What I don't like about Ethereum - Jerome de Tychey

Transcript

[Music] What I don't like about Ethereum sound is loud. Okay. Uh this is ultimate trolling from uh Joseph Jastic because he also put the put the title of the of the presentation with Ethereum Foundation and I'm I'm I'm not related to the Ethereum Foundation. So don't don't take this as a as a disclaimer from the foundation. like I'm not from the foundation at all. So, who's I? You can find me on social media here, J. Uh I use the same name everywhere. So, if you want to reach out uh get in touch like please do. And I I I do host HCC and I hope to see you all at uh HCC can

this late June, early July is really going to be a bash as it is every year. So, where does this beautiful title come from? Uh we had a tradition at HCC back in 2018 where uh the first real edition of HCC because before that we did if Paris and if uh atcon in Paris back then in 2017 we had a very nice speaker called Rick Dudley that you see here. He couldn't come at Prag this year unfortunately but he he accepted to talk at the first HCC and do the opening talk. uh he was deeply involved in the in the construction of the different uh Ethereum clients and the discussion

about the consensus and so on and he said like yeah I'd love to do the the introduction call uh okay what you going to talk about I'm going to talk about what I don't like about Ethereum I was like oh okay first time we organized a big conference like this and the title speaker for the opening talk is like what I don't like about Ethereum and we decided to make it um a renewing talk uh every we would invite someone to talk about what they don't like about Ethereum and unfortunately in 2020 we had some hiccups with COVID. We still managed to hold the conference but yeah some people had to cancel and uh we stopped this tradition. So Joseph reached out and said like hey do you want to do you want to talk about this?

I was like oh okay well sure do let's do group therapy then. Uh and funnily enough uh when Rick uh accepted to do this talk I was like can you send the slides? He said, "Yeah, I sent the slides." Are you sure you send the slides? Yeah, this is the slide. This space intentionally left blank. And we had Rick sitting there blah blah blah blah blah blah blah ranting for 40 minutes about what he don't like about Ethereum. So, two good newses. I couldn't do it without slides. I I could hardly do it. Actually, it was u really hard for me to think about really what I don't like about Ethereum. Uh and also looking back at what I produced today um in a sense that um maybe I shouldn't have done slides because it

would have been more impactful but anyway so if you don't want to watch Rick's talk too bad but if you do watch want to watch it it's interesting it tackles multiple cryptographic problem that we had to handle back there a lot of critics about uh the problem of 256 bytes uh cryptography compared to the optimization that we have on arithmetics usually in 64 bytes and blah blah blah and problem with consensus iss. Anyway uh of course since 2020 2018 2019 uh the term project grew to a level of magnitude and complexity that's nothing compared to what we had back then. uh now we have this huge road maps these uh these huge milestones that we need to reach and it's uh just to say like well

extremely hard to be aware of everything that's going on in the ecosystem to be relevant on uh being like oh but verify delay function we're doing it wrong it's it's it's bad in this sense oh but if proving we're doing it bad in this sense like now we are at a stage of maturity where it is getting really hard to be uh relevant on multiple topics about the ether ecosystem itself Anyway, there is one thing I don't like about Ethereum. It's hard to get test net. Yeah. Uh, it used to be not like this. Uh, and there are some test net that are easy to reach. Uh, you can get easily some test net here and there, but test net if here and there. But most of the test net that expose easy if on the test net or test nets where you don't

have good RPCs. it's hard to get connected to existing dabs because there is like discrepancies between the mainet and the and the test net. So yeah, um good test net is hard to get. That's maybe the only uh technical critics I can say about Ethereum right now. Uh okay, let's go to the group therapy. Uh 10 years of Ethereum marketing your agenda July the 30th. So looking back, we could have launched the mainet in September or in October of the same year or maybe in June of the same year. July the 30th is a bad date for a birthday. If you have kids and they are born in the summer, they're not

going to be a lot of people coming to their birthday, unfortunately. So, the birthday of Ethereum, we're going to have uh we're going to have trouble on uh on organizing something that's um like a big gathering in the in the 30th of July. But that's an example of something we could have done, right? Caring a bit more about our history. So one thing that we claimed a lot in the Etherum ecosystem or some of our thought leaders claim a lot or or visible people in the ecosystem claimed a lot is that at Ethereum we have a strong cultures and values. Strong cultures and values.

Okay. So one thing you have to know if you type Ethereum values on Google the first result is the price of Ethereum. Yeah that's a problem if you like. Okay. But what are the the philosophical value the the the the values that Ethereum try to convey the value that Ethereum try to uh try to to put forward uh we have anti-fragility we have credible neutrality we have kindness and respect we have openness we have all of those things all of those things that we try to put forward where something is wrong when we are in a stress mode like hey we are cultured values like don't hit us but we barely celebrate our history and we barely make examples and re important points and important days that we should remember that

brought it us that brought us to these values. So that's something that uh I don't like about Ethereum. We are missing the point on building up cultures and enculturing the people that are coming in. But we have a lot of assets that we can tackle that that we can leverage for that. Uh here's what the competition is doing. The pizza day. Yeah. And sometimes they even get an all-time high on the pizza day. So you have a dad, two kids, first transaction for a real good. Hey, pizza day. Easy, easy, simple, not edgy, too not not too edgy, not too complex, easy to celebrate in May. Let's have pizzas. That's that's impactful. That's something that people can relate. Oh,

you know Bitcoin? No, but you want a pizza? Oh, yeah. Let's have a pizza. Yeah, that's it. Simple. Yet, uh, at Ethereum, we have had a tremendous histories. Those 10 years they give you gray hairs for sure. Uh but they are packed with a lot a lot a lot of impact a lot of thing we had to overcome a lot of challenges we tackle a lot of research hiccups we had to to face. So here's a couple of example of what we could do uh and and to celebrate our history. For example, the epher lent. Okay, let's go uh let's go give up on something or let's do good between the the the DA hack and the DA fork. Let's celebrate the library day uh for the November 6th where you accidentally killed it. Um let's celebrate also

complex relentless research. For about seven years, we tried to figure out how to do and implement proof of stake, right? Uh just look at the difficulty bomb. This is this is really committing to your research, committing to doing something and to achieving something that you're believing that it's not implemented yet, that you don't know how to do it yet, but you want to do proof of stake, right? So, you commit on the September 7th uh of 2015 saying there will be a difficulty bomb. I like I I I kind of I must say that I'm not sure that every newcomer in the Eternal ecosystem know about the difficulty bomb, but it was pretty stressful back then. like the research researchers at the EF and the external

researchers were saying hey let's uh let's make sure that the the the the network is not usable if we don't manage to ship the proof of stake and then regularly accepting that you fail to deliver you fail to deliver once tries blah blah six time we have to push back the difficulty bomb to say like hey we need more time to implement proof of stake right and finally we send the difficulty bomb that's the kind of example that we want to send that's the kind of example that we want the new generation of Ethereum to learn of and also the previous generation of Ethereum to continue telling the story that uh now that we have a huge road map to ship and way more ambition than it was to switch from proof of stake to proof of

for proof of stake, we need to remember that this is the history and this is the the culture that can be built on top of this. So look at those those pictures. Uh which one do you think is going to be the most culturally impactful? Yeah, this is this one. This is Shanghai 2016 where the network was basically falling apart uh because of a bispicing of one of the op codes. And what I don't like about Ethereum is that we celebrate this instead of that. This is called sitting down and rebooting the network. Not rebooting the network actually, just fixing the network on the main client because par was uh still working and keeping the network alive.

Um yeah, this is rocket science high stake engineering done live just before the opening talk of a conference. Yep. And not a team building where we get on stage and uh and do some bonding and show that hey we can be edgy and hey it's welcome everybody can come and build on Ethereum. Now, if you come and build on Ethereum, it's going it's not always going to be uh blood, sweat, and tears, but we're going to have fun and we are going to tackle a hard problem. And you can be white, black, yellow, green, we don't care. Just come over and uh and build something cool with us. Um in the recent in the recent conference I've been to, uh we we we were kind of losing I think on the on

the stickers tradition. Uh that's something we shouldn't leave at all. The the stickers we bear them as code of arms on our computers on our wall on our on our books on the notebooks and so on. Uh and this show how much uh how much of the the history of it we've been through. So if you are at the company that is suggesting to bring some swag at the conference, start with the stickers. It's very important. Anyway, that's the kind of thing uh we should celebrate. That's the kind of thing are under appreci I think are underappreciated about Ethereum. Uh years without downtime 10. Yeah, it's cool to have a network. It's cool to

have an EVM. It's cool to have multiple layers. It's cool blah blah blah. But yeah, what do we advertise? I don't like that we miss advertisement on such things like we have no downtime. 10 years no down. Change the the core engine, no downtime. Years without accident, many more but still no downtime. 10 years that's what we celebrate. So for culture to emerge in our ecosystem uh I don't like that we've been just throwing words and concepts like hey we are cipher banks hey we are solar banks hey we are antifragile it can barely emerge from those uh inspirational concepts like when you meet someone is yeah but why Ethereum oh it's because we are solar punks okay I

know about the deaf punks but the solar punks yeah okay well thank you I'm out compared to showing what we've been through showing the important dates uh showcasing the different data showing casing the different things uh this is what's going to to bring the new generation together with the old ones and continue to convey the value and let an Ethereum culture emerge so we did a few good things that we tried to impose to the market that we work really hard on that we try to convey and communicate a lot on and then we gave up on them so that's something I really don't like we gave up so far maybe we'll pick it up and we gave up on ultrasound money. So ultrasound money was something that was pretty hard to uh

to to make resonate on the social media on the different people talking about it. Uh the Ethereum supply at some point in time started to decrease uh because of EIP 1559. Um and then we started to advertise less and less about this. Um it was a reaction to Bitcoin advertisement of we are sound money. You know there is a fixed supply. There's many thing that are theoretically theoterically quite wrong or quite misunderstood about having a fixed supply. But yet in the years of the layman it's a easy meme. Oh, it's sound money. Yeah, it's sound money compared to all the other money. What about Ethereum? It's ultrasound money. Huh?

Ultrasound. Yeah, this is powerful. This is way more powerful than uh we we thought it would be. And it's super easily memeable. Look the bad sign. Yeah. Ultrasound animals are really cool animals including the dolphin for the flipping and that we give up about uh ultrasound money so far. This is something we will be dearly missing if we don't revive and that we should revive and I really don't like that we gave up on this because we invested a lot on bringing it in and it's actually something really great about um Ethereum. It can be ultrasound and it should be and should remain ultrasound because it's the easy way to bring people in. paid etras and then you start digging in understanding was it about Ethereum um of course along the years uh we saw

heavily uh VC invested uh heavily marketed uh generations of layer ones of alternative blockchain that were branded as Ethereum killers. Well, um, something that will be really bad for Ethereum is that at some point perhaps a new project once won't won't brand themsel anymore about being if killers like when we stop to be relevant as something to kill or something to overcome, we stop losing traction. Imagine something that will be like, hey, we are the Solena killers.

Wow, what about if killers? No, we don't care about if it's not relevant anymore. We are going to kill Solena. Well, you want to be at some point so big, so so powerful, so efficient that nobody want even to compare to you. Uh it's mesmerizing that new project can just advertise themselves like we're not even live. We had many downtimes and oh we are barely live and we are ifers. So naturally in the early days of Ethereum when we saw the first generation of ifers were like yeah if kiders okay why not uh try to try try to have a good coding language for your VM try to do something better on the consensus first.

and then a second generation and then a third generation and a fourth one and a fifth one. And while we were in dogging them, those new projects were slowly occupying the rest of the market or the niche of the market that we weren't touching. And when the market started to slow down, when uh traction started to manifest differently between projects, we realized that they were also here to show us a lesson. So we missed a lot of opportunities due to our positioning regarding if killers due to our ignorance of what they were doing right and what we should have done better. For example, the shipping of 4844 was really expected and really important for the network and when it

was shipped suddenly we lost ultrasoundness of Ethereum. We started to pop the question of L2 sustainability. Well, indeed, L2s were pretty expensive to run if you had to push your data directly on chain. But now that you have blobs, people start to say, "Hey, but what about the value capture? Missing out about the narratives on value capture is a huge mistake. It's something I I don't even understand how we missed that before we shipped for 844 and then we gave crack cocaine to all the spin doctors to say like, hey, Ethereum is worthless. Look, no network effect, no nothing. Hey, it's going to the groundh." And that's part of why I don't like about us ignoring the if killers.

We need to look at the the the the counter argument they bring, the the the thing they say about us that is wrong and try to overcome them, try to shape the narrative, try to answer that and not ignore it at all. Because every time we ignore it, we are, you know, showing the back and getting stabbed. And this is really bad for us as an ecosystem and us as an attraction for third parties and newcomers because the first contact with EH it doesn't happen anymore with a proof of worker. It happens with a a chart on a centralized exchange.

Um, anyone that has started a retail oriented project, whether it is an NFT thing, a gaming thing or a universal basic income thing, can tell you this hard truth. When the price is down, it cost you 100x, 1,000x more to acquire new customers. Simple. At least keep the charts stable. And if possible, give it a little bit of green. Otherwise, people will say like, "Hey, it's red. I'm not going to go this direction. What amazed me as an organizer of meetups in France is that the the the population that we see in the meetup completely changed after the proof of of stake. People were not coming anymore to say like, "Hey, I

want to set up a minor to earn some ETH." And then you saw those guys coming again and again and again in the in the different um in the different meetups. Now that when people want to build on top of Ethereum, they first have to get um test net if which is hard and and then because they the test net ask you to be active on Ethereum to give you if sometimes um and their first contact with it is just to buy if so that's something we cannot ignore anymore. We cannot ignore the price narrative on Ethereum because this is the first contact of newcomers for Ethereum. They would be like, "Hey, I want to go on this on this blockchain." But what does the native token look like? Oh, it looks pretty bad. Yeah. Uh, yeah, no, thank you. Back in the days, you could just mine if and

then you had some E and then you wonder what you could do with your E and then you started to build something or meet people that are in the ecosystem. And that was really powerful as a acquisition tool. Now we have not as good acquisition and we have also to deal with the fact that the entry point is a centralized exchange. And now on to the credible neutrality thing. I don't don't like credible neutrality. I think it's extremely important for us to stay credibly neutral because this is one of the thing that differentiate us from the rest of the ecosystem. Nevertheless, we can apply credible neutrality in terms of real politics.

um ignoring and and not dipping our toes at all with political uh organization, with governments, with uh with uh institutions. It leaving the door open to many different actors. That's typically the kind of niche that the the Ephraim killer started to occupy. If you ever wonder why you see a PR uh in the in the big press saying, "Hey, the Euro stable coin from the European Central Bank is going to be built on IBM Hyperledger." Like what? IBM Hyperledger? Yeah. Why? Well, because those guys occupy the occupy the seats.

They come, they sit down, they talk with the regulators, they talk with the institutions, and they are not afraid to show up. And at the same time, they say, "But the Ephirm Foundation is not showing up. And what is the ETM foundation doing doing instead? And I I don't like it. The ETM foundation is take giving the flag to an external organization saying the if you're enterprise aliens will do it saying uh a private company maybe if allies will do it and send them with the flag to talk to those institutions and the reflex of these uh institutions and if killers is to say well the foundation is not talking to you. Look all the foundation are here. We are we are neutral. We are here. We are here to

help. We're here to help. And those guys, they're not the foundation. The foundation doesn't care. So the tempo and the rule have been set up against us when it comes to institutional adoption. And this is something we have to counter. We have to we have to acknowledge and we have to act on it. Otherwise, we won't be able to do anything top down. And not doing anything top down and fighting for the bottom up is going to be an up an uphill battle. And I don't think we should ever consider being in this situation anymore. Um, finally, uh, one of the thing I really don't like about Ethereum is that we make a batch. We make clones of oursel on social media. It's not news

to anyone that the social media landscape evolved a lot with the arrival of Elon Musk at Twitter. Uh, suddenly a platform which was really hard to get a blue tick. Now you have a paid blue tick and uh gold tick if you pay even more. Uh there is little to no uh to no moderation. There is a lot of bots and so on. So the the very uh relevance of it of Twitter for uh someone that is uh looking at this with a few step uh looking at this from from afar is like hey Twitter is a show so I shouldn't be on Twitter. But the fact is that Twitter has such a network effect and

such still a presence among the press makes it something that we shouldn't abandon. So many people reacted in the community uh in the in the the changes on Twitter by saying like, "Hey, I'm just going to leave. It's just just too much negativity in this." And not fighting the negativity in leaving Twitter is leaving an open space for uh the the competition of of Ethereum. Now when you post something on Ethereum, it feels like you are just being taken down by the algorithm. And at the same time when we saw that Twitter was uh less and less relevant as an echo chamber for Ethereum what we did is create Ethereum well Ethereum based Twitter alternatives. So some of us

started to migrate on lens some of us started to migrate on on Farcaster and so on. So we basically left the battlefield saying like hey we don't want to be in this battle. At the same time those places were occupied by people actively dumping on Eve. So we are not owning the narrative anymore and I really don't like it. Uh we are not even fighting those battles by saying like hey it's what you're saying is false. Ethereum is not like that. Ethereum is a world computer that never rebooted. Ethereum is ultrasound money. Ethereum is not like this. We are reacting this way and sometimes also we end up in civil wars and those civil wars really really really really hurt us a lot. So this is the end of our childhood and at the same time the end of our

teenage years. We have to realize that we should care about the narrative. We should care about our history. We should care more about our culture and we have all the asset to leverage and and achieve that. So this was what I don't like about Ethereum and I hope you liked it and you shared some of those uh points. If you want to chat and have more friend stickers, you can find me outside. Thank you everyone. [Applause] Check. Check.

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