MERGED with Tim Beiko & Danny Ryan

Transcript

hey bankless Nation welcome to another state of the nation episode where we talk about something big that's just happened get into the details of it and David what could be bigger than the ethereum merge five days ago proof of work was abandoned proof of stake executed implemented we merged the proof of work chain and the proof of stake chain and we're here to talk about it this is kind of a post-game show I think who do we have on what are we covering today uh of course none other than Danny Ryan and Tim Baco the two lead coordinators of this whole entire merge effort uh who have been just shepherding the many parts of ethereum to get this

done and there are many parts of ethereum so this coordination effort was no small feat and so these people have been Danny and Tim have been at the spearhead of this whole coordination effort and so we're just going to talk about what are they feeling right now post merge like and also what are they going to do next when they have been thinking merge proof of stake Beacon chain for the last you know over a year now what's on the horizon and also what drink did they drink after after they merged so all of these super important questions and more uh when we finally get to uh Tim and Danny yeah these are the important questions I think David um and uh in addition to that I think we want to ask what the future of ethereum is so this is a major Milestone and now

it's in the rearview mirror where do we go next is the question I actually think one of those areas we go next is we need to work on decentralizing our staking providers in particular our staking pools I wanted to give a shout out to our friends and sponsors at swellnetwork they are a staking application similar in some respects to Rocket pool and Lido with some differences though David what is a swell Network and what can folks do if they're interested in decentralizing uh staking pools with this new critical yeah swell has joined the ranks of Lido and Rocket pool to be a decentralized staking as a service provider slash Dao it's like

Lido in that it's got a permissioned validator set that the Dow approves or bumps out but it's also like rocket pool in that it has a permissionless validator set that you can join if you put up a bond so trying to do the best of both worlds in these uh swell network is just getting started so if you want to be on the ground floor of something you can go and click a link in the Discord Discord and as a disclaimer you can see that Ryan and I are also Angel Investors so they both sponsored this message and also Ryan and I are Angel Investors into swell make sure you check out that Discord an opportunity to get on the ground of floor of something new so David gotta ask you the question but I think it's pretty obvious of the state of the nation is today what is the state

of the nation though David oh Ryan the state of the nation is merged importantly past tense uh the state of the nation is also proof of stake as in much of the uh defy economy was previously proof of work and is now proof of stake uh so Ryan the state of the nation has merged with the future merged with proof of stake overall just merged in general uh yeah there we go how'd you like that one I I I love it it's music to my ears and we are going to be right back with two of the individuals instrumental in making this happen Tim beco and Danny Ryan but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible lens protocol is an open source Tech stack for building decentralized social media applications it is the new era for

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media handle that you'll ever need to create so in order to get started there is a secret code word in the show notes enter that code word in the Google form links and you'll be well on your way to entering the world of web3 social rocketpool is your decentralized ethereum staking protocol you can stake your East in rocketpool and get our eth in return allowing you to stake your eth and use it in defy at the same time you can get four percent on your eat by staking it with rocket pool but you can get even more by running a node rocketpool is the only staking provider that allows anyone to permissionlessly join their network of validating ethereum nodes setting up your rocket pool node is easier than running a node solo and you only need 6p to get started you're getting an extra 15 staking

Commission on the pooled Eid that uses your node to stake you'll also get RPL token rewards on top so if your bullish e-staking you can boost your yield by adding your node to the decentralized rocket pull Network which currently has over 1 000 independent node operators it's yield farming but with ethereum out you can get started at rocketpool.net and you can also join the rocketpool community in their Discord you can find me hanging out there sometimes in the chat so I'll see you there Arboretum is an ethereum layer 2 scaling solution that is going to completely change how we use D5 and nfts some of the coolest new nft collections have chosen Arboretum as their home while D5 protocols continue to see increased liquidity in usage you can now Bridge straight into arbitrum for more than 10 different exchanges including Finance FTX huobi and crypto.com once on

Arboretum you'll enjoy fast transactions with cheap fees allowing you to explore New Frontiers of the crypto Universe new to Arbitron for a limited time you can get arbitrum nfts designed by the famous artist ratwell and sugoi for joining the arbitrub Odyssey The Odyssey is an eight week long event where you can play on-chain activities and receive a free nft as a reward find out more by visiting the Discord at discord.gg arbitrum you can also Bridge your assets to arbitrum at bridge.arbitrum.io and access all of arbitrum's apps at portal.arbatrum.1 in order to experience defy and nfts the way it was always meant to be fast cheap secure and fiction free bankless Nation we are excited to introduce you yet again to Tim Bako and Danny Ryan these are two of ethereum's

lead coordinators they've helped Shepherd the ethereum foundation and ethereum itself into the future including implementing most recently the ethereum merge Danny Tim welcome to bankless how are you guys feeling yes yeah thanks for having us pretty good uh honestly I had an inclination huge relief uh very exciting um you know this culmination of quite a bit of work from quite a bit of people so and it it went well I would say I think uh going going well might be sort of uh an understatement in some ways because this thing was like smooth as

butter and I'm wondering if that was kind of like what you anticipated I'm sure it was what you hoped for that was on the optimistic side of things but um did you think it would go as well as it seemed to go Danny first I thought it could go as well as it went um I thought there was you know a non-trivial chance that a a client of moderate use would have had more substantial error where you know there's a bit of scrambling maybe a quick release or maybe like telling 10 the network you have to restart your node or something like that but uh the fact that you know I think we saw like a four percent drop I think we saw some intermittent uh node failures on one

client that a few people did have to restart their nodes but just like it was very it was it was a dream yeah Tim how did you hear about this was it a dream yeah it was like I you know historically when we have an upgrade I have to do something in the next couple hours whether that's reaching out to some operator or client team like you know I I didn't expect the network to go down I was incredibly confident we like finalized and all of that but I expected that somebody somewhere would have forgotten something quite important and like we'd have to reach out to them and you know coordinate and that didn't happen which was kind of wild like that he said you know there were some minor

issues but like even that four percent drop I think in a matter of hours it was back uh and potentially less than that so um yeah I I don't think he could have gone much better as it went pretty much better than like most of even the shadow forks and whatnot that we did so um I think we've had like one or two Shadow forks go similarly as well yeah you know and and ones later in the process but just like we've had plenty of times we were like oh 20 networks off the Network's fine it has a whole but like we need to we need to go triage an issue but we didn't have that yeah so one of my questions was going to be what did you think you would be doing immediately post merge versus what you

were actually doing so Tim it sounds like you were about to be you know picking up the phone calling a particular like client team perhaps we're messaging them and saying hey this thing's going wrong we have to troubleshoot this but instead uh you were just watching the merge and nothing nothing going wrong I guess how long did that take to set in before you realize like wait we had a you know a perfect merge how long until like were you in disbelief like what was going through your head at the time so we we kind of knew as soon as we finalized and even before we finalized so there were some people from the research team who were looking at the other stations kind of piling up on the epoch so before it had officially

finalized we sort of knew we were good that was that was like a a pretty big relief um yeah each block like so you see the first block and and then there's slots Right Slots are kind of the ticking of time every 12 seconds and um you can have a block or you cannot have a block at each slot and so we had a block and then we had a block and then we had a block and then we had a block and like every every slot that ticked by that we had a block and we had no Mis missed slot you know it was an indicator that like the Network's online Network's very healthy and like this thing's going through so like iteratively through the course of like 20 minutes as we're waiting for finality I think we're just more and more like okay just working

it's still working and it's still working I think we missed maybe one slot maybe two slots between the beginning of the merge and finality um you know and it was only like on the 30 puck or something which is normal if you have you know 95 to 99 online uh it was just like kind of shocking so we're talking within minutes you guys realize that the merge is going to be perfect or not perfect but as good as one could hope iteratively you know iterative knowledge um until that finality point you know but it was looking pretty good and so where were you two uh were you were you but uh I know Danny you were at the EF office uh in Colorado because I saw a picture of you there Tim oh you were

also there Tim you guys were right next to each other weren't you yes I flew into Colorado for this yep it turns out it's hard to plan a party around a total difficulty yeah yeah I can relate we're like is this gonna be a breakfast party maybe a lunch a luncheon um and then at some point we're like it's gonna okay we can have dinner and it's gonna be at 8pm and then end up at 12 30 a.m so we're just like we ended up it's kind of this funny time in between uh everyone Gathering and like waiting it's like a lot of like so it's coming everyone's like refreshing everyone there's like there was a wager pool on uh when it precisely it was gonna happen people were playing Super Nintendo you know

um I had like my my iPhone had 20 different bordell tabs open like you know how you can go in this like Safari view of all your perhaps I would just scroll up and it would just be like bordels everywhere um yeah so that's what I did all day I know vitalik said he was um he was surprised like you know kind of the the merch date didn't oscillate as much oh my God people expected were you guys surprised by this yeah I mean we did this better than a proof of work hard Fork like the timing the the the timing when we hit it was like closer than we usually get I mean it was what it was just a few hours off of the total predicted time right yeah and I think we got six UTC so we got

like six hours from what we make what we ate um yeah that was that was as good as it could have gone as well but Tim you mentioned vitalik during this interim between 8 pm and like 12 30 when we were waiting uh you made it you made a beverage right um because I wanted you know by 8pm I wanted to drink uh but I don't want to like be drunk if the merch was happening at 2AM yeah I didn't want to fall asleep either so like the vitalik was actually perfect for this because you had a little bit of red wine some caffeinated green tea um so it kept me awake and going all the

way until the merch hit and um what's the vitalik ratio is that 85 percent uh green tea and 15 am I remembering that correctly correct you have to get that ratio correct or else yeah 84 16. okay yeah so I have to ask how how was it was it was all right yeah I feel like it tastes a bit like cranberry juice um that's like the closest I would I would put it um yeah and so what what was the atmosphere like when when it happened of course I I think a lot of people listening uh to bankless right now maybe they have seen clips from the live stream the moment

the merge happened uh maybe they were even actually up and and present for it what was what was the feeling I guess you were you guys were in the ethereum office what uh what was there like shouts was there high fives like how excited were people or is it was it pretty chill like you know there's a Dev group and like just silent nodding and big smiles like what was the reaction to all of this and you want to go yeah yeah um exciting you know everyone yelled pandas because we all saw pandas on our on our logs and then uh a bit of like anxiety as we as as it it uh approached finality I wanted to pop champagne after the

pandas had happened and everyone's like no you can't pop champagne until finality um but once you know call it 18 minutes in 15 minutes and uh finality happened champagne popped lots of hugs lots of excitement and sharing um it was it was an emotional release for for a lot of us you know I think people a lot of people in that room have been working on or at least following this thing for many years somewhere between two and five years and so to see it come together definitely emotional emotional experience I set up till 4am and I usually go to bed at like 9 30. so that speaks world so it's the importance yeah yeah no yeah no the atmosphere was

was great and I mean the fact also that it went so well I was sort of expecting people to kind of be partying but things not to be perfect so I would be like you know going back to work on my computer somewhere like reaching out to that staking pool or you know that forgot to update or something uh no so like I got to eat cake and like drink the champagne with everyone which is nice um and it was just a lot like it was kind of surreal that like you know it just happened on mainnet like you kind of see it happen so many times on Shadow forks and whatnot and the graphs all look the same right it's like it's all it's all this it's literally the same thing that happens over and over but to think like oh man like this is mainnet right like it that

was that was pretty wild do you guys have any like any you know family or friends like your in real life friends that uh that you could share this Victory with like so so for me right it's um a whole bunch of my internet friends my ethereum friends and they're just as excited as as I was the merch happened and like get to share that Victory with them obviously but then I go to you know real life in this like you know it's like that Meme and you're the guy in the corner of the party no nobody knows the merge just happened right with my wife the next day I said that to her I said I feel like the guy I think was this Danny I mean we were joking before we uh we started recording

that um the merge may have single-handedly in one night reduced Global electricity consumption by 0.2 percent like that happened this looks like a big deal it's like you know Norway or or Chile or something yeah yeah it actually was this moment where at least because that you know I think my my parents and others they like kind of know what I do it's not very clear than what I do um but they've definitely seen some of like the the energy uh narrative over the past couple years as nfts became more in the mainstream I think uh that became fodder for some of the mainstream media uh like my dad always says like

Bill Maher like is who talk show Person uh just shits on on crypto because of the energy it's all about the energy my dad's like so this is like this is a big deal this is like a game changer right because because Bill Maher can't [ __ ] on this anymore I think I think so that's right though yeah yeah no I know so it's it's it is cool like they they had some context I think they know I very much believe in this stuff but also like uh had seen some of the mainstream media criticisms of the it it it it it came together to a certain extent my sister actually was nearer she joined um the party which was cool I think she just got to see a one she thought it was

going to happen at eight and then ended up staying until 12 30 in the morning um on a weeknight but she got to see just some of the energy and see like how meaningful it is to this little sub Community um so it was cool to get a glimpse there too Tim how about you did you get any texts from family friends you know celebrating this with you or they just have no idea like what you do no my friends definitely follow it like they're not like into crypto you know they might hold eth or whatever but they're not like you know LPA I'll give you swap or stuff like that so they they all thought it was it was pretty cool my dad texted you was like wow if this went well why did the price go down yeah so um also I need colder but not uh far

beyond that um yeah and I think you know have this I think it was kind of nice how a lot of the mainstream media actually covered the merch like I think it is one of the cases where things at least I I don't read everything but like the stuff I saw was like pretty fair um so I felt like I don't know people around me who like sort of follow crypto you know they read like New York Times or whatever articles about crypto or like Bloomberg um it seemed like they had like a decent picture of what was about to happen and the impact um and so yeah that I think that that made it easier like I didn't have to go and explain all this to them they're like okay this is switching off um seems good uh seems risky but if it

works you know it would be it would be a nice thing um but that was quite neat yeah I definitely every time I spoke with someone from mainstream media leading up uh they clearly playing into the risky part like they were clearly looking for people to talk about how risky it was and how crazy it was and they were always trying to get me to validate like is this actually like changing the motor of a plane I'm like yeah it's gonna be fine so how did it feel to remove point two percent of global energy uh consumption because I feel like if I was one of you two I'd be like nice I did that I guess I helped very important I think to contextualize it though it's if if the

eighth price 10x it wouldn't be 0.2 percent right it'd be like two percent the new equilibrium so it's not just removing like an absolute number today but like removing this kind of Insidious growth that was coupled with the platform that we want to reach like massive Global adoption right so it's not even just what it does for today but what it does in the event that ethereum becomes what we wanted to be well you know what it does for that future and that felt pretty good it felt pretty good I will I will caveat this a little bit so we remove it's like this energy still exists in the world but it's like the world ethereum can exist in the world without requiring that energy right um so I kind of feel good it you know I I feel the good that we can keep doing

our staying here and not have like the disproportionate impact um but yeah I also I'm always skeptical when people like push that too far and to a certain extent I mean like obviously you can use free energy that maybe wasn't being used in some mining but you're also putting Demand on it which is either going to increase the supply or uh increase the price for others that are trying to get back you know act in that supply and I think the growth rate like you said is like the the part for me that like is the hardest to convey like oh there's all these articles you know I was saying like uh ethereums reduces its energy impact by 99 99.5 99.9 and it's almost like those articles are

understated yet because like you're making a point yeah you take the point where we're at today and the consumption today and sure you can like get a number even though there's very wide error bars but it's like 10 years from now that number would maybe be 10x bigger and then you know even though looking at the energy impact of proof of stake is kind of a weird thing to do we also benefit from like growth in the opposite directions like if computers get better if chips get better like then ethereum takes less energy to run right because it just uses computers now um so I think that is like a a really neat thing it's like we yeah and this this platform that we rely upon the price of the asset for security like we no longer have a linear relationship

between that thing that we rely on and energy consumption of the platform yeah plain and simple it's very very very very very important um I I just don't think that over like a 10-year time Horizon that there's going to be much social and political appetite for something that has that type of relationship so we can be very much more excited about you know price increases without all of the baggage that was kind of lingering right the the sort of the narrative baggage but also the the real baggage of um inefficient energy is yeah yeah I mean I also just as we saw with one of the first applications to be adopted outside of like our immediate community nfts and art use cases like you know even it's very the farther you

are from like the understanding of like how these mechanisms work the more you're just like why the hell are we bringing all this energy this makes no sense you know it's just it was not going to adoption I don't think could be adopted uh Mass adoption of that Paradigm and as you said Danny like as if ether 10xed in price that would actually have been two percent uh of energy Global energy uh consumption you know in theory um but then if we if we eliminated it then it would have really just been another nine on the other side of the decimal in like how much energy we reduced so like what does it really mean to the average person to reduce energy by 99.95 versus 99.995 like it's still the same level of like impressiveness and kind of like loses a little bit of the point and I

think you know bankless listeners in the broader ethereum Community we all kind of know like why we did the merge you know it's it's a more secure consensus mechanism we're reducing energy consumption so like we know what it means from an ethereum for ethereum at a pretty a concrete level but I want to ask you guys what you think that it means for ethereum in a in a more broad sense like what else does it mean for ethereum and I remember vitalik on the uh on the live stream he said these are the first steps towards ethereum becoming a very mature system so just want to appear in your guys's heads like what do you think he meant by that and what does the current state of ethereum mean inside of its own trajectory and aspirations to fill its own shoes um Tim I'll start with you

I'll leave the technical road map to Danny stuff because um I think he has some interesting perspective on it um I think one thing that like the merge you know beyond like moving the proof of stake and and like reducing the energy impact I think one thing that I am really excited about is like it shows we can ship complicated things I've grown like much more excited about this over the past two three years like it felt like ethereum launching was like incredibly ambitious um and then we had like a a couple years where we weren't shipping that much on chain um there was a ton happening you know within client teams a ton of research happening but like I was kind of concerned like will we be able to ship like complex things or are we just going to make these small incremental changes

to ethereum um and then you know we launched the beacon chain which was wild um and I think it but but we did that separate from like the applications um and then 1559 I think was also kind of neat because it showed it was the first time since we launched ethereum that we changed like the format of the network and not just like adding new things into evm or whatnot that's with these like flexible blocks and stuff like that um it was kind of neat and then the merge is just like 10x you know 100x bigger than that but it's like we're shipping this insanely complicated transition across all of these client teams which all have to work together smoothly behind the scenes with no down time um and we did it and we did it you know obviously it took a while but like when

you think that within like 13 months we went from Shipping like EIP 1559 to the merge um it's not like that long you know uh in hindsight so I'm really excited it shows like we can ship like really complicated things um engineering wise um both from like a coordination point of view from obviously like the implementation point of view but also like from getting the community to run this um not that we shouldn't like try to minimize complexity across all of those things but you know if we want to get through this entire vitalik world map diagram um there will be more complicated things to ship and I'm I'm much more optimistic than I was say like three years ago that like we can ship off that and the merch was like a huge bump on that front yeah to be fair

You could argue we've been attempting to ship the merge since 2018 with the beacon chain if you actually Encompass that complexity into this right so like which but the fact that for the past year that the complexity of the merge has not been writing the beacon chain for all these execution layer clients it's just been like the plugging together you know I think that the modularization here is also gives us very much gains in terms of scaling out teams resources and software um yeah and Tim you you touched on that subject but ethereum previously previously it's actually gonna be my question uh has this branding of like oh ethereum doesn't chip it's full of promises it's got a bunch of ideas uh but it doesn't actually follow through

on them how much like I mean I'm talking to the person that is directly antagonist to this to this idea but just like do you think that that take has any weight left to it at all well I think it's wrong like and I've tweeted about this before it emerged but I think you know for what ethereum tries to do I think even from the beginning like since Genesis the execution has probably been like popped here and that like yes it was a mess but like every every company that does something complicated is a mess or like project or whatnot like it's not this is not like an ethereum thing like it's hard to do complicated things um and I think the fact that it all happens in the open makes it look much worse for ethereum like you don't see

you know what SpaceX looks like you know like but imagine you know what it must feel like to do something like like what they're doing um so I think that is like a big part of it like it it looks worse uh because it's all in the open and I think the other reason why it looks comparatively worse is there's a lot of shortcuts you can take that don't show in the short term so you can have like all these other competitors that come and like don't do the hard stuff and look like they're making more progress but imagine if you had something like you know someone doing that the SpaceX the rocket would just blow up right and actually you do kind of see that you know like there was Tesla and then there's all these like fake self-driving car companies you know who stacked right and they all had like

all these demos and whatnot and like none of them actually had like a self-driving car um and I think you kind of get a similar effect where like it's easy to like look like you're doing as good as ethereum or like your 90 of it but then it's like the equivalent of this self-driving car that was just rolling down a hill um so I think we look worse than like we are and I think even and I do think we we have improved significantly and like yeah the past like two three years it's just been wild the amount of stuff that ship um yeah you also you say people might say oh it's just ideas it's not just ideas we certainly but we certainly have more ideas than we are able to ship I mean that's just the nature of like the the vibrant research

community and either your ecosystem is like there's like new ideas every day there's new ways to think about how to solve these problems every day and like what shipping is is actually distilling those into simple you know what is what are the requisite ideas to get where you need to go how how do we simplify them as most as possible and then how do we not break this hundreds of billion dollar Network in doing so and so sure like if you're just watching the ideas you're going to be like they're never this is never going to happen they're gonna happen but that that's the point of ideas it's a point of research right and it's also kind of weighed through it all and it's a it's a really good sign if all the ideas that most of them come from like people working on ethereum

because it kind of shows you that like this is where a lot of the energy is going uh even though it looks worse from the outside because you see all these ideas that actually don't I mean the ethereum the their communities shocking intellectual Powerhouse it it we call it a kind of the intellectual gravity well of ethereum is strong and it just continues to suck people into it academics Engineers random people on the internet uh it's the force is coming for you can you can you guys talk about that for a minute so like who actually made this happen and how did it happen so I think you know so many people's experience with with

software projects if if they're kind of in the field is there's some top-down hierarchy structure right we have like agile processes of course but you know there's there's a budget and then there's you know a program and there's a set of teams even complicated projects like run like this um but it's all very well orchestrated and coordinated and kind of topped down but I don't get the impression that this was how the how the merge shipped at all and how clients are developed in ethereum at all I get the impression that it's maybe completely different and I don't know if there's an analog somewhere else in the open source world

or something like Linux for example but Danny could you talk about that because I think people are kind of wondering the core devs who are these people this is hundreds of them maybe somewhere like how are they all coordinated how does the sausage actually get made here it's hard to say even being in the middle of it um you know and there there are maybe some analogs like maybe uh some of the like engineering standards bodies that have mailing lists and like form new standards that ultimately get adopted by the internet like uh like SSL and that kind of stuff or maybe Linux maybe Linux has some parallels they have

a there's a there's a foundation they shall kind of all ship the kernel there's many different companies that work on it but ultimately there's lioness who's like the the bdfl the benevolent dictator for Life who gets to like decide what goes in and uses it for their you know the Linux foundation's political uh agenda to you know maybe if you work on the plumbing we'll put your future in the kernel um that kind of stuff so we don't it there's some parallels to stuff but I honestly do think it's like a very um unique you know in in this context in that there are like we were talking about ideas it starts with ideas starts with research starts with um people thinking about the protocol thinking about its needs thinking about the kind of the design trade-offs those

becoming uh posts sometimes becoming academic paper sometimes becoming prototypes um and ultimately becoming proposed specifications right and there's a number of places where people work on ethereum specifications just because something is a specification doesn't mean it's ever going to mean that there are probably more specifications that will never make a domain than than are um maybe maybe Tim has the answer to that one um and then ultimately there are a bunch of people that build software that runs on the ethereum network these are often what we call Core devs who is a core Dev I don't know um I think a mean might be able to be

able to answer that one for you but uh the you know there's the the protocol on the abstract and then there's people that implement the protocol and we have tons we have many many implementations of that there's two layers now the consensus layer in the execution layer there's something like five teams on each side uh maybe not all of them are production ready uh but maybe five four um and these people kind of through asynchronous processes around the EIP repo and other specification repos uh through magicians forum and also through some synchronous processes on our all core devs calling because that's a seller call hash out kind of the importance of one that kind of technically that a lot

of these specifications and then try to figure out an optimal configuration of how to bring them to mainnet um you know balancing what are the most critical things often security bubbles up as like a very very very critical thing you know without security this thing doesn't exist and then there's but then there's other things like nice to have features like those might get less prioritized but sometimes they do make it into into this process and so it's kind of like amorphous process amongst um sophistication writers researchers prototypers and these client developers um to figure out how to bundle specifications into Network upgrades often called Forks and uh and ship it

um the process of shipping it is is also very complicated the amount of testing um testing security analysis and all that goes into that is is pretty massive too and happens also like a very distributed fashion but Danny what I'm curious about is you know so you're a lead organizer here and you're kind of also like I don't entirely know how it organizes it's it's like somewhat it's like some kind of chaotic uh organization type structure like so so and I would contrast that you know Tim was talking about we've entered a new era for ethereum this is the ethereum can ship era we've just proved it we have three recent proof points ethereum didn't always have that reputation I hearkened back to like 2018 2019 when it felt like

the project was almost like stalling out even though um you might say Danny like look research stuff was going on behind the scenes I remember a very famous and part of this maybe was the the bear Market but part of it was maybe some Truth uh famous tweet from uh Fred Wilson unisco adventures and he was like ethereum just doesn't know how to execute they have the lead and they are falling call someone call Silicon Valley but this is not how this is basically what he said because this is not how you build startups in Silicon Valley how do you build startups well you have startup organization you ship fast you break things of course we'll adopt that in the startup Mantra but you have to have governance you have to have

accountability you have to have some structure and the idea was that ethereum would just fall prey to the you know tyranny of structurelessness and it would never actually get anything done why because Silicon Valley knows how to build software we did Facebook we did Google and that who are these ethereum people trying to like make this thing happen with like what volunteers around the internet like how does this even happen okay can you it's funny because the internet actually is much more built like that obviously you know rather than these companies that were built on top of it maybe that's the parallel here is that like ethereum's not trying to be a company they're trying to be the Internet it's trying to be it motivates these people the internet like that what

motivation to get involved but this is like interesting because I think if ethereum is trying to be the internet like what a lot of these people are trying to build are like web browsers right like when you think of like a client that's effectively like a web browser for ethereum and the original parity client actually had a UI like a web browser UI uh now they've all ditched that but um and and I think that kind of gives you a good feel for like why would they do that it's like well why did the people build Chrome or Firefox or like Safari like you know different organizations want to like own access to the network like the interface you know the access on the network for a bunch of reasons like you know and and so I think you can get this mix where like you have

these organizations that are financially motivated like consensus is a company Sigma Prime is a company neither mind is a company right like they need to make money at some point somehow they don't necessarily make money on the client itself or need to ever do that but like they very much need to like survive in the long run as an organization and they I think they do provide like the people working on this are not all just like random volunteers basically like a lot of them I think do see themselves as a company as like professionals who need to ship high quality software and and that's like we get a lot of like you know let's say Fred Wilson was complaining about true death the thing we don't get is like the top-down

roadmap right like this is the other thing that's like 10x easier in a startup you just you know you have the VP of products you know talk with the CEO say okay we're going to ship these three things um and then that's done right and you know and then you can just kind of execute on them we can't do that on ethereum for like many reasons like the first is just like the people who write the code aren't the people who run the software as like with the majority of the stake or the majority of the notes on the network so it needs to be like this weird sort of conversation across all these places of like what what is the thing we're converging towards and otherwise you know client developers can write code for a bunch of stuff but if the community doesn't want to run the upgrade then

that was useless and similarly if the community might want a bunch of stuff to be possible on ethereum but if they can't convince client developers that there's there's value to it that it's uh you know that it's safe yeah safe is the big one you know usually they can't convince plan developers that it's safe um but then then the code doesn't get rented right and it doesn't go live so I think this is the part where like from the outside that's incredibly messy and even from the inside it is incredibly messy because like there's no there's no like VP of product who can be like okay we ship this thing um but in terms of the contributors themselves I do feel like most people could like be spending their time doing something else because they're smart they're motivated uh so you know they want their time working out ethereum to

be valuable and you know I think that that's creative pressure to like ship meaningful stuff um yeah so I mean there are certainly there are organizations that have structure and are able to ship but they're like a piece of the larger kind of amorphous puzzle I think um Ben Edgington referenced a was an article from I think 1999 about Linux the cathedral in the bazaar and how you know the ethereum process is much more about it is a bizarre you know it is a place where um there's lots of different Specialties lots of different things going on and like sometimes if there's something missing naturally something somebody's going to kind of show up and fill in the gaps because it's you know there's there's a motivation to kind of be a

part of this this thing I will say so you said in 2018 2019 we weren't shipping there's a Herculean efforts going on on on guests specifically I mean certainly on the beacon chain stuff like that was all being worked on but like sure the feature set that users saw being upgraded in Geth was very minimal but like the amount of uh work going on into like sustainability of that of guests in the context of mainnet like uh State Management uh State access database optimizations all that kind of stuff so that like it can't so that it can handle State growth and not be dust off the network um and optimizations in sync and other things like that like that was happening

that was very very important um critical uh but it just like it wasn't felt so I think it's important to note as client developers there's always kind of just many streams but you can think of two streams like shipping new features and maintaining the client right and like it oscillates between how much they're doing of one or the other in 2018 and 2019 there was like a lot of critical of the of the latter of that maintenance of the client and maybe that goes back to what uh Tim was saying was that you know there was a lot of shipping but uh if you tell me what an optimization optimization inside of Geth looks like Danny I have no clue what that means sure because it doesn't matter it doesn't matter to you except that like it kept the network but yeah but yeah I will notice when the network

goes down and so uh I haven't been to seeing the network go down anytime yeah but Danny I want to zoom in and just get this a little bit more concrete if we can the way I've kind of pictured you and your and your job coordinating the the arrival of the merge and proof of stake and maybe this is incorrect so we can we can start there it's like you just go to the heads of the client teams uh and maybe Tim this is also maybe your job as well you just go to the heads of the client teams and just like all right like we need to make sure that this part works with the other client teams so like you drill down into uh Prismatic and you talk to like Preston and Raul and be like hey are you guys are you guys coordinated with like the other

client teams you guys you guys all Gucci over there and so like first question is like how many if that's what you were doing like how many people were you interfacing with on like a semi-regular basis for like the months leading up to the merge like if can we actually like put that into a number and then like if that's n plus one where you are and Danny's uh Danny's and Preston Van Loon and Raul are like n plus ones as in people that Danny actually interface is with how many people are they interfacing with that are also working on the merge right like the question really is how many eth devs does it take to make a merge happen uh and like so is there is it possible to put these things into numbers so I I don't spend a lot of my time

knocking directly on doors right I actually um a lot of my time on upgrades is spent writing specifications okay and uh communicating and educating and coordinating around those so like and then dealing with the feedback loop around that right and a lot of that isn't like hey Preston have you seen this thing a lot of it's like this is bubbled up as very important um pinging the right people or making sure it comes up in a kind of a group setting call to kind of work through uh and get through so the coordination mechanisms by default are very good right we have we have get we have GitHub we have public channels and stuff like

that so like I don't have to I don't have to be a hub right like I have to sometimes it's like a matter of knowing what's missing and saying hey can you do this or hey like I really think you you should take a look at this that kind of stuff but a lot of it is just kind of like keeping your eye on on on the things and making sure the pieces come together and sometimes it's a bit more about like seeing seeing the future in the sense that okay we have to write the software we have to write tests for the software we have to do test Nets just do this and do that so it's a matter of like uh making sure that the people that are going to be involved in this piece of the puzzle are aware that that piece of

the puzzle is coming right and that uh they need to keep their eye on this so they can trigger that piece of the puzzle so you know it's it's a lot more kind of these like soft things um kind of maneuvering around and then and then also like being the more that I think Tim and I both are like moderate to deeply involved in the technical weeds at times so that we can see so it helps us kind of see how those pieces of puzzle fit together and knowing how to get ahead of things and make sure they come together properly Tim any thoughts on this I guess to answer your end question if I had to like my sanity probably like I must have been in touch with 25 to 50 people like and definitely

like you know 25 would be like multiple messages multiple interactions per week right like you know and then 50 is maybe if you're like you know once every one or two weeks and then you probably five to ten X that like in terms of no number of people like for sure like you know 150-ish people working roughly for like not necessarily full time on the merge but for whom the merge was like they're main thing that seems roughly right but then if you add like a bunch of adjacent folks probably like double that or something like um there was not like a thousand people contributing you know I mean if you start thinking about all the like professional node operators then you get into quite quite a mini but

yeah yeah but if you're thinking about like people writing like code that then gets used by professional node operators or average order I say my upper bound of like obviously involved is like on the couple hundreds um tightly involved is like on the 100-ish um range and that might be variable even within a client team you know they might have like at the peak have had four or five people dedicated to getting out the core merge feature set and then for the past three months four months might have been more like one to two owning it and then if they needed back up because there was like some big hole or minor specification change more people would be jumping in so you know it's kind of all over the place the fact

that we can't really pin down a number is awesome it's well let me just go to the the ethereum ecosystem org chart running a quick analysis yeah you're muted Ryan well honestly this is what I wanted to to kind of ask because I think that there's a um like a wisdom here and a resilience and a strength and I would even say a scalability um here that Silicon Valley doesn't benefit from and can't benefit from because this thing is um so decentralized now actually when you kind of look back and and you actually see that it no it can ship which is the main charge if you have like a decentralized community it can't ship No it can ship then you look at how actually strong this thing is how many

individuals are involved because you not only have all of these separate Giga brains in all of the different client teams you also have the rest of the ethereum economy working for you right and like staking providers and you know Bridge uh software that's being built and um infrastructure applications like infuria and etherscan but but then you also have like the roll-up Centric roadmap which further creates Innovation on I think what we'd Now call the execution layer of ethereum with teams like arbitrum and optimism and like matter labs and ZK sync and starkware

and all of these teams with their own set of like Giga brains are now economically incented to continue hacking and developing on ethereum code base and like bringing that back into the core and so when you start to like look at the different rings of the onion here you have maybe like this core team and like these you know uh coordinators in the core Dev group but like there are so many other layers to this and this is a scalability that um a Silicon Valley corporate structure could not possibly seek to emulate yeah it allows you to expand in so many

different directions at once it also has a resiliency right like ethereum needs to exist if the efcs to exist ethereum needs to exist if Netherland closes shop you know Theory like this and and that's a design constraint that like Google doesn't have right like Google Google exists when Google exists like that's that they they they're they're the same one and the same whereas the ethereum protocol and the abstract and ethereum network um you know are independent of any one of these actors um and that that's that is a like very important design constraint of ethereum and thus it it builds and operates in in a way that is just fundamentally

different than a corporation Danny Tim uh when we come back I think we want to talk about what's next what's next for you individually what's next for the devs and then also what's next for ethereum we've bitten off the merge we've successfully completed it is that the end are we ready to ossify is there more ahead guys we'll be right back with these questions for Danny and Tim but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible Juno is bringing crypto friendly banking straight into your checking account with Juno you can send money from your Juno checking account straight onto a layer two like polygon optimism arbitrum and they have ZK sync and Stark net support on their way you can skip the ACH wait times you can skip all the gas fees and

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Bako I think if I were you guys and we were post merge I'd be having this like big existential crisis it's like what the hell do I do next uh is how does it feel to be on the other side of it do you guys know it are you guys taking a vacation you're going on a break what's like the next thing the next chapter of your guys's lives uh Daniel I'll start with you um I spent a lot of time on Friday and Monday and Tuesday doing a deep dive on the 4844 and withdrawal specs wow no breaks huh I think I was totally off on Thursday I was useless on Thursday because they stayed up till four in the morning right

um but yeah pretty much I want us to be in a good position to have Shanghai conversations and uh keep keep things moving I think withdrawals are very important to the community so there's a bit of testing and refinement going on there as our scaling proposals like 4844 um and you know again I one of the things that I really enjoy doing and I think I have a good insight into is kind of writing and reviewing specifications so I want to make sure that I get that done so that we can keep moving but uh yeah I need a break um after Devcon I am taking a not insignificant amount of time off so in a middle of October second week of October is Devcon can take like a month off

it's looking like three weeks three weeks um you know it may be up for debate okay Tim Tim you taking a break anytime soon so actually I took a break right before the Verge um I don't write code for this stuff so you know when my job sort of picks up now I guess in a way uh oh now that's now that the merge is out of the way you can like ship so many more things now we need to talk about which we ship next and that's that's kind of what what I do right so um and I think we we had purposefully like stopped talking about that for the past like four or five months just because um we wanted to focus on the merge and it was so big uh but you can think of it a bit like a damn you know like we kind

of closed the dam and the pressure is built up and now people really want to talk about what comes next um so yeah that's that's what I I'll be focusing on um and that said you know we we didn't want to have the client teams like jump into planning Shanghai that they have to merge So like um we're gonna be canceling a couple awkward devs and consensus layer caused um in the coming weeks so people can like have those conversations async and you know slowly kind of wrap their hands about around what's being proposed what are the different options here um but without feeling like they need to kind of attend every week otherwise they might miss like the whole upgrade scope changing um so I think it's like claim to groundwork so that you know after

they've gone like once people come back and they've had a time to disconnect and kind of refresh um we have a good idea of like the general picture and then we can kind of finalize the scope and and start start implementing these stuff in some sense consensus layer teams have been working on the merge for four years straight you know ever since they started working on the beacon chain the beacon chain was always intended to become the consensus mechanism of ethereum that's all they've been working on you know is getting it ready for being the consensus mechanism theorem so I think um you know everyone is taking a moment you know is that is that a week is that a day is that is that a month um and when exactly hard to say but everyone's taking a breath um a well-deserved

moment absolutely super well deserved yeah four years straight of just proof of stake merge proof of stakes merge I'm sure you need you need to take a break to be able to come back with a new frame of mind and it sounds like the answer to the question of what's next for ethereum is Shanghai the Shanghai hard Fork but but uh yeah but well yes by definition but also that it sounds like the Shanghai hard Fork hasn't totally been defined but Tim to the best of your ability can you kind of just like you know using our our going Westward metaphor can you explain what's in the path ahead of us what is the Shanghai Fork mostly going to be about yeah so um like you said it's still very much in flux

um and part of the reason why we stopped discussing it this because like three four months ago at least on the execution layer side people were starting to like make decisions about what should maybe go in and whatnot and it felt like it was so early like we didn't have the code for the merch done and we were already committing to all these things for for Shanghai um and on the execution layer we have this concept of like considered for inclusion which is like a soft commitment to eips because usually we don't know how like big eips are until we actually start writing the code so considered for inclusion is when we say look you know this sounds like a good idea it seems like it's not going to break ethereum we'll try and Implement that usually if there's no issues we would we would move it to maintenance

right um if if we do find something not you know we might fix it but it's not like a strong commitment that we'll ship this no matter what um and then uh the consensus layer side has a completely different process of just like making PRS to the specs um and I can let any chime in the that after but at a high level from the from the execution layer side um the main the two main things we had sort of self-committed to are Beacon chain withdrawals um so there's the spec for that is is pretty much done I like Danny was saying you know he's been refining it and writing tests um and this is something we did like leave out of the merge and there was always this idea that like we would have to get to it shortly after

um so we have like soft committed to that it's not implemented yet um the second big thing or potentially not as big but it's uh this EIP called uh evm object format and this is like a neat thing um people have been trying to improve the evm for years and there's always this question of like well what do you do with existing smart contracts right if you add new functionality are you gonna break everything that's on chain um so the Epsilon R D team has come up with like this really smart thing where we can Define versions of the evm on the network um and and have you know contracts specify that they use a new version and then you introduce new functionality only in those but everything that already exists kind of maintains its uh

its current behavior so there's no changes there and so that's the second kind of big thing we'd already soft committed to um there's a bunch of other smaller things we've self-committed to but you can think of them as you know basically one line changes um they're not in practice but you know they're all very minor features that add um yeah one line one line of feature and then like about ten thousand that's a listing yes yes and so there's a couple of those um some of them actually aren't even that much testing because they just add bounds that were implicit on the network and we just make those explicit so things like like um but basically the two big things we've self-committed to are these withdrawals and then this evm object

format there's a whole other list of things that's being proposed um there's an ethereum magician's uh tag now called Shanghai Dash candidate so if you you go through ethereum magicians and you search for that you can see the whole list of things that are being proposed and this is what over like the next month people will discuss and kind of Wade through um and then we'll see if you know we we update our currently existing list with other stuff if we remove anything you know because we think it's either no longer relevant or because there's some like unforeseen complexity um so that's that's what we'll um yeah right there okay yeah so if you click there you see like say the first one there's you know Shanghai candidate eip374 but then you can see there's a

tag under it called Shanghai candidate so if you click on that tag oh you actually you're already on the paycheck so that that tag will show all of them that are being considered um and the discussions on them um so yeah and so that's basically it on the execution layer the consensus layer is a bit different so Danny do you want to kind of walk through how that works right so uh yeah the consensus layer the beacon chain was architected in parallel to the proof work chain we all know this and then it was merged um but in doing so the specification process uh was independent of the eips at the time and ended up in its own repo because since the specs um and here

um features are proposed as kind of like little branches of code it's an executable specification where they also do testing and in issues and PR as we discuss them um we do expect this process to over time inherit and unify a bit more uh with with the eips and especially with some of these features of like cross layer so like uh withdrawals are not just a feature on the fence layer they're a feature on the condensed layer that interacts with the execution layer so again and I think these things will converge over time but one of the big things that we have on the consensus side that's been spec and is up for discussion and refinement are the withdrawals the existence layer analog to the withdrawals then another feature

on the consensus layer that has been spec um is up for discussion is the the 4844 both of those being cross cross layer there might be you know I think especially between now and Devcon there could be like a little thing or two that pops up and ends up as kind of you know an analog to one of those like one line changes like um some sort of like weird Edge case that's worth cleaning up uh you could expect maybe something like that pops up but um those are the two big ones under discussion I think the famous ones the the ones um echoing kind of the the user and investor uh Community uh in our ears are definitely withdrawals so people want to know if they can get their eth back right and when at what point in time and the other one of course is as

you just mentioned Danny uh eip4844 which maybe is the the most famous EIP since eip15 um five nine one five five nine excuse me apparently not that famous yeah and and so this is one proto-dank sharding and this is all about we've done entire episodes on eip4844 on bankless this is all about kind of the the scalability of data and providing that as part of the roll-up Centric uh roadmap so this is the big Proto because it's you know an iterative way to go first we get some scale and we love the foundation to get more skill just yeah one small point on that it's also because of Proto Lambda

right correct and it's dank because it's dead and it's also dang because it's not good okay that's just a fantastic ethereum trivia I wanted to get out there um so I guess maybe Zoom zooming out right um what problems would you say ethereum still has yet to solve in its red map because I think maybe you guys have a Divergent view here but I think everything we've seen from the core Dev Community is that ethereum at a protocol uh from a protocol perspective like will ossify at some point in time there will be fewer changes over time right like at some point in time your drops will be done and Danny you could go open that that coffee shop and we've always wanted

to open right but like that day is not today it's not yet so we've gone through the merge but what are the other core problems and I guess the high level the merges now we have staking and we no longer have proof of work um we've we've cemented ethereum's monetary policy and ether's monetary policy as well but what other big problems are there to solve would you say Danny so my My Lens um when I'm thinking about what needs to happen to L1 protocol is first and foremost we need to get to the functional skate velocity metallics written about this essentially the minimum amount of functionality on layer one to be able to do it extend and build and whatever on top of it so we can stop changing it and then my lens from there is and I talk about this all the time uh

security sustainability and scalability right like I think we made it massive leap forward with proof of stake on the security front also on the sustainability front um sustainability is nice it encompasses a number of things obviously we've got that environmental standard sustainability stamp of approval uh but now there's other types of sustainability so like the sustainability of the protocol from a state standpoint of State growth right so we need this protocol to be sustainable such that we don't need to intervene with it and abusing that term uh because sustainability environmental sustainability and protocol sustainability is probably a little bit different but um you know so since we need to we need to balance State growth we need to bound node resource requirements so this thing

can stay decentralized um and we need scale right and so that's that's Roll-Ups with the the nice L1 data multiplier through through dank sharding um I there's probably some other very important things that could manifest inside of ethereum like the beacon State Route Landing in in the evm OR BLS signatures Landing in the evm or things like that a lot of this stuff personally I consider nice to have and on our ossification Journey maybe they'll make it in or not but really for me it's this thing needs to be secure these are sustainable and needs to be scalable and we need to do the minimum and simplest approach to get those three things in a

place where we don't touch this thing anymore but Danny are we like are we like five years from the coffee shop are we 10 years from the coffee shop is it longer [Music] um I think five years is actually like very very very reasonable um and the nice thing is especially like sustainability like a node architecture sustainability that's something that isn't going to bite Us in the ass tomorrow it's something that we have to fix but it's going to it can take time and then the scalability we're we're getting we're getting Scout develops today and we're working on multiplying that iteratively over time so like it doesn't actually feel like there's a massive fire and that we can do this right and we can do this over the next three to five years Tim what about from your perspective

I think five years is optimistic but I think one way you could you could do this if if you really wanted to never touch the core protocol again is you can segment this between changes that require consensus level changes uh not consensus layer but just like protocol rules um and you can think of something like on the execution there like a stateless ethereum right like we need to change the try structure um from one thing to another this requires a hard fork and potentially many hard Forks um but then once that's done there's some stuff that you can potentially do outside of the protocol it's almost like semi ossification you can have something where like um example yeah p4444 which uh is about dropping the history requirements for

nodes um but something that doesn't change the protocol rules for ethereum it changes the client Behavior right and it helps to to get kind of a more uh more accessible nodes uh and and greater decentralization so I could see a world where like you know maybe we have five-ish years left of like instead those layer changes and then I'm not optimistic that will be done then but I could see maybe the second half of that decade is like things that clients agree um so like the protocol rules don't change but the implementations of them all kind of change intend them to be to be better and I could for example you could you could have a better State sync protocol and that you could do it in eight years and doesn't change yeah but even eip444 doesn't need any protocol

changes right yeah that's kind of like a sync protocol change yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah it's like it's and and the same with something like stateless you know you could like front load all of the protocol changes but only start gossiping the witnesses and building the blocks separately after that right and the rules of the protocols won't change from that um so I I could see that I I don't get it all done in five years but if you if you give me an extra five or we don't change the protocol rules um I yeah I think we're going to not I think it's going to get harder and harder for and for good like because it's just gonna be harder and because it for good reason and so like things that take 10 years I don't think are gonna happen yeah so I agree with that I feel like

the the bar that a feature needs to hit or like a potential protocol change needs to hits to be considered yeah it's getting higher yeah and the reason it's just there's more stakeholders right like there's just more people who need to agree it's a good idea and there's more impact if it's if it goes wrong um and usually we're also at the point where like there's not many free lunches anymore in ethereum most of the things we're considering have like trade-offs and by virtue of having a trade-off it's like you need to get people to agree to one side of the trade-off and that gets harder and harder as the community grows um so I think we have this natural tendency towards there and the question is like how do you strategically fit all the potential changes such that they're like

doable before the community like it's too big and too hard to coordinate for for something like that and I think the message uh we're hearing from from both of you is that there's a lot of work ahead and like years of work ahead to pull off the entire ethereum road map and I know we're all here to like because we believe in crypto um because we think that ethereum will make the world a better place um but also Tim I I know to take that that's not necessarily inevitable and maybe this is a reason that we actually have to put in the hard work the Bangles Twitter account uh recently tweeted out what's your most canceled crypto take and I thought Tim you had a really

interesting insightful take here which is it's not a given that crypto will actually make the world better is what you said we should heavily caveat such claims and push back and and work hard to make sure it actually ends up being the case that the thing that we are building actually does make the world better can you talk a little bit about that Tim yeah I feel like that the bank test Twitter baited me right before this call but uh yeah look I think you know um especially with the merge now and in general like the space we we we want to believe we're building something that makes the world better and I think to be clear crypto even today brings it on a

ton of positives right and the question is like 10 years from now is the balance and that positive or not negative I think it's worth recognizing that like you know there's still many scams the environmental bit was like concerning up to recently um and you know things like privacy there's a world where like crypto enables Mass Financial surveillance on a scale that's like never been seen and like lays the Lays the path for like Central Bank digital currencies you know we kind of build the technology that like governments would never have thought about and then they just co-opted and built kind of the worst possible version of it um and and you know I'm not saying that that's the likely outcome saying it very much is a possible outcome and that's something that like as a community we should think about

um I think somewhat paradoxically at the protocol level it's almost where we have the least impact on a lot of this stuff um I think we can help you know anything that helps make joining the protocol and participating as low requirement that's possible is good um because it means you just get like a more diverse set of participants and it's harder to capture um but I think you know when thinking about like what applications we build um what scaling Solutions we build I don't know that's that's something that's very much on my mind like are we sure that this is not just going to be used by like some government or just use as is and you know Force everyone to say use usdc and then that's actually a

worse status quo than say bank accounts on many respects the joke I was giving with Ryan is when we were talking about this tweet before the live stream podcast uh before the slide from Tim was that oh sweet we just shipped ethereum to proof of stake now our Ponzi sis platform is like super efficient it's going to be great right uncensorable yeah and I think yeah like almost the easiest version to like defend against because like people just kind of like you look at the early internet right there were tons of scams and they like mostly went away or got like relocated so I'm I'm not I don't do sleepover scams I think like privacy and like Financial surveillance is probably the biggest one that I think is is uh is a challenge and um and it's it's it's a

challenge not only because like the tech is hard but also because there's a world where you build privacy and that's also like a terrible world like you you know yeah it is very bad ways to build privacy software so like yeah it is I think it's super interesting there certainly can be with any of these new technologies many unintended consequences that that become Unleashed I I know in particular of course you guys I'm sure have been following like the you know AI type discussions and AI ethic type discussions it's a bit of a cop-out to say they're unattended what I'm saying is I think you know we can very much predict the second order effects and I think there's a world where like Eve and the AI the AI risk people will tell you that as well you know like with Google and when they'll

criticize Google and open AI it's like the people there are very well aware of the risk but they're driving in that direction thinking you know they will somehow avoid them but it's not like an unintended consequence it's like a second order effect you chose to dismissed because you thought you could like navigate around it and we very well very well might but it's yeah it's not a given I think this kind of stuff breaks my brain a little bit but uh Danny do you have a do you have a take on this my take is that without such technologies that blockchains enable were on a crash course anyway with the uh massive uh corporate surveillance and

government surveillance and and kind of the manipulation and control uh going on here and so at the very least this this intermediates that trajectory it allows us to kind of rethink and re-architect what's going on obviously we could re-architect it badly poorly uh but one thing that blockchains do provide that traditional structures do not is that even if we end up in a weird or bad equilibrium um you can you can do new things right so if we end up in a world where uh we're using two Roll-Ups and they're massively surveyed and uh controlled you can actually build another Roloff that has privacy right so like there there's a certain amount of choice as long as we

have a neutral base layer uh that this stratum provides for Humanity um obviously there can be structures beyond that disallow us from exercising that choice for example if we were regulated to use the government sanctioned roll-up we might have issues and exercising our choice to create a new privacy role but um that kind of extra protocol consideration aside these protocols allow us choice that does not exist in our current structures I I'm you know I'm a pessimist I'm trying to be that Mr here but uh you know I think that that's my Optimus to take care and I did caveat my tweet with like a more optimistic one which is like it's really hard to have

this conversation because when like critics will compare you to like perfect right to the perfect world and they'll say you know like ethereum is like not perfect because of x y and z um but then like Danny was saying like the status quo very much isn't right so ideally all you want is like a net improvement over the status quo um but to get that I think you need to almost hold yourself to like a much higher bar internally um but yeah it's a very tricky thing to do when again all this happens in the open and there's no top down you know it's not like I can choose what privacy Solutions ethereum will build right like you know I can like that or even more so that people will build on top of it

right exactly exactly yeah do many things drop down things so it's like a tricky yeah it's almost harder than the AI problem because the AI problem you know you have like a limited number of organizations with enough uh Hardware to actually meaningfully make progress and then you can like steer them we have like this amorphous blob of people are working on it um yeah and that's that's a harder thing to yeah this is interesting it is interesting that it's kind of out of the core depth hands right and it's you know it's back to kind of the the layer zero back to the community and I do appreciate something that um that you

were saying is like um these types of takes are not takes that you'd get canceled for in ethereum like I I feel very proud that the ethereum community is always one that kind of um is its harshest critic at times um and I I hope we're able to preserve that that moving forward because I think that's um that's gotten us uh to the merge and gotten us to this era of momentum around shipping and uh Tim and Danny we just want to want to thank you guys both for joining us and also for helping to deliver this I know it's not just you of course you are flanked by and represented by dozens hundreds of different countable numbers like developers from around the world who helped make this happen but as kind of

their voice and and uh their face I think on behalf of a community of users and passionate people individuals on the bank list Journey like sincerely thank you we appreciate you we appreciate all of the core devs all of the researchers who made the merge happen uh and uh it's feeling very much like the the future of ethereum is bright thanks to your work yeah thank you yeah and Echo that shout out to everyone uh involved in this it was a colossal effort speaking of which by the way we are having vitalik on the show tomorrow what should we ask vitalik guys any any burning questions in your mind Danny or Tim I talked to him all the time

[Laughter] uh ask him yeah yeah I think I think vitalison thinking a lot he's been drawn into the AI conversations um and and where that's going for Humanity I think a lot of people have but he has some really interesting tics there so if you have a moment uh take us a side step from from crypto and his takes on AI that sounds like some Great Bear Market content [Laughter] well we will leave it there everyone in the midst of the bear Market but we are building Danny and Tim thank you so much for joining us and of course bankless Nation remember none of this has been Financial advice eth is risky so is ethereum it always is crypto is risky all of it you could lose what you put in

but we are headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bank list Journey thanks a lot yeah I guess