Ethereum’s Progression with Hudson Jameson | Layer Zero

Hudson Jameson is an Ethereum enthusiast and core developer liaison with a rich background in blockchain projects. He’s played an active role in shaping various online communities for decentralized technology, including Ethereum and more recently, Zcash. On today’s episode, Hudson shares his storied crypto journey starting in 2015 when he first became interested in Ethereum through the ups and downs he experienced as a part of Ethereum’s inner circle, all the way to what he’s up to today. Hudson closes with some heartfelt advice on burnout and mental health in the crypto space that you don’t want to miss. ------ 📣 Chainlink | Register for SmartCon 2022 with promo code “BANKLESS” https://bankless.cc/smartcon ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🌱 LENS | ACCESS CODE: MINTME https://bankless.cc/Lens 🚀 ROCKET POOL | ETH STAKING https://bankless.cc/RocketPool ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 🌉 JUNO | BRIDGE FIAT TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Juno ⚡️ ZKSYNC | THE LAYER 2 SCALING ENDGAME https://bankless.cc/zkSync ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 4:40 Hudson’s Background 6:54 2015 Crypto 9:00 Fork and Fair Launch Era 14:26 Early Tribalism 19:28 How Hudson Stumbled on Ethereum 23:43 Early Ethereum Culture 28:40 Progress Through the Chaos 33:12 How Vitalik Handled the Chaos 37:24 Why PoS Took So Long 38:45 When Bullish ETH Became Clear 41:34 Augur & ICOs 44:51 Hudson & Inner Circle in 2017 47:46 The DAO Hack 53:30 2018-2020 Bear Market 1:00:11 Core Devs Tug-a-War 1:08:00 The Ethereum Community 1:09:41 Hudson Steps Down From EF & Burnout Culture 1:14:35 Hudson’s Legacy So Far 1:17:05 Improving Crypto’s Culture 1:20:37 Privacy 1:21:45 Closing ------ Resources: Hudson Jameson https://twitter.com/hudsonjameson https://hudsonjameson.com/ ----- 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.

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

• 0:01David 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. The cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it. And Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code, because Ethereum is people all the way down, and it always has been. Today on Layer Zero, I'm talking with Hudson Jamison. And Hudson is a perfect example of this intro of the show. He got pulled in, like so many of us do, into Ethereum because he saw the vision for it. But it's because he met the people and vibed with the people, and in his words and many others, felt like he found his tribe. So he tells this story, and we start at the very beginning in 2015, because Hudson has

• 0:46David Hoffman?

  been around Ethereum for so long. And we go up to where Hudson is today. And this is a story of the progression of the core developer and core developer community in Ethereum, the EF in Ethereum, the story of DevCons, the story of the DAO hack, the story of the ICO mania, the 2018 to 2020 bear market, the story of Prague Pao, and just really how each one of these events have shaped the story and trajectory of the Ethereum core devs, the Ethereum community, and therefore Ethereum at large. Hudson, he's one of the chorus Ethereum community members that there ever is, and he's seen it all. And so he's one of the most apt people to tell the story of Ethereum and how it's progressed

• 1:28David Hoffman?

  along the way, both from the perspectives of the community and also the perspective of the core devs. Hudson is a person that just exudes Ethereum values and Ethereum ethos. And so it's been a delight to have him on this podcast. So I hope you enjoy this fantastic conversation with Hudson Jameson, right after we get through some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Arbitrum is an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution that is going to completely change how we use DeFi and NFTs. Some of the coolest new NFT collections have chosen Arbitrum as their home, while DeFi protocols continue to see increased liquidity and usage. You can now bridge straight into Arbitrum from more than 10 different exchanges, including Finance, FTX, Huobi, and Crypto.com. Once on Arbitrum, you'll enjoy fast transactions with cheap fees, allowing you to explore new frontiers of the crypto universe.

• 2:10David Hoffman?

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• 2:54David Hoffman?

  But there's a weak point in Web3: your crypto wallet. And most crypto wallets are browser extensions, which can easily be spoofed. But the Brave Wallet is different: no extensions are required, which gives Brave browser an extra level of security versus other wallets. Brave Wallet is your secure passport for the possibilities of Web3 and supports multiple chains, including Ethereum and Solana. You can even buy crypto directly inside the wallet with Ramp. And of course, you can store, send, and swap your crypto assets, manage your NFTs, and connect to other wallets and DeFi apps. So whether you're new to crypto or you're a seasoned pro, it's time to ditch those risky extensions and it's time to switch to the Brave Wallet. Download Brave at brave.com/bankless and click the wallet icon to get started. Juno is bringing crypto-friendly banking straight into your checking account.

• 3:35David Hoffman?

  With Juno, you can send money from your Juno checking account straight onto a Layer 2, like Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, and they have ZK Sync and Starknet support on their way. You can skip the ACH wait times, you can skip all the gas fees, and go straight from your checking account to an Ethereum Layer 2 in seconds. Inside Juno, you can buy and sell crypto with $0 fees, and your Juno checking account comes with a metal Mastercard that gives you up to 5% cash back on your spending. Juno is also giving you $10 cash back on your first crypto deposit and $100 when you set up a direct deposit. This ad just writes itself, so go sign up at juno.finance/bankless. Hey Hudson, what's up?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Hey, hi David, how are you doing?

• 4:13David Hoffman?

  I'm doing absolutely fantastic, how are you?

• 4:15Speaker 01

  I'm doing pretty good, pretty good. We got all the AV issues settled, so I'm happy about that.

• 4:23David Hoffman?

  To kick things off, the podcast listeners won't get this one, but I have the guest with the most flowery vibrant TV shirt with the most flowery vibrant wallpaper in Bankless history going on right now.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  I'm proud of that. I'm proud of it. You can thank my spouse, Lila. They bought me their shirt and bought the wallpaper. It was not me.

• 4:41David Hoffman?

  Hudson, a lot of early Ethereum people and later Ethereum people like myself definitely know who you are. But can you just explain what your role? How would you explain your perch in Ethereum for people that are new to Ethereum?

• 4:57Speaker 01

  I would say that it was harder for me to answer this question last year because I was kind of like, working so much, I didn't have time to reflect. But now I can say that I see myself as a connector in the ecosystem, someone who tries to bring good vibes and niceness and make sure that like, we're not just going to turn into awful toxic, you know, Maxies that are gonna, you know, keep people out of the ecosystem and also keep us on track for the ethos of Ethereum.

• 5:29David Hoffman?

  And how do you go about doing that? That sounds hard.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Lately, I shitpost a lot, but I also just maintain presence in a lot of different chat rooms. I have a lot of discussions. I feel like I've been told I'm one of the more social people at conferences and like, online when I get into that mode. So it's just basically keeping connections, making sure, you know, just kind of stay down to earth and talk to people about it.

• 5:54David Hoffman?

  And when did you get into Ethereum?

• 5:56Speaker 01

  So I got into Ethereum in 2014 to 2015. I was there for the pre-sale and I bought Ether in the pre-sale, but I didn't actually get heavily involved until I'd say early 2015. I was writing documentation for the Homestead, Hard Fork as a volunteer, and then I went to DevCon 1 and volunteered and from there, joined the Ethereum Foundation.

• 6:20David Hoffman?

  What did you do before?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Before that, I did a computer science degree at the University of North Texas and Denton, Texas, and then went on to work for a bank. At first, I was doing mainframe development, but I was so annoying about what the promised blockchain brings that they eventually sent me to what they called the innovation lab to be the lead blockchain researcher in 2015, which was really weird for a bank at the time. But I got to look into all the really crappy solutions and scams people were coming up with to get kind of my grounding on blockchain in general.

• 6:54David Hoffman?

  Can you put the listeners into the shoes of 2015? What was blockchain like back then? What did crypto mean? Was crypto a word in 2015?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Um, you know, I'm trying to remember. I think it was, but it wasn't as widely used because there was still some like, oh, that's short for cryptography people, you know?

• 7:13David Hoffman?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  I would say that back then, there was definitely a different feel about things, a different flavor, because in 2015, there was a lot of Bitcoin forks that were still trying to compete. Like, everything was a Bitcoin fork. Everything kind of had the same idea that Bitcoin had. And there was a big push for finding a way for people to use cryptocurrency to pay for a cup of coffee, which, as you can probably see over time, yeah, that was the meme. And now it's like, very different, both in Bitcoin and other places in the cryptocurrency space. So, yeah.

• 7:50David Hoffman?

  I wasn't around for the Bitcoin fork and fair launch era, but I've had it described to me as something very, very similar to the food farm launch era on DeFi and during DeFi summer. Can you help like draw those comparisons for listeners who weren't around? Like, and me?

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. So like, it kind of was that way, but I would say that,

• 8:12Speaker 01

  I think the biggest difference to me is that there was a much more diverse like political and social leanings for the DeFi food era where that didn't play as big of a factor as back then in the Bitcoin, you know, fair launch era and stuff like that in 2015 and maybe around 2014. I feel like it was more very heavily libertarian and like heavily that kind of dude. And I say dude because there was like even less women then than there are now and stuff like that. So it just had a different, it had like a different feel and a different like, it was very policy and libertarian focused in my opinion and less about innovation and making really cool things. Whereas the DeFi farm era was really

• 8:55Speaker 01

  exciting as well, but it was like about making cool things and pushing the limits on innovation.

• 9:01David Hoffman?

  Okay, okay. So the perhaps the word monoculture might be appropriate back then.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 9:07David Hoffman?

  Were the Bitcoin forks all that innovative? Like, were they really all that different from each other? How crazy did like the ambitions of these things go?

• 9:16Speaker 01

  There were a few that stood out. And the problem was the ones that stood out, as you can see, the people I feel like in crypto who are the most creative, push innovation the hardest, sometimes are more quiet or they're like less like out there and like really trying to shill their product at first because they're just really interested in making cool shit. So for instance, Namecoin, I think Sunny made the first proof of state coin back then around that time.

• 9:44David Hoffman?

  Sunny Agarwal from Cosmos?

• 9:46Speaker 01

  No, a different Sunny. I think they're Anon. It's just like Sunny 97 or something, but they made, they made, I can't not think of the name. It was the first proof of state coin back then, which was really crazy, but like everyone was shitting on it because it's not Bitcoin, it's not proof of work. And then, you know, there was a few other experiments that were pretty neat. There was one that was a coin that airdropped to like everyone in a country, I think Finland. And it was the first airdrop back then that ever happened. And that was kind of a neat idea to play with the economics of an airdrop and, you know, giving people back like, you know, kind of like a universal income in a way, but through a one-time airdrop.

• 10:24David Hoffman?

  But my take on that whole era of crypto was that a lot of the ideas that it brought are fundamental ideas of the crypto industry and zero of the projects that invented those ideas made it.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  That's correct. And I think there's a few reasons for that. Yes. And the thing is like, so the biggest one is colored coins and, you know, kind of the Omni kind of layer of Bitcoin, which was kind of a extracted, you know, smart contract layer in a way. And colored coins were the first chance to do kind of ERC 20 tokens, but on Bitcoin. And like, there was some interest in it for sure. But like, I think it was more the team's execution of the idea. Like, they weren't really marketers. They were technology people like through and through. I think that led to their downfall. So now, the need, this really, I guess, at the end of the day, highlights the, the position

• 11:18Speaker 01

  that marketing is a really big factor in, in projects. If you don't have marketing, it's much harder to get your innovative idea out there in the sea of other stuff, just like it was back then.

• 11:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Well, we'll turn to the ICO meeting in a second, which is where I kind of think marketing really started. For, I would say for better or for worse, but it was mainly for worse. But I kind of want to go through some of the ideas of that came out during the Fork and Fair Launch era that we know of today. You already named one, like the airdrop. Namecoin is now instantiated in ENS, I would say. It's like that, what Namecoin was, was a blockchain that was a blockchain with like a name, right? Was there like a currency of Namecoin? Or like, how did Namecoin really work?

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Namecoin, and actually, funny enough, it's still being developed. There are releases every month or so. There's like one guy doing it. But how Namecoin worked was basically, it was a separate blockchain that was a core of, a code fork of Bitcoin. And you would get Namecoins instead of Bitcoins. And you could use, you can mine Namecoin to buy Namecoin, like, domain addresses, basically. So I could buy Hudson dot. I think it was dot name. I'm not, I can't remember. It's been too long, but I actually did mine name coin for a little bit.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  It was, it was a long time ago, like, but uh, it, it, I think I got like seven name coin, which is now literally almost worth nothing. But uh, yeah, it was very creative and it did lay the groundwork for things like E N S. But I think that there were going to be limitations, just like as we've seen now, any code I feel like that has forked Bitcoins code base. Now has limitations heading into programmability and that includes name coin, that includes Z cash, that includes Litecoin, everything. Like if you want programmability, you're forced to do an L two. You can't do base layer as easily as you could.

• 13:17David Hoffman?

  Right, right, right. Um, was there any like philosophy on what the name coin asset would become? Uh, and like fitting that into the broader landscape of like all of these different blockchains are being built with each one a little bit more of a specific use case than Bitcoins. Bitcoin being money, name coin being question mark, peer coin being question mark. Well, what was the philosophy of like? What the role of each currency of the blockchain would, would be in over the long term back then?

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, I think, I think that that involves them like working together, which I didn't really see happening if I recall.

• 13:57David Hoffman?

  So like blockchain interoperability?

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, there wasn't, there wasn't that cohesiveness and idea of blockchain interoperability at the time. There wasn't Cosmos. There wasn't a vision of a network of blockchains. So working with one of the blockchains didn't mean you were in competition, but it's like, I didn't see Bitcoin people really clamoring to have like uh, connections with name coins. So I guess that's to say, to answer your question, there were people who used all the blockchains, but it was kind of a wait and see who won out. And then Bitcoin kind of won out.

• 14:27David Hoffman?

  Right. What was there? What was tribalism but like back then?

• 14:31Speaker 01

  The tribalism was mainly.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  About people who were against private and enterprise blockchains. And I guess that's kind of biased on my part because I worked in the enterprise blockchain space, which is, which then and now wasn't really that great. Not like there's bad people, there's great people there, but just enterprise blockchain is a hard sell. So like, there are people who are like,

• 14:53David Hoffman?

  To this day.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  To this day, you can't have private blockchains, you can't have, you know, consortium blockchains, those are stupid. That's how, that's where I saw it. So I guess it's hard for me to say, because I wasn't deep in the weeds on Bitcoin development, what the tribalism exactly was like. There would sometimes be some like, some stuff where like, someone would go crazy and a dev would say something absolutely ridiculous, like Luke Dash Jr. saying something stupid. And then like, you know, that would make news for a day. And that's mostly what I remember.

• 15:24David Hoffman?

  Interesting. Okay. So I'm going to go with the tribalism was not nearly as present as it is in today's world.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  I would say between blockchains, correct. Absolutely.

• 15:34David Hoffman?

  Right. Okay. So there was no real like sense of like Bitcoin maximalism, right?

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it was kind of the only one. It was like the leader. There wasn't a competitor or anyone really trying to compete. There were people that were trying to do things that Bitcoin couldn't do, like Namecoin and Omni and stuff. But in all and all, they would be aligned ethically, politically, et cetera, with Bitcoin for the most part.

• 15:57David Hoffman?

  And the, the launch of Ethereum both has an idea before the actual blockchain got launched. That was like Bitcoin's first significant competitor, right?

• 16:08David Hoffman?

  Um, because like Ethereum as an idea was put out in 2014. And from my very loose understandings of the history back then, like it offended a lot of Bitcoiners back then. And if you're telling me that there was no tribalism, there was no real competition to Bitcoin, but then this Ethereum yellow paper got released by Vitalik and Gavin Wood and a few others. And then a lot of Bitcoiners were like, that's, that's bad. To me, that's like, was that, is that the first indication of when this like tribalism part of crypto really got kicked off?

• 16:36Speaker 01

  I'm trying to think back to the feelings around the time when the yellow paper and white paper came out, because I remember reading the white paper and was blown away. But also by that time, oh, you know what else? That there was starting to actually be more competition to Bitcoin at the time, like maybe 2014, 2015, like you were talking about. I might have to take back my earlier comments because I worked closely with Darkcoin, which was the one of the first privacy-based coins. It's now called Dash, and they've kind of gone away from privacy a little bit. But at the time, I was working with them, and they had their own unique, like, X11 mining protocol. They were a brand-new codebase. So there were starting to be those pop-up, and they were starting to go to battle with Bitcoin for their lack of innovative features, lack of

• 17:21Speaker 01

  privacy, stuff like that. I think Ethereum's white and yellow paper coming out, I think it didn't got, I don't think it was taken seriously for a while. I think that, like, there were a few people who were really interested in it, but like, it was posted, if you go back to the forum on Bitcoin Talk, it was kind of treated the same way as like, a bunch of projects that never really made it back then, like Quarkcoin and stuff that had their own consensus algorithm and new ideas and new codebase, where it was like, what's this about? Like, like, I'll look into it, but like, this isn't going to change the world. Like, no one was saying, this is changing the world, until maybe 2015, when it launched.

• 17:57David Hoffman?

  Interesting. So, like, this is like a little bit of a lesson in Alpha. Like, Ethereum was just as, like, mixed in with all of the shit that never worked and went to zero, as every other chain was back in 2014, 2015, huh?

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And I mean, like, the, the marketing for Ethereum back then was basically this guy named Stephane Twal. And, uh, yeah, and like, even that, and like, that was good marketing from him, but like, everybody else who was made on the project, like, did not have the social skills or EQ yet, to like, really bring Ethereum to the level it is now, or do something like what EOS and other ones did to really bring their project up at a marketing level that's respectable.

• 18:38David Hoffman?

  But when I hear that, I'm like, okay, good. Because a part of, like, the philosophy... My philosophy of chains is that the innermost, I always view blockchains as like a set of concentric circles. And the innermost circle needs to be these like diehard, free, open source software developer maxis that don't care about the money, that don't care about the marketing, that are probably like too like socially awkward to really promote this thing in a shilly way. And that keeps the vibe of the blockchain very pure. Would you agree?

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah. Blockchains and their communities have a heart. And like, if you don't have the social acuity to see that, find someone who does and you can copy their trades. Because like, that is really what makes a project like valuable and also like worthwhile.

• 19:28David Hoffman?

  So how did you stumble upon Ethereum, the Ethereum white and yellow papers? Like, what was that first like introduction to you?

• 19:34Speaker 01

  So I was working at USAA and I actually, this was before USAA. So I was, I was working on dark coin stuff and I saw the white paper. And so I participated in the pre-sale for Ethereum. And then I kind of forgot about it for a while, like, because I was getting like started at work, working for USAA. And I was reading about Nick Sabo's like 1990s ideas around smart contracts, which were like one of the first instances of a smart contract on a blockchain idea before blockchains were even a thing. And I think that that inspired me to look even deeper into Ethereum.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  And then when I became like the blockchain person at USAA, Ethereum was the clear winner in technology and innovation. In fact, we had some internal hackathons at USAA where me and a team of people used solidity smart contracts before Ethereum was released, like in 20, early 2015, I think, or 20, late 2014.

• 20:34David Hoffman?

  So you were running in solidity before the blockchain was alive?

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was writing in solidity with a few other people. It was like release candidate six, I think, which is like, there was no documentation hardly. There was like three videos on YouTube of some randos like being like, here's how to do solidity and they weren't even on the team because the team was working so hard. But we tried it and I was like, this works. That's crazy. This works. And so that's kind of what gave me hope because all the other enterprise blockchain people I talked to seemed to not know what they were doing. The one exception I would say would be Eris Industries, which is no longer around, but they did turn into Tendermint. So the Cosmos Tendermint people, some of them kind of started with Eris Industries

• 21:20Speaker 01

  connections and other stuff like that to do enterprise blockchain stuff with their with their software. But yeah, that's just kind of a little side piece that I got to talk to some really early like Cosmos people. That was exciting.

• 21:34David Hoffman?

  And then so you started tinkering with solidity, read the white paper, read the yellow paper, got Ethereum pilled, not to put words in your mouth, but yeah.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I would actually be at USAA. Sorry for my old manager from USAA, but I would literally like sneak in working on Ethereum while I was at USAA. And then I'd work like a full day at USAA, come home and then ignore my family and friends and work six to eight hours on Ethereum, which I do not recommend. I think it contributed badly to my burnout later in life, but I was that obsessed. Yes.

• 22:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, certainly kind of par for the course for people that found found these things very, very compelling. So what did you do about that? Well, how did you how did you scale that up?

• 22:16Speaker 01

  I did a few different things. And this actually goes into what I usually so like I right now I'm doing a lot of things to help people mainly on Twitter who just DM me like, hey, how do I get into the industry? How do I get a job with Ethereum or with blockchain technology? One of the things is just like be in chat rooms, talk to people and volunteer. So like I let up the Homestead guide development, I guess, like the one of the only full guides on Ethereum at the time in 2015 for a hard fork that was going to happen later. And then I also volunteered at DevCon one and I wasn't signed up to volunteer, but I got there and it was pure chaos. So I was just like, hey, I can help. And I jumped behind and I like did tickets and badges.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  And then I did T-shirts and then I did like timekeeping and then like three hours later, I was like on the phone with the venue solving like structural problems with the venue and I'm not even, I don't even work for Ethereum. Someone gave me a credit card and said, we need these copies now. Go down the street to the, to the copy store and make copies with my credit card. I'm like, ah, okay. So like, I'm just running around doing all this stuff and I did a postmortem privately for Ming Chan, the executive director, where I wrote like a five page thing on what went right and wrong with the conference. And after that, she wanted to hire me. So I got hired to do the future DevCons and DevOps and community stuff.

• 23:36David Hoffman?

  Oh, this is a great lesson of people get hired after they just do work for free and prove their value for a lot of these communities. Uh, the, the early culture of Ethereum, I think is pretty interesting, especially when like something like Ethereum and Bitcoin also as well, especially in the early days before the culture is defined by the community, the culture is defined by like the vision or the code. And so like Ethereum was defined by like a bunch of people who read the yellow and white papers and then like got compelled by the actual like Ethereum itself, rather than like, you know, Ryan Sean Adams and David Hoffman of Bankless on YouTube, right? Like, no, it's actually like Ethereum code that is really talking to these people and attracted a very specific set

• 24:20David Hoffman?

  of like early believers into this thing. Uh, and that was who you were experiencing and meeting with at like DevCon one and zero, uh, at one and like the early days of Ethereum culture. Can you just like, for the listeners and, and also for me, just like, what was Ethereum culture way back when? Like, what, what was it like? What was it? And what did it mean to be in Ethereum back then?

• 24:40Speaker 01

  It was, it was very interesting. Uh, number one, I felt like I was like, had found my tribe, which I've heard from a lot of other people who join the Ethereum ecosystem even today, because there is this really cool thing. And it wasn't, you know, maybe it wasn't as big back then, but like you can Cross like a lot, like even if you have different political ideas than people, you all kind of have the same ethos of having a decentralized censorship resistant technology that it can be useful for everyone around the world that governments can't interfere with. And so like, that's something that brings a lot of people together. And then after that, there's this curiosity, especially if you're into technology, or you're a technologist, like doing development work or something, that this technology is being built by people

• 25:23Speaker 01

  who kind of are like you, I guess is the best way to put it. Like everyone there had like pie in the sky visions. There was people early on talking about NFTs and ERCs and the EIP repo got released during DevCon one, which I ended up eventually being one of the main maintainers of. So like, all these things coming together was like, really crazy. And on top of that, you had that combination with like Reddit posters and somewhat Twitter posters, although less so than Reddit at the time. People like Vlad Samfear, where you'd read their stuff. And then I got to DevCon one, and I was like fangirling, because I was like, oh, my God, there's Vlad. And I got to talk to him, and he was super nice. And he actually ran out of fiat money and had like, three or four Bitcoin or something.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  It was like, hey, can I trade you this Bitcoin? And you go to the ATM and get me cash? And I was like, I'm doing a task for Vlad. And it was like, I was just like, so freaked out. And I got to talk to like, yeah, like Alex Vandesan was super nice. The first person I met when I got there was Piper Mariam. And I was the first Ethereum person he had met too. So I'd gone to dinner with like Piper and Martin Swinde, well before they worked at the Ethereum Foundation. And we were all just there like, we found each other. We're here. Like, we've talked online for months, every day, sometimes multiple hours a day, and we're here. So yeah, it was just this excitement of finding your tribe, finding people who really relate to your ideas, and being excited about a common goal.

• 26:49David Hoffman?

  This is the same exact experience that I like communicate when I tell like my beginnings into Ethereum. Like your DevCon one was my ETH Denver 2017.

• 27:01David Hoffman?

  And just to have like a little bit more context on that, like I was part of a recreational soccer team with like some of my best friends growing up. I was part of a fraternity in college. I was part of all these like different like social groups. But I never felt like 100% a part of these groups. And then I go to DevCon ETH Denver 2017. And I, you know, have like three days of conversations, listen to the talks, talk to strangers. Yet like at the end of that weekend, I'm like, this is, this is the 100% like alignment with this tribe. This is my people. This is my community. And I even just after just like three days of this, it was, it was painfully obvious.

• 27:41David Hoffman?

  And it's just interesting to see like some of these like early relationships being formed just on just like a very, just a gut feeling. I was like, this is the right thing for me. And it's cool to see this like same story repeated both in the early days, the middle days, and now like the later days where we are today, like through and through.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And like, I see something that I don't see in other communities that I see in Ethereum are people who are welcoming, like welcoming and accepting of people who are neurodivergent. And I don't mean like explicitly like, oh, poor soul, more just like, oh, you're autistic? Hell yeah. Like you probably code better. And like, oh, like you don't, I know, like, I know you're talking to me and you're staring at the wall right now, but I understand that. And I'm not going to judge you for that like I would if you were at some kind of other thing, you know? Like it's a lot easier to be weird in Ethereum.

• 28:33David Hoffman?

  It's definitely true. What about, um, so that's like the kind of the community culture, community vibe, but like, what about like actually getting shit done? Like you kind of talked about the chaos of like DevCon one. Was, can you talk about like that whole side of things?

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, you mean at the time during DevCon one?

• 28:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and overall, just in like the 2015 to like 2016 era of Ethereum and that and they're like this, the chaos of like, because there's so many like visionaries, right? Everyone has these like utopian visions for what Ethereum could be. And then everyone forgets to like also file the paperwork and make structure and process and all that stuff.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  There were dozens of people who would work more than overtime to keep things together despite people getting in the way. And when I say people getting in the way, like even, even people, what's the best way to put this? There were forces that were going against Ethereum at the time. A lot of it was with the leadership of different organizations. A lot of it was with developers being overly opinionated. But throughout all that, people just kept coding and kept making decisions and things like that. I mean, if we look back, like some of the biggest things that I feel like, just to get some spicy takes out there.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  The biggest things that I think were forces going against Ethereum were the like organization, like the Ethereum Foundation, like leadership and organization structure has always been wonky. I mean, I has made it a lot better, but at the time Ming Chan, if anyone read Lorschen's book, you can just see how crazy it was. And that was put, that was causing a lot of friction with the operations and other non-technical people at the Ethereum Foundation. Luckily, it didn't affect the technical side much. And then on top of that, while Ethereum Foundation's doing that, you'd have like parity technologies that would apply friction and stuff like that after Gavin left the Ethereum Foundation to get their opinionated stuff across. And then that would cause even more tension between groups.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  And I only know this because rather, other than being in the Ethereum Foundation myself, I also led the core developer calls, which meant that I had to be a kind of middle person between parity technologies, Romans Java, Java, Java team and the Geth team and the JavaScript team and everything else. So like, it was just, it was just very difficult. I don't think, I think if you look back on those calls, you can kind of see the tension and how difficult it was, but it would be very, very boring because they're core developer calls and they're just boring by default. So yeah, it's, it's, it's been a challenge.

• 31:15David Hoffman?

  Hozu recently talked a lot about his vision over Maker Dall governance and how right now, currently Maker Dall governance is being pulled in seven different directions at once because no one really has a coherent or articulated vision for what Maker Dall is. Therefore, everyone imparted their vision for what it is upon Maker Dall and tried to tug Maker Dall in that direction. Is that kind of how you would describe like the early days of Ethereum? It's like everyone, it's like, you know, the blind men feeling the elephant metaphor, like Gavin Wood feels Ethereum is going to be like this and somebody else thinks Ethereum is going to be like that. And like, all of a sudden, like, none of these visions are actually completely compatible with each other and therefore there's friction. Is that a fair way to summarize this, Sarah?

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Um, yes and no. Yes, in that there were people with differing visions that would clash and then eventually leave the ecosystem like Charles Hoskinson and Gavin Wood. That's absolutely true. I would say that even though that was happening, though, the weirdest thing, I still don't know why this has happened to this day, but everyone still followed Vitalik's lead. It was kind of, the only way I can really describe it is kind of like, it would be bad for your clout and your social status if you were to go against Vitalik at the time, because he was the leader of Ethereum. I mean, and at this point, he just has influence in Ethereum. I don't consider him the leader of Ethereum any longer. Not in a negative

• 32:37Speaker 01

  way, like Vitalik's amazing, but just, I feel like he's purposefully taken steps back and he's had enough times when his ideas didn't go through, that I don't consider him the almighty leader, is what I'm trying to say. So, and to what you said, yes, there was differing opinions on where to go, but the thing that kept everyone together back in those days was Vitalik. And it was just an amazing feat of, or maybe luck, I don't know to this day, of just people following the leader and really going with what he needed, what needed to happen for Ethereum to succeed.

• 33:12David Hoffman?

  Vitalik at that time was something like 17 years old, I think. And I remember watching, I just, I shot that number from my hip, so somebody needs to check me on that. I remember watching a video of Vitalik around the era of DevCon 1, like very early, 2015, 2016, of Vitalik, like, young kid Vitalik shaved head, obviously in front of a very like professional camera with like a script of like what Ethereum is like, and it was like some early, early marketing of Ethereum. And it's like Vitalik marketing Ethereum, you would never see him doing that today. And like, it's definitely like somebody else came to Vitalik and like, Vitalik, we're gonna put a camera in front of you and you're gonna like promote Ethereum. And he was,

• 33:55David Hoffman?

  I'm guessing at 17, he was probably like, okay, that makes sense. This is what I do, not really having developed his total and comprehensive philosophy of blockchains that he has today. What was Vitalik's, what was Vitalik like? And like,

• 34:11David Hoffman?

  because he was around like 17, 18, maybe even younger. No, not younger.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  No, not younger. No, he was, I mean, by the time 2015 rolled around, how old would he have been? He would have been like 21, 20, 21. Yeah, because I was like 22 to 24 in 2015.

• 34:29David Hoffman?

  Oh, so he was born in 94. And so in 2015, he would have been 19?

• 34:39Speaker 01

  That makes sense.

• 34:39David Hoffman?

  I'm so bad at math. Anyways, anyways, this is an extremely huge responsibility putting on a 19, 20 year old back in 2015 and 2016. Like, from your observations, how Vitalik hang? Like, how do you handle that?

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Um, I think he had to grow up really quickly, but I'm not saying that in like a negative way, just more of a, that's what ended up happening. I think he handled it pretty well under the circumstances. I don't think I could have done any better, honestly. And neither could many, many other people I know. Um, he was definitely put in a position where there was a lot of people from a lot of sides, talking to him and giving their opinions. And it's really hard to cut through the BS and know who to trust and things like that when that's happening. And I've been there. Two, because like I was listening to the same voices he was in EF leadership and outside of EF leadership where I'm like, well, wait, are they really meeting well? Are they really wanting the best for this? Like, so it's, it's, it's always really hard to juggle.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  He also, and this is something that I think other people have commented on. His speaking skills improved drastically from 2015 till today. So that was something that helped a lot with the communication around Ethereum's vision and stuff like that. But again, what I try to stress to people, it's like, I almost feel weird dissecting Vitalik because he's a person. And to me, it's like, if there was someone on a podcast dissecting me, I would feel weird about that. And it's not to say that we shouldn't because he is a public figure and that's fair. But like, at the end of the day, anyone who's talking to them, to him, like, they start to realize like,

• 36:13David Hoffman?

  Like he's just a dude.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Right? Yeah, like, yeah, exactly. Like, he's just a person. Like, and that's kind of the, the thing I've always taken. And that's also why I think he appreciates people who provide blunt feedback to him about when he's wrong. Because he's not better than anyone else.

• 36:27David Hoffman?

  Right, right. Well, I don't mean to do this a little bit more.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that wasn't, yeah.

• 36:32David Hoffman?

  I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna just ask one more question in the same, in the same vein. Do you think at that time in 2015 to 2016 that Vitalik understood the magnitude of what Ethereum would eventually become?

• 36:46Speaker 01

  No, I don't think so. There were interviews after that where he said, I had no idea it would get this big this quickly. And that is also an excuse I use a lot, including the people close to me, as to why proof of stake took this long. We thought that we'd have a lot more time, I feel like, to get proof of stake and, you know, get out of the energy wasteful proof of work. Because we wouldn't get this big to where we're actually contributing to the demise of the earth.

• 37:10David Hoffman?

  Interesting.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  So, so yeah, that's, that's kind of a take that I hear a lot of early Ethereum people have, which is, no, we had no idea it would get to this magnitude. And because of that, bad things are happening and we feel bad, but we, you can't stop it once it starts.

• 37:24David Hoffman?

  Crazy, crazy. And that's actually the first time I've heard that, that proof of stake. Well, my, my general answer for why proof of stake has taken so long is that all the Ethereum, early Ethereum developers underestimated how complex of a, of a transition that was going to be. This is the first time I've heard that no one expected Ethereum to become so gargantuan so quickly. And that was actually a big reason as to why it got so complex.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  That's kind of, yeah. I mean, like, I do want to separate it to say that, like, I, at least me personally, and I've heard this from other people, too, I thought we'd have more time to, like, really hammer out everything. But the proof of stake transition has a long and sordid history, because we want to do the most, we want to do our best to get it right at a timely, but more importantly, get it right so that it lasts for a long time, which is, I think, a lot of the motivation for ditching the Casper proof of stake chain that Danny came up, that Danny finalized as an EIP a few years ago.

• 38:24David Hoffman?

  Hmm. And that, that wasn't the hybrid proof of work, proof of stake?

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Yes, it was. Oh, really? No, no, no, not, no, sorry, not the hybrid. No, no, no. It was the hybrid. It was the one where it was going to be like, Casper, proof of stake, and then we were going to put sharding, like, right after, or something like that.

• 38:42David Hoffman?

  Right, right, right, right. Okay. All right. So let's keep on going in Ethereum's history. 2016 is, like, 2016, I kind of correlate to 2020, in that, like, 2020 was up only for ETH price after we hit the bottom in March. And 2016, if you look at the price, the price starts is, like, up only, because it's like the crescendo building up to the ICO mania. When was it obvious that Ethereum was about to go through this, like, massive bull market?

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Back then, you mean?

• 39:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah, back then, yeah.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Oh, man. I'll be honest, I am an awful trader. I didn't even look at the price that much.

• 39:19David Hoffman?

  Hang on, let me ask, let me ask this question slightly differently. How did the community receive the Augur ICO?

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Oh, that, okay, I see what you're saying. Okay, that was pretty exciting when those things started happening, because when Ethereum, I'll put it this way, when Ethereum first launched, there were a lot of games, like little mini games, kind of like Satoshi Dice style games on Ethereum, and, like, you know, like, kind of Ponzi games in a way that were, like, just little, like, be the top of the pyramid. And that's all we had for a while. And, yeah, like, no, seriously, like, you could look it up, there's, like, games where you were, there was a pyramid, and you was, like, get to the top of the pyramid. I'm like, That's that that's sketch, right? So there are games like that and like people just doing random stuff, but like there were a few use cases. People were really, really excited about, but they hadn't been developed yet. One of them was Maker Dow.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  One of them was Augur. Another one was going to be, um, I think like, uh, what's it called? Oh, the stuff where you could do a graphics card.

• 40:24David Hoffman?

  Oh, uh, Golem, Golem.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Golem was another. So like those were coming, some of the big ones. And the only ones out of those three that I feel like really delivered in all the ways they need to so far has been Maker. Although it is going through somewhat of a crisis right now, it sounds like from certain people.

• 40:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's gone through crises before.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so basically to answer your question, yeah, it felt like once these started coming out with the ICO. Oh, another big one was DigiStal for the, for the gold that you could store. I think I had some DigiStal. I definitely had some ICO Augur tokens. But, uh, it was very cool to see it being like, it's almost here. It's almost here and all we got to do is give a little bit of money. And that plays into the psyche of how the ICO era tricked so many people into giving into scams or giving into projects that weren't going to make it. Cause it's like, oh, this is an idea. I love this idea and it's so close and all they need is a little bit of money. I can throw in some token, I can throw them some money for tokens.

• 41:22David Hoffman?

  Maybe a little funding.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, they should a little funding and then they run away with it. And then it's like, oh no, but I had such, I said, had such high hopes and it, you know, scar, like, uh, makes people jaded. So that's unfortunate.

• 41:34David Hoffman?

  Right, but Augur didn't do that. And for listeners who don't, aren't familiar with Augur, A U G U R is what you want to Google. It was the first ICO on Ethereum led by Joey Krug. And it was a prediction market and it was, it was the first like construction of an Ethereum DAP. We called the DAPs back then that like, I think just kind of made sense on paper. It's like, yes, you do need a token for this thing. The token has a very specific role to play. And the idea is sound in that it definitely needs a blockchain to do it. And so like that, and it was the first ICO on Ethereum. And so like, it was really like this, the, one of the few ICOs that weren't tainted, right? Like they actually built the product, they actually delivered it.

• 42:17David Hoffman?

  But then it like kicked off this snowball of like shit that followed over the next like 18 months.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. And yeah, Augur was very impressive. It turns out that like, the downfall of of a lot of dApps that would come out over the next few years, and I'm talking Augur, I'm talking Funfair, that's going to be on the regulatory, yeah, that's going to be on the regulatory side. Funfair was like a casino on the blockchain style set of dApps that you state channels very early on, which was a scaling technique. But I believe, I'm not positive, so don't take my word for this, but I felt like there was a lot of regulatory pressure on both Augur and Funfair, which led to slowdowns. And then also, the other side of it is, other dApps that didn't quite make it, some of it was a marketing thing, where like, you couldn't tell if they were legit and a

• 43:06Speaker 01

  stream of just shit dApps. And so they didn't rise to the top or get usage.

• 43:11David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah. And this is when I come into this story, where I like, start to see these ICOs and be like, oh, you can fund an idea before it exists, and then you can manifest the idea into existence via your funding. Wow, we've solved human coordination. And then like, 99% of them, they're just like, no, you just paid us money. Thanks, bro. And then the bear market comes. Anyways, going back to like, the core Ethereum developers during this era, what did they think of it?

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Uh, the few of them that were actually watching thought it was stupid and kept coding. It's pretty as much as simple as that. They never lifted their head up from the laptop.

• 43:47David Hoffman?

  Wow. So like, this whole entire massive mania went on, and the core developers were like, that's nice.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Um, not even that. They would actually get a little annoyed some of the time, because users, especially new users, would blame them for congestion on the network, because there were major ICOs, such as the status ICO, that would take down the net, take down, I say, not actually take down, but like, slow down the network to a point where it was basically unusable for certain users, who weren't paying high enough gas fees. And at the time, you know, crazy that you'd have to pay a $20 gas fee, and that's way too high. Like now, it's very different now. But no, like, I would, I would kind of hear every once in a while, little quibbles about stuff, but like, um, no, if it was basically, if it was important enough to be brought up to them, myself or someone else would just bring it to them during the all-core devs call or in the chat

• 44:38Speaker 01

  room. But no, they just, they just kept coding on, on what they were starting, needing to code on, because like, um, Yeah, they cared more about the product of Ethereum than the use cases that were fly by night potentially.

• 44:51David Hoffman?

  And how has your role in Ethereum changed during this period? What are you up to these days in 2017?

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so 2017. So when I started in 2016, the middle of 2016, I was on the DevOps team for the Ethereum Foundation, one of two people. The other is Jamie Pitts, who's amazing. And then I also ran DevCon 2, and then I ran DevCon 3 in 2017. Also, in the middle of that time, our awesome communications director at the Ethereum Foundation, George Hallam, had to leave. So I took over as communications, as well as DevOps, as well as DevCon. I also started doing the EIP editing. So like, I was an EIP editor, and I did the All Core Devs meeting every other week. So that was like, all the things I did at that moment, and it only grew.

• 45:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that was a lot of things. Can you just like, how has the culture in the EF and around like, the innermost circle of the concentric circles of Ethereum, like the core devs? How has this like, how has the vibe shifted by like, two, three years into it? Like, how has it developed?

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Um, yeah. So by the time like, by 2017, 2018.

• 46:05David Hoffman?

  Right. It was overall, yeah. Going through the story of just the progress and development of just like, Ethereum development, culture, progress, just vibes of the innermost, the innermost circle of Ethereum, yeah.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  We're starting to see some, some stress burnout and being tired from some of the inner circle. Part of that also was something we completely skipped, which was the DAO hack.

• 46:27David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  That happened during that time. So like, that actually took out a few, at least one or two core devs from their job, not out of fear, but out of just like, it was just absolutely the most stressful thing ever, because there was a ticking time clock. There was, you know, a lot of stuff at risk. There was the, you know, credible neutrality of the network at risk, a bunch of other stuff. So that, that affected a lot of people for a long time. There are people who completely broke, like mentally. Because of the DAO hack. And then after that, as the ICO thing happened, there was a lot of stress and pressure that, you know, devs are still feeling to this day, but have been alleviated thanks to some of the work by people like Trent Van Epp's,

• 47:08Speaker 01

  who go and they're like more of a voice for the community than, you know, having to speak directly to a core developer if you have a problem with your DAP, for instance. So yeah, the morale morale wasn't the highest ever, but they still believed in the mission. It was just everyone was really tired. We had been working for four years straight.

• 47:26David Hoffman?

  Right, right, right, right. And if listeners wanted to hear like just a very deep dive into the DAO hack story, I did an episode with Griff Green, Layer Zero with Griff Green. And so like, if you want to hear that part of Ethereum, you could just like supplant that like right into this middle of conversation with Hudson. Well, when you can dive down that rabbit hole because it's definitely a deep rabbit hole. But can you, could you summarize like how the DAO hack? Maybe, maybe it's fair to say like left a scar on like the Ethereum devs? Like, how, how did the trajectory of Ethereum change because of the DAO hack? Obviously, like we hard forked, but like more about the developers and just their mental state.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I would say a couple of things. I don't want to name names just because it's people's private lives, but there were a few people who basically went through and had to deal directly with the stress and pressure of having, making that decision, being the one to code certain things, being the one to challenge their ethos and, you know, figure out what their teammates believe in and having a lot of people yelling on Reddit and Twitter and podcasts or like all, all kinds of stuff. So that just was a lot of stress that was put on them. Some of them took breaks afterwards and were able to handle it. Other ones fell out. And that's kind of what happened there. I will say there is a positive to this in that the DAO hack.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Took fractured the community in a way where people who were purist from a, you know, censor or like from a not a mutability standpoint went with Ethereum classic and then Ethereum kept people who were practical and I liked that. I stayed with the practical people. I wasn't really, I was back and forth on whether or not we should do it at the time. I would have been fine if we had actually kept, you know, let the attacker keep the ETH and the DAO tokens, et cetera, and not intervened. But I respected the fact that there was a lot of discussion with the community from around the world that Vitalik and others did to come to the conclusion that there should be kind of a signaling system from leadership, including the core, some of

• 49:29Speaker 01

  the core devs, Vitalik, others, that this should be the default option in clients, some clients.

• 49:34David Hoffman?

  Can you summarize the argument as to why the choices were made in the way that they were? About the DAO hack?

• 49:40Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah. So there was a few things. So just, I need to stress that there was a compounding factor of a timeline. Basically, how the DAO code was set up, you only had, I forgot what it was, like 21 days to figure this out before the decision that you make is permanent. You can either leave it how it was, or you can put in a regular state transition, which basically means telling the blockchain to do something that you usually wouldn't do, which is to take the coins out of the DAO attacker, put it into, back to the users through a multi-sig that was set up.

• 50:13David Hoffman?

  And you say only 21 days, but it's also definitely worth to note that most contract hacks are zero, one block. And so there's actually a nice feature in the DAO hack that was very serendipitous that allowed for a 21 day window. So yes, a 21 day window is very short amount of time to make a very big decision, but the fact that it existed at all saved the Ethereum blockchain from doing a full rollback of the chain and only had to do a regular state transition of one single contract.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Exactly, precisely. And so the, uh, we, so there was, people point to the coin voting that happened as like the reason that the, that the change that we decided this. I think it was more than that. The ethereum.org blog post kind of referenced the coin vote, and I think that was a bad move because there were like hundreds of chat rooms going on talking about this that me and other people in Ethereum participated in and then would bring back the opinions to Reddit publicly and sometimes privately to different developers and developer groups. And I think that the practical thing would be that if we had a hack that big, um, we had, basically, that was like the only major DAP to participate

• 51:25Speaker 01

  in at the time. You can look back and be like, well, why didn't, you know, why didn't people keep their money? Like, a huge percentage of people participated in that. So you'd basically be saying like, you're making a lot of people sad that they lost their money. You'd be losing a lot of people who were using your blockchain and you might not recover from that. Or you can do this one time thing from someone who is a malicious actor and then at an early stage of your development and, you know, maybe be more prosperous. Uh, the best thing I heard about this was, I think it was years later, but Andreas Antonopoulos, who's a Bitcoin advocate and very popular Bitcoin speaker, said that he considers the DAO hack like a baby hitting their head while they're trying to learn to walk. Like, if you're a baby and you're trying to learn to walk, like Ethereum was less than a year

• 52:10Speaker 01

  old from launch, I think, uh, you've got to hit your head on a table and fall down. But like, you're going to learn not to do that. And then as an adult, you don't hit your head on that same table ever. So, yeah, that's how I see it.

• 52:21David Hoffman?

  I remember Andreas giving a talk at 2019 Ethereum Denver, uh, maybe it was 2020 Ethereum Denver. Um, and he talked about how you get one mulligan. You get one mulligan, because if you use it twice, then you then a two, you know, two is a trend. One is a mulligan. Two is like now if if like and now well, fast forwarding super far into the future. And we have like this tornado cash thing like if if the authorities came and said, hey, roll back the chain. And you tell them, well, we can't do it. And they say like, well, you did it twice. Like, that's different than like a one single mulligan. And I don't think and no one in today's world thinks that you can roll back the Ethereum blockchain,

• 53:03David Hoffman?

  even though it did, it we didn't roll it back, we had a regular state transition. But no one thinks that you can just do that. No one thinks that that's a tool in the tool belt that we have.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  I agree. I agree. The tornado cash thing is a shame, too. I mean, I think it'll be solved in the end, but yeah.

• 53:17David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, that's at the very end of this conversation because we're going, we're doing a very good job of going.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Oh, I'll go to order. I'll keep it order.

• 53:25David Hoffman?

  Okay, so that was a DAO hack. We will speed run through 2017.

• 53:31David Hoffman?

  The 2018 to 2020 bear market was now now I'm here. Now I'm now I'm involved. So I can start to remember some of this. How would you describe like developer morale and just like the developer attitude back then?

• 53:46Speaker 01

  I thought that for developer morale was actually really good because there was a lot of cool new creative ideas during that time. And we weren't distracted by a lot of the stuff that they're sorry that a bull market brings. People say, you know, it's kind of cliche within crypto Twitter to say like, I'm so glad there's a bear market because now we can build. But like, that truly is a thing that developers feel because there's less distractions. And there's less people throwing money at you to do things because that's a hard thing to turn away when, you know, you might not be making as much money. So.

• 54:18David Hoffman?

  Right. I want to check my check this with you. I think before 2017, the Ethereum community and the Ethereum like inner sanctum of book core dev believers.

• 54:31David Hoffman?

  Was more or less the same thing. And then in 2018, after the ICO mania, there was an actual Ethereum community that was separate from the devs. And like post 2017 mania, I think this is when like, there was this big growth in Ethereum community that like, you know, listened to the devs and like, listened to like, what was going on, but didn't actually partake. And so there was like, a new concentric circle that was outside of the inner circle of the Ethereum core devs and Vitalik and you. And now then there's people like me, Anthony Cesano, Ryan, Eric Connor, on this like, more outside circle. And I don't think that existed prior to that bull market. Would you agree with that?

• 55:13Speaker 01

  I would agree with that. And a part of that reason was less about the bull market, but more about the fact that prior to 2017, there were less dApps to get excited about and pull people in. You kind of had to watch the core dev meetings because that's all that was going on. It's like when you used to have only three TV channels in the 1950s, like you just watched it. Or you just participated with the core devs and whatever they were doing because that was all there was. There was just that and Augur and the DAO. So like, now, we have dozens of things to do and we have DeFi that's starting to come up. And so now it's like, our attention's on that. So we're, so the newcomers and other people are paying less attention to the core devs, or if they are, they're going to start to have disagreements, which is great. I love that. I think that's perfect because the last thing I want is, and

• 55:56Speaker 01

  the last thing the core developers want is to have all the decision-making power with no influence from the community.

• 56:02David Hoffman?

  Right. And how, and I actually kind of consider you as somebody that spans both of these parts of these circles. You're definitely a part of the broader Ethereum community, and you do, and you interface with the core devs quite a lot. How would you describe the, this relationship between the innermost circle of Ethereum and then the first concentric circle outwards of this? And how is it changed? How did it change over 2018 to 2020 or so?

• 56:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I would say that Ethereum itself, as a community with everything involved in it, got so big, it was untenable for there to be more of a direct connection between the core developers and say, the commenters on Reddit, or the commenters on Twitter. Commenters, people commented. I said, comment, commenters.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, you please stop talking to us. No, I'm just not, it wasn't that. Okay, so no, what happened was it got so big that it was just untenable to do that. So there started to be more direct things like, at that time, I was more of, I would call myself a developer liaison all the time because I, or core developer liaison, because I'd be in Reddit and I'd be in Twitter and I'd be wherever else, chat rooms, and then I would bring the concerns to the core developer agenda or to individual core developers or projects or clients and then be that interface because they were so busy and there was so much on their plate, they didn't have the time. So it was more of a growth thing, just, it was more of a growth thing rather than like not wanting to be involved.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Not to say that you indicated that at all, but just like the core devs, like it just got, became too big.

• 57:38David Hoffman?

  Right. Lens Protocol is an open source tech stack for building decentralized social media applications. It is the new era for social media. We all have toxic relationships with our Web 2 apps. We want to break up with them, but we can't. These applications own our digital lives and all the relationships that we've made. We need to break through to a new paradigm of social networking applications that we control rather than them controlling us. Lens isn't a social media app, it's a protocol to let a thousand Web 3 social apps bloom. Lens is a permissionless and transparent social graph that is owned by the user. In crypto, we say not your keys, not your crypto, and on Lens, we say not your keys, not your profile. With Lens, your followers go with you to whatever social media application you want to use. And instead of being trapped by an algorithm chosen by that app, Lens lets you choose the way you want to experience your

• 58:21David Hoffman?

  social media. Lens is the last social media handle that you'll ever need to create. So in order to get started, there's a secret code word in the show notes. Enter that code word in the Google form links and you'll be well on your way to entering the world of Web 3 social. Rocketpool is your decentralized Ethereum staking protocol. You can stake your ETH in Rocketpool and get our ETH in return, allowing you to stake your ETH and use it in DeFi at the same time. You can get 4% on your ETH by staking it with Rocketpool, but you can get even more by running a node. Rocketpool is the only staking provider that allows anyone to permissionlessly join their network of validating Ethereum nodes. Setting up your Rocketpool node is easier than running a node solo and you only need 16 ETH to start it. You're getting an extra 15% staking commission on the pooled ETH that uses your node to stake.

• 59:04David Hoffman?

  You also get RPL token rewards on top. So if you're bullish ETH staking, you can boost your yield by adding your node to the decentralized Rocketpool network, which currently has over 1,000 independent node operators. It's yield farming, but with Ethereum nodes. You can get started at rocketpool.net and you can also join the Rocketpool community in their Discord. You can find me hanging out there sometimes in the chat, so I'll see you there. ZK Sync is an Ethereum Layer 2 network that is pushing the frontier of high-performance blockchains that don't compromise on security or decentralization. ZK Sync has combined the power of zero-knowledge rollups and the Ethereum virtual machine, enabling developers to build the greatest Web3 projects possible, ones we haven't even seen yet. Crypto needs its killer applications to onboard the world, but crypto killer apps need ZK Sync as a platform to build on first.

• 59:48David Hoffman?

  It's generally accepted that zero-knowledge rollups are the conclusion of crypto blockchain scaling technology, and ZK Sync is leading the charge into the final frontier of crypto economics. So if you're a developer who wants to build your app on a future profoundation, which gives your users the best UX possible, check out ZK Sync's website at zksync.io. And yes, there's also going to be a token, so give them a follow on Twitter too, @ZKSync. How significant were there... When did like a big tug-of-war happen around core devs? Where like, there's like political desires to pull Ethereum in one direction and the community wanted to pull in another direction? When did that become really relevant?

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Uh, there's a little something called Prague Pal. That was fun.

• 1:00:32David Hoffman?

  Was that really the first instance of this?

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  That was the largest instance, in my opinion, of the community disagreeing with the decision of the core developers. I can't think of another one before then.

• 1:00:42David Hoffman?

  Did all of the core developers believe in Prague Pal?

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  I would say all the core developers were either neutral to approving, just about.

• 1:00:50David Hoffman?

  Interesting. Why did that schism come out?

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Maybe not every single one, but yeah. The schism came out because the community felt like they weren't being heard. In fact, I think Eric Connor was either on your podcast or Sassel's podcast and said that like, "The community doesn't feel heard."

• 1:01:08David Hoffman?

  He was on his own podcast, you mean Into the Ether?

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Could it be his? Oh, he was Into the Ether, yes. It was the episode with Joe Delong.

• 1:01:13David Hoffman?

  Crazy to think that Eric Connor did stuff once in a while.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Shout out Eric, I love you. Okay, so, so basically, uh, yeah, so, so basically, that was one of the biggest schisms because although the core devs had been making that decision for a while, I came on Reddit and said, hey, this decision has been made. And at that time, I was having a large family crisis. So there was like a good two to four week time where I hadn't updated the community on anything like I had because I had been Ethereum obsessed for years and it finally came to a head where I didn't. So then when I updated them late, I kind of blamed myself for this because like, then everyone was like, whoa, we didn't hear about this. We didn't get enough warning. And then everyone like started getting, like, there was memes made about me. Like, there was a meme that Makira

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  made, and it was a thing where I was at a table, like the table at the college campus where it says, change my mind. But it said, Prague Power is happening this year, change my mind. And it had my face on it. And I was like, I got memed? This is so cool. But like, but like, other people were like, oh, man, don't make fun of Hudson. I was like, well, you can make fun of me, but don't actually like, send me angry messages like a few of you have. Like, it got really contentious. And it ended up the community winning, I guess, to an extent. But like, at the same time, like, in that time, we wasted a lot of time and money by doing like, audits, and there was just no cohesion there. I think the community learned from that, though. A lot of people I talked to privately, who were some of the biggest voices against Prague Power, apologized to me privately, to say,

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  hey, I got on to you too much. I didn't research enough. It really wouldn't have been the end of the world if it happened, that kind of stuff.

• 1:02:52David Hoffman?

  Right. And, and just to speed run listeners on Prague Power, Prague Power stands for progressive proof of work. And it was basically, we're going to swap out the Ethereum mining algorithm from ETH hash, which it currently is, to progressive proof of work. And this came about as a result of a bunch of ASICs arriving on the scene for Ethereum. And Ethereum is supposed to be this ASIC resistant mining algorithm. And so if you enable ASICs into Ethereum, you produce a more centralized mining, like, industry around Ethereum. And we don't like centralization. We like these things to be GPU mineable and so Prague Pao was supposed to restore the first class nature of GPU miners in Ethereum.

• 1:03:35David Hoffman?

  But the community thought that this change was too political in nature. And so it was determining there were going to be some winners, some parties of Ethereum that were going to win over others. And we didn't really justify, felt like it was a justifiable change to change the mining algorithm. Because it wouldn't have really changed the trajectory too much of Ethereum. And so the idea was like, I mean, we only necessary, necessary changes only. And so the, and then, but for some reason, to this day, I still don't know why. A lot of the core developers liked this, this update. Do you, why, why did Prague Pao resonate with core devs?

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it was actually programmatic proof of work for those looking at.

• 1:04:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah. This is why we were interviewing you, not me.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Also, if we have a, if we have a, I have a website, Hudson Jameson.com. If you look like one page back on my blog post, I have like a 15 minute blog post of the entire history of Prague Pao. So if anyone's interested to get nerdy, go there. So yeah, the core developers liked it because that seemed like a, to them like a credible threat. That ASICs could take control of the network. And how we have it now is like, and including today, we know the people who are the top five biggest pools that make up over like 60% of the network or like 70%. Two of them make over 50%, but they're altruistic and good actors. We know that because they're helping out right now with the merge.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  But if the ASICs came on, those people would be forced to be kicked off potentially. And then we'd have unknown actors operating ASICs that could easily take up over 50% of the network. And then if they're bad actors, who knows what could happen. But all that was unknown at the time, there was a rising, ASICs were being made for. ET hash, but they weren't like the the algorithm, but they weren't like super relevant yet. They were starting to be. Here's the thing, though, this is very interesting because people are probably wondering, well, what about today? Are ASICs taking over the network now that we haven't done anything? It turns out there is only about 20% ASICs on the network as of earlier this year is what I've heard from people's analysis. Now, here's the thing.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  I think the reason for that is the pandemic and the chip shortage that stopped ASIC manufacturing and the pandemic stopped a lot of other stuff. So had that not happened, would ASICs have taken over? Maybe. So really, we were still at an unknown of if it was a good idea or not, but it turned out OK in the end because we're moving to proof of stake in a month, I think.

• 1:06:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, hopefully. Crossing fingers, knock on wood. Yeah, yeah. But, uh, but yeah, that's just an interesting side thing I was going to mention.

• 1:06:17David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah. And it's not that like the Prague Pau was really all that interesting. It was more about the interface between the community and the developers, which is really the big, the big story out of Prague Pau is that it was just like Prague Pau was this, the, the, the field between these two things. How, how, how did that event impact Ethereum, would you say, like moving forward?

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  I think that it was a wake up call to certain people that there needed to be better interfacing between the people who are making the decisions on the core developer side with the community. So we started having more ideas about that. The Ethereum Cat Herders, which is a group of people who do note taking for the core dev calls, and they also do surveys of the community and educational podcasts and stuff like that. They're a group I co-created with a few other people. And they also had some ideas that started to be enacted, like we started having more Ethereum Cat Herders on the call, on the core dev call, and we started interfacing with people like Trent Van Epsmore to be a conduit and Tim Byko to be a conduit for

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  the community to the core devs. And also Tim started, I think it was after, right after that time, Tim started doing his tweet threads, his, all his core developer call tweet threads, which have been very, very valuable to get the word out to everybody. So now, if you're out of the know of what the core devs are doing, like, I'm not going to say it's your fault, but like, we have notes, we have a Twitter thread, we have live and recorded videos on YouTube. And so like you just look at it yourself.

• 1:07:57David Hoffman?

  And it was the cordas perhaps, were they perhaps like surprised as to like how large and how large the Ethereum community had grown at this point and like how much of a of a voice the Ethereum community had gotten in the last like year or so? I think that might have also played into the story.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  Maybe I never talked to anyone specifically about that point, but I would say that I'm personally am surprised at how loud and big the community can get and not in a negative way. Like I'm impressed. Like I'm like, oh, people can come together and really share their opinion in a mature way, unlike Bitcoiners who literally just backstab each other and yell. So.

• 1:08:36David Hoffman?

  And like, again, this this community that it rose around, it was really like, it was Anthony Cisano, Ryan Sean Adams, Eric Connor, me, DC Investor, Spencer Noon was around, many other people who I've forgotten, Eeks on Twitter, shout out Eeks. Like generally he stays silent until something like political happens and then he and then he wakes up. And then he also Chad donates like 20 ether into like 50 different Bitcoin grants. But yeah, this is like where a lot of the Ethereum community like banded together and like, yo, we don't know how to be devs, but we understand the philosophy and like, we've got a voice. And like this is, I would call like this era of Ethereum where like this second concentric circle around Ethereum really, really calcified and like got built out.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. I think it did. And I think the community is growing and growing, but like, we're starting to learn how to better manage that as as a group, as everybody, I guess, like how to interface with people and like etiquette for how to talk to your projects and dApps that you like and not be a prick in a Discord server and stuff like that.

• 1:09:42David Hoffman?

  And around this, at the end of this era, I think 2020, maybe early 2021, I can't remember, refresh my memory, but that's, this is when you actually stepped down from your role at the EF, right?

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, April 2021, I stepped down from the Ethereum Foundation. I also pretty much had stopped EIP editing for a while at that point, but had been helping a little bit with management. But honestly, people like Mike Azoltu, who's a beast, and a few other people have really taken up the torch on that. And then, yeah, I quit the Ethereum Foundation, waited a few months, and then voluntarily checked myself into a mental hospital because I was burned down and was having issues.

• 1:10:23David Hoffman?

  Okay, talk about that. And also, can you talk about this burnout culture in this space?

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And just a quick, what's it called?

• 1:10:31David Hoffman?

  Chill.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  Chill, yeah, quick chill. I'm doing a talk at DevCon in Bogota, Columbia on burnout culture and how to avoid it and stuff. But basically, I've had mental health problems for a while, just like I have Twitter threads on it, you can probably search, but basically, and also on my blog. But I have like depression, anxiety, bipolar 2, OCD, ADHD, and probably have autism, but we're figuring that one out later. And that's not even a mental illness. That's just like, oh, Hudson, you're kind of weird. So basically, yeah, it's neurotic mentality, exactly. So basically, I had been depressed and had not left my bed for weeks. And I, part of my bipolar 2 symptoms is having intrusive thoughts. So there are thoughts

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  that like, I literally sit there and have to think about them. I can't stop thinking about them. And they involve, they involve suicide. So I was sitting there in my bed, thinking about it, thinking about, thinking about it. I'm not going to do it, but it was so annoying and so just blasting in my brain. I checked myself into a mental hospital to like, get help voluntarily. I stayed there for a month in 2021. And yeah, it was a very good experience overall. I did go to like a rich person mental hospital called Manager Clinic, which was really good. I say rich person because like all the other, like other mental hospitals have bad, like, Like, like things attached to them, like they have like histories of like not being good stigma.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  They have a stigma around them. Yeah, yeah. So this one actually got me on new medicine. They did new tests on me. I completely got off all my old medicine onto new medicine. And by the time I got out, I was pretty good. So then I started working for Flashbots uh later that year. And then I just, and then I burned out again because I started working too fast because I was too excited about the industry. And so um we left, I left Flashbots on very good terms in February. They were super supportive the whole time about the struggles I was going through. Flashbots is amazing. Shout out to them. Uh, and so then that's into 2022, I guess. So we're almost there to now. And uh, since then, I've only done Zcash community grants,

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  which is a grants committee that isn't a full-time job. So, but that's, that's been good for me as well.

• 1:12:44David Hoffman?

  Uh, can you talk about Ethereum's role? Did, is it Ethereum that sent you to a mental hospital, Hudson?

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  Wow, that's a good question. So I think that it was how I interacted with Ethereum, because it has been my blockchain's been my obsession since 2011, like in all forms. And so like either Bitcoin, Darkcoin, Ethereum, Zcash. And so I've had an unhealthy relationship with it where that's like all I would do, all I would think about, all I would try to succeed in. And I think so that was ultimately me. It wasn't actually Ethereum, but I do, will say that to your point, Ethereum does breed a culture. Either, it's either a hustle culture on one end or a like you need to devote yourself kind of culture that I think is very unhealthy. And I think we're getting better about calling that out.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  Uh, but there's a, there's a ways to go. Um, I'm gonna have some very strong opinions on that at my dev con talk. But in general, we all need to just kind of make sure that if you, if you are a boss, have some time for employees to have like mental health days with no questions asked. And like, if you're a person, like get, get a therapist, they're really cool. Like it helped me a lot. That's like the number one thing that helped me and look into, you know, de-stressing yourself and finding ways to, everyone's gonna be different, but just find ways to not get too obsessed so that you burn out.

• 1:14:06David Hoffman?

  Yeah, uh, there, therapy is tight. Uh, the therapists are basically just like personal trainers for your brain. Like, everyone should have one regardless of like what mental state you're in.

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I mean, otherwise you'll end up in brain jail like me. So don't go to brain jail, kids.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, they don't, they don't, they don't let you have real curtains. It's all Velcro. It's not good.

• 1:14:29David Hoffman?

  Right, right, right. Yeah. No, no things that you can hook a line around.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:14:36David Hoffman?

  Hudson, what would you say that the you, the legacy you've left behind has been in this, in this industry?

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  The way you phrase that made me think that you think I'm leaving or I've left the legacy you've left behind.

• 1:14:51David Hoffman?

  So far.

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  So far. Okay, okay. Yeah.

• 1:14:54David Hoffman?

  How has the industry trajectory been altered by your existence?

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  I think that there's a few times that I've heavily affected some of the trajectory behind the Ethereum Foundation, which I'm pretty proud of. When I, when I did my work there with the amazing people there, there's some people who've been there since the beginning and are incredible. And then also from a community perspective, I'd like to be remembered as someone who was nice and did eventually did the right thing and started speaking up for things I believe in. I think the first half of my Ethereum experience, I was very quiet about causes I believed in, which are like mental health issues, queer issues, privacy issues, because that wasn't in line with Ethereum all the time. But now I'm much more open about that. And I want to almost be known for that. I think I, I think a few

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  people are starting to call me woke on Twitter. So like, you know, there's a win.

• 1:15:51David Hoffman?

  What?

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  See, I just want to be a nice person who's changed some stuff, I guess. I don't really have like huge goals or anything. I just, I just want to be a nice person.

• 1:15:58David Hoffman?

  If you were able to spin up like five clones of Hudson and set them off on different tasks of things that you want the industry to be better about or work on, what would those things be?

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  All right, five clones. One, two clones would go to Zcash so that they could accelerate their progress in deciding to join a route towards Ethereum alignment and programmability, potentially. I would have another clone go and work with Trent and Tim because that's really fun and they're awesome people. And maybe they could do more collection of like community stuff, even though Trent's doing a good job. And then there's two clones left. Hold on. All right. So two clones, I would have one of them go to conferences and speak on shit that's like really important. I don't know what those topics are yet. And then the last clone would have like a shit, like be like a shitposting podcast where I go over the shitpost of the day on crypto Twitter.

• 1:16:53David Hoffman?

  That's one of the best answers to any question I've ever asked on this show.

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 1:17:00David Hoffman?

  But which is a great, I'm glad you answered that. But what I kind of meant is just like, what about crypto culture? Do you think we would need to work on as a community?

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  Oh, the biggest thing is going to be like actually take diversity and like inclusion of different people seriously because like, there's kind of this thing where we were kind of inherited this libertarian-esque thing where it's like, oh, you could be gay, you could be a woman, it doesn't matter. You're on the internet, it doesn't matter. But really, it does matter because if you're not supporting people who are underrepresented, they're going to be, you know, like, interacting with people who do think they don't deserve a place at the table. And so really what you're doing is being passive, which is not helping them at all. And you're being privileged and blind to their problems that they're going through.

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  So that's kind of a big thing right now is that if we get more diverse voices from different genders and sexualities and races and religions and Ethereum, that's going to be the ultimate way for us to really reach places we haven't reached before, which is like, non-white male spaces.

• 1:18:10David Hoffman?

  Basically, what you're saying is that if you take a passive neutral stance, you don't get to pat yourself on the back and pride yourself in how progressive you are. You actually need to tilt the board in favor of the underrepresented people. And that should be considered the new neutral is when you've tilted the board in favor of the underrepresented communities.

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And it's like, it doesn't have to be like, oh, give the woman a job instead of a man. Like, it doesn't have to be like that. But it's like, I don't know, just like, if you see something, call it out and don't just say, well, that person's stupid and must be in the minority. Like, call it out. I want to see 30 people calling out. If a crypto Twitter, if a woman in crypto Twitter is getting like slut shamed or something, I want to see 50 people call it out. I don't want to see it just left there.

• 1:18:56David Hoffman?

  Cool. That's one example. What other things can we do to help help in this regard?

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  I think the I think the community needs to be a bigger advocate for privacy. I think that privacy is incredibly important, and it's a shame that it's not going to be built into the base layer of Ethereum anytime soon, if ever. Because if it's not built into the base layer, then you're going to have to bring on non-anonymous assets to turn it into Railgun or Tornado Cash, or not anymore, or other things. You know, so privacy is a big deal. And I actually, I have a quick anecdote about you, David, if you if you don't mind about privacy. Sure. So David, you have a problem getting it up. And what happens is when you take someone home from like, a nice third date or something, you're, you know, you're in the mood, you can't get it up. So you go and you buy penis, you know, erectile dysfunction

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  pills for your penis. And that transaction, you maybe use a credit card or Venmo or PayPal. And then suddenly, it's out there for everyone to see. The metadata is out there. And you would think, I'm not doing anything wrong. So I don't need privacy. So I'm not going to use an anonymous crypto for it. But really, someone later can look at the fact that you have ED and not date you in the future because they have a bias against that or something if they're like, work at a place that has that metadata. So my point is, even if you're not doing something wrong, you need privacy. If I am funding, like, like someone's abortion, or like, maybe an abortion rights organization, I don't want the government, because this is something that they're starting to try to do is like, come in and like, actually

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  look at those transactions. And if it's across state lines, charging you with stuff just because you paid that way, we should all be supporting bigger privacy for both chat services and anonymous monies.

• 1:20:38David Hoffman?

  Just not too long ago, some like period tracking app sold all their data to Facebook. So this is kind of like, I'm trying to find the tweet from Evan McMullin about this. Oh yeah. She goes, "In May, I explained onstage that Web 2 surveillance data would be used to prosecute women and limit their body autonomy. On multiple podcasts, I've repeated that data self custody is the key to safety, and now it's happening." And she retweeted something that says, from the motherboard Twitter account, says, "We've obtained court documents that show Facebook gave police in Nebraska teenagers private chats about her abortion and then used those chats to seize her phone and computer." Okay, so slightly different than what I said. So yeah, super relevant.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  Still, that's a good example, though. Yeah, because it's like, that's the serious case. The other one's about your penis. Sorry, I had to bring you on the stage.

• 1:21:25David Hoffman?

  I would like to say that Hudson used me as an example, but this is not a conversation I've had with Hudson previously.

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  Yes, I should make that clear. That's completely a joke.

• 1:21:35David Hoffman?

  Happening to use me as a person, not a personal, personal experience.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  Everyone, everyone, David's penis is fine.

• 1:21:46David Hoffman?

  Oh my God. Hudson, I definitely appreciate everything that you've done for this community and in the very candid and comical way that you do all of your things, as listeners of this podcast have enjoyed thus far. So any final messages or just final words of wisdom that you have to impart upon the listeners of Layer Zero?

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say that something that, a lot of advice that I've been giving to people lately, especially that are like just starting out in Ethereum or blockchain. I was just at ZCon the other day, and there was someone who came up and like took a picture with me and another person who saw me at a bar and like wouldn't talk to me. And I talked to them and I was like, oh, he was like, I'm kind of starstruck right now. And I was like, okay, I'm not better than you and you're not better than me. You're not better than Vitalik or Zuka Wilcox or anyone else. Like, if you don't have confidence, just fake it. Like, don't interrupt people or be rude if you're at a conference with them, obviously. Like, there's still social etiquette, but like, don't be too starstruck to really put your chance out there to share ideas and meet people. A lot of people are friendly.

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  Especially in Ethereum and Zcash, they're very friendly and open to chats and dialogues over chat message and chat rooms. So start there and you, I mean, you really can be as big as you want to be and do as much as you want to do. Just try to gain some confidence.

• 1:23:03David Hoffman?

  Hundred percent. I really enjoy that sentiment. And honestly, ironically, the people, I've had this experience as well, like some people aggressively like go out of their way to meet me and then like those people tend to be the ones that like pitch me something within 30 seconds. And then there's the other people that are very silent and they're like, oh, I don't want to disturb you, but just like, I'm a huge fan. And it's those people that I enjoy talking to far more. It's like those people who kind of get it and want to be humble and not like, you know, bother the people that they see on crypto Twitter or podcasts all day. But it's the humble ones that actually are the ones that have interesting thoughts and like are worth talking to. And it's

• 1:23:44David Hoffman?

  the super aggro ones that like go out of your way to like, you know, aggressively annoy you and like talk about, hey, can I come on your podcast? Like, don't have anything interesting to say. And so if you are one of the quieter, more introverted, shyer people of the crypto community, you are free to lean into not being so quiet and shy. I will give you, I'll lean into that.

• 1:24:11David Hoffman?

  Hudson, thank you so much for coming on Layer Zero.

• 1:24:15David Hoffman?

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• 1:25:00David Hoffman?

  and other fantastic content. Thanks, everyone, for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless Nation.