Live Interview: Marius van der Wijden and Sara Polak

Transcript

foreign that was Thor thank you very much for that we're now going to do something a bit new for this event which is we're going to switch across the live stream to a live interview with Marius Van Der viden from the Geth team uh he's doing a lot of the work around testing the merge right now hopefully if it works properly then that live stream interview will be shown in here so feel free to stay and watch this but without further Ado I'll pass over and hopefully the switching will work so that we will move to the live stream interview with Marius Van Der viden

being interviewed by Sarah thank you very much yeah I know oh are we live oh we're live fantastic thank you so much I thought we were doing a test and there you go that's how technology works when it's actually real real time uh it's really nice to meet you everyone my name is Sarah I'll be doing my best to make these interviews and live streams not sound like a I'm just selling jewelry at a tele shopping conference but um really welcome everyone to eat Prague um we have a solar Punk theme this year which is basically cyberpunk's more optimistic more ecological and more friendly and Greener kind of little brother um I've got however here Marius from uh ethereum foundation and Marius my first question would be you've got the testing

the merge um hashtag on your T-shirt which looks like good swag um how does that connect to the solar Punk theme I'm curious hey hey hey everyone uh thank you uh for having me um yeah so right now we're we're changing the uh algorithm uh the proof of work algorithm the consensus algorithm of ethereum to be more energy efficient and more environmentally friendly and I think that's it's a big issue right now and I think it stops a lot of adoption because people still um when they think about cryptocurrencies they always think about the energy consumption of it and if we

can get rid of most of that um then it would be really nice and I think it would uh it fits right in with the solar punks uh trying to make the world a better place and trying to make the world a Greener place also nice um one of the things that we want to do here is kind of uh divorce from the nation state because that's not always done well it's never done exceptionally um efficiently and we've got on one hand Greta tunberg kind of traveling the globe and telling everyone about saving polar bears but the other thing is the demonization of cryptocurrencies because of the um energy consumption so how do you feel it fits into the general climate narrative and what is the technology going to look like as well you're making it more efficient

yeah so the big energy in in cryptocurrencies is spent on making sure like limiting the set of participants that can propose a block and limiting the tax service that someone can do and [Music] um so if we change it so right now we're basically we're just wasting energy so the proof of work is actually more proof of waste we're wasting energy to make sure that we wasted something that we put some capital in um and we bought a mining Hardware we bought energy and we put Capital to work

and but we can also just lock up capital and that's the proof of stake basically everyone goes ahead locks up capital and by this um they can they get to vote on the next blocks and so it's uh way more efficient than proof of proof of work roughly 99.95 and so the energy consumption of ethereum ethereum will go down from the energy used by a small country like like Ireland down to the energy used by a couple of thousand people and so that's

I think it's a great step in the right direction nice I love it by the way ladies and gentlemen this is like the best workout for actually holding the microphone in place I need to go to the gym more um but one last question which is dreaded by anyone working in Tech when can we expect this deployment that that that's a great question usually in in ethereum it's always phrased a bit differently it's always uh when merged uh that's the that's the big question um we started the first test net actually two or three days ago here in Prague we merged the first test net Robson everything went extremely well and so we have two more test Nets that we want to go through

um so we've been testing for the last half roughly half a year and after the last two test Nets then we will go to mainnet if nothing breaks on the like nothing significant breaks on the test Nets so we should be looking at a timeline roughly like early biggest earliest roughly around August maybe one or two months later depending on the circumstances so it's it's coming it's near and it's time to get excited about it yeah you you heard it here first ladies and gentlemen time to get excited about it and if you want something out about it the climate don't necessarily rely on institutions but rely on awesome people like Marius and his team here to actually like make the world a better

place and make it a little bit more solar Punk although I've got steampunk glasses on I solar Punk is very much my jam um so thank you so much we will be seeing you oh we can keep going apparently see well we're testing it out apparently we've got time I'm always stressed about time immensely um so actually if you could tell me a little bit more about the team that you're in as well because that was my kind of backup question that I was excited about as well so how does it work within the ethereum foundation yeah so the the ethereum foundation itself also has the like it also likes to be decentralized in a in a way it also likes to live what it preaches and So within the ethereum foundation you have a lot of different small teams that organize themselves and

I'm in the go ethereum team we uh we we make the the go ethereum we developed the go ethereum client which is basically the software that um that does the whole network so basically when you when you send a transaction you send it to a node and this node distributes your transaction throughout the whole network uh the people in the network will will verify your transaction that you have enough funds that you that you like can pay for the transaction and then they will mine it into a block and this block will get sent to the network verified everything and all of this is done by by full nodes and go ethereum is

one of the full node implementations um but there are like a couple of others and you should also run them because right now co-etherium is is used by most of the people but they are really good other implementations out there that should be run by more people so if you're a Staker out there and you're looking to upgrade your setup for the merge then go run a minority client like nevermind and piso air Oregon they're really good they're really great clients and we're happy to have them and yeah that nice and unfortunately for the stage manager they encouraged me that I can

like keep talking so I'm going to do that um I've got a bit of a philosophical question um when policy is made in terms of like to make a better Society to kind of move forward usually like the nation states put together you know something and then that's executed how is this a decision making and this policy making done somewhere as decentralized as ethereum Foundation because you don't want to replicate the same hierarchy in terms of like giving like things to do but at the same time you want to move stuff forward so how's that balance yeah it's it's not easy it's not easy in a decentralized way um so the idea for the network to switch to proof of stake was already there from the beginning and it was always um the the idea to to do it at some

point and it took way longer than anticipated uh to actually implement the stuff and make sure it's secure and um so uh yeah like it's not easy basically we're changing the the the motor of a of a running engine uh the engine of of a running car uh going down the highway and um so yeah it's not easy and um like the decision like the decision uh what happens with the network is not done by the ethereum foundation but it's done by the community and done by the the different client implementations some of one of which US was run by the by the fun like is funded by the

foundation others are their own companies and so it's always a uh it's it's it's always a lot of discussions we have a pretty like decentralized process we meet every two weeks to discuss uh General directions and and stuff like that so that's why it's it's it's decentralized in a way and that's why it takes so long uh but it also prevents um players from like capturing the governance and I think that's that's that's really great it's pretty grassroot yes yes that's awesome I I think that it um takes um maybe long in

your world but it's probably still quicker than like the Paris climate agreement or something um uh ladies and gentlemen this was an amazing talk um and I've got one last question before we leave what what are you most looking forward to at eat Prague what's like the Highlight that you think yep I gotta do that or something that you want to get out of this conference oh it's it's great here like I really enjoy it um just uh I really enjoy going to hackathons just a general feeling ethereum hackathons it's always it's always really there's so much like Flavor in it it's it's just great and they they did a they did a great job just this venue is incredible so if you if you're able to

make it here it's great and the food is great and um there's so much like there's so much power here and you feel it and everyone everyone you talk to um I I really like that I'm I'm also participating in the hackathon so uh one thing that we that there's an update coming up soon after the merge and um we're we're building some prototypes for that and uh yeah we're we're hacking on that I'm really looking forward to to doing that um we will probably not be participating in the in the real hackathon but like

just doing it on the side being part of this community is uh is in is incredibly nice awesome thank you I mean you can really have had a better sales page for eat Prague here at parallel police um in Prague um and if you also want a power to the people but without the 100 million dead from communism then this is definitely the place for you to be and try hack some stuff and thank you so much that you're doing something very actively for climate change and preserving power and making sure that you're much more efficient without any kind of dictat from the top you kick ass Marius so thank you so much for being here with me thank you thank you so much for having me and uh have fun with a with a live stream I think there's a bunch of really great talks coming up

today and tomorrow a bunch of my colleagues also are talking about stuff and thank you for having me thank you and we'll have a lot of fun with that live stream so we'll see you tomorrow with a little bit more there's also two pre-recorded things going out today which you definitely should keep your eyes peeled out for and if you can make it please make it and otherwise we'll see you online and thank you so much take care bye together