Tim Beiko | Layer Zero

Tim Beiko runs the core protocol meetings for Ethereum. His path into crypto began in 2017, buying the top. But he stayed in the space, initially working for Consensys and their Besu Ethereum Client before trailblazing with EIP-1559's implementation. This conversation covers his story into working with Ethereum core developers, the role and landscape of Ethereum clients, and coordinating the maintenance and upgrades to the Ethereum protocol. With the merge on the horizon and barbarians at the gates, humans like Tim Beiko work to keep Ethereum as credibly neutral, efficient, and open as possible. Can Vitalik impose his will on Ethereum? Is it centralized? This episode has the answers. ------ 📣 OPOLIS | YOUR CRYPTO CAREER https://bankless.cc/Opolis ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🍵 MATCHA | DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE AGGREGATOR https://bankless.cc/Matcha 🔐 LEDGER | SECURE YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger 🧙‍♀️ ALCHEMIX | SELF-PAYING LOANS http://bankless.cc/Alchemix ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 4:30 Tim Beiko Before Crypto 12:27 Getting into the Space 16:45 Working for Conensys 20:56 Clients and Values 26:48 Forks of GETH 31:52 Clients as Businesses 37:42 Keeping the Balance 44:57 EIP-1559 51:47 Coordinating Core Devs 59:00 Communicating Code 1:05:17 Security 1:11:18 What the People Want 1:14:18 Who is a Core Dev? 1:21:07 Facilitating Forever 1:26:00 When Merge? 1:30:47 Closing ------ Resources: Tim on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TimBeiko?s=20 ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code, but it's composed by people, and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. Cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code, because crypto is people all the way down, and always has been. Today, I'm speaking with Tim Bako. Tim Bako has a similar timeline with getting into crypto that, as I did, got into the top of the 2017 markets and then found his way into what niche fits him best. Started working as a client project lead at Consensys, project manager,

• 0:48David Hoffman?

  and then eventually he hand raised and used his position working on the Basu client to really focus on EIP1559. And Tim raising his hand to take that effort on EIP1559 led him into the role of being the all-core devs coordinator. So this really, this podcast is really a lesson in the dynamics of what it means to make upgrades to Ethereum, and very, very true to what I think Layer Zero is all about, is like, who, what code and who is proposing this code that ultimately becomes part of Ethereum really needs to be considered, because people, the code dictates how people's lives will look. What Ethereum is will impact the people that use it, and Tim

• 1:32David Hoffman?

  Bako is at the heart of what changes make their way into Ethereum and what changes do not. And so this, this is a fantastic podcast to answer the question, are there just centralized actors that can upgrade the code? Can Vitalik just get whatever he wants into code and upgrade Ethereum as he sees fit? We've talked about these subjects directly. And then also talk about some overarching decisions and problems that will inevitably be part of Ethereum's future and what we can do to solve those problems now. Also, this is a lesson in client diversity and client development, and so just a very informative podcast. So let's go ahead and get right into this Layer 0 with Tim Bako. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.

• 2:17David Hoffman?

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• 3:01David Hoffman?

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• 3:45David Hoffman?

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• 4:23David Hoffman?

  That's A-L-C-H-E-M-I-X dot F-I. Follow Alchemix on Twitter at @AlchemixFI and join the Discord to keep up to date with Alchemix V2 and to get involved in governance. Hey, Tim, how's it going?

• 4:37Speaker 01

  I'm good. How are you?

• 4:38David Hoffman?

  Pretty good, my man. Pretty good. Still in Seattle, about to head into a plane to get back to San Diego from the holidays. Where are you at?

• 4:47Speaker 01

  I'm in Vancouver and was just in San Diego yesterday to celebrate Thanksgiving with some friends.

• 4:52David Hoffman?

  Oh, bummer. We miss each other. I'm up north and you went down south and I was down south and you went up north. I see you have one of those cool NFT things. I can't remember what the name of that NFT project is in your background, but I remember looking at those.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think they're called crypto trees. So I bought it. I didn't mint it. I'm still looking for a good NFT background if you have suggestions.

• 5:16David Hoffman?

  You're gonna get flooded with suggestions.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, this one is like decent, but I don't know. I'm not like 100% in love with it either. So yeah.

• 5:24David Hoffman?

  Yes, I feel like that's how NFTs go is like you never actually feel completely in love with them. So you always have to keep on searching.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:32David Hoffman?

  So Tim, let's go all the way back. For those that don't know, Tim is one of the lead efforts, coordinating the ETH1. So I don't think we call it ETH1 anymore, but also largely the EIP1559 efforts. But let's go even even further back. When was your moment that you first heard about Ethereum?

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Right. A friend of mine told me about it and I ignored it the first time. That was a mistake. Second time I heard about it was in the context of the DAO, but when the DAO was a fundraising project and not a hack. And that seemed interesting. And I actually bought my first ETH to contribute to the DAO. I bought the absolute top. I think like my buy went through on Coinbase. There's always like a couple of days, like literally the day before the hack happened. Um, yeah, so that was my introduction to Ethereum was the DAO getting hacked.

• 6:27David Hoffman?

  I feel like this is a great exemplar story, like your friend tells you about Ethereum, you ignore it, and then you buy the top. This is how people get into crypto.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 6:40David Hoffman?

  What kind of experience, what was your work life, your career trajectory before crypto?

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Right, um, so I, I, I kind of started out more on the business side. I always started a bunch of projects. When I was in, in high school, I had an online T-shirt company, uh, Shopify, I don't think existed back then, but you today, that would be like a Shopify store. Um, then I actually, I managed a painting company for like three years, uh, like actual painting of houses. Um, I realized that doesn't scale really well. So there's like really diminishing returns to scale, uh, with like physically painting things. Got interested into tech because it seemed like something you could like scale easier.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  And, uh, instead of going to college, a friend and I figured out, uh, why not try and start a tech company? So we spent a year trying to start a startup, uh, didn't work out. The idea was to try and, uh, basically Airbnb for your luggage space. So if say you're living in Bali and you want something from, uh, France, uh, we would like match you with somebody coming your way. Uh, and then you could pay them to bring, uh, whatever you want. Um, and that, that was also like a horrible tech idea because that also doesn't scale really well. Uh, but learned a lot about, you know, technology and, um, also realized how little I knew. I kind of taught myself to code a little bit while we were doing that. And, uh, when the startup didn't work out, I went back to school to do computer science instead of business.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  And basically did that. Um, and then, yeah, after that, uh, worked as a product manager and, uh, kind of kept doing that. It felt like a nice intersection of like being involved in the engineering side, but also not like just writing code.

• 8:21David Hoffman?

  So you always have had a entrepreneurial spirit inside of you?

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, pretty much.

• 8:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Did I extend like even earlier than that? Or is that kind of like the early stories?

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Think the T-shirt business was the first thing. And it was interesting because I was like, I don't know, 16 years old at the time or 15 years old. And it was just like so hard to do everything from like getting your PayPal account, right? Because you're not 18. You know, getting like set up on, I forget what I use for a storefront, but like the equivalent of Shopify, like all those things are quite hard if you're not 18 years old. Yeah.

• 8:55David Hoffman?

  Was it, was it the pursuit of, of capital or the spirit of building something? Like what, what really resonated with you about?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. So definitely the building more.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Capital was nice in that it was mostly like unconstrained, right? Like when you work a job, it's like, you know, you can work more hours or find like a, you know, slightly better paying job, especially when you're like 16 years old, your options are quite limited. And so, yeah, like I guess working on something that's like self-directed, but also like, you know, if things work out, you do get like a higher payoff. Yeah, I think those two things were really the gist of it.

• 9:33David Hoffman?

  And then what made you decide computer science? When you went back to, was it, was that, that wasn't your undergrad, was it?

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, undergrad.

• 9:40David Hoffman?

  Undergrad.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  I guess trying to code, I liked it. I realized how little I knew and like how flaky everything I was writing was doing. So, you know, there's a lot of like debates about how like useful it is to understand like the theory behind like computer science versus like just doing like say a coding bootcamp. And I think I'm very glad I kind of started with like the bootcamp approach and actually, you know, got to building things really quickly. But after that, you kind of just realize how little you know. So then going back and looking to theory and I spent a lot of time in undergrad also doing AI and that was really interesting to learn. So yeah, I, you know, I enjoyed kind of getting just a better understanding overall of like how these things work behind the scenes.

• 10:25David Hoffman?

  So after you graduated with a degree in computer science and then you had, you had some experience, you know, building, being an entrepreneur, like where did you think you were going to take that?

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. So one thing I realized when my company didn't work out is I didn't want to start another company unless I knew I was like the best person in the world to do it. And it was just something like meeting, like as I had my startup, I got to meet that, you know, a bunch of other founders and to me that seemed like one of the really.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Not necessarily like necessary things for companies to work, but like it greatly improves your odd if you feel you're like in the top, you know, one or 0.1% of people that can actually tackle this problem. So I'm, you know, I was and still am kind of fine, you know, not starting a company for its sake, but waiting until there's something where I'm like, well, nobody else can kind of do this better than I can, right? Or, you know, the vast majority of people can't do that. And so, yeah, and also realized, while I was kind of running my company, you know, we were like a startup of three, that I didn't have like a good feel for like, what does like a successful 10% company look like? What does like a successful 50, 200, you know, 10,000

• 11:36Speaker 01

  person look like? So during my undergrad, I tried to intern at like a bunch of different sized companies to like get a feel for like, you know, what do they look like? And then after my undergrad, I basically went to like a mid-stage startup for a year, working on AI. And that was, I think, late 2017, early 2018. By that point, I had been kind of following Ethereum again, like, pretty much. But there's not a lot of jobs on Ethereum if you're not an engineer. So, and AI kind of felt like a better kind of career path. So, you know, I worked in AI, kind of followed Ethereum on nights and weekends. And at some point, just started searching for a job full-time

• 12:19Speaker 01

  in this space. I got just really bored of it after like eight months. And so I was looking at any Ethereum job I could find. Yeah.

• 12:27David Hoffman?

  What was the process of like work Ethereum balance for you before you got into like full-time, before you got your job in Ethereum? What was like?

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, tell me about that.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  So if I have to describe it quickly, it's like booking your conference room for yourself and like reading the beige paper, you know, like you're doing crypto zombies. So I would try to like, if I wasn't too busy at work, you know, take time there to like, you know, study or read up on interesting things, spent a bunch of time on the Ethereum subreddit. The quality there was quite high.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  And I didn't actually go to like Ethereum meetups, like there weren't a lot of them in Montreal. But I managed to get my AI company to pay to send me to a blockchain conference in Austin. And then when the first ETH Berlin happened, my goal was to go there and try, I bought a ticket for ETH Berlin, a ticket for DevCon. And I was like, I'll just go to those places and like get somebody to give me a job. And I was really lucky that I actually landed my first job right before going to ETH Berlin. But that was kind of my plan was like in person, it'll probably be easier to like meet these companies and yeah, find, find a good fit.

• 13:39David Hoffman?

  So this was in 2017 ish, right?

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, late 2017, early, I guess ETH Berlin, the first one was in 2018. So I kind of started looking, you know, late 2017. Again, probably like right before the top and then kept looking throughout like the first half of 2018 and got something a bit later in the year.

• 13:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah, no, our timelines are about the same. So why Ethereum? Because in 2017, like there was, there was everything, right? Like there was EOS, there were a billion Bitcoin forks, like why Ethereum?

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I, you know, I'd known about Ethereum since like the DAO and I just, the project really resonated with me. It did seem like it was trying to build something like genuinely new. I, you know, I'm just like not that interested, but I say like Bitcoin forks, you know, where they like tweak a parameter and like, you know, kind of derivative projects. So I, and I don't know, in 2017, aside from Ethereum and like Bitcoin, and maybe a couple of smaller ones like Monero or stuff like that. And Zcash, there weren't like a lot of actually legitimate projects. And I also felt the risk reward of working on say like an ICO project was pretty bad.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  And that's kind of what got me to decide to work on Ethereum full time is when there was this ICO boom, I was like, you know, all these projects might fail, but clearly it shows there's like demand for Ethereum, right? Like there's demand for like using this platform. And also the thing that I realized was like how kind of broken Ethereum was like, I don't know if you remember then, but like ICOs could Like plug the mempool for like two days or something like that. And it was like really hard to get a transaction in. And I was like, clearly, there's a lot of work to do at the protocol level. There's like some demand for the protocol itself. And all this stuff built on top still feels pretty speculative. And I was not, I didn't feel like I knew enough to be able to say like, you know, this is like a project that is actually going to make it.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, uh, yeah, Ethereum just felt like, I don't know, like the platform order is like the most actual activity innovation happening on it. And in a spot where there was still a lot to do to actually improve the protocol.

• 15:46David Hoffman?

  While you were going through this 2017, 2018 journey of learning how to get into the space, were you more of like a lone wolf? Or did you have like company, like a friend to go with you? I remember in 2017, I had like five or six like friends in a group chat, right? And so like that, we all kind of shared knowledge. What was your dynamic like that, like that?

• 16:04Speaker 01

  No, like, yeah, the exact opposite, like completely alone. Yeah. There's like one guy who told me about Ethereum and Bitcoin and like, we're not like close friends. So like, you know, I had, you know, I, I like message him probably 10 times in the span of three years about it. But like, yeah, no, I didn't really have anybody I knew.

• 16:21David Hoffman?

  And I feel like that was also kind of true when you were building your businesses, your early businesses, when you were first experimenting with being an entrepreneur. Were you also a lone wolf then too?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  More or less, like a lot of them had co-founders or had friends involved in that or like made friends through the process. So I think, you know, a lot of them probably started with me more or less alone. And then, you know, I kind of brought people into it. Yeah.

• 16:43David Hoffman?

  What was your first job in Ethereum?

• 16:47Speaker 01

  So I, I got super lucky. Consensus was just starting your protocol team. And they needed product managers. So, uh, actually I tried, I think it was like early in the year. I applied, I interviewed and they're like, we're kind of looking for a product lead and not like a single PM. And we'll call you back if like we ever hire single PMs. And I thought they were just being polite and like say no. But it actually did call me back like four months later. They were like, well, we hired a product lead. Now we're looking for actual PMs. Are you still interested? And I said, yes. So it was just like such a perfect fit. And at that time, consensus was building your client from scratch. So I basically joined right after they had like the, called the V1, but it was really more like a V0, like a very basic clients that could like sync to mainnet.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Only had full sync, was only an archive node. So, you know, aside from like working in theory, it really didn't do a lot like on mainnet. And then over the next couple of years, we basically got to like build that and add kind of all the features you expect in like a, you know, standard Ethereum client like fast sync, pruning, all the JSON RPC support, tracing and all that stuff.

• 17:52David Hoffman?

  Did this client have a name?

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, so it was called Pantheon, now it's Basu.

• 17:56David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I remember it. Yep, yep, yep, yep.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  And it still exists today, yeah.

• 18:02David Hoffman?

  Right. Did you feel like equipped or like qualified to be able to do that? Like, was that, was that a challenge for you?

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Right, um, so I'm not sure there were a lot of people who would have been like 100% ready. I thought I, you know, I'd say it was probably 50% there. My biggest like surprise or learning when I first started is I assumed I could like read the spec, you know, like the yellow paper, the beige paper and like, that would be like 80% of the actual client, right? Like, these are like the rules of Ethereum, but it's more the opposite. It's more like 20% and like 80% of stuff in clients, like for example, fast sync doesn't have a spec, right? Like the spec, there's like a PR on Geth that explains how it works, but it's like, yeah, there's so many things that are kind of like that where they're not, or there may be specified somewhere, but you really have to know where to look for.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Um, and it's quite obscure and you kind of have to learn by like either using the other clients, uh, or, you know, like trying to understand what they did. Um, so yeah, you know, that was a lot, probably the part where I had to like ramp up the most, uh, was just, you know, understanding all these, these parts of Ethereum that are like specified in the weird corners of the internet.

• 19:13David Hoffman?

  And is that, is that true just because of like the chaotic nature of Ethereum? Just it was a young ecosystem, people weren't really writing stuff down? Like, why, why was that true, do you think?

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's, that's, that's part of it. I think the other thing is maybe like you don't know in advance what, what will be like the popular feature. So for example, like, uh, snap sync, or sorry, no, fast sync, uh, is what Geth implemented and Parity at the time had warp sync. Um, and, and snap sync actually turned out to be, or sorry, fast sync, snap sync is what they have now, so I keep referring to that. But fast sync, uh, just turned out to be like the better of the two. And so everybody kind of converged towards that, but like when they were implementing it, you know, they. We kind of didn't know that in advance. And for example, for tracing, it's the exact opposite. Parodies tracing APIs are actually the ones that everybody say like EtherScan or exchanges use. And then the get ones are are less used. And so, yeah, same thing.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  It's just like, you know, people kind of didn't necessarily know in advance which ones would would would work. Yep. Or also like how people would use them, right? Like, there's a bunch of like quirks on like tracing APIs like, you know, how you want to like figuring out if a transfer has actually happened can be quite hard. If it's like a smart contracts that say sending in the RC 20, you actually need to run through everything and make sure it doesn't revert. And and only then can you actually like mark, say, the tokens is transferred. And so over time, people like exchanges or block explorers, they just gain really deep familiarity with like these APIs. And they know all the quirks around them and how to handle them.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  And like, yeah, these things just become kind of cemented as like the the standard, even though they didn't set out to be used like that. Or use use so extensively, basically.

• 20:56David Hoffman?

  One of the things that that me and Ryan are particularly obsessed with is are like, and the broader Ethereum ecosystem are like the values of Ethereum. And when you start to like build out a client, is that where you start to become related to those things? Like how like building out a client and also like making sure that Ethereum like retains the values that it was originally purported to have? Like, was that a relevant conversation when you were building out this client?

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the biggest one is like, you know, all core devs is probably the place where that like plays the biggest role. And I think the questions we had at Basi specifically is like, you know, given Basi was funded by Consensus and Consensus is like a big organization in the space. Like, you know, should like our views reflect, you know, consensus's position every time? Should you have people kind of reflect their own views? Like, how do you, how do you make sure that like you build this in a way that's just aligned with the other teams? And so, yeah, I think we we weren't, you know, super explicit about like, okay, what are like the values we want to embody? As much as just like what the like every interaction we have, like, how does that reflect?

• 22:06Speaker 01

  You know, is this like a net positive for the ecosystem?

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think it's yeah, it's kind of all these small decisions of like how you act and like, you know, the battles you picked and the things, you know, kind of when are you, when are you willing to just like, you know, let others win? And and this is like the hard part about Ethereum, like we have, you know, four clients, and they all have like different trade offs that they make. And sometimes, you know, some feature can be like harder for you to implement because of, you know, your architecture and stuff like that. And just thinking about like, okay, how do we make sure this all works? When we disagree with people, like, how strongly do we want to express that? And, you know, overall, like, does this make Ethereum better? Or, you know, does this just benefit us? And I think we've tried to be really mindful of that. And the team still is, so I'm no longer there, but I think they still do like a really good job of that.

• 22:56David Hoffman?

  So it's less about like the Ethereum values and more about just like the technical details of like, if we build this in this way, will that trip up other clients that build it in a different way?

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, but but I think, yeah, I think one of the big values is like decentralization, obviously. And and like having multiple implementations was always something like that was important to Ethereum. And it was pretty critical like in 2016 when there were the Shanghai attacks. And even now, like, you know, if one client has a bug, it's it's great that we can have others kind of pick it up. Even more so with the merge, with the fact that like staking penalties are like anti-coordinated. So I think it's just like the this idea of like decentralization and like resiliency is probably the one that like as a client team, you spend most of your time thinking about.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  And that's like another interesting conversation, like, you know, how much time or how little time, I guess, client teams spend understanding what's happening on Ethereum, especially as it grows in complexity, like you literally can't understand everything that's that's being built. So just trying to figure out like, you know, where do where do, on what like Ethereum value can we have an impact and like, you know, how do we make sure we do a good job there?

• 24:05David Hoffman?

  Do you remember like a particular like decision or issue that that had to just like really be unpacked? Like for a good example for the listeners, just so they can wrap their head around like these small choices that had to be made that what you would have to consider and what that process was like?

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Sure. So I can go like very technical and then like much more broad, but like the very technical one, for example, is the ETH networking protocol. So the format by which nodes communicate with each other. So when they send a new transaction, how is that? How is that formatted, right? And this is like, can think of it like how nodes talk to each other on the network. The four, you know, these formats all have like assumptions embedded into them and we improve them. And oftentimes, if you want to create, say, like a new sync algorithm, when you're syncing, you're basically asking a bunch of nodes on the network for data about the network. So this is where like things change a lot. And I think there's a lot of time where like

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Geth has been like building new syncing algorithms and they've

• 25:09Speaker 01

  and supporting these networking formats is something that adds like a lot of technical depth to them. And they really benefit when other teams kind of drop, you know, are able to also quickly deprecate that. So that they can just, you know, refactor their code and make their syncing work better. So that's an example where I think we've always tried like with the Basu team, even though we might not be implementing the same syncing algorithm as them for like another year. To try and see, okay, how can we prioritize this thing because it helps them? Another thing that's really basic is just like adding testing infrastructure, right? Like the EF maintains a lot of the Ethereum testing infrastructure and it's really valuable when other client teams are able to like spare some resources to help improve that. And that's one thing, you know, we try to be mindful about.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Bit more high level and probably relevant to like most of your listeners is like EIP 1559. So when we decided to start working on that, it felt like something where we had kind of the skill set in the team and we also had the bandwidth. And like literally nobody else in the client teams had, they all had the skill set, obviously, but they didn't have like the bandwidth to do that.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Just felt like something that was like super valuable for Ethereum, where there was a lot of work that could be done and we knew that like, we could do a lot of the work, you know, ourselves and then get it to a point where it was like, a bit more ready so that when we start involving other client teams like that, you know, the foundation has been set. And that was stuff like obviously implementing the EIP itself, but just like building tools to test it better and stuff like that. So yeah, that was probably one of the biggest one in the past couple of years where like, I think we were able to really have an impact.

• 26:48David Hoffman?

  I've always thought like the position of being a client dev is really, really interesting because it, there's a little bit of like, evolutionary fitness that goes into into clients, right? Like bad, bad clients drop off, good clients, you know, become downloaded more. And the cool thing about crypto is it's, it's, it's all like biomimicry, right? And so whichever client can get themselves replicated more is therefore a successful client. Yet at the same time, like clients can't be in too much of a competition with each other because you don't actually want one client to have a monopoly, right? You don't want one, one little organism to dominate the whole entire ecosystem because then the whole ecosystem will die off. Because you can't have centralization on, on one client. So I've always thought it's like, there's this tug of war between like, you want to make the best client,

• 27:34David Hoffman?

  but you can't make it too good because then you, then you smother all the other clients. What was the conversation? Is this a conversation with client teams?

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we've had this, I think every team kind of agrees they're not going to make their client worse, right? Like, so you know, like whether that's like the gap team or, you know, Aragon, like they're all, you know, say very good on certain aspects, like I don't think any team is willing to compromise to like make their client worse, you know, for, for like the sake of client diversity, just because, you know, at the end of the day, we do want like to offer a good, a good product for, for the users. I think what we often compromise on is like making the client better, but slower, right? Like, it's like, we have, we all have like these roadmaps for what we want to do, but then if other people kind of have other stuff that's really important to them,

• 28:22Speaker 01

  you know, we're, we're sometimes fine, just like, you know, not, not doing something, but just making it in a way that, you know, gives others time to adapt and stuff like that. And for example, you know, like this happens a lot, say with the Aragon team today, they have like a completely different architecture. And so oftentimes like, If we can do things that like allow them to implement that better, then I think we we really should try and do that. And and because, you know, even though they might not be the most popular client on the network today, they're, you know, potentially like the most popular client in like three years. And try, you know, leaving the room for that is is what allows us to have people who come in and like decide they're going to build a whole new client.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  And I wouldn't be surprised like after the merge, kind of the the assumptions around like what the network should provide and what not kind of change. And there might be a new team that pops up and that's like, well, you know, we're going to build a client who like doesn't care about anything before the merge. You know, if you want to validate proof of work, sorry, we just don't support that. But we can be like really optimized for validating everything starting from the merge, for example. And I think it's really valuable. You want to leave the space for that because this is how, you know, we we keep having like better core infrastructure for Ethereum. And I'll add a note, like I'll shield the clients a bit more like when when you you hear about like Ethereum killers or like, you know, especially EVM compatible Ethereum killers or even like roll up solutions.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  A lot of them reuse clients from Ethereum, like a lot of them, you know, will just forget and like build their whole kind of basically network around it, Tron, Avalanche, Optimism are all forks of Geth and Polygon as well. So I think that shows you like how good the software actually is. And we want to make sure that, you know, we we keep this software really good and we we give the space for people to come in and build like even better software on the foundation. And for example, Aragon, which is used to be called Turbo Geth, is a client that like stores data in a much more efficient way.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  But that also started as a fork of Geth. And now, you know, they still can bring some changes in, but they've they've made like major modifications. So they're I I'm not sure it's like it's it's fair to them to call them a fork of Geth anymore, but they definitely started out as that. And yeah, I I think it's really valuable that we we we leave the space for new people to come in and improve on this stuff. Yeah.

• 30:48David Hoffman?

  Well, I want to keep on going on this conversation, but since we touched on it, like, why is everything a fork of Geth? Like, why Geth?

• 30:55Speaker 01

  It's just so good. And so I guess a couple of things. So I guess this is extremely good. It's also the oldest still running client. So there's a lot of, you know, people who are knowledgeable about it. I think the license is quite friendly. And, and yeah, like, also, people probably expect that it's going to be maintained, you know, forever. Like, like, for example, Parity was very, very popular as well. And the original team kind of walked away from it. And there's been others who've like attempted to maintain it. But like, it's a really hard job to maintain a client. And so it's, you know, even though some teams, you know, can come in a few engineers.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  It's, there's like uncertainty about like, well, will this thing actually still be there like in five years? Or am I going to have to move off to something completely different? And I think the Geth team has like shown that, you know, they'll, they've been there since basically the start of Ethereum. And they'll probably be there like up to the end of Ethereum.

• 31:52David Hoffman?

  So isn't this just like a massive public goods problem with? Because like if we need these clients to be maintained, basically until Ethereum dies. Like, how do we expect these clients to just be maintained for the next, like, you know, multi-generation timeframes?

• 32:08Speaker 01

  Right, right. So I think luckily like the space has grown in terms of funding. And I think what regards to just like basic maintenance, like think about it like paying maintainers salaries. We're probably getting into a spot where it's, it's, I wouldn't say easy, but like it's, it's, it's a manageable problem. So whether that's like, you know, through large grants, either from the EF or others, or through clients have, you know, working with say layer two teams or whatnot. That can then get paid for that work. Like, I think there's, there's more and more options where like. You know, starting a client can be, say, like a profitable business in a way.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  I think the biggest challenge and something I, you know, I want to spend more time on is aligning the incentives so that the risk reward of working on a client is better. So right now, you know, most client teams are most client teams like devs at best have like equity in the company they work for, right? Like, everybody who works at Nethermind has like Nethermind equity. Everybody who works at Consensus has Consensus equity. But that's like a very indirect like value creation to capture mechanism.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  And and there is like, obviously, some amount of risk to work on the protocol, but it's it's it's less than like starting your own, you know, DeFi project, for example. You're not like starting from scratch.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  But I still think that the kind of reward for working on the protocol, which is, you know, from zero past your salary to like some equity in some company that's like tangentially related to the client and also not necessarily correlated with like Ethereum's rise.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  That's like way too low. And so what, you know, the risk is that people are able to take like a little bit more risk. So they go from like working on the clients to starting their own DeFi project, which is obviously riskier, but then instead of getting, you know, 10 times the reward or like five times the reward, they get like 100 or 1000x times the reward, right? And so what what I really want to make sure is like that we can create mechanisms where we can have some like rewards for these people that's correlated with like the overall growth and adoption of Ethereum. And what this could be in practice is something like, you know, asking projects to like donate a percentage of their treasury, you know, when to some fund that goes out to client developers, for example.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  And and something like that where like, if you can get new projects like that that are just starting out to have like a social commitment to that, then, you know, a subset of those projects will be really successful and that kind of provides some upside to the to the different people working on this stuff.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  The weeds of it, there's like a ton of this details about like, how do you, you know, how do you decide who's in, who's out of the lists, you know, how do you wait people? How much do you ask for projects and whatnot? But like, generally, I think this idea of like, if we could get projects to provide some sort of like upside contribution or fun. That would help make working on a client like a much better risk reward kind of proposition. It'll never beat, obviously, starting your successful DeFi protocol, but like, doing that is also taking way more risk. And I suspect there's a lot of people who'd be happy with just, you know, like, slightly better upside, given the risk that they already take. Yeah, so that's what I think is really important and where the community can really kind of innovate on in the next couple of years.

• 35:39David Hoffman?

  Is there a world where it doesn't have to rely on like donations or contributions, but there's actually a way to like turn this into a business? Like, I know, I'm pretty sure like it's like blasphemous for a client to like have some sort of like, you know, fee in it, right? Like, but is there any way?

• 35:56Speaker 01

  A lot of them, a lot of them have businesses, but the problems like those businesses are like, they capture such a small percentage of the value. So for example, like a very common business with like, two or like, you know, consensus clients is like, you can offer professional support to like staking services, right? Like consensus does this, and I'm sure, I'm not super familiar, but like, I'm sure basically every team will do this. It's like, if you're Coinbase and you want to use, you know, consensus as client, you can get like, you know, enterprise level support and consensus obviously generates revenue from that. And I think this is why I was saying earlier, like, I think you can build a sustainable business into starting these clients, but you.

• 36:36David Hoffman?

  But they don't have token gains, right?

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Exactly. They don't have like the exponential upsides that you see in like a lot of crypto native stuff. And I haven't seen like a good proposal to like embed that in clients directly. That doesn't require, say, like, you know, on-chain allocations to dev funds, and I don't think that's something we want to do.

• 36:57David Hoffman?

  Right. Starts to feel like a part of hell, right? At that point.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Exactly, right. Yeah, yeah. And like, I would be very uneasy to have like something on-chain that like sends funds to a bunch of addresses or to one addresses. That just seems, and there was a proposal for it a couple of years ago that got shut down pretty hard. So I don't think we'll get, we're not going to get funds from the protocol. And I think the revenue is nice, but it basically pays for the salary. And it's almost like we need some mechanism to pay for like the upside or like the equity. And that's like the bit that's missing.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  And yeah, donations totally might not be the final or like the best approach. If people have suggestions, send them to me. I'm happy to try and to try and get those working. Yeah.

• 37:42David Hoffman?

  Say for a thought experiment, for example, say we figure out as an ecosystem how we do actually attach the upside potential of a token to building a client. And then say, again, in this thought experiment, that we successfully figure that out and then all of a sudden clients and tokens are paired. And then like we have some sort of just like mania where like, oh, I can like make my token go a thousand X by starting a new client. And then we go from having like a handful of clients to like hundreds and thousands of clients.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:14David Hoffman?

  Is that a problem? If we have like hundreds and hundreds of clients?

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  So I think, you know, the easy solution to that problem is like you time gated, right? Like, so you time and feature gated. So you say, you know, your client has to be live for a year. And like the EF, if you want to build a new client, you know, come see the EF's grant program or some other, you know, Molok Now or something. And like, you know, we'll give you funds to like actually try this and prototype this. But like, I think if you have any, that sort of mechanism, you require clients to have been live for like X amount of time. And it's like extremely hard to start a client. So like, most people will give up before a year, I suspect.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  So, and I don't know, maybe like a year's too short. Like maybe it's two years. I don't have a strong opinion.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  And then you like feature gated as well. It's like, well, can you like sync the mainnet and like process these blocks? Like, or you know, post-merge, can you like be a validator? So there's like a couple of things that like, and say if you're a validator, like, you know, can you like keep these metrics, right? Like, can you like attest to like X percentage of the blocks? Can you propose blocks on times? And I think it's. It's not that hard to define like the the baseline for what a successful client is. It's quite hard to build it. Um, and there's been, you know, probably 50% of teams who've tried that like have not made it to like this bar historically. So, yeah, I, I, I think that would be the way to go. Um, and like, and then, you know, if we have twice as more like there's a,

• 39:42Speaker 01

  you know, there, there's a discussion to have like, you know, how much do we need? And does it bring you extra efficiency or not? Um, and, but that feels like kind of a happy problem. It's like, if like the problem we're having is like too many Spark people want to work on this. Um, you know, I, I'm sure we can figure out a way to, to, to, to have them work productively. Yeah.

• 40:00David Hoffman?

  I, I want to pick up the, uh, client diversity question, uh, line again, because yeah, are there conversations in the very, very, very long term, like 50 to 100 plus years about the inevitable centralization of Ethereum onto one client? Do, do people think that ultimately one client will kind of win out? Or is there like a conversation that like, oh, we can, we just need to be able to balance it just enough where

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:26David Hoffman?

  What, what are like the long-term thoughts about client diversity in the, in the very long term?

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I, I'm sure people like have very differing opinions. So like I can, I can speak to myself like in what I see, but like,

• 40:39Speaker 01

  it's, so one of the challenges with like, not the very long term, but say like the short to medium term is like, people have like a really strong sense of pride in what they built, right? Like, so people who build a new client, they're not going to like pack up and go home and like, be like, okay, I'll just like work on get instead. Like people put like, you know, huge amounts of resources and efforts into that. And, and so I think they, they want to make it successful. So I think there's like this, um, this, I don't know, like inherent like motivation for, for different people who started these projects to, to keep maintaining them. Um, you know, I think.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  I would be weary of only having like a single client like in the future. Like if you told me that like, I don't know, in like 50 years, we have like two or three. That seems like less bad. And the challenge is like, if one client goes down and has a bug, then like the Ethereum network basically stops working, right? And, and again, that's maybe something that like we change our mind on as a community. But so far, we've had like an extremely strong bias on Ethereum to like, the chain doesn't go down, right? And Ethereum's been, has had like a higher uptime than Bitcoin. The Bitcoin chain has like very early on in its life, you know, stalled for a while while they put out a bug fix. Like that hasn't happened on Ethereum.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  And, and I think there's, especially like as more and more economic activity gets built on Ethereum, right, like you, you, what, what we're selling basically to people building on Ethereum is this like settlement layer that does not go down and that you can always rely that like, you know, post merge every 12 seconds, there's a new block that comes in. And if for some reason the chain had to go down like for two days or like even a day, and this is, this is like the, you know, the amount of time you'd expect like an A plus engineering team, if there's a bad bug, to like wake up in the middle of the night, find what the issue is, fix it, test it and ship it and get everybody, you know,

• 42:38Speaker 01

  to update their nodes, you know, realistically, you can't do that within like less than 12 hours, probably.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  And like if the Ethereum chain went down for 12 hours, that'd be terrible. Like just think today, you know, what would happen with like DeFi? What would happen, you know, with like all the businesses who like rely on being able to accept payments? With all the insurance that's like on Ethereum? What, and if you, if you look out five, 10 years in the future, it's like if TradFi is selling you on this, imagine it's like market close in the US or in Asia and like, you know, you're selling for the day and like Ethereum's down. So like. If if people had to like expect Ethereum to be down, I think you take away, you know, fifty plus percent of like Ethereum's value proposition. And so I think we really want to be in a spot, client wise, where like this can't happen, right? And I'm not sure what the right number is.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  It's definitely bigger than one. I think it's also bigger than two. Like, it's it's not ten or a hundred, but like somewhere in that range, I think is is really healthy. And and I think it becomes even more healthy after the merge, because some of these bugs can have impacts on like people's stakes, right? Like, so if there's just one client and there's a bug in it and the chain goes down, you know, you you basically, you know, can can lose people money that are validating on the network. And that's also something like, yeah, it's it's a big part of the value proposition. Like, you can be a validator and earn income. And if you do things right, like you, you shouldn't be penalized. So, yeah, I, yeah, I, I know, that's my opinion. Like, some people might disagree.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  And I also think, yeah, if you want Ethereum to keep innovating in like fifty years, the way to innovate is often to build something new. Because like, for example, Geth could not build what Aragon has built, just because they need to support all the current Geth users. So like, new teams are able to kind of leapfrog and and and kind of, you know, if if in fifty years, we have like, all zero knowledge based Ethereum, I suspect we'd have a client that's built to like, support zero knowledge proofs, like, from the core, from day one. And that would be way more efficient than whatever zero knowledge implementation is added to Geth. Just because you can take all the decisions making those assumptions. So, yeah, I I think we'll always keep a few. It's really important for the resiliency. I don't know, some people might might disagree with that, though.

• 44:56David Hoffman?

  I definitely want to get into the zero knowledge conversation later, but I also want to pick up on Tim's story. Because, Tim, you got came on a lot of people's radars because of your efforts on EIP1559. Can you talk about the transition from working on on Besu into EIP1559? You touched on it a little bit, but just keep on going down that story?

• 45:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I kind of mentioned earlier, like, you know, at consensus, we always tried to think about like, what are things we can do that really help the the community and that like, we're maybe uniquely positioned to do. And 1559 kind of fit that bill perfectly because it was like a huge effort. Like, we knew getting into it, it would be huge. We underestimated how big, but we we knew it would be big and bigger than we estimated. And we also like, you know, we wanted people to use Baysuit. So we were like, well, if we're the first ones to get like a test net with 1559, you know, people will want to try that and it'll be it'll be good for us. And we also saw like, you know, no one was really working on it. So like, there had been some original efforts done, but the team had kind of stepped away.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Or, you know, they they weren't super like, it was it was like missing momentum, basically. And and it seemed like something that was just

• 46:11Speaker 01

  mostly like desired by like a very large part of the community. Like, it was somewhat contentious, but like, it felt like an, I don't know, 80% bet that like, this thing will actually make it on chain, assuming it's safe. And finally, also, yeah, it's sort of known like when 1559 was first presented, the get team like, basically had a bunch of technical issues with it and no one had like really addressed them. But we have like a really clear list of like, problems to solve.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, so we, you know, we decided to take like one or two engineers, have them like, look into it really deeply at first to to understand, you know, are we missing something here? And then, you know, we just started kind of prototyping it. I started running calls with like the people who had been involved in the past to see like, you know, like, what have you guys done? You know, what were like the blockers? What are like the things we're missing to to get the main net? There were a couple like, really big changes we made to the spec that that really helped simplify it. So for example, the original 1559 EIP had like this transition period. So it was like, on, we're going to have a hard fork and like, on the hard fork block, you're going to start with like 1% of transactions and a block can be 1559.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  And then like over like six months or a year, I forget, you know, you'll have 100% or maybe 99%, like you always leave a bill of. Room for like legacy transactions, but you kind of transitioned this way. And that was super complicated because like we would have clients maintain like two different memos. One for fifteen, nine transactions, one for normal ones. Have to create a block and like you need to like cross check them. And if we got to the spot where we wanted to like actually deprecate legacy transactions. You have this problem of like, somebody signed a transaction five years ago, they walked away in the woods. And like now they come back and they want to submit it to the network and like they can't because you know, we've break it.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  So that's one thing that like, even though in in theory, it it might, or in practice, it might not matter much. Like in theory, felt very important to keep this property. Like if you've signed an Ethereum transaction, we shouldn't like lock you out of the system. And so, uh, Micah Zoltu found like a really smart way that we could convert legacy transactions to fifteen fifty nine one. Where we set the the gas price to both the max fee and and and the priority fee. And that allowed not only to like solve that problem, but also to simplify the spec hugely. Because then we had a way to have a single mempool and you can just like treat all transactions as though they were fifteen fifty nine style transactions.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  And and you know, like, we just spent like a year, basically, that was one of like the bigger kind of, you know, fixes to the spec. But we spent like a year going over this and trying to figure out, you know, what are like the problems here? How can we fix it? Uh, the other huge one was, um, there was no proof or like analysis that showed fifteen fifty nine actually worked. Everybody who, yeah, everybody who like had specked it and and like looked at it from the client's side kind of understood intuitively why it would work and why it was a better system. But like, some people were were uneasy. They were like, well, you know, what if we're wrong? And so, uh,

• 49:17David Hoffman?

  And this this question is about like, we don't really know until we see it in action and we can't really know ahead of time. Is that kind of the issue?

• 49:24Speaker 01

  No, it was more about like the economics of it like we don't know if this is like a sound economic system and like when you think about it, you're like, it sounds like it, but like we were scared that like some economists would just look at it and be like, oh no, this is absolutely broken. Like, you know, somebody will do this and like, you know, kind of bypass the system. And so somebody basically helped and hired Tim Rothgard, who's a computer science and game and game theory professor or economics professor who specializes in game theory. And he basically spent three months with his team researching 1559 and trying to come up with a formal proof or model of like, does this actually meet the goals that it's intending to?

• 50:07Speaker 01

  And he published like a 50 page paper, the TLDR of which was yes, it basically does.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that was, that was hugely valuable because at least there was something we could point to that was like, you know, somebody with like deep expertise in this field who also understands Ethereum, like, you know, was able to analyze this and like, there was no like massive shortcomings in it. So it was just like, yeah, spending the time to doing all this. And towards the end, we got to a spot where like, we were actually ready to put this on the main net. And I think there was more work around like trying to educate the community around like what 1559 does and doesn't do. So I spent a bunch of time, wrote a bunch of articles trying to explain that and like, you know, what can people expect? Like, for example, like, you know, people thought 1559 would like massively lower transaction fees on Ethereum and just trying to explain like, what does it actually do to transaction

• 50:58Speaker 01

  fees? And similarly, you know, there was a lot of talk about like miners and how would miners react? So I spent a bunch of times working with folks, not only to analyze that, but also to like talk with miners and, you know, try to explain to them this change.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  And trying to explain to them, you know, other revenue sources that they could get and like how to prepare for that. Yeah. So I don't know, it was a lot of like very technical work at first, then kind of transitioned to more like community outreach and just like a lot of explaining 1559.

• 51:31David Hoffman?

  So a lot of your EIP 1559 work came through working on Besu?

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, basically. And it was extremely helpful to be in that position because I had a dev team that could actually write the code, right? Yeah.

• 51:47David Hoffman?

  And then you actually transitioned into a different role in Ethereum. How long after did that happen?

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so basically, I think I'd been at Consensus for two and a half years or so. And I was always like involved in the Awkward Devs call because I was on one of the client teams. But I was also kind of the less technical person on those calls. Like, I was kind of the only non-engineer there, basically, alongside Hudson. And sometimes, you know, other folks show up, like Pooja and James Hancock was there also earlier on. But like, you know, the call is basically 90% engineers and then like some kind of people like us who are more on like the project and product management side of things. And towards, basically, the end of 2020,

• 52:34Speaker 01

  I was talking with Hudson and he mentioned, you know, he had been doing this for, I think, five years up to then and wanted to move to something new. And, you know, that just felt like such a great opportunity. Like, it felt like something where

• 52:49Speaker 01

  I knew kind of, you know, how Awkward Devs worked. I think I had some ideas about like how we could potentially improve it. And also, like, my time, like, my opportunity cost for doing this wasn't that high. Like, you don't want an engineer to run Awkward Devs. Like, you want them to, like, write the code. So I was like, I'm one of the few people who, like, understand how this whole thing works, but also I can't actually write the client. So like, the next most valuable thing I can do is is try and, like, manage or run this whole thing.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, I got to talking with Hudson and it seemed like a good transition. One thing the EF was super mindful about is they really don't like taking people from projects and like bringing them into the EF. They really want to, like, you know, push many projects to thrive. So one thing we did was I took basically six months to transition out of my role at Consensus so that we could hire somebody new and train her, who's basically the new product lead for Besu today, Sejida.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  And I kind of started working part-time at the EF and like went part-time at Consensus once we had hired Sejida, so I could just, you know, kind of help on-boarder. And then, yeah, over, basically, I think it was around March, I was just like full-time at the EF and no longer at Consensus.

• 54:06David Hoffman?

  For the listener that isn't familiar, and which, I mean, includes me at this point, can you just like TLDR, explain like I'm five, what Hudson and now your role is with EF? Like, what is it that's really happening?

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Right, right. Not super easy, but like, so the main thing is every two weeks, there's this call where all the different client developers get together to discuss changes to Ethereum, right? This is how we plan, you know, network upgrades, how we discuss, you know, new EIPs and whatnot. And you need like a moderator for this call. So that's kind of my job. Like at very basic level is like every two weeks, I sit on this YouTube call and I, you know, try to make sure that we, you know, we get through all the topics.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  From there, you know, to make sure like those calls generally go well. And I spend a lot of time thinking about how can we make, you know, client development like a sustainable and like thriving thing. And so that, you know, that includes things like working on grants programs or just, you know, talking with the teams and organizing workshops when we need to. So just like, you know, making sure that like the kind of working environment around this is good.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  And then the other half of my job is basically explaining all the stuff that we do to like the broader Ethereum community. And so stuff like this podcast or like, you know, writing these tweet threads that I do or writing articles, just trying to like, take what we spend like all our time on and make it accessible to somebody who's like, obviously familiar with Ethereum, but like, doesn't want to spend two hours every two weeks, listening to this call and trying to dig through like EIPs and pull requests and whatnot. So yeah, I really see it kind of like twofold, like internally, work with the client teams, make sure that like we're, you know, we have a roadmap for Ethereum, we're executing on it and like, trying to like unblock the biggest blockers, whatever they are as they come up.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  And then kind of sharing what's happening with the broader Ethereum community so that they can have like a feeling for what happens and obviously can participate if there's something that they, they support or disagree with, then. My hope is like, somebody can just like skim my tweet threads and be like, oh man, this is like a terrible idea. And then like engage on this like one specific issue rather than to have to like, listen to all the calls all year long. And like, the hope that, you know, nothing goes wrong.

• 56:32David Hoffman?

  Right. So you're, you're a relayer between the community and all of the client teams, just relaying the data.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:38David Hoffman?

  And then, uh, in both ways, right? Like, hey, uh, client teams, like the community has these concerns. Or like, hey, client teams, like, there's this thing called the IP1559 that the community really, really, really likes. Uh, and then probably vice versa too, right?

• 56:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think that's giving me too much credit. So it's like, if I had to simplify it, I, I think I'm a better relayer from the core devs to the community. And we've actually hired somebody to do kind of the opposite. Uh, so Trent Van Eppes, uh, works with me closely. And if I had to describe, I'd say he basically does the opposite. He's like better at going to the community and getting their opinion than bringing it back. Or like, if we have something that really affects kind of the community, like, he helped a lot with 1559 and, and now with the merge, for example, trying to like, reach out to like, all the projects. Um, yeah. So it's basically two full-time jobs. One is sending the information out and the other one is getting the information. And yeah, we obviously work, uh, yeah, yeah. And we, we work pretty closely together. Yeah.

• 57:34David Hoffman?

  Hey, guys. I hope you're enjoying the show with Tim thus far. In the second half of the show, we are getting into the details of what does it actually mean to make changes to Ethereum? Who actually is a core dev? Am I a core dev? Are you a core dev? Uh, some interesting conversations, some interesting thought experiments coming up in the second half of the show. Before we get there, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Matcha, everyone's favorite DEX aggregator, has just launched an open beta for gasless trading. So if you're trading more than $5,000 in common ETH and wrapped Bitcoin pairs, then your gas fees on Matcha are free. And that's why you should be using Matcha. Matcha routes your orders across all the various DeFi exchanges on Ethereum, Polygon, Binance,

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• 59:03David Hoffman?

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• 59:45David Hoffman?

  DeFi never stops growing and the Ledger Live app grows alongside with it. So click the link in the show notes to see all of the DeFi apps that Ledger Live has and stay tuned as more apps come online. And if you don't have a Ledger hardware wallet, what are you even waiting for? Go to ledger.com, grab a Ledger, download Ledger Live and get all of your DeFi apps all in one space. So like, what's that like? Like, what's it like to work with all of the client teams? Like, are, because they're all engineers, right? And so like the, they're engineering type that like the meme is the engineers, they're really good at code, but they're not really good at communicating. And sometimes they're all kind of like lone wolves. It's like, what's that, what's that experience like?

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Right. I think most teams have like some people who like are actually pretty good at both, who are good on like the engineering and like the more project management level. And typically they'll like self-select those people and like have them participate. So I don't necessarily have to interact with like all the engineers, right? I can interact with like the subset who decides they want to like participate in like the project management. But yeah, I mean, and I think I kind of see it as my job to like fit around their schedules or like their constraints rather than the other way around. Like, you know, they have to like write all the code. So, you know, uh, yeah, I just generally try to, to, to work in a way that's convenient with them, whether that's like whatever platform you message them on or like, you know,

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  what time you schedule meetings with them, like, just like all these small things that like, you know,

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  ideally don't add too much friction to their day job of actually building the clients. But yeah, like, I don't, most teams have been like great to work with. Like, I don't have any complaints about like them. And I think the, the other part that's like really interesting is I work with, with, with those and spend most of my time with those too, but also like tend to work with basically everybody who submits to the IP that gets, you know, some amount of traction. And then I kind of help them, you know, get this in front of the right people and, and, uh, and do that as well. So, yeah, I, I know, I'm, I'm stoked. Like, I get to work with like all the smartest people working on the protocol

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  and kind of observe and like sit around as, as, as they like build Ethereum.

• 1:01:56David Hoffman?

  Do you, do you have to like, do you worry about like your own impartial, uh, what's the right word? Impartiality, impartialness? Like, do you like, it's like, hey, there's a thing that I'm interested in. Hey, core devs, let's focus on this. Or like, are you kind of like a steward that is supposed to be apolitical and just facilitating communication?

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:13David Hoffman?

  Have you ever did balance that at all?

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, totally. It's something I think about. So for example, when we did 1559 and when we decided whether it was going to be included, I asked Hudson to come and run those calls because I obviously had like a strong, you know, feeling there. I think, yeah, generally I'll try to be on the more impartial side.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  I think you can't be like 100% impartial as well, like.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  And this is like when we were having 1559, you know, conversations, for example, you know, sometimes there are like some bad faith arguments. And if you just give, you know, as much of a platform to like bad faith arguments as to like good faith arguments. You're not actually being impartial, right? You're kind of tainting the thing. And I think that's something that's like a bit more subtle, like that I try to think about a lot.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  At the end of the day, like, you know, I can't really do much, like, even if I feel really strongly about something, if the devs don't want to implement it, like, you know, I can't can't force them, right? Like, and this is true of anyone, not just me, like, you need to, like, actually convince people because and then it's like, even if I convince the devs and like all the community hated it, well, nobody would download the software. And so they'd have to do that. So I think you need to be somewhat impartial, but it's also. What I spend like a lot of time like focusing on is finding out like, what's the actual bit on which people disagree and like focusing the conversation there? Because I think a lot of time we lose, like, there's like, you know, say 10 arguments, but there's actually like one or two of them that are really important.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  And like, if we, if we get like resolution on those, people will like, you know, be okay with like all the other small issues. And so when we have like these discussions, one thing, for example, I found really helpful is. Outside of the Alcor Devs call, reaching out to all the client teams and being like, hey, what do you guys think about this? What do you guys think about this? So that I can get to the call and be like, well, you know, have the teams think this, have the teams think that, you know? And like, we can discuss this, like one specific point of friction and like ideally move it forward. Yeah, so I, yeah, I know. I think being somewhat impartial is really important. I don't think you can be fully impartial.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  And another, so for example, another like bias that like I and I think all core devs have is like, we'll benefit the Ethereum mainnet over other like implementations of Ethereum, right? So this idea of like interrupt, like we won't try to like kneecap other implementations, but like we'll always kind of put the Ethereum mainnet first, right? And you know, that's obviously a bias because somebody from like Cello or like Avalanche come on the call and be like, well, you're not impartial. And I think we're fine telling them, well, you know, like we want to focus on the Ethereum mainnet and like. So yeah, I, I think there, there are like these decisions we've made and, and I try to like adhere to like the rough social consensus.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  And, and yeah, just to try and highlight like the biggest point of frictions between different people. So we can ideally like spend most of our time discussing those.

• 1:05:17David Hoffman?

  This line from the Cypherpunks I'll, I'll repeat whenever I get the opportunity is that Cypherpunks understand that the code they write impacts the people that use it. And like the all core devs call is like, it's like the war room for all, all changes, all, all bits of code that, you know, in theory will impact generations and generations down the line. And like, it's probably really, really draining to think of every single decision as like, all right, well, what about three, three generations from now? What about 200 years from now? But like, is, is that people's thoughts and considerations like behind the scenes?

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  So I think the, the part where we have it maybe slightly easier than that is people are willing to attack the Ethereum network today. So we could usually get by saying like, you know, will, will somebody attack this, right? Like if they can. And, and I'm not sure that's like a perfect proxy for like, is this going to be good 200 years from now? But we, we can also make more changes in the future, right? Like if we realize something's wrong in 10 years, I hope we'll be able to change it. So the, the one kind of main bit we always think about is like, you know, what's like the security implication of this? And basically every EIP that gets proposed kind of goes through this, somebody like. Is using Ethereum, they're frustrated by something and they're like, man, I have like this perfect idea of a feature that like,

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  you know, would would make this so much easier. They talked to other projects and they're like, they all agree to like, man, this is great. Like such a good idea. And then they come on a Cordova's call and like they get pointed out, well, you know, this like has like three security issues in it if we introduce it. Um, and then at least half the EIPs just die there. Um, and then once they usually make it in, you'll have the author kind of then spend, you know, months and in some cases years, trying to come up with like some workaround that's like, provides the feature that they originally wanted to, but is also safe. Um, and this is like 50 to like 90% of the work of actually getting an EIP on the mainnet is like, okay, how do we, you know, make sure that it's safe?

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Um, and that's really like the main lens by which we, we, we kind of view things. Um, obviously there's like this implicit assumptions, like we want to do stuff that's useful to people. Um, but generally that's not like the hard part, like it's easy to like, look at a new feature and be like, okay, yeah, this would help, you know, because it lowers gas costs, because it improves UX and whatnot. But then it's like, it has all these other problems like that, that people might exploit and, and how do we, how do we address those?

• 1:07:45David Hoffman?

  So, so obviously vetting the code for, for making sure it doesn't break Ethereum is really, really important. But like, have you ever experienced like a social attack as in, somebody's trying to make their way into the all core devs team to, or to calls to implement some, you know, some social, some social coordination attack, because as, as we know, even outside of crypto, like most, most hacks are just like people, social engineering, other people, right?

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:08:11David Hoffman?

  Have you, has any story like this ever arisen?

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  So I think what we see a lot, um, a lot, might be an overstatement, but like what we've definitely seen like a few times at least is, um, people who come in with an, with an EIP and they have like an incentive to get it in. Um, they're like much more unrelenting than the people who don't want to get it in. So like, say you come up with an idea and it's like, you really want this and you know, people are like, well, there's problems A, B and C with it. And And then the next week you come up and you're like, well, I really want this idea. And like, the person doesn't want to like, repeat like, I told you, you know, there's problems A, B, and C. And, and, and you see that like, it's, it's almost like a war of attrition.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  Where like, people would like, try to bring you up stuff over and over and over, even though like, the fundamental issues with them had not been, been like, addressed. And I think we've seen it a bit less recently, but yeah, in the past, I think, you know, the way with that is we would just like, tell people like, you know, like, you can't really come back on the call until like, you've addressed these things. And once you have, you know, we're, we're happy to. But I think that's really the things, like the imbalance between people who want something and people who don't want it. The people who don't want it, having to like, constantly re-justify why. And like, not wanting to, like, it's, you know, like, it's not really their job. So that's one thing I'm, I'm pretty mindful about.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  You know, I think that the like, more subtle engineering attacks, you know, say like, like, very like, I don't know, like, uh, extreme scenario, like the NSA infiltrates, like, you know, a, a Cordef team. I think this is where the, the client diversity also kind of matters, because like, no client team can like, single-handedly push a change unless they kind of convince everybody else, right? And, and then even if the client teams agreed, then they'd have to convince the community to do that as well.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  And you can imagine stuff where like, you only need to convince the client teams, right? Like, if it was like, some backdoor in a cryptography function, you know, the amount of people running nodes who can actually verify that is, is quite small. But like, if somebody was coming in, like, shilling, you know, like, their BLS 12 library non-stop, and like, I don't know, say, like, the get team was like, oh yeah, we're really on board with that. And like, other teams thought something was like, fishy about it.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  It would probably just stall, right? Or, or if not, you know, other teams would be like, okay, we'll do this, but like, we'll use a different library. And so you kind of mitigate any impacts of, of that. And also, like, as we're noting, a bunch of teams have people that disagree with each other on the team, right? Like, so it's quite possible that, like, somebody, again, say this, like, this example, somebody tried to put a backdoor into Geth, you know, that the Geth team might not agree about, you know, do we want to use this library or not? And so I think this is where it's really valuable. Like, you don't want to have just one implementation that's guarded by one team. Because like, if for whatever reason that team got compromised, like, you know, the other teams kind of act as a sanity check. And that's, that's really good. Yeah.

• 1:11:18David Hoffman?

  So part of the ethos of this whole industry is that it is reflective of what the people want, right? And the nature of open source systems is that you can contribute to them if you think that you have something valuable to contribute. So vet this statement for, for me. If you have something that you think Ethereum can, should, should go into Ethereum, you can actually get that done. And I'm, and I'm talking about like, not you or the client teams. I'm talking about Joe Schmo from, you know, the, wherever, wherever in the world has a really good idea. But he doesn't know you. He doesn't know Danny Ryan. He doesn't know any of the client teams. But he has a good idea. Can he actually get that code in there? Or is that, is actually updating the code gated to a very small privileged number of people?

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  Right. So I've, I've actually, we have EIP1, which kind of describes how to do changes to Ethereum. And I've, I've updated that a note about this. You know, I think the difficulty, the difficulty is proportional to two things. One is how big of a change you're trying to introduce. If like, you know, something that happens all the time, for example, is some teams working on like rollups, for example, use a precompile and they think the gas cost is too high. And, you know, they come in like, we don't necessarily know them. And they're like, look, this gas cost is too high. It would help us a lot if it was cheaper. And we've run some benchmarks and we think it's safe if it's cheaper. So like, you know, they can come in and like, they, they're obviously familiar with Ethereum, like they don't know anything. But like, it's a simple change. They're able to add rationale for it.

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  And that's pretty straightforward. If say you wanna like change how, you know, say an idea on the scale of EIP 1559, like you're gonna need a lot of like time and effort and convincing people to do this. And so I think, yeah, like one part of like, the difficulty is proportional to how big the change you wanna make is. And it's also proportional to like how big Ethereum is, right? Like because you're changing the system, not just for yourself, but for everybody else, right? So the basically, the more Ethereum grows, the harder it is gonna be to make big changes. Because like you just have so many different people that depend on it. And so, you know, like can like a random person who knows nothing about like Ethereum come and, you know, make a massive change? Like realistically, no.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  Can they come, you know, without having like connections and like propose something that's like intelligent and like well scoped and like be heard and like have it critique like 100%? Like we get ton of those. And if you're not sure, you know, you can reach out to me. I I get emails from people that are like, I wanna come on all core devs and talk about this. And I'll I'll try to like let them know, you know, just like set their expectations. And even if they have an idea, you know, I can tell them like, look, even if this works, this is gonna be something that's gonna take like a year plus to get done. And like, you know, if if this is something you wanna commit to, I'm happy to help you. And and like I'll put you in touch with, you know, people who can review and give you feedback on this. But like, yeah, people should expect that it's not like a trivial thing to come on Ethereum and and

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  and change your protocol and and that's by design.

• 1:14:18David Hoffman?

  So Tim, who is an all core dev? How do you define that?

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  Right, hard question. So I think we use all core devs to define the call, not like the people. And I think I I've tried to like break it down between like client developers. So so the people who, you know, actually write code into one of these clients. And then we have a bunch of other folks on the calls for extremely valuable like researchers, obviously EIP champions.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  I find it easier to think about that, like what the people actually do. I think when people ask this question, they're like asking implicitly like who gets to make the decision. And, you know, it's a balance. Like I've mentioned this a couple of times already, but like, even for example, this is, I'll take like the, I don't know, most like steel man version of this is like Vitalik really wants to change. Vitalik has a list of changes. He really wants to see an Ethereum that's like, don't get adopted because, you know, for whatever reason, people don't think they're safe or like they're just not the priority. And like even him like can't like force something through the process and get like everybody to like drop everything they're working on. And unless they all agree.

• 1:15:27David Hoffman?

  Quickly, can you just like rattle off like off a list of things that like that you know that Vitalik wants that isn't going in? Just a really quick list.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  I don't have the full list, but the one he talks about a lot is removing self-destruct. That's like his, one of like the fairly simple, you know, things we could actually do that has a lot of like kind of ripple effects, right? And that's an example where I think he'd be happy if we like decided like, oh, we're going to remove self-destruct really quickly. And then when we look at this, we're like, well, how the hell is this going to work? And, and nobody else, I guess, you know, by, nobody else has spent their time like figuring this out. So I think that's a good example where like, you know, and, and, and there's valid reasons for removing, yet it helps with a bunch of stateless stuff and whatnot. Like he doesn't just want this for fun. Like there's, there's a strong rationale for why.

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  You know, I guess as a group, we just end up having other priorities and, and like, nobody has made that their number one priority. So even him, and I'm not saying like it's not going to happen, but it's like, even him can't like get everybody to drop some, everything and focus on like the thing. And, and if, you know, he might come up with a proposal that's like important enough, but people would have to all make the call like, oh yeah, he's right. And like, we should drop everything to work on that. And, and so, yeah, when people ask you about like, you know, who has like the power to make these decisions, obviously like the group. The group decides, you know, what code goes into what hard fork. We have this concept of rough consensus, so we, you know, we want people to generally agree.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  We won't, you know, require like a hundred percent agreement, like a lot of people will just, you know, sometimes say like they disagree, but not enough to block it. If people have like really strong objections, like it is possible for somebody to like, you know, single-handedly block or like delay something if they have like a sufficiently strong objection to it. But there's no hard and fast rule here. And then, yeah, even so, if you have consensus amongst all the client teams and like some of the folks, like say the EIP champions or the researchers, you still need the community to adopt the change, right? Like, and you need everybody to upgrade their nodes. And I think we try to be like, we don't want to be into a spot where like we just ship a bunch of software and nobody upgrades it.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  That's actually very confusing. You like, it's bad and it's a situation we want to avoid. So like, generally, the core developers won't like ship an upgrade that they feel would not get adopted by the community.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  But but it is a possibility, like if if for whatever reason, we, you know, we messed up there, like we like misread things and like the community decided this is actually bad. You know, they don't, they don't have to upgrade. And, yeah, so, so I think, you know, obviously,

• 1:18:17Speaker 01

  if you want to make changes to Ethereum, there's like a lot of value in spending time to understand how this process works. And and, you know, kind of gaining trust from the people in it and, you know, providing good contributions and whatnot. But I don't think there's like anybody who can like single-handedly like change or like derail the process at this point. And and I think that's like really, really healthy. It's probably way underrated, like when, like, if you look at, say, like the the straw or like the straw man, like arguments against like our governance process and like how, you know, people will like say, again, like Vitalik can like influence the entire roadmap. And what actually happens, I think there's like a massive gap there and like, yeah, that's, that's really, really valuable.

• 1:18:59David Hoffman?

  So in phrase differently, would you say like a core dev is somebody that has a good idea? The motivation to actually commit to that good idea, the resources in order to prove that that idea is good? And then, and then like, you know, is ready to follow through on carrying that idea all the way to the very end of its execution? That person is a core dev?

• 1:19:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah?

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And again, it's like a fuzzy label, right? Like, so like, that seems generally like a good definition. I, I think like, what I don't like about this label is it's also like, say you have like a researcher, right? Like who spends, you know, two years coming up with something and they don't actually implement it. Like they're not a core dev in that they don't write code, but they're like hugely valuable because like they, they've done like the work. Like, for example, everybody who like worked on the beacon chain spec, but like doesn't write code for it, you know?

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't know, like you could debate whether you call them a core dev or not, but like they're definitely a super critical part of the process. And, you know, I, I call them like a researcher, but they're involved in the protocol governance for sure. Um, so yeah, it's a fuzzy label.

• 1:20:05David Hoffman?

  I'm just getting like images of the, the whole like Spartacus meme where everyone stands up and says like, well, I'm a core dev. I'm a core dev. I, I wrote a tweet that helped the core devs like learn something like, oh, I, I wrote the introduction paragraph to this EIP. I'm a core dev. I'm a core dev.

• 1:20:21Speaker 01

  Right. Right. Yeah. Yes. And like, I mean, I don't know, I, I don't want to like exclude people from it. And I think, yeah. Uh, yeah, maybe at some point we'll just stop calling it all core devs altogether and get rid of that problem.

• 1:20:34David Hoffman?

  That's pretty funny. Um, is Amin Soleimani a core dev?

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  I mean, I think, um, a lot of people like almost dismiss Amin because he, of his attitude. He's made like mega important contributions to Ethereum. Like he's worked on state channels, Moloch now is obviously huge. Um, so, you know, I, I think like people are too quick to dismiss Amin. Um, yeah.

• 1:20:59David Hoffman?

  That was mainly the reference. Maybe I'll try and find that clip and put it at the end of the show, but when, uh, yeah, yeah, you know what I'm talking about. Listener state of the end. Well, we'll put that one in the end. Uh, so, so Tim, uh, are you gonna just facilitate these core dev operations for like the rest of your life? Or what, what's, what's next on the horizons for Tim?

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  Man, I don't know. I think it's really hard in a space that moves so quick as Ethereum to like, have like, say, a five-year plan, right? Because, you know, yeah, it's impossible to predict. I, you know, I felt like, obviously, when I joined this, like, one of the main things I needed to do was get the merge done. Like, that seems like a no-brainer. You know, like, and we're working on it. It's the next big thing. We're also gonna have, like, the withdrawals from the beacon chain won't come in the same upgrade as the merge. They're gonna come a few months after. And like, you know, if I think of like, the merge being done for me, it's probably those two upgrades. There's a bunch of stuff after that I feel really strongly about at the protocol level.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  So the most, the biggest one is stateless. So the idea is that the amount of data on Ethereum kind of keeps growing over time, as more people use it, then there's more data stored. But it'd be really nice to have a way to cap, like, how big a node is for a bunch of technical reasons.

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  But, you know, just to have a kind of a constant or a ceiling on the node size. That's something we've been talking about since, like, 2017, 2018. And that I think after the merge, we have a good shot of, like, prioritizing that and, like, sharding. But sharding happens much more on the consensus there side. So like, the beacon chain teams will probably handle sharding for like, you know, 90-plus percent. Whereas stateless happens mostly on the execution side. So I think that's like another big problem that like, I have a, I've basically been there since we started talking about this. I have a good feeling for like, what the different trade-offs are, how we can maybe get this done.

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel pretty strongly about getting this onto mainnet. I think if we had sharding and proof of stake, and I also felt pretty strongly about EIP 1559, like, if with EIP 1559, proof of stake and stateless, I think, you know, Ethereum could probably go along for 10 years without any upgrade and like, still be, you know, be good. You know, I think there's a bunch more stuff we'll want to do to make it even better. But like, yeah, those things just felt to me like, the major kind of flaws or like, issues with the protocol, and I'd really like to help fix them.

• 1:23:31David Hoffman?

  Is your entrepreneurial itch sufficiently scratched right now?

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it's, I think, you know, my work is great in that it is extremely self directed like an entrepreneur. And I think I do have like the ability to like shape things, you know, like the other big part of like stuff I like to work on, which is like a bit lower on my priority list. But it's like, how do we formalize the governance processes for Ethereum, right? Like, and one thing, for example, I think is like a flaw in our process. Like, I don't like that we actually rely on these calls every two weeks to make decisions. I think it's like a bit, it's not great for like, different time zones and like people who can't make the calls. I think some people also like, are not, you know, most comfortable like going on a call and like talking about stuff

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  like they're more comfortable writing. So I would love it if like we move to like a mostly async governance process. And we would still have calls, you know, I obviously we're gonna always need calls to like, discuss stuff. There's things that's just higher bandwidth to discuss on video. But like, another way to phrase this is like, I would be really happy if like, the way that I end this goal, this work is like by putting myself out of a job that you don't need somebody to run those calls every two weeks. And you're still gonna need people to facilitate. But like, it, it does feel like the amount of context that like myself or Danny needs to have to do this is extremely high. And like, I would love it if you were able to like, you know, have a much simpler process

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  where, basically, anybody say with like a project management background would be able to take in if like, for whatever reason, I stopped doing it. So I think that's from like a process perspective. I, that's like something that bugs me. And Rick Dudley had a tweet about that, I think a few years ago that stayed with me. He said, you know, if your, if your engineering process requires genius to work every time, you don't have an engineering process, you have an artistic performance. And I'm like, I feel like we're, we're not quite an artistic performance on all cordons, but like, we are a bit too close to that side for me to be, to be comfortable. And I really like it if we had something that's a bit more formalized and less dependent on like, live calls that are run with people with a ton of context. Yeah.

• 1:25:52David Hoffman?

  If somebody had to-

• 1:25:52Speaker 01

  So yeah, we'll see. I mean, once that, yeah, once all that stuff is done, we'll see what I do next. But I feel like I've got it all on my plate for the next couple of years.

• 1:26:00David Hoffman?

  Uh, so if somebody pinned you down and forced you to answer, what would your answer be for a win merge?

• 1:26:07Speaker 01

  I'd say 2022. So that's, that's a good hedge.

• 1:26:13David Hoffman?

  The whole year. And if you, if you had to pick a month, and you, and you-

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  Month is hard, right? So, so the reason picking a month is hard is because, you know, what I can control is like, how much focus, you know, we have on the merge and I, that's like my main thing, like making sure we, we keep, you know, the vast majority of our focus on that. I think assuming, and, and then the, the other thing that's hard is like, you know, we might find like a massive bug at some point. And, and like, if, if we find that, it delays things and it's like, it's hard to know by how much. But like, assuming we didn't find that, I think like early next year, like sometime in February, we, we can probably have the code like done, right? Uh, again, we, we might not like, that might not happen if, if there's like a major issue. Um, but assuming we got that, the question is then, how quickly does the community,

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  how quickly can the community upgrade for the merge? And this is like a bit hard because the merge is like a really different upgrade. It's not just you, you update your node and that's it, right? Like if you're a validator, you're going to need to run an execution client as well. If you're like, you know, Coinbase or like Binance, whatever running nodes, you're going to need to like, kind of change your setup. And we, we want to make sure that the community has time for that. Like, we don't want like the merge to work at like the consensus level, but then everything breaks, right? Like all the staking pools break, for example, like that'd be terrible. And so it's hard for me to gauge exactly how much time the community needs. What we've been doing, uh, Trent has been taking the lead on this, is having these merge community calls.

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  And literally they're kind of, we'll share some updates, but most of the call is just like answering people like wallet developers, infrastructures, questions like, and, and also figuring out like, what do we need to do to get this like in an, I easily, in a, in a good form for you to, to upgrade. Um, so we've had one a month or so ago. We have the next one this Friday. I think that's a way we can kind of speed run the process where like, we don't want to wait till the code is completely finished. Just start reaching out to like infrastructure providers. Uh, we want to solve as many of their issues proactively as we can.

• 1:28:17Speaker 01

  And then it's like, yeah, so like if the code is done in February, like we need two months. We usually take about two months to deploy an upgrade. That's like, you know, April, but if for whatever reason, like, you know, if EtherScan was like, well, this is completely going to break things. And like, we just learned about it at the last second. We'd have to make a call, like, you know, do we make it three months? Or do we go with like a broken? And I say EtherScan, but like, I suspect it would be like all block explorers, right? Like, um, and so, and so that's why it's hard. Like I, I would be disappointed if we don't get it then like the first half of next year. And I'm doing everything I can to get it, you know, within like as close as possible to the start of that first half. I, I don't think, you know, like, I, I think the code is not going to be done until like January or February.

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  So like, you know, I, I think it's unrealistic to expect things like before, you know,

• 1:29:06Speaker 01

  April-ish or, you know, late March or something like that. If everything went like absolutely perfectly. But yeah, then there's like a couple of months that is just unclear how, how quickly we can get this out. And, and I think everybody involved in this kind of prefers safety over like shipping it like two weeks earlier. Um, yeah.

• 1:29:24David Hoffman?

  So it's, it's a matter of just not only having the code and having that just vetted and tested, but also like watching Coinbase raise their hand and Coinbase says, hey, we're ready to go. EtherScan says, hey, we're ready to go. And just like, oh, we get a gist of like, everyone kind of says they're ready to go. And so like, like, let's go ahead and do this, I guess.

• 1:29:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, basically. And also like we, we, we need to make sure things like mostly don't break. So it's fine if they don't have like perfect support. Like we saw this with 1559, right? Like MetaMask didn't like support it like right out of the gate. It took them a couple of weeks after and I don't know, I'm, I'm fine with that. If assuming like it doesn't like lock out users in any way. I'm fine if like, you know, the protocol upgrades and then like things are maybe a bit like, like sketchy for a week or two, just as like infrastructure sets up. But you just don't want to fundamentally break anything, right? You want people to be able to use the old version, um, and, and have that work and. Yeah, so I I'm not saying we need to wait for like every single like infrastructure

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  provider to be ready, you know, and there's good competitive pressures amongst them. Like, for example, you know, if Binance supports it, but not Coinbase, like Coinbase obviously wants to do it. If like, you know, infra supports it, but not Alchemy, Alchemy wants to do it. So like, I'm, you know, I don't want us to like do kind of central planning here, but I do want to make sure we're not completely breaking some major parts of infrastructure. Yeah.

• 1:30:47David Hoffman?

  Well, Tim, this has been a fantastic lesson as to like what it's like to be working on a client team and also just working very, very close to the heart of Ethereum. If there's one thing that you wish was more common knowledge throughout the broader Ethereum ecosystem, what would that be?

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, I think that bits I mentioned earlier about like the process actually being quite decentralized now at the governance level. I think even within the Ethereum system, some people might have like a picture that like, you know, certain folks are able to push stuff or like, you know, to like single handedly veto stuff. And I think, yeah, that's like gotten less and less true and that's really healthy. Um, yeah, so that's probably the one thing. Yeah.

• 1:31:32David Hoffman?

  Well, Tim, I hear those criticisms and critiques all the time. And so, uh, thank you for coming on and producing a show with me where I can actually point people to actually direct them here. So I thought this will be a new resource for that.

• 1:31:46Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 1:31:46David Hoffman?

  Awesome. Tim, thanks for coming on.

• 1:31:49Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:31:50David Hoffman?

  Cheers.

• 1:31:51Speaker 02

  We need a consensus of the core devs to do that.

• 1:31:54Speaker 03

  I'll do it.

• 1:31:55Speaker 04

  I mean, you're not a core dev.

• 1:31:57Speaker 03

  Can I be a core dev?

• 1:31:58Speaker 02

  No, you're not a core dev.

• 1:32:00Speaker 03

  How do I become a core dev?

• 1:32:01Speaker 04

  Um, we'll talk about that offline.

• 1:32:03David Hoffman?

  Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast and community as a Bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks and exclusive content and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles. And unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a bankless premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders,

• 1:32:44David Hoffman?

  Ask Me Anythings and weekly rollups where we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the bankless nation.