359: Pierre Rochard on the Ethereum Supply Issue

Pierre Rochard is the Founder of Bitcoin Advisory and one of the strongest public proponents of Bitcoin. He has the unique combination of skills and experiences that can only be captured with a background in accounting and software development. In this conversation, we discuss the Ethereum supply controversy. We review what happened, why Pierre thinks this is a big deal, how the Ethereum community responded, what the latest update is, and what Pierre hopes will come out of this debacle. ========================================== Athletic Greens is an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. Even with a balanced diet, it’s difficult to cover all of your nutritional bases. That’s where Athletic Greens will help. Their daily drink is like nutritional insurance for your body that’s delivered straight to your door. You can get yours at https://athleticgreens.com/pomp ========================================== Coinbase Wallets are adding support for .crypto and .zil domains through their partnership with Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains provides an all-in-one solution for blockchain domains. You can send money using these new domains instead of long Bitcoin wallet addresses, while also storing your domain in Coinbase's collectibles section. Go to unstoppabledomains.com in the dapp browser to register and manage your domains. =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Pierre Rochard is the founder of Bitcoin Advisory and one of the strongest public proponents of Bitcoin. He has the unique combination of skills and experiences that can only be captured with a background in accounting and software development. In this conversation, we discuss the Ethereum supply controversy. We review what happened, why Pierre thinks this is a big deal, how the Ethereum community responded, what the latest update is, and what Pierre hopes will come out of this debacle.

• 0:38Anthony Pompliano?

  I really enjoyed this quick conversation with Pierre, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to talk about our sponsors. Today's program is brought to you by Athletic Greens. They're an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. Even if you have a balanced diet, which I don't, I love McDonald's and I love Domino's, but even if you have a balanced diet, it's difficult to cover all of your nutritional bases. That's where Athletic Greens will help. Their daily drink is like nutritional insurance for your body that's delivered straight to your door. So they've got this complex blend of 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients. Athletic Greens is a greens powder engineered to help fill the nutritional gaps in your diet. If you eat like me, you need Athletic Greens.

• 1:23Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Can simply visit athleticgreens.com/pomp to claim my special offer today. Again, athleticgreens.com/pomp to claim my special offer today and get a free D3 K2 dropper with your first purchase. That's more than a year's supply of vitamin D as added value. So go to athleticgreens.com/pomp. I never talk about things that I do other than eating Domino's or McDonald's. So if I'm talking about it, know it's the real deal. Athleticgreens.com/pomp. Go do it. All right. Also, today's sponsor, Unstoppable Domains. Coinbase has a wallet

• 2:52Anthony Pompliano?

  product and they're adding support for .crypto and .zill domains through their partnership with Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains provides an all-in-one solution for blockchain domains. You can now send money using these .crypto domains instead of using the long Bitcoin wallet addresses. No longer do you need to have your heart pumping aggressively about to jump out of your chest when you go to send money to a random string of letters and numbers. You can use a .crypto domain with the Coinbase Wallet product and also can store that domain in Coinbase's collectibles section. So just like you run and grab your favorite domain on the regular internet, on the decentralized web, you need to go get

• 3:35Anthony Pompliano?

  your favorite domain before somebody else gets it. So go to unstoppabledomains.com in the DApp browser and you can register and manage your domains there. Again, once somebody gets your domain, you can't get it. So go to unstoppabledomains.com in the DApp browser. I've got pomp.crypto. None of y'all are getting it. If you want a domain, go get it at unstoppabledomains.com. And then lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. I break down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com.

• 4:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Go get yourself educated. All right, let's get in this episode with Pierre. I hope you guys enjoy it.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 4:49Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. Pierre is back. Thank you so much for doing this on short notice there, my friend.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure thing. Thanks for having me on, Pomp.

• 4:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. All right. You've had an eventful weekend, but before we get to that, let's start with anyone who didn't listen previously, just give us kind of a quick, you know, 60 seconds on you, your background and kind of what you've done in Bitcoin.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So I graduated from UT Austin, Hockum, in 2013 with a bachelor and master in accounting. And they've got the number one accounting program in the nation there. I'd argue maybe in the world. And I enjoyed that a lot because I was interested in learning about accounting from an Austrian economics perspective. I'd studied Austrian economics when I was in high school. I was really into gold and sound money back in 2005 before anyone was, before Bitcoin was even a glimmer in Satoshi's eye, right? And I wanted to get into accounting because Ludwig von Mises had this quote about how

• 5:58Speaker 02

  that's how business people can make decisions, right? The profit and loss system, the price system, that's aggregating all this information in a very complex economy. And, you know, that I found really appealing, more appealing really than than finance itself. I kind of wanted to see how the numbers, you know, got put together. And I graduated in 2013, immediately started learning how to program because I didn't like the bookkeeping part of accounting. I didn't like having to copy paste things manually and all this. So I wanted to automate that part so I could focus on, you know, the, the interesting parts of accounting. And I got interested in software development itself. So that's what

• 6:43Speaker 02

  caused me to, to learn Python and SQL and to pursue that as a career rather than accounting. So I worked in Big Four at Deloitte. I worked at Hudson River Trading, which is a high frequency trading shop in, in New York in their back office. And I worked at Bitpay too, which is a Bitcoin payment processor in Atlanta. So since then, you know, I, all along, I've been very interested in Bitcoin. I got interested in Bitcoin back in 2013. And something that I, I found really fascinating about it was because of my accounting background, I, I realized the value of being able to reconcile all of these numbers in real time

• 7:25Speaker 02

  and to have a transparent, immutable ledger. So it immediately clicked with me. Combined with like the scarcity supply schedule of it, where with my sound money, like Austrian economics background, that part also clicked with me that, hey, this is, this is inherently going to appeal to, to, to different people and increase in value over the long term because this, the unit itself on the ledger is scarce. It's not like wow gold, you know, where a company can just issue as much as they want. So yeah, that's the, that's the TLDR on, on me.

• 8:00Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. You are one of the strongest, most public proponents of Bitcoin. You do a fantastic job talking about all the, the positive aspects, all the other things. I've not heard you talk that much about Ethereum or Ether. And this weekend, all of a sudden, chaos breaks out. What exactly happened? Like, take us back to what was kind of the, the impetus for all of this?

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So I mean, we could go all the way back to the Ethereum pre-sale because I was I was around back then. And I I personally was skeptical that it was going to launch and they proved me wrong. Right. They did the pre-sale. They actually launched the product, which I got to hand it to them because that's fairly rare in crypto. Right. That someone gets all the money upfront and then actually executes and actually is able to build a self sustaining ecosystem. So I think that they deserve a lot of credit for that. And I was skeptical from the from the get go that they would succeed at doing that. And yeah, so I didn't really have big reasons to criticize Ethereum.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  My my view at this point is really that Bitcoin can succeed and altcoins can succeed as well. And so that's because that's what we've seen over the past 10 years. So that's just like an empirical observation of what has been happening. And I just expect that to continue to happen that these like these all these different systems, you know, in different iterations. And yes, of course, some will fail and fall by the wayside or, you know, become unpopular or whatever. But that largely like the reason Bitcoin is going to succeed is not because it is better than altcoins. It's because it's better than the status quo and it's better than the US dollar.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Like, I really do see it as competition between Bitcoin and the US dollar. And then the competition about like US dollar versus Euro or Litecoin versus Dogecoin. Like, those are secondary considerations because we're not really talking about the the the title fight, right, of the night. The the two heavyweights here. So any in any case. So I don't talk about Ethereum very much, but you know, this this came up over the past week because there was a lot of back and forth between Bitcoin proponents and Ethereum proponents about the relative merits of these systems. And

• 10:35Speaker 02

  There's a view that like they're not even comparable, right? That it's actually unfair to judge one using the criteria of the other. And that there's kind of a fundamental values debate between these two systems. I think that's plausible. I actually, though, when I look at what decentralization means to me, it's all about verification. And it's not just that I'm saying that because like my background is an auditor. And so, you know, that's just like where my mind goes. I think that a lot of the software engineers who work in this area would agree that verification is really one of the key parts

• 11:19Speaker 02

  of keeping these decentralized systems decentralized and immutable. If nobody's verifying anything, then anything can happen, right? And we've seen that with the fail reserve. That's why people are always saying, hey, let's audit the Fed. And, you know, they want to dig into the details of what's going on so that we can figure out, is there something bad happening? Or are we not achieving good outcomes that we want? Is there embezzlement or fraud going on? All of these, I think, are valid questions and, you know, merit verification. So in any case, the nice thing about cryptocurrencies is that we can use cryptography, right? It's right there in the name, crypto, cryptography, to do the verification, right?

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Where, you know, someone does a cryptographic signature and then others can verify that that signature is in fact valid. And that's kind of what causes Bitcoins to be transferred from one person to another is the validity of cryptographic signatures. So that's kind of on the transfer part. And then on the issuance part, we're also able to verify the issuance because, and I'll mention, I'll keep this conversation focused on Bitcoin, right? Because we're going to get to Ethereum. But in Bitcoin, you know, every time Bitcoin are issued, it's because a miner is proposing a block to the network to add to the blockchain.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  And when they do that, you know, the, the, the process by which they do that is called hashing. And what they're doing when they're hashing is that they're trying to get a certain number of leading zeros in some random output. The input is not random. The input is actually the block header data. And it contains a lot of information, but the salient part is the difficulty, which is going to determine how many leading zeros you need to have in your hash. And which is going to determine how much hashing you're going to have to do in order to be able to submit a block for, to the network. And other, the, the, the guiding principle in this proof of work system is that

• 13:30Speaker 02

  it is very expensive to propose a block. And then on the other side, it's very inexpensive. It's very affordable to verify a block, right? So then we can double check this work without having to redo all the work because we can just do the, the cryptography, very quick verification on the, on the node side. And so this creates a balance of power in the system where it's not like the miners control how many Bitcoin get created. It's actually this decentralized peer-to-peer network of nodes that is receiving proposed blocks and double checking them to make sure that the miner is following all the rules

• 14:13Speaker 02

  and that they have in fact found a, a, a valid proof of work.

• 14:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So basically the way that this system works is, one, like you just described, the miners are proposing blocks. They then get added to the blockchain through a process. If you run a node at any point, you can query the blockchain or you can get a whole bunch of information. Right? And that information can skew from super complex nuanced things around a blockchain to just how many Bitcoin exist, right? And the chaos this past weekend came down to, if you ran a query with a Bitcoin node on the Bitcoin blockchain at the same time, anywhere in the world, you, and, and multiple people did it, they all got the same answer. Here's how many Bitcoin are in the circulating supply.

• 15:01Anthony Pompliano?

  If you did that same exact thing on the Ethereum network, people started getting different answers. And so. At high level, I think people say, why? Maybe before we get to the why, just describe, how did you uncover the fact that people were getting different answers? Like where did you first see, oh, wait, there might be an issue, or people might not actually have the answer to this question?

• 15:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's funny. I know that at some point over the past five years, somewhere I read a tweet that you could not calculate the total amount of ETH out there with just a command line thing. And so that was planted in my mind at some point over the past five years. I don't, I can't point to it specifically. But then, when I started seeing some of the debates over the past week about running Ethereum node and this verification, that resurfaced to my mind and I was like, wait, did they, did they write this piece of software? So let's talk about three different numbers.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  There's the total issuance, which is kind of a like, how, what's the total amount of Bitcoin or of Ethereum or of ETH that could have been created while following the protocol rules? So that's kind of the theoretical issuance, right? And you could, you could derive that just by looking at what their issuance formulas are. The second number is the total supply. So let's say, okay, so there can be a total number of 21 million Bitcoin issued. Subtract from that all of the Bitcoin that have not been issued so far, right? So that's about 3 million Bitcoin. And then subtract from that, historically,

• 16:52Speaker 02

  there have been bugs in some minor software, which caused them to not claim Bitcoin that they were entitled to claim. And so we're actually below issuance because of that. And you can, you can do this math, you can reconcile these numbers and you know exactly, you can point to which blocks are lacking the, what's called the block reward, right? The total amount of Bitcoin those owed. So, so there's, there's, and then there's the third number of circulating supply. That, that's really a number that nobody could really know because the concept there is that someone might have lost their private keys and so they no longer have access to

• 17:37Speaker 02

  the underlying asset. And so, well, you know, hypothetically, we should just remove that from the supply. But how are we going to know that someone actually lost the keys versus it's just been a long time since they have transferred the asset? And we kind of want to have the presumption that someone can transfer Bitcoin to their keys and sit on those keys for years and not, you know, have any concerns about needing to refresh that or needing to, you know, rotate their keys or anything like that, assuming that their, their private key management is secure. So circulating supply is really unknowable. We, there are estimates of how many Bitcoin have been lost using various heuristics,

• 18:21Speaker 02

  but ultimately that's not the part that interests me because that's not something I can audit. The first two numbers are numbers that I can audit. I can, I can, I can derive the, the issuance number and then I can go and add up on Bitcoin. What you do is you add up what are called unspent transaction outputs. And so that's kind of the current ledger balance, right? Of, okay, how many Bitcoin are locked up to how many addresses? So that's a UTXO, so and you can just sum that up. It takes a few seconds and you've got the total supply. Ethereum is much more complex than that.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  So you have, you don't, they don't have the output model. What they have is called an account model. And so you have to go into all of these accounts and add them all up. Now,

• 19:19Speaker 02

  This is orders of magnitude more data than the UTXO set. And I would argue that that makes Ethereum less scalable. But it's actually, it's not fair to them because that's not what they're optimizing for. They're optimizing for something completely different, which is trying to have expressive smart contracts. And so this is where, you know, we can get into like, okay, why would we judge Ethereum's account-based model against Bitcoin's output-based model? So those are two different trade-offs, right? And that's fair. I just want to highlight that what you're trading off is your ability to get a solid accounting for the total supply.

• 20:04Anthony Pompliano?

  It feels like in this scenario, right? You've got Bitcoin, which has a very understood, simple framework that is all about provability when it comes to supply and ultimately scarcity, right? So I can prove to you that there's 21 million total Bitcoin that will ever get created. I can prove to you the 18 million and change Bitcoin have actually been issued. And then I can, I cannot prove to you what the current circulating supply is because of the issues you described. When you then go and you apply those things to Ethereum, I think a lot of people are asking the question,

• 20:44Anthony Pompliano?

  well, is this bad if all of a sudden, if you have a public transparent ledger with a digital asset that's supposed to operate on a decentralized permissionless network, but you can't prove some of those things? Is that not, maybe not fatal, but is that a red flag or is that an issue? And I think that's really kind of what you raised the flag on and was saying, wait a second, I can't do this. Why can't I do it or who has the answer, correct?

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think that we're getting close to an answer. The latest reconciliation I've seen was able to, if I'm reading it correctly, because frankly, they didn't really format it to where I don't know if they're plugging a number or if they actually separately calculated this number of Ethereum that have been destroyed, of Ether that have been destroyed. So I think that we're within about 2,400 ETH of kind of having the reconciliation done. I, you know, I kind of found it, this whole thing has been surprising to me from the beginning because I thought that this would be pretty buttoned up, that like, that this wouldn't be

• 21:56Speaker 02

  an issue because, you know, it's not impossible what I'm asking for. And it's been interesting to see if prominent Ethereum influencers imply that I'm asking for something unreasonable or something that can't, cannot be calculated. And I think they're wrong, it can be calculated, they've just never done it before. And I think that, you know, it does speak to the Ethereum culture and kind of the value proposition that they have. What I find disappointing is that they have been promoting this narrative that ETH can compete with Bitcoin as a store of value. And I just fundamentally disagree with that because of what you were mentioning.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  And also because of the actions of the Ethereum community, right? Like if, if, if, if their response to me had been, hey, you're right, we're fixing this right now, and it was over in a matter of hours, that would be great. But we're on like day four or five right now and we're down to 2,400 ETH, but you know, we're not down to zero, which is kind of what I look for in an audit is to have it foot to zero.

• 23:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and I think part of this, because I'm with you, right? Like, you know, to clearly state, and I wrote about it this morning. We're recording this on Monday, and we're going to release it the next day or two. But when I originally wrote the piece, I said, look, I'm a fan of Ethereum, the network. Like, I actually believe that it can empower a whole bunch of things that Bitcoin doesn't empower. Like, it is solving a different problem. And my whole point is like Ethereum should go double down on what it's great at. And Bitcoin should go double down on what it's on what it is great at and forget all the maximalism and tribalism and like all that nonsense. And so I appreciate I think that you've got a similar view in that. The one thing that I'll say, though, is I was shocked, as it sounds like you were,

• 23:48Anthony Pompliano?

  at the cavalier-ness and the nonchalantness of the Ethereum community when you asked the question. Like, to simply ask, like, hey, can you calculate this? To be told we're close enough, and then it comes out that, you know, it's like 300,000 Ether a porter, about 130, 140 million bucks. It's kind of like, wait a second, like, whoa. I saw somebody tweet, and I said, if they think that you're close enough on this, well, what else are they close enough on? Right? And it starts to kind of like, you start to poke a little bit. You're like, wait a second, there's some smoke here. Like, is there a fire? And not in a sense of like Ethereum's going to fail. But you just start to get this sense of like, wait, there might not be as much first principles thinking as I previously thought, right? There might not be a sense of urgency like I previously thought. And so it doesn't necessarily going to change.

• 24:32Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, if you're a hardcore Ethereum or Ether believer, I don't think you're going to change your mind over this. But it was surprising and unexpected, in my opinion, the reaction that you got specifically.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, and to be clear, like, I don't think anyone listening to this should go out and make a financial decision based on what I'm saying. All I'm asking them to do is to do some research and to really scratch under the surface on these assets and to figure out what I consider to be kind of like due diligence questions, right? Of how many, how many exist? How did they come about existing? How many are going to exist in the future? And, you know, that's kind of like corporate governance, right? You want to know what the cap table looks like. And you want to know who's authorized to issue more shares? What is the process around that? Like, Because if you don't do that, then you run the risk of getting diluted out. And you have to be able to protect your rights, right?

• 25:27Speaker 02

  Defend your rights as an investor. And the way you do it with these decentralized systems is by running a node and by running the numbers, right? Adding it all up of seeing what percentage of this ledger do I own? You know, and that way you're able to make some. And that's where I think it's really important is to have like the highest quality information out there. And it was surprising to see like Vitalik point to CoinMarketCap as his trusted, you know, data provider for how many ETH exist. I think that, you know, that should be open source. It should not be a proprietary number that is only calculated by a select few

• 26:10Speaker 02

  of people who work at CoinMarketCap or who work at another data provider. I think that anyone in the Ethereum community should have access to the tools for doing the math and figuring out what's the total supply out there.

• 26:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think part of this too is it's not a anti any third party data provider specifically, right? It's just simply saying the third party data provider should be able to calculate for their needs, but so should you. And you should be able to verify what is at the third party data site. You should be able to verify what's in the blockchain, all that kind of stuff. So I think that that's like pretty non controversial. And I think we'd be fooling ourselves if we said, if this same issue was brought up by somebody who was not a Bitcoin proponent, it probably would be handled differently, right? Like, like to me, it feels like there was just this reaction of like, we're being attacked almost. And so my hope is that eventually that stuff kind of dissipates and people realize,

• 27:09Anthony Pompliano?

  yeah, there's kind of a better way to work together to some degree. And so maybe talk a little bit about you issued a Bitcoin bounty, which, you know, as I wrote, I find hilarious that a Bitcoin proponent is literally paying for the creation of something that helps the Ethereum community. But if you kind of take away the irony with that, what kind of was your thought process behind the Bitcoin bounty? And then where does that stand now?

• 27:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. I mean, so fundamentally, like Ethereum is the number two asset in this space. And if something bad were to happen to Ethereum, I actually think that would reflect poorly on Bitcoin as well. So I think that if, if as a whole, we're as a whole industry, right, we're going to say, these are decentralized immutable ledgers that we're building, then we should work towards that. And I kind of want everyone to have the same expectations on that. So I do think that the end result is going to be that we have a clean audit, right? And that there aren't going to be any surprise surprises at the end of the day. That's my expectation. We'll see if we get there.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  But that if we get that, then I think that it increases confidence in this space overall and including in Bitcoin. I think that there really is a positive effect here, especially from like an education perspective of why did Pierre go through this exercise? Like, why did it matter? And I've seen a lot of people asking about that, like, why does this matter that that we're doing this? And it's about decentralization. If we're going to trust centralized third parties, then we might as well just go back to the Federal Reserve, right? Like we, and I know that there's, there's also a spectrum, right? So like, some things are going to be more decentralized than others. So for example,

• 29:05Speaker 02

  you might argue, well, you know, aren't you trusting the developers who are writing the script? That's all true. And that's why when I did the bounty, the bounty is still up. I don't want just one script. Right now, I have, I have two scripts. I have a script that calculates the issuance rate, and I have a script that calculates the, the total supply currently outstanding. But I, I don't have a reconciliation between those two scripts. And I also don't have separate iterations of those scripts. So in auditing, you always want to be recalculating what the client has given you. And so you don't just want to have like

• 29:44Speaker 02

  One methodology, you want to have multiple so that, you know, maybe even write them in different programming languages and with different approaches and with different sets of sanity tests. So that you can have a lot of confidence in the end result. And I, I think that, um, so I'm going to keep the bounty up. The bounty is a million satoshis, which if you do the math, that's about a hundred dollars. Although, you know, the exchange rate is very volatile. It's going up generally, so it's, it's more than a hundred dollars now.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  But you're going to have to pay income tax on it because it is, you know, compensation for, for work done. And the, so the, the grant I created because I really think that it's hard to get developers to open source their code and to do work for free. And, and it also, I felt like mitigated the critique of you are doing this in bad faith, right? That you're just trolling. Well, you know, if I put money up and, you know, okay, I could put up more than a million satoshis. If, if, if that's what I need to do, I'll put up more than a million satoshis. But right now, you know, I think that a million is a fair price for what I'm asking for. Everyone says it's a simple script, so I feel like a hundred bucks should be okay for a simple script.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  But it's turning out to be fairly complicated, so maybe I'll have to increase the bounty. I also wanted to use this opportunity to talk about satoshis because saying a million satoshis and that I'm going to make someone a millionaire is provocative. But I, I think that one of the problems in this space has been the issue of, um, kind of the, the numbers bias of, oh, one bitcoin is too expensive. I can't afford $10,000, so I can't buy bitcoin. And that's actually wrong because bitcoin's divisible out to 100 million satoshis. And so when I say a million satoshis, that's a hundred dollars.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  So if, you know, a hundred thousand satoshis is $10, so anyone can buy bitcoin is my, my point there.

• 31:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, look, and I think that part of this too is although there will be many people who disagree, the idea of one identifying a problem and two, I do think is a good faith effort of, hey, I'll pay somebody to create this solution here. Frankly, it was pretty clever on your part. So it's, it's pretty interesting to see. Before we finish up, what do you think is kind of the outcome here? Right? Or like, what do you hope that we end up, you know, over the next couple of days or weeks?

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's a couple of different considerations. One is that if we get the reconciliation working, you still need to run a full Ethereum node to actually do it, to actually run those scripts. So I'm going to start syncing an Ethereum node and that way I'll be able to double check the work that I'm paying for. Secondly, is thinking about kind of the roadmap going forward. The Ethereum community is hard at work on Ethereum 2.0. And unfortunately, Ethereum 2.0 makes what I'm talking about even more complex of adding up the total supply. Because of sharding, now not only do you have different accounts, but they're

• 33:05Speaker 02

  going to be on different shards. And so the Ethereum 2.0 is extremely successful and a lot of people use it, it's going to become extremely expensive to count up the whole supply of ETH on Ethereum 2.0. And if it becomes too expensive and nobody can do it, I think that introduces a vulnerability whereby your ETH could get diluted and you're really in the dark as to whether when you're buying ETH, are you actually receiving legit ETH? Or is this fractional reserve ETH that was kind of created out of thin air, but nobody's running a full node? So there's no way to know. So I think that this really impacts

• 33:49Speaker 02

  the scaling debate and the debate about the direction Ethereum 2.0 is going in. Now, maybe, you know, maybe that's okay, right? That we can have a world computer where the math is a little fuzzy on what the underlying asset is. And the metaphor that they use, which I think is plausible, is that ETH is like oil. You don't need to know the current supply of oil at all times. You just want to put it in your tank and use it, right? So maybe that's the case with ETH, is that you just want to put it in your wallet and, you know, get utility out of it in various ways. You don't actually need to know the total supply because you're not going to be a long-term investor in ETH.

• 34:32Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that's a great perspective of like, these two things do two different things. And they should both double down on what they do well, right? Kind of this idea of ETH as money doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I think there's a lot of people in even the Ethereum community that says that doesn't make sense to them either. But I think that we're headed to a world where, I love how you opened it up, with just like, more than one thing can win at what they're trying to accomplish, because they're trying to accomplish different things, right?

• 34:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. And I think that if we want to bring it back to a debate, it's like, all right, which of these has the biggest total addressable market? Which of these is going to accrue value? But those are kind of like different, and it gets religious, right? People have lots of opinions. The market's going to decide. What's needed for the market to decide, though, is clear and accurate information. And so that's something I want to continue to promote.

• 35:23Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. Listen, thank you so much for jumping on so quickly. But where can people find you or find more of the work that you're doing?

• 35:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure thing. So go on Twitter, @pierre__rocharde. It's a fire hose of information, especially on a weekend like this, where everyone's working really hard, crunching numbers. But that's where to find me, and my DMs are open. So if you want to chat and talk about different questions you might have, I'm available that way.

• 35:57Anthony Pompliano?

  You were cranking out the tweets this weekend. I was loving every second of it. And frankly, I thought you navigated nicely between the smart-ass comments and also the actual kind of substantive ones of, let's try to figure out a solution to this. So hopefully, people realize that this will be a plus one, I think, in the history of Ethereum and also in Bitcoin at some point.

• 36:23Speaker 02

  Thanks, Pom. Have a good one.