somebody named thomas greco who started off as i believe he was an advisor to omizo and maybe at some point was even i i forget i i yeah i don't sorry i didn't brush up on on all the details about this but you know he was involved basically in uh the crypto world in different ways but um he essentially just became kind of like a close friend and confidant of

vitaliks and since he did not have an official role of foundation but was kind of hanging out with vitalik all the time and people said that he kind of like managed vitalik's schedule and sort of in that sense like vetted who vitalik was interacting with and things like that that that just gave him a lot of power and they would say things like that um because so for instance i asked one of them oh well why if he didn't have an official role at the foundation then how did he have so much power at the foundation and this person said you know that sounds like such a logical and and good question

however it was just this thing where he was just a part of it he was just there and you don't question it and he this person said it's sort of like when there's trump there's gonna be jared kushner and you can't you can't um you know kind of point out like what is this person doing here and and so it was you know um and then i had other people say like oh when i first started working at the ef in my first week like somebody who was working on devcon uh what devcon 4 i guess said oh um you know i was on the event planning team

and we had decided on copenhagen as the city for the conference and um we had a blog post ready to go we had booked the venue like everything was all ready and the night before we were going to announce uh the city that we had chosen it got scratched and um i later heard people whispering oh it was thomas and so this person kind of got this impression of this person being this like invisible puppet master and thought oh you know he must have a lot of weight to do something like that if you know the blog post is all ready to go the venue's booked like you know all that um and so

yeah just there were like a lot of stories like that or even things like you know there would be um kind of momentous events happening and um even people people would even be scared or nervous to mention that he or this other close friend of his that people also kind of talked about wendell holmes uh they would be kind of scared or nervous to even mention that they were there even if they weren't doing anything but they just happened to be there when this like big event happened they would be scared to mention that to me so it was just you know or even like when i asked vitalik about it he whistled when i when i mentioned thomas's name he whistled in the interview like like this kind of like oh you know oh she she kind of like is

asking me about this sort of secretive person thing you know whatever it was just i don't know so there was just a lot of people acted very strange about the whole thing frankly um but a lot of people said like oh they make me uncomfortable or you know i don't like how um you know they sort of work yeah in this shadowy way but it's just you know like like they were saying for a blockchain project where transparency is supposed to be one of the values like this is goes against that and so i think you know that's part of the reason why people talk to me about this yeah i mean so like i think anybody who's been at blockchain conferences or like defcon or whatever you know has noted have noticed uh uh ethereum

vitalik's entourage and like thomas definitely has been part of the entourage like for for a while i don't know if you know if he still is now and there's other people so like wendell davis uh also and joseph poon wendell davis not holmes is like a judge i you know maybe as i was reading this i thought oh like you know this is this is kind of interesting and juicy but like another way to frame this would be that you know these are close friends of italics maybe they share uh you know they share as like similar world views um and you know vitalik you know as you mentioned earlier like being as young as he was and i think perhaps at that time

having to deal with a lot of uh a lot of issues with the foundation and and you know the the the management of the foundation you know perhaps found some comfort in you know people that worry that sort of like spoke to him on his wavelength and uh were able to give him advice uh about this thing that would like had made a bunch of people millionaires and like we're making it like you know totally changing people's lives i don't know i i looked at it as more of yeah sure perhaps they had some influence and maybe some people felt that that influence was you know unwarranted or you know wasn't um you know shouldn't have been uh so powerful but i i don't know i i

i kind of always thought that these were just like people that he um placed a lot of trust in and uh you know we all have those people in our lives yeah we're just not all running you know multi-billion dollar blockchains yeah i'm sure that from vitalik's side that's what it felt like and that's why um that was happening that you know i mean as you read in the book he definitely had an issue early on where a lot of people that he shouldn't have been trusting were kind of um you know exerting a lot of influence and and and yeah just kind of having a lot of sway in ethereum and so i'm sure that was sort of one of his methods later on for kind of learning how to deal with that

sort of shielding him from a lot of people and just having certain trusted advisors um so that part about the shatter government is definitely from the people on the outside who you know felt like oh this caused a lot of problems for the foundation and for them um but yeah i think you're right and and i you know i think i make it clear that um you know the reason at the end that he finally feels he has a close group of friends is because of people like that um so yeah i i think it's both i think from vitalik's side that's what it is and from other people's side on the outside like yeah they're like this is not appropriate for a foundation so yeah i mean when i read that section of the book i was like oh yeah thomas greco that's the name i haven't heard in a

long time and it did really bring back memories um of you know the time that musico was uh so dominant in the ecosystem you know you know other different plasmas and basically it kind of it just they faded out and they hadn't thought about them in at least two years or something so it's crazy how things how things change yeah i think he's kind of uh you know out of crypto now as far as i understand because i tried to reach out to him of course but he's very difficult to google because i mean obviously thomas greco is probably not a real name so i mean yeah i actually tried and uh i failed but then i'm also not a professional fact checker yeah the the other thing about these

people is just one of much like so like thomas and wendell is that they're you know i know endo a little bit and like he's like super privacy like privacy minded like i once i once you know talked to him i think it was in progress something and i was like i was trying to meet with him and you know he doesn't have a phone or he only uses encrypted email and i think what he said to me was like i just walk i just walk around life living like it's the 80s right so if like i have to meet someone we give a meeting point and we meet there and if you're not there then it's like too bad you know yeah yeah i also try to reach out to wendell i did not did not manage to get through to him or or if i did he didn't respond

yeah wendell if you're out there i'd love to love the chat sometimes so reach out if you zoom out now so obviously we kind of know that kind of things took a turn for the better and basically the the theorem foundation is now um a lot cleaner than it used to be but if you look at the mess that the first couple of years were with with ming who i will spoil this now who was the other person who misrepresented her educational credentials um and i mean she was i mean she was clearly incompetent and at least incompetent i'm not i'm not going to go as far as kind of in attributing malicious intent to her

but i mean clearly she was not a good person to um run the foundation um what do you think do you think we would be um at a different point now had the foundation early on been more together because i mean now basically it's it's it's um i i totally see how it was a disadvantage years ago i mean the the constant insecurity and funding and yeah so basically i mean obviously that was a complete mess but now arguably it's quite good for the ethereum ecosystem that there's no one central force at the center of it right yeah um so one thing actually that i

don't know if i totally agree with you on is when you said that she was totally incompetent definitely people credited her with cutting the budget early on which is what you know kind of helped them live through that period when uh when it was like lean times um but for sure i think her usefulness was was pretty limited maybe to just a certain time period because i do think that the problems with her began to outweigh um whatever benefit she was bringing like pretty quickly um but you know it's so hard to run the experiment again in my head of you know what would it be like if um there had been a

more competent executive director um you know one thing i will say is that like again it goes back to vitalik's judgment around people you know he kind of quickly distrusted this like professional board that they had hired but you know i've spoken to those people and actually i think their hearts were in a good place and i think that they probably were pretty smart and actually competent and they sort of identified some of the problems but you know for whatever reason vitalik didn't trust them part of it frankly was that ming was sowing seeds of doubt about them and his ear um you know which they sort of suspected but then actually vitalik you know said to me like oh yeah you know she was

telling me blah blah blah so he confirmed that um but you know whether or not ethereum would be even more dominant now than it is i mean that's that you know like people have been asking me in these interviews if i think that all the stuff that i uncovered detracts from ethereum in any way and like personally i don't i feel like okay clearly it succeeded despite all the drama and the messiness and whatever um you know do i think that because all this happened that it means like ethereum won't be successful or isn't successful like no i mean it's definitely successful there's no question i'm you know when you see that electric capital report that they issue

every year and it's like ethereum far away has the most developers it's something like 4x the number of the second largest ecosystem they're bringing in 20 of all new developers to crypto every month i mean like like no other blockchain can claim that not even bitcoin and bitcoin obviously just the asset itself is like so much more successful even than ethereum and has like you know greater um brand recognition and liquidity and whatever but still despite all that the developer activity in ethereum just like blows every other crypto out of the water so no i don't actually think that um any of this that i uncovered means anything negative about the technology itself

frankly that's just my opinion so how important do you feel vitalik is now to um kind of the direction setting the direction and setting vision for ethereum like you know through your reporting how has his role evolved and like what is it now and i think i think one of the things i was wondering when reading this is well one i i'd love to have at some point like someone write a biography um a vitality butter in biography uh but you know what what's his where do you think he's at like in his life right now like or you know where does he want to go

yeah it's kind of a nebulous question but like is he good yeah yeah i haven't reported on this latest period but um just from random things that he said i think that he's kind of struggling a little bit with this level of fame that he has now you know i think that that's probably a little bit challenging for somebody with his personality in particular you know i mean he his heart really is in more like the research and that kind of thing and so to have people come up to him on the street i want a photo or to you know kind of i mean you know he's famous so um he just gets a lot of human interaction that he probably isn't too excited about

um i think he you know he's here here's the thing about vitalik like despite all his like social awkwardness whatever like he's he's a pretty mature person you know what i mean um like some of the other co-founders even though they're older and they were able to manipulate him at that young age there's something about them where because of sort of how greedy they are and like self-interested there's something that just seems less mature about them whereas vitalik okay yeah he didn't maybe have all the interpersonal skills at that young age but he had sort of a level of wisdom about you know what should the purpose of this

blockchain be like a kind of an understanding of like how could be used in a very idealistic way to benefit a great number of people and not just himself and that really is like a more wise and um yeah it's just like a more mature perspective than some of the other people that were like oh like i'm gonna make a lot of money off this you know which was the perspective of frankly like older people than him that were some of the co-founders so um you know i do think that yeah he's grown uh in that interpersonal way um but yeah he he like there's something about him he's just i feel like probably in his heart he's more like a monk and a researcher like a scientist than he is

yeah you know this person who uh feels comfortable with this level of fame um but you know i i can't claim to have reported a lot in his current life or anything like that um we were just interacting a lot during that period but um you know for sure uh i would say that even just for the years that i covered 2013 to 2018 he changed so much in that time and people will read about it in the book and i'm just certain that he's even more mature now so you know having interviewed him a few times and interacted with him over the years i think like that's the thing that i've always been so impressed with is that this this guy who's like

10 or 12 years younger than me and yeah has a level of maturity uh that you know i've like rarely seen in in people that age and and and just also the the the amount of change that he's gone through in terms of you know like his social social interactions being comfortable in situations and like that perhaps are you know very difficult for him and he's just like he's such a he has a way of expressing himself that it's so clear and that you know is rare and um yeah yeah and so let me actually just say one additional thing about his level of maturity which is that most people if they became that successful and famous they would become kind of arrogant they

would let some of it go to their head vitalik remains like a humble person super humble yeah and his heart is in the right place he he's just that's what i mean when i say that he has a certain level of maturity like despite all the issues with like his inability to to you know kind of uh yeah assert himself with interpersonal relationships he just has this like other level of wisdom like yeah okay maybe it doesn't apply in social situations but like the core of his being i feel like is definitely more mature and evolved than like i said these other co-founders that were a lot older than he was so so so this is the part of the credits where uh

you know the part of the show where you're all the credits and it's like at the end of the documentary or at the end of the thing where you have like all the names of the people like what they're doing now um so uh um so yeah what's uh like where are uh you know people like stefan tual and anthony diorio and ming and um you know some of the characters that have kind of faded out of the of the space a little bit so anthony announced that he was leaving crypto last summer this happened roughly a month after we finished the fact checking for the book and um you probably read in the book he didn't react very well to finding out kind of what people were saying about

him i didn't know if that had anything to do with it or not um he said he's going to focus on philanthropic things and um ming i'm not sure she obviously um was fired slash left the ethereum foundation and um her linkedin just says she's the former executive director of the ethereum foundation and i um you know had minimal uh interaction with her she only emailed me once just to say that that time was not a good time for the interview but even though i continued to email her um for more than a year uh requesting an interview i didn't get a response except for one response that people will read

about in the book which was kind of crazy but uh anyway so uh who else did you ask me about there was something oh stephan twall um he is working on another venture um which i'm just blanking on the name of it i feel like it has something to do with film or i don't remember it's not in crypto i do know that um but you know i think he's yeah just kind of moved on and is doing other things um i do know he's also had kind of uh you know just other things that have kind of had to take a big focus in his life and so i think for a while he wasn't too focused on work um but yeah i mean there's so you know one

other person i just want to mention is jeff vilca or jeff wilkie we would say in english who um created the go ethereum client uh he was one of the three original coders him gavin and jeff you know architected ethereum and um he left crypto i chronicle that in the book and he's working on some like new game with his brother and uh i think he's frankly uh yeah i don't think he pays attention to crypto at all anymore which is kind of fascinating so but yeah there's there's a lot of yeah there's too many characters there was also this list of like icos at some point that you mentioned in the book it's like civic and block mason and ether party and all these things like

none of these things exist anymore except maybe for civic it's um it's quite telling about how fast things uh move in this space yeah no the whole the whole thing at the end with the icos was i mean we all lived through that right and it was kind of hard to capture in the book the only way i could do it was through taylor monahan because since she was at my ether while she was sort of in the middle of it but like to jump from each one of them it would would have been too confusing for people um but yeah i almost feel like it's just too hard to kind of capture the enormity of it i tried my best but um yeah that's just like this crazy phase where yeah uh it all just sort of blows up but it's really hard to capture through like

a personal story yeah i mean even as someone who kind of lived through it um it seems surreal now um so laura i mean now that you've kind of birthed this book um what's next for you so i mean i i i mean you said earlier that you had uh a year where you have five where you had five social outings and two were forgetting the vaccine so i assume this has changed again i hope this has changed again i mean kind of i let's just say ever since the book came out i have been so busy in a way that i did not anticipate my i i get

just a flood of um emails and messages and requests and i it i'm i definitely need to hire more people um it's definitely getting like like i just cannot keep up right now um but in terms of what i'm working on um i i do have something cool uh but i am not ready to announce it yet um i'm very excited to announce it though because i think it'll be fun i think people will really like it and um let's just say that working on this book was the most fun i ever had professionally so i will definitely be doing another book i just loved doing it so much um but in general this kind of um this kind of storytelling you know

where you can kind of like really dive into the story into the people into you know just like yeah telling it like a story that is so fun for me i love it so i will be doing more of that in various mediums let's just put it that way and um yeah i will keep you all posted on my twitter my newsletter you know et cetera et cetera i would love to i would love for you to do a book about like uh cosmos and the implosion of tendermint and uh all the drama that happened oh okay that's my personal preference i will have to look into that yeah yeah uh cool well it's it's really great to have you on finally and um yeah good good luck with everything and and uh we'll keep following your podcast

and and uh your your great work thank you thanks so much for having me on the show thank you for making the time oh yeah this is this was incredibly fun i just really enjoyed chatting with you both