Bankless - Danny Ryan | Layer Zero

Episode Date: October 19, 2021

Danny Ryan is an Ethereum 2.0 researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, but he is also a cat owner, husband, and outdoors enthusiast. With some of the longest hair in crypto, Danny is solving extremely difficult and important problems at the protocol level for Ethereum. He is a communicator and a thinker—he is technical but also personable. Danny is a human at the center of this movement, navigating through high-stakes subjective decisions and surrounded by smart, passionate people. This conversation also covers what it’s like working for a protocol. What’s it like working without a boss and concrete job description? Danny’s answer? He cares a lot. ***** 📣 POOLTOGETHER | DEFI LOTTERY https://bankless.cc/PoolTogether ***** 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🍵 MATCHA | DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE AGGREGATOR https://bankless.cc/Matcha  🔐 LEDGER | SECURE YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger  🧙‍♀️ ALCHEMIX | SELF-PAYING LOANS http://bankless.cc/Alchemix  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 4:00 Danny Ryan & His Hair 8:50 Coding & Building 12:45 Communicating 19:37 Subjective Decisions 25:05 Existential Risks 31:35 Work Culture & Accountability 38:08 After Ethereum 41:21 Proof of Stake 45:36 Social Interactions 51:42 More Proof of Stake 55:40 Bitcoin 58:10 Clean Money 1:00:15 Happy Devs & the Mock Merge 1:06:01 Personal Stuff 1:14:55 Closing ------ Resources: Danny on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dannyryan?s=20  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code, but it's composed by people, and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. Cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code, because Ethereum is people all the way down, and it always has been.

Today I'm talking with Danny Ryan, who is the coordinator of the greater eth to effort. And Danny is in an interesting position. He's one of those people that can go deep into the weeds with code, but then also zoom all the way out and explain it to the non-technical folk like me. And so we went through a little bit of Danny's pre-etherium history and where he got his skills from, and it turns out he's got a little bit of an entrepreneur in him. And then we ask some greater questions as to why Danny feels as somebody who works for the EF and kind of doesn't really have a boss where he gets his accountability from for waking up every single day and contributing to Ethereum when no one actually forces him to do that. And then also

expanding that to the other developers as well. We also talk a lot about this recent dev interop event and what it's like to be there as a developer. And then also I share my perspective as what it's like to view these things from the outside. And then we finished off with an interesting conversation about I asked Danny whether he is an optimist or a pessimist, and what about the world makes him what it is? And I thought his answer for that was pretty interesting. So without further ado, let's go ahead and get right into this conversation with Danny Ryan. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.

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Pretty good. Yeah. Having a good time. Hang out my basement. Yeah. Where's your basement? Where in the world is your basement? Can I docks you as the first thing I asked on the show?

Yeah, yeah, that's reasonable. I don't think it's a secret. Boulder, Colorado. Ah, one of the Colorado clans, huh? Yeah, yeah, I've been here for a couple years. Yeah, the Michael Wong, the guy who does culture and memes at Bankless jokes about how all the Colorado people are really into public goods and have long hair. Well, I won't pull it down, but I think I have the longest of the hair. Longer than Milwaukee?

Oh, yeah. My hair's to my waist. What? Yes, I'll actually pull it down. Oh, my God. Really? Yeah. It's usually in a braid if it's down, which, you know.

Oh, my God. It is that. the longest hair. Wow, you have the longest hair in all of Ethereum. Look at that. I think I might, yeah. That's great. How long have you been growing that thing out? I don't really know. I mean, a while. I think... Before you were in Ethereum? Yeah, but probably like three years ago, I cut off like six inches. I just wanted to be six inches shorter. Three feet too long. People tell me you're supposed to, you're supposed to trim it to keep it healthy, but I don't follow the guidance. Well, wow, I have already learned something new about you so early into this show. Danny, I want to hear about your time before

Ethereum. What did you do? What were you doing right before you got into Ethereum? I was doing a mix of various software and business consulting. So my niche was probably like not just being a hired hand, but also like working closely with small business CEOs to like help them figure out how technology could actually make their lives better. Some of this was like helping like literally small businesses in like Louisiana that like literally didn't know databases existed or like how to track customers and things like that. And that was you can make a big impact. But I also like, I also did a lot of work with a company called Kid & Co, which was like an Airbnb knockoff for families traveling with kids. So I built a lot of that stuff and like worked closely with the CEO on,

I don't know, strategy and that kind of stuff. Were you like working as an individual or was it under a company? Always, I mean, as a company, but just as a front for myself, you know, some limits, some liability and help with taxes and that kind of stuff. And so your, your typical client was like kind of a boomer that didn't really know technology is what it is? Is that the vibe? It was a, it was a bit of a mix. You know, I think it was, it was actually not boomers. It was probably like 30-somethings that were like, you know, go-getter businessman that just hadn't awoken to all the things that technology could do for themselves. Was being an entrepreneur, one of like, have you always been an entrepreneur?

Or before that, did you ever work for a company? You ever work for a nine to five? I've never had a real job, I don't think. Really? I started a screen printing company when I was 15. It still runs today. No way. That's my fall back.

Yeah, yeah. Wow. My business partner and best friend, that's his full-time gig, but I'm still involved somewhat. No way. Okay, this is like apparel, right? Just like making cool shirts and stuff like that. You started that when you're a 15. Yeah, I mean, we primarily do it for other people. So like they can take the risk on of like their cool shirt and try to sell it. And we'll, yeah, we do like a hundred to 10,000 piece orders for all sorts of different entities. We got to shop in Louisiana. Okay. So would you say that you've always had some sort of entrepreneur DNA part of you?

I would. Yeah. Yeah. And I've always. had the desire to not have a normal job and to dictate my time on my own standard. And this is probably the most normal of a job I have. I mean, it's like I work for an entity. I, and I, you know, I don't, I don't have hours, but I have things that I'm trying to do and I get paid to do them. But it's, it's entrepreneurial sense that, like, no one tells me what to do. And I just, uh, see, I see what needs to be done and kind of try to bring the value where I can. Definitely. Yeah. So you are, you are your own leader, even though you have a paycheck, which is a, the fact that the EF is the most normal job you've ever had is absolutely insane. When did you learn to code? In college,

actually, I've always, like, used computers and was like a power user probably, but I, I never dipped into coding until I had to take a computer. science course for a mechanical and aerospace engineering degree I was doing. And then, and this is my sophomore year of college. And I, I loved the class and switched my major and went all in. And I, you know, and it was like, felt like a late bloomer, you know, like, I'm never going to make it in computer science or programming because, like, people have been doing this since they were two. But it worked out. It's working out. Yeah. What about code just resonated with you? It felt immediately like the most sane way to get through college because it was fun. I guess I was doing the mechanical and aerospace

engineering degrees because I thought it would like build things. But you didn't really build stuff at my school until junior or senior year. Whereas day zero of the programming class, I was like building cool little things and that just kind of struck me. And it felt like solving puzzles and I felt like I could I could spend the rest of my college career solving puzzles and it would get me get me through school at least. So is the builder DNA also in you as well? Like whatever you, whatever medium you have to build something the easiest and the fastest is what resonates?

Probably so. I don't know. Sometimes I think I'm a builder and then I see my wife who's like sewing and like making dresses and like it's always building shit like literally always building shit. And I'm like, I'm not much of a builder. Wait, you don't think you're much of a builder? I am a communicator. I'm a prototyper.

I like to think deeply out hard problems. But at a certain point, I'm also not the guy who builds it. And nor do I think I'm the right one. Like if you look at the, say, like the Sigma Prime team, you know, Paul is a builder. Paul like Rex building lighthouse and like is it can is just constructing crazy shit. I mean, proto, proto is a builder too. And I build things, but I do a lot of other things too. And like I if I spend all of my time trying to build things and trying to do.

bring something totally to production in terms of from my own hands. It's it I don't get I have a hard time doing that. I have a hard time like focusing quite like that. So I like the mix of stuff I do. I made this mistake with Kevin Awaki once or maybe it's actually Ryan that alluded to Steve Jobs and Kevin was like I don't I don't like that analogy but I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it anyways where Steve Woszniak was yelling at Steve Jobs saying what is it that you actually do like what are what are your skills like you don't actually build.

anything. And Steve Jobs gives this anecdote of like somebody going up to a conductor of an orchestra and asking more or less the same question. Like, what do you do that a metronome can't do? And the or the conductor gets really, really offended obviously. And he goes, well, you know, the trumpeteer plays the trumpet and then the, you know, the flutist plays the flute. I play the orchestra, right? Like that's his instrument. Would you say that that, uh, metaphor is kind of apt for how you are the conductor of all the ETH2 client teams? I will not take the Steve Jobs analogy direct. I cannot accept that. But I will say to a certain extent, because like the conductor probably played an instrument most of his life and knows

and knows music inside and out, you know, knows how to communicate about the music and things like that. And so to a certain extent, sure. Yeah. And I enjoy that. So what, has it been like to be the, I kind of, so the other metaphor that I think I have for what I think you do is like kind of like a traffic control man for all of the different just like packets of communication data that all the different client teams talk about. We were, me and Ryan were just got out of done recording a weekly roll-up and we were reading one of the ZK roll-ups like announcement blog posts. And we were just trying to unpack their blog post over and over and over again. And like, it was very, very clear that a developer wrote this blog post, not a communicator.

So, like, as somebody who's a good communicator, how is it, what's it been like to, like, communicate with all these, like, you know, developers who speak in this very, very, like, technical, non-communicative way? Oh, that's fun. I mean, I, I can speak the language. And I, like, I don't just communicate, like, in this interrupt last week. Like, I did a lot of communication. I did a lot of kind of organization and stuff, but I, you know, I'm in the weeds, like,

figuring out, like, the optimizing the engine API, right? And, like, figuring out how that's actually going to run and, like, some of the edge cases and stuff. And so, like, I think if I could not get deep into it, that I would be, I would not be effective at what I'm doing or what I've been doing in the past few years. And so on the technical side, it's very fun. And then I really enjoy explaining things. I really enjoy teaching. And so I really enjoy like finding the right metaphor, the right like thing, analogy to communicate a technical concept to people who maybe aren't as deep in the weeds.

And so because I get to deep, I get to be deep in the weeds, then I also get to then turn around on the other side and communicate outward. So when you're at these dev interrupt events where everyone there speaks code, like speaks developer, you don't need to use metaphors, right? Like, that's, that metaphors are for you to communicate to people like me. Or do metaphors, are they useful in that environment? Like, what are the communication skills there? That's an interesting question. The metaphors are different, but they're still valuable. They're still, like, sometimes you're talking about something very complicated.

And, like, if you can abstract it and be able to talk about it more from a higher level, like, one, you're going to get the three people in the room over here that knew what was going on and the four people over here that didn't quite yet, you're going to help expedite that process, which is good. And also just it helps, like we all have to think about different, like, we have to be able to think about different layers of abstraction. So like once we have a good metaphor, even though we've like worked on the minute details of thing A and thing B, once we have a metaphor for how thing A and thing B kind of live together at a higher level once you have the details worked out, then you can talk about that higher level and not have to worry about the details unless you like need to open it back up and go back in. So they're very, they're very valuable. Yeah.

They're not the same metaphors all the time. they cross, you know, sometimes they're good for educating an outside audience and for communicating amongst oneself. But they're certainly valuable. Computer science is all about distraction, and that's metaphors in a certain sense. Is there a specific event that comes to mind when, like, you just could not figure out how to get two teams to communicate or you couldn't communicate with someone? Was there ever like a big breakdown in communication that's happened that's the story you can tell us about? Hmm. Anything come to mind there? There are something. things. And these types of things, or if you talk to my wife, would be the things that over the past

three years, three or four years have stressed me out the most is this communication breakdowns. I will probably, I will not go into deep about any one of them. I will say that early on in the ETH two, the beacon chain journey, we had done a lot of work on consensus, a lot of work on the core security, the core state transition, how these things come together. But the, the, the networking was not in full view. And there was a bit of a lack of expertise on the networking and ownership over it. And when we got there, that was probably one of the hardest times is just that there were parties on both side of the aisle that thought very, very different things about how the networking should be built and how it should look. And it like almost drove me crazy because I could not, I could not like, it took probably months to get past and resolve an issue.

and ultimately came down to just being like, we're going to do it this way. We can't do it both ways. Sorry. And usually we're better at compromise. Usually we're better at finding a solution where all the parties are, like eventually all the parties are like,

oh yeah, that makes sense. Which is really good. I think in Ethereum, most people operating at this layer one, like they truly want to find the right solution. And like often we propose solutions that get iterated on or just totally shut down. And like you have to do that.

Most people are very good at that and don't bring a lot of ego to their solutions. And because of that, I don't think we get to these weird impasses where we're just bike shedding to death. I mean, we bike shed certainly, but like not about the important thing. What's bike shedding? It is a term used quite a bit that the idea is we're building a bike shed, you and I. And obviously, bike sheds need like foundation. They probably need a concrete foundation. They need walls.

They maybe need a door. All sorts of stuff. You maybe even need locks for your bikes for security. But like, instead of dealing with all that, we're sitting here arguing about like the color we're going to paint the shed. You know, and the shed doesn't even exist yet. And so bike shedding is when,

uh, people get hung up on some sort of minute detail that like, it doesn't really matter. And we're not like, we're not even getting to the meat of it. So like the name of an API endpoint. Like that could be the thing that is bike shed to oblivion because there's no, there's no correct name. There's literally no correct answer. Like there's there's it it becomes a matter of

opinion and once you get to these areas that are a bit more of a matter of opinion rather than like some sort of absolute correctness and nothing has an absolute correctness but there's certainly things that like get closer in that direction. But when you get farther away from that direction like naming things like that you get you get into bike shutting. And if you look at like all core dev calls sometimes it'll be like 20% meat and then 80% bike shutting. Right. But then if you say that people are bike shedding, then somebody that really cares about the issue, would be like, this is a bike shedding. This is really, really important.

Right. They don't think they're bike shedding. They think that they are presenting the objective. Yeah, yeah. Right. Okay, so I want to unpack that a little bit because building Ethereum, no one knows what Ethereum is. It's kind of like the internet. And like the future of Ethereum is like what Ethereum should be is a subjective thing, right?

We don't have any objective like reference point for, what we are trying to build when we're building Ethereum. So like you said, all choices are subjective and some are easier to come to consensus versus others. Would you say like one way to describe your role is that like you are the facilitator of all these subjective decisions, some of these subjective decisions all the teams have consensus on so we can just leave that, you know, put that in the rearview mirror, but perhaps a lot of them need to have, you know, powwows and deliberation and debriefs

about how and why choices are made. So would you say, like, your role has been to be the facilitator of these conversations about these subjective choices? That's one of my roles. I'd say that's one of my roles. And the, we, like, it is subjective. There is no absolute as to where we're going. But there are design considerations.

There are, like, deep philosophical things that are guiding us. Obviously, like, we don't have to all agree on them all. But like you can go, we can, you can begin to cite. You've been like, we've been working on proof of stake for like six years. And like it has these, like these are things we're trying to achieve. And like the ethos of the community is kind of rallied around this, you know. And so that becomes something to help you help guide you. But also there's other design considerations.

Like complexity is the enemy of everything in consensus systems. And so like minimizing complexity even at the cost of some advanced feature set or like, optimization often, you know, is a guiding light. And that, you know, is generally agreed upon, you know, but you maybe there's 5% of engineers in this process that like, they're not afraid of complexity at all. Right. So there's a bit of there's like a compromise that has to happen there. So so yeah, subjective, but there's this, there's this like ethos and philosophy and, and kind of design guiding, guiding, like guiding light that's guiding us. And sometimes I have to help try to contextualize that.

Sometimes I have to help try to figure out what the community thinks is the designing light or the priorities. And like, I don't know. It's all messy. Right. So, yes, you said values and ethos will help guide the decisions. How much, how well defined do you think that actually is? Because like, if you really want to get down to it, there's no actual source of single source of truth for anything in this universe. Like, are there any very, very concrete things that like, well,

This choice abides by this set of values. Obviously, like decentralization is perhaps a very concrete value that no one disagrees with. Are there any other values that, like, you can, like, name for us here? But even decentralization is on a spectrum. And so, like, you know, the bitcoins might say that we've, we've, like, gone off the deep end in terms of it being some sort of centralized process or centralized protocol or something like that. And I don't, I don't agree with that. But then I think other protocols have gone off the deep end in terms of centralization and design considerations and things like that.

So decentralization, certainly, top one. Decentralization also, there's many different things that can mean. Often in protocol design, we're considering it not being able to be captured by powerful interests, it not being able to be censored and things like that. And the, I would say there's, there's an ethos of Ethereum of assuming that the world as it is today and the way the world interacts with blockchains today is not as the world will be in five, 10 or 20 years. So you end up seeing protocols that they make what I would, what people consider pretty large compromises because, well, this is how it works. No one's doing this. No one's doing that.

Like, it's going to be fine. whereas there's a very strong ethos in a theory I'm assuming that something that can be captured will likely be attempted to be captured if it's valuable enough and we're attempting to build things that are very big and very valuable and so the we're not we're not we're trying to think about like you know what what happens when a state actor cares what happens when you know some mega cartel of some of the richest people in the world care like that kind of stuff what happens when when the banks are trying to shut it down whereas And so that's definitely, it's definitely a design consideration.

What are the other philosophies? That proof of stake is better than proof of work? Yeah. I mean, I could, I could write. Yeah, I mean, there might be a spectrum. Yeah, we were trying to do hybrid proof of work proof of stake at one point. So that's, that's the spectrum. Although I don't think that was actually a good idea, even though I wrote the EIP.

But the, yeah, I mean, it's messy. It's messy. What's something that could be captured? Because like obviously all of Ethereum is like or like, you know, enough stake to validate the chain in ways that you deem appropriate. Like obviously having enough ether, that's one way to get capture. But like what are the other like mechanisms that like maybe somebody that's not developer minded like I am wouldn't think of that is like an attack point that you guys try and

harden up? Well, you would, well, I think that this is this is something you would think about, which is capture the governance process. Sure. You know, like, the fact that you can upgrade Ethereum is dangerous. Right. The fact that we can upgrade Ethereum is dangerous. And Bihali becomes increasingly so as the powers that be give a shit about this stuff.

You know, like, there's a bunch of developers, a bunch of community members. There's a bunch of signals and stuff. And those, I'm certain, could all be manipulated. And I don't think that's what's happening today. But I do think that that could happen. the future. What about something that actually involves writing code in a specific way? Or if we write the code this way, like it might be open for capture in the future. Yeah. Yeah. One thing that comes to mind is, is P2P networking. You know, it's, we make

assumptions about the amount of honest actors on a network. We make assumptions about being able to connect and being able to get in and actually find the right network. And some of that, the P-to-P stuff in general actually becomes a bit like a bit more a bit harder to define an objective way like consensus mechanisms you can be like if two alternative chain histories were created a minimum of this amount of stake is slashable like that you can make you're very clear to define it whereas like defining someone being grieved on a P-to-P network and and all the vectors there and are being eclipsed and things like that is usually a bit usually a bit tougher and so definitely places that you have to, it's easy to not harden that, I guess, is the point, but you got to spend the time doing that. Let me think dependencies.

That's an interesting one. Reducing the software dependencies that you have reduces the ability for people to kind of make their way into your code unsuspectingly. Like, for example, if you had a dependency for a big integer library, some random library and like one guy maintains it and like your client is is running on this then all of a sudden that one guy can potentially like get a bug in that dependency that then affects all the arithmetic in your client which could then lead to xyz bug you know printing a million ether or something like that multi-client helps us there but it's you know there's a lot there's a lot of different entry points

not even attack vector that I even knew existed they're called that's called a supply chain attack on the on the software itself but there's hardware supply chain attacks too um and apparently you know well there's the last up there but the like you could imagine there being some sort of box that people love the stake on and you literally just bug the hardware and you steal people's keys right yeah but that's not your responsibility it's not but it's worth considering if there are safe ways to try to prevent that i mean one consideration for that would be like the separation of of the active staking key and the withdrawal credentials. Right. You know, by doing that, by having the ultimate ownership of funds being a key that

could be much colder and maybe on a hardware wallet, you know, protects you against certain supply chain attacks. At least, you know, you could, those attacks could still potentially still keys, but, and could get you slashed, but you maybe lose one-eath instead of 32-eat. So what you're talking about? There are, there are protocol, thanks, considerations there. What you're talking about, I think for listeners who didn't follow that, is that when you stake your 32 ether, you predetermined the outbound Ethereum address where when you unstake that ether, where that ether actually goes. So you unstake your ether rather than just like, unstake my ether and send it to this address, you actually give your Ethereum address that it will be unstaked to when it is unstaked. That was right, right? Right, right.

So you talked about how there are some assumptions that are made in the Ethereum Protocol, and this is, of course, a subjective decision that must be made. Historically, with all these client teams and making these decisions, are people generally come to consensus about these things, about what the assumption level should be, or is it a bunch of, like, is there disagreement or tend toward disagreement, or tend toward agreement? What's that process like?

by case basis? Yeah, I mean, it's a bit of case by case basis. I think that the people that are working on, you know, the proof of state consensus aspect of this protocol, one inherited a lot. So, inherited a lot of the philosophy and a lot of the design considerations from ETH one, from the existing proof of work chain. And, you know, a few court people wrote a lot of the initial specifications. So like myself, Italic, Justin Drake, and others. And so those initials, specifications are grounded deeply with a certain philosophy. But then design and considerations ripple outward from there. So one, you know, we reiterate quite a bit on specifications with engineers and teams. And then the specifications only contain so much. So engineers are

ultimately making decisions. But I think they are grounded very deeply in a certain ethos. But you do see a bit of a, you see different philosophical decisions coming out in different clients. So maybe like an enterprise client might cut corners here or there to make things nice for enterprise or make, you know, some user experience really nice. Whereas, like, a client that wants to be running on, you know, unstoppable, embedded hardware and, like, routers and all sorts of stuff all over the world, like, they might have, like, a different, you know, standard that they're holding to. And maybe it makes the Ux worse.

Hey, guys, I hope you're enjoying the conversation with Danny thus far. Stay tuned for the second half of the show where we talk further about the dev interop event and also Danny's optimism or pessimism about the future of the world. what he can do about that. I had a fantastic time talking with Danny here, but first, before we get there, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.

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weave in and out a little bit is the culture around all of these client devs. None of them work for the EF. They kind of, they correct me if I'm wrong here. They all kind of have their own internal treasury that they used to pay out all of the developers. But I feel like the vibe of the job is they're all kind of what you described your job at the EF is like, well, you receive a paycheck, but you don't really answer to anyone. You kind of just have your job.

So everyone's a lot more loose, loosely organized. Everyone kind of just like gets up and works loosely works. So like the answer is probably obvious. But like when you get up in the morning and like I don't think you have a boss or maybe you technically do, but you probably doesn't feel like you do, like what keeps you accountable? Like why, why does Danny actually do the things that are in his job description? I ask myself that sometimes. I don't have a job description, but I, I, the same job description. Yeah, I, because I care. I care a lot and I don't know why. I mean, I think I

know why, but sometimes, you know, throughout the years, it ebbs and flows in different directions, but, like, I cannot help myself. Like, I cannot, I cannot, not wake up and immediately, like, figure out what the new problem is or wake up and like realize that if I don't do x, y, or z, that the merge literally might be delayed by two weeks because we're like trying to get the specs out and stuff. And like I just, I care. And then I care because I care about the technology, but I also like the way it's all structured is it's all this, it's all this open source project that we're building together. And it's a community. So like the accountability doesn't necessarily come from a direct boss or anything.

The accountability comes from the fact that I'm a member of this community building this thing. And I have this emergent responsibility building this thing with these people. And if I didn't do what I thought I could do and do my best to do so, I would be not giving my all to this community that I care about. And I'm deeply integrated in. And that's the community angle. There's the like, I care about shipping this piece of. technology and then I don't know there's a certain level of obsession that I and pretty much everyone else I work with has and that's probably because of the community

thing it's probably because of the impact but it's just like someone someone mentioned it like Ethereum is just the ultimate nerd snipe and I the word nerd isn't even the right word like I don't necessarily consider myself a nerd but just the like it is such an interesting problem it is such like the combination of economics and cryptography and game theory and programming and distributed systems. It's unbelievable. It's like hilariously interesting. And it's captivated me for many years now. I just had to look up nerd snipe. So for those that I also needed to look up nerd sniping is a slang term that describes a particularly interesting problem that is presented to a nerd, often that physicists, tech geek or mathematician.

the nerd stops all activity to devote attention to solving the problem. Often at his or her own peril. Danny, do you feel like at your own? Do you feel in peril at times because of Ethereum? Sometimes. Sometimes I feel like Ethereum. Wait twice if Ethereum holds you hostage. I think it might.

I think it might. I'm serious. Like I've been infected, you know, like the memes, but the memetics, like the infectious idea, like that thing. Like, you know, I've definitely been infected. Like I cannot, it's hard for me to think about other things. I have to, like, rip myself away and, like, go, go to the gym or go hike in the woods to, like, force myself to not think about this thing, which is incredible. I never thought I'd be so wrapped up in something and care so much about something.

But it's also, like, it's also a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Do you, like, if you went and just, like, effed off for the day, like, went to the beach or just, like, whatever, like, maybe two days in a row, like, would you feel like, you feel guilty? What emotions would you feel while you were not working on Ethereum? No, I don't think I, definitely some anxiety because like it all keeps moving. Right. Like, because I'm going to open my phone, even if I didn't look at it for two days.

I'm going to have literally 500 messages. And like many of them are going to be in like interesting technical conversations that one, I want to follow. And two, I often have very strong opinions about all these conversations. And so like I want to make sure that I help steer. in the direction that I think is good. And so, you know, if I, if I disappear for too long, you know, who knows, it might be steered in that direction.

I have to, like, try to write the ship. Right, right. So many people implemented a depos EIP or something. Yeah. I don't mean to, I don't mean to imply. So I think I work a lot. I do. And I love, and I enjoy it.

But I think I actually have like a pretty good work life balance compared to some. Like I go to the gym almost every day. I love camping. I love hiking. I got a beautiful wife that. I hang out with plenty of friends, that kind of stuff. So, like, I pride myself in having a good work-life balance, but I also think I work a ton.

So I don't know, there's, I don't know where the line is. Right, right, yeah. The cool thing about Ethereum is like when, I think everyone who finds a job in, probably greater crypto too, is that no one actually feels like they're working. I mean, I'm sure some people do. But the, perhaps why this thing has been so sustainable when it comes to infecting your brain is that because, like, it doesn't actually feel like, work. Yes. I agree. And simultaneously, it does not feel like working, but it can still be

exhausting. Sure. Yeah, right. Yeah, absolutely. There's plenty of things that aren't work are very, very exhausting. Running a marathon is exhausting, but it's not technically my job. Right. Have you ever thought about like what you're going to do with yourself once Ethereum calcifies? No. I will either not be in technical. or I will be working on open source technology. I'm not, I will not be working on closed source technology ever. Um,

I know that as a matter of principle. Yeah. I mean, it just doesn't interest me. And also one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing is because, uh, I'm trying to make an impact on the world. And I don't think close source software is the, the right way for me to make that impact.

Right. Uh, but it's, we'll see. We'll see. It's hard to imagine doing something else. Um, although I certainly will do something else eventually. Um,

And yeah, my guiding principle is to work on things that I care about and to try to create value, not in the sense of like lining my pockets with cash, but like fundamentally try to create value. And in doing so, I will continue to open doors and be able to work on interesting things. That has worked out for me so far. I'm also a very fortunate, very lucky person in many respects. but I figure if I keep doing what I'm doing, keep working on interesting things, keep working with interesting people, that whatever that next door is, it will, it'll be, it'll be a good one. Do you see yourself putting the entrepreneur hat back on and building something on Ethereum? Now that you've finished the foundation, build a product?

Maybe. I think that that would be, it would be the right thing and not to be the right people. You know, if there was a person or two that I really, really wanted to essentially hack on a project with for a few years, then I would. But I'm not, I'm not certain. There's a funny, so I got into proof of steak. So, like, I work on a lot of things, but, like, I really focus on proof of steak, preface implementations and research and specifications and security and all that kind of stuff. In 2017, right at the beginning, I got rid of all my clients.

clients because I had become obsessed with Ethereum and I was going to figure out how to make it work, how to make it my job. And I, for that first probably half a year, I was just kind of bumbling around. You know, I was, I lived in New Orleans at the time and I thought to myself, if I'm going to be serious about this, I need to go to the New Orleans Ethereum meetup. And there wasn't one. So I made, I made the New Orleans Ethereum meetup, you know. And then I was like, I had never contributed to open source before, which is crazy because I was a belief. for an open source and I used it a lot in my projects and stuff, but I had not like gone to a project and just contributed back. So I was also like just start contributing to anything and everything.

You know, I contributed to Piper's Web3.Pi library, a Python tooling library for Ethereum. And I started just contributing to things. And I wrote a few smart contracts, trying to figure out maybe I'll, maybe there's a business opportunity there. And then I, then I was like learning more about this shift, this proof of stake thing coming. And my first thought was, That's never going to work. That doesn't make any sense. But then two days later, two weeks later, two months later, I don't remember. I was like, oh, I get it. Both of these are proof of dedication of economic, scarce economic resource to the protocol. It's easy to prove that about mining hardware and electricity. And it's also easy to prove about the end protocol asset itself. And so I was like, okay, this is starting to make sense. And so I thought, maybe I could make a staking pool. and so I started I started digging into proof of stake because I thought it was coming in like five months. And I thought I could make a staking pool. And so like that that opened up my contributions.

Like that that is why I got under proof of stake because I was like, there might be a business opportunity here. And it turned out there was a lot of work to still do. So I had to kick to can down the curb on the business opportunity. And I will say wholeheartedly at this point, I have zero intention of making a staking pool. That does not interest me at all at this point. But that's the business opportunity was what actually made me do the dive, the deep dive on proof of stake to begin with.

That's pretty funny. I also in 2018 thought about like a model for a staking pool company and I actually pitched it to this ICO advisory company that I worked for at the time. And Peter Vestness, who is the owner of the company, New Alchemy, he said that proof of steak is years away. And I was like, no, it's not, Peter. No, it's like right around the corner. It's like six months away. We got to start building this thing. And that was, again, in 2018. Yeah. Yeah. I helped write EIP 1011, hybrid proof of work proof of the stake. And at the time, I, and I was in 2018, I was like certain main net by the end of 2018, no problem. Like, no

problem. It's really funny that like the 2017 bowl market, at least inside of the, the Ethereum land. Everyone was like buying ether and ether was running up to $1,400 because people were like speculating that staking is just like, Casper's coming. It's like it's right around the corner, right? And in 2020 and 2021, it's the same thing. It's a full cycle. It's really coming. It's coming. I went to the, I went to the merge interrupt and saw some beautiful things. It is actually coming. How was that, by the way? I was thinking about it when you said that work doesn't feel like work. Because multiple times during that week and we were in Greece, I was like walking back

to my room and just, and I get overwhelmed just with like a, I'm having a fantastic time. Like, I'm having a great time. And after having been spending eight hours like in a room with 30 other people like thinking about hard problems and debugging software and all that kind of stuff, which like I don't know if I don't know if I'm allowed to consider that having a great time, but I was having a great time. So it was awesome. It was like exactly the right time, exactly the right group of people, and five times more productive than our wildest dreams. So it was, it was very, very excellent. Is the in real life component the reason why it's so productive, do you think? I would say yes,

except yes, with an asterisk. The asterisk being that it has to be the right time in a project, it has to be the right group. Like it made a lot of sense because we're done with London. We're done with Altaire and we have the, we have like the core specs for all the stuff. And there was a little bit of lead time so that people could work on and lay the foundations in their software before that. And so like all of that, doing all of the other stuff before probably would have

wasted time if we were together. You know, whereas we got together and we had this like very interesting structure of an interop where a lot of the software work had been done leading up to it. And what you're doing is you're kind of like pairing off with different groups and you're like, can our software work together? Oh, let's fix the bugs. And then you switch and you go with other group. And you kind of like architect this pyramid of increasing complexity throughout the week.

And at the same time, having conversations to iron out, okay, now that everyone has implemented the specs, what are the issues? You know, what do we need to refine? You know, so we could have very deep conversations about ironing out the last bits of the specs and at the same time also like do this like culmination thing where we we get to this mega milestone at the end of the week and and so yes there's magic to being in person but I I'm also like a decentralization maximalist for for a lot of it too because like the value in what I can do at home and writing software and stuff like it's just a different it's a different type of exchange and

you don't want one or the other all the time and but it was really nice coming together after like two years of being apart right yeah I think a lot of people had very very similar feelings in New York recently for Mainnet where a lot of people are literally just coming out of their homes for the first time since COVID. And also, crypto is very, very different in 2021 than pre-COVID times. Like, we've actually blossomed into some sort of like society. And just the richness of the social interactions, maybe as a result of that, or just maybe just in general inside of crypto. For some reason, social interactions in crypto seemed far more rich than all the other social interactions I've ever had in any other contexts. And I think maybe it's because

everyone has like shared stories, shared values, shared like purpose and is also intellectually curious, I think everyone who crypto is generally intellectually curious. And then like when you like hide people away for two years and then get them and then pump their price their asset prices by 10x and then put them in a room together. Turns out they have like a lot of things to share. Yeah, I think that's, that's all,

it's all very true. Yeah, the, the thing about the interop and about some other similar events is like, how much everyone gives a shit. Raises the level of engagement, the level of conversation and level of just enthusiasm and fun. Whereas I could imagine being in a more traditional business context and like,

people are there like do their job. but there's not that giving a shit that that's there also just everyone's so aligned on shipping the merge um philosophically uh from a perspective of climate change like all sorts of angles like everyone there was like they're on a mission like we're doing this thing um whereas you could imagine other things even in ethereum or in crypto there's like less of that like deep deep deep mission. Like state expiry. I mean, state x-3 is incredible. Like we need, we need a sustainable state solution, period. End of discussion. But doesn't have that as much of this like world-changing feeling to it. But I'm also very biased. I love proof of stake. Why, why is proof of stake

so grand when it comes to meaning and impact for so many people at the DevOps event and just the Ethereum devs in general? One of the big things was climate change. A lot of people just like, and I hadn't, I hadn't expected how much most of the people at that event were feeling impacted by that. Like I talk about, you know, proof of sake, making things more secure, more sustainable, and more scalable all the time, you know, and I mentioned the reduction in energy usage by like 99.99%, you know, and I think it makes an impact to some, but I was surprised.

and I shouldn't have been, but I was surprised throughout the week how often various developers were just like, this is literally the most impactful thing I will ever do with respect to climate change in my life. I will not be able to outstep this accomplishment. So there was just this feeling of actually being able to make an impact, especially when you look at estimations and Ethereum uses as much energy as Poland or something and climbing. Is it simply just a function of Ethereum using less electricity, or is there a deeper, like, relationship between proof of stake and climate change? Or is it simply as simple as just moving away from proof of it? Yeah, I mean, I think it's, if we have crypto-economic consensus mechanisms and which the asset securing it, the quantity and capital securing the protocol, scales with the value of the protocol, when that is energy consumption, you quite simply have this, like,

tough relationship between energy consumption and the and the security and value of the protocol, which like we all want the security and value of the protocol to increase. And so there's a bit of a, I guess a dark side to it. And I look, I, you know, we could, I'm, I don't buy the like Bitcoiner, uh, green energy thing or that like Bitcoin is going to usher in the new wave of green energy. I don't buy that. I think there is probably some nuance to the argument. I think you could have like an interesting debate as to like if you have these proof of work mechanisms what does the future look like in 20 years you know does it look like bitcoin using 50% of all the energy in the world probably not it's like it's hard to imagine that that becomes

the reality and so maybe there's like more nuance into how this this actually ripples outward but nonetheless I I would I would make a pretty grand bet that 80% or more of Bitcoin and Ethereum's energy consumption is not clean. Right. And making an impact on that seems meaningful. I think there's also, there's other components, not just the, not just CO2 emissions, climate change, that kind of stuff. I mean, there's also the access and the potential, like the amount of people that

can participate in a proof of stake protocol in a meaningful way is probably much larger than proof of work. It's also more equitable in a sense that I can very purely turn capital into an equity. participation in the securing the protocol whereas in proof of work like that scales very poorly for small actors so like the the more capital that you have the more entrenched you can get into real world supply chains the more return you can get on your capital and the economies of scale and so like you you know fundamentally even you set the energy stuff aside that asset being grounded so much in the real world and not the metaverse uh means that you don't get kind of the same equitability in the crypto economic consensus mechanism, which one is maybe not nice from a philosophical standpoint, but it's also not nice from a security standpoint. Was there any conversations at this interoper event about Bitcoin and how Bitcoin is like bad or needs to change or should like should be shut down or any sort of like resistance towards Bitcoin as a,

as a system? We don't spend too much time on Bitcoin. It's certainly, it's the butt of jokes sometimes. You know, I think people, people that are working on Ethereum Proof of State find Bitcoin

probably pretty uninteresting. It's very interesting because it moved the needle, you know, went from zero to one. But people also, I think, tend to find it very uninteresting.

And then there's certainly toxic, there's toxic members of any community. I think if you look at Twitter, there's a lot of, loud toxic Bitcoin members, community members. And so I think that sometimes when conversations come up with that type of group, like we would focus on that or instead of focusing on maybe some of the good, but I don't think we see a lot of the good because we don't,

we're not deeply rooted in their community. We just see loud, uh, toxic people. We, there in conversations we were, there was a running joke about, um, writing a proposal, maybe a Bitcoin improvement proposal to utilize, uh, not our beacon chain, not Ethereum's beacon chain, but a beacon chain,

you know, and an instantiation of, of the same technology to do emerge for Bitcoin and to help them get off of proof of work. There are some complexities there in how you actually lock your stake. You might actually need a new op code, and I know they're pretty resistant to that. But I think it'd be pretty fun even to just take. As a social experience. Yeah, I mean, literally just like, You know, in 2017, there were 100,000 Bitcoin forks like Bitcoin Diamond and whatever the hell.

You could, you could make a Bitcoin fork. Once Ethereum has proven that you can safely move and prove it to proof a stake, you can make a Bitcoin fork and try to rally the world around it using the same technology that we've used in Ethereum to secure it. I think pretty cool. Who does that really, really? Someone needs to do it. Well, why not you? That's what I'll do. Once the theory amosophies, I'm going to help Bitcoin.

Move to proof of sake. What about Rune Christensen's blog post, recent blog posts? I don't know if you read that or not. Was that a topic of conversation at the interrupt event? I don't know the blog post. I'm sorry. He was proposing that Maker Dow with its efforts to go into the real world and search for a real world collateral, specifically finds climate-aligned collateral. right so maker doubt has already financed like a $2.4 million loan die loan to a solar panel farm in new york and then he talked about like you know more philosophically maker dow should find a collateral like find

opportunities to finance and get collateral that is climate aligned and can actually like move the needle with regards to climate change yeah we didn't we didn't come up a conversation that's interesting I mean there's two different angles there one is like ride the hype like maybe you you get you get good press and it helps Maker Dow to just have this aligned basket. But there's also like, I think it's more interesting if you can make a compelling business case. You know, maybe the thesis is that these are actually

the types of collateral and the types of businesses that are going to be very fruitful over the next 10 to 20 years. And that's why, you know, Maker Dow is being aligned. You know, I don't know. I don't know exactly his angle there. Yeah. My angle on it was that like there's a lot of very far left social justice war. your cancel culture types that are also very, very anti-capitalism.

And what happens if you can, like, create a money that fights climate change, where if you use this money, you're by proxy fighting climate change. Like, you actually might, like, onboard some of that demographic into the world of money and finance and say, like, yeah, we do know that money in finance is corrupt and bad, but not this money in finance. Like, this money in finance is actually good. It's the inverse of that. Yeah, why don't you learn to use money in finance?

and new coordination techniques to create the world you want to see. Yeah. Totally. So one thing about the dev interop event. And overall, like, I was joking with, I think both Ryan and Anthony, Sazano in different contexts about this, like, from, you know what it's like to be there and actually to experience it. A lot of us, the non-tech types, view it from a distance, right?

View it from Twitter and we just see the pictures. And so, like, from our perspective, it's like this semi-regular, like, ceremonious time where we see pictures of all these developers looking at this projected screen with a bunch of code on it and they're all happy they're all happy and clapping and so like all the devs are like looking at the screen and they're all everyone smiling and then like everyone else is seeing the smiles on the devs face and so for us it's like yay the devs are happy I don't know what's going on but like they're happy so that's nice I showed that picture to my sister last night and I showed her the other picture from Ben Edgington's suite and I showed her the other picture of um of the screen we're all

looking at and she just cracked up she thought it was hilarious she's like of course of course for context I don't know if it was on that picture but one of the pictures that was shared the key was there's a tiny little piece of text that said proof of stake stage entered or entered proof of stake stage you know and that's what we were all cheering about right right right okay so this is the first mock test net or actual test net for the merge. So you simulated the merge. Was that what happened? Right. So we kicked off a proof of stake beacon chain that was not merged, you know, like the beacon chain is today in production. And we kicked off a proof of work chain that was not merged and was run by proof of work. Both of these things hung out in parallel for a while. And then they

did the dance to take the valuable things inside of proof of work and to instead put them into proof of stake and stop listening to proof of work and finalize. And, and move on with its business. So it was, it was the, what we were cheering was kind of the culmination of the week, which was we had a lot of very short-lived dev nets. So like even just transitory, I have two nodes running on my computer,

like running an experiment for 30 minutes. And I'm like, okay, the experiment worked. That's good. You know, and we had, like I said, we had a lot of these different client pairs where like Gath and Tech, Gath and Tech would like pair up for a bit and like make sure the software work together.

And Nimbus and Nethermind, would pair off and make sure their software work together. And we were building out more and more complex versions of all the interactions throughout the week. But often, you know, with two or three nodes, like nothing crazy, like very small toy networks. And what we did at the end of the week was Perry, who is a DevOps wizard at the EF, who has been increasingly taking ownership over test nets and automation and all sorts

of stuff. He'd been working all week on automation of all this stuff. And so he took all the configuration and automated a 100 node deploy around the world. So like 100 different cloud instances around the world with different client pairs and builds and like automated the creation of the beacon chain network and the proof of work network and and kind of kicked it all into motion. And then it was about, I think they ran independently for about an hour. And then we had it on the projector when they, when the trigger event. came together and they merged. And so it was really that like taking it from a toy on our laptops and, you know,

different like reduction in complexity of different configurations to like bringing it to something that really, you know, felt real. That network, I think, was torn down yesterday. And there's a new one, Pithos, which is the, it's supposed to be a longer standing one. That is, was it launched literally like an hour. It was launched this morning, but like the configuration. became available about an hour ago. And I already started seeing some of the East Staker guys.

I think Lamboshi was on it. He was already running nodes. And so now the community can also interact with it. Can you tell us what the sound was like in the room when that proof of sake mode entered happened? Like was it like, oh, yay, neat. Or was it like more about a roar of people? I mean, it was legitimate, like legitimate joy, legitimate like clapping, not just like a little golf clap like clapping cheering and people people literally hugged each other you know um it was

it was it was an incredible energy and we actually we had this closing dinner at 730 that night and the the timestamp that we we did the merge because you proof of works especially when you're CPU mining a proof of work chain it's like hard to fully gauge the timing but it was 729 it was t minus one minute till dinner like we were either going to go to dinner, like super fucking excited and floored about what just happened, or like kind of with our heads hung, like the last chance of running this experiment, it failed. And it was a success. And like we kind of, we all just went to dinner after and had a great evening celebrating.

So, yeah, a minute before you, you have to go to dinner. So I'm sure maybe some amount of clapping was like, oh, thank God we get to go to dinner. I don't even, I mean, I doubt. I think we were all a bit late for dinner. but it was, the timing couldn't have been, couldn't have been better. It couldn't have been more suspense-inducing. Dramatic, yeah. Do you get shivers?

I probably not. I got something. I got one needed to go. In a completely different direction. Is your wife a crypto person? Yes. Okay. Kind of.

Does she understand, like, what you're up to? My wife works for the Ethereum Foundation. Oh, okay. So there's the answer to that question. Yeah. Would she there with you? Um, she, uh, she used to be a pastry chef. Mm.

And, in a French restaurant in the French quarter of New Orleans. And I started traveling a bunch for work. And so us being, you know, young and having fun, I was like, well, definitely quit your job and come travel internationally with me a bunch. Um, and she got to know some of the people on the grants team and they needed someone to help, like, answer emails and stuff. Uh, so she started as the person who helped answer emails and stuff. And then like three or four months later was the team lead. Nice. Very cool. So like when you were like a, I mean you work at home, but when you quote come home from work and like vent about stuff like she's like, oh God, the guys from Teku were just so annoying today.

Is that some of the conversations that go on? We. Some. Yes. I certainly. She knows what I'm when I'm bitching about something. She knows what I'm bitching about. And, and she understands things enough to like.

when I describe some issue, I'm banging my head against the wall. She, like, understands the domain of the issue. But it's also, sometimes we'll be, like, driving into the mountains for a weekend. And we'll just be, like, talking about Ethereum and be like, we got to stop. No more. Like, we, like, I can literally talk about Ethereum all day to the people on the Internet. And then I can, like, go have dinner and talk about Theory and more. And it's, uh, it's very cool, but it's also sometimes a little much.

Eric Connor, who is the first ever guest on Layer Zero, we were talking about this dynamic where like you literally can wake up and do Ethereum things until you go to bed and then repeat that for years. And then you get what we've called this thing called Ethereum Brain, where like, you know, you just have like toxic levels of Ethereum going around in your brain. But you said you have good work-life balance. So maybe you don't have too much Ethereum brain. I have a good work-life balance. I do, I do get a step away from the computer. I do make sure I have nice little trips and things like that. And I do go out to dinner and stuff.

But I also am probably toxicly infected. When you say you guys go to the mountains, are you hiking or backpacking? A bit of both. It just kind of depends. Sometimes we'll go stay at a motel in the mountains and hike around a bit and put around some towns or sometimes we'll go backpacking. And my favorite thing is to swim in very cold alpine lakes. So often we'll be hiking up to 13,000 feet to find a nice lake to jump into. Yeah, which was like recently snow a few weeks ago?

Yeah, I mean, it just depends. I mean, sometimes there's like snow on the outside of it still. It just depends on the time of the year. You know, I think we're at minimum, the minimum snow. Hey, take it three weeks ago, and I think it snowed up in the mountains about a week ago. So the cycle has begun. If your cat hadn't come on screen, I was going to ask about it. it.

That's Tyco. Tyco? Yeah. How old? The image I have of you, we were on Zoom at some point in time, but there was this time where you had Tyco and Tyco was facing the computer. So he was facing the computer. So kind of like pseudo looking at the camera and you were just like massaging his head.

It was like at least 20 minutes long of like you. You just, yeah, just like massaging your head while Tycho like kind of looked into the camera right in front of you. I thought it was absolutely hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I tell Tyco sometimes. Tycoe you're my best friend. Yeah.

And I mean it and not in a sad way. Tyco's my best friend. Nice. Great cat. It's good. He's spent a lot of time working on proof of steak with me. Nice. Yeah.

Moral support. Danny, you can do it? Yeah. Danny, so what else do you do for fun other than? backpacking and hiking. Are you a gamer at all? No. Nope. I probably left gaming behind when I was about 13. I was I played I think Diablo 2 and StarCrap were my main games at the time. I played a little bit of counterstrike and stuff but I um music and girls became much more interesting way to spend my time playing playing to play to play to piano but I, I, it's listening to girls. No to music.

Oh, I'm playing. Playing what do you play? Um, these days I play mainly piano, but I, In high school, I played a lot of piano, but also bass. I played in, like, jazz bands and metal bands. And you still play piano to this day? When I was 18, I went to school and I stopped playing music. And about four years ago, I got a piano and I play about every day. So I took a hiatus, but I play most days now, and I very much enjoy it. What kind of piano do you play?

I learned some classical pieces and play that. I also just kind of mess around. And I do actually when we launched the beacon chain, I bought myself a present. I got this like Moog synth. So I have a piano and I have this synth next to each other. And like, you know, I kind of mess around and make weird electronic stuff between the two. Nice. Have you heard of Ben from Optimism, his Ethereum song?

Yes. Yeah. Ever thought about writing something like that? Or is that? Or is that tainting of something that's wholly that doesn't need to be mixed? I definitely, I think it definitely doesn't need to be mixed. I also, I don't think I've ever played the piano and sang at the same time. So it would be a challenge.

It would be a new challenge. Maybe I should try. So I think this question is always much more fun when somebody's actually a musician. What kind of music do you listen to? So in college, my music tastes change because I started coding. No shit. So I stopped listening to music with. words, like almost entirely, and started listening to a lot more electronic music. And I listened to

like ambient electronic music most of the time. Very experimental, like very like kind of out there sounds and soundscapes and things like that. And I can definitely attribute that to like being in college drinking that cup of coffee, putting on my headphones and just like coding and like getting into coding for the first time and like what what got me going when I code and like I that radically has changed my music taste and over the past couple of years I've like tried to reintroduce not what I'm coding but like if I'm in the car or different things like that like I'll put on I don't know talking heads or put on like the Beatles or put on something where somebody's literally saying words to like pull myself out of the ether but is it because the words are distracting while you're

coding or is there something else there? I think so. I think that's probably it. I mean, it's not just the words are distracting. It's that these soundscapes are like enhancing. Like I, oh, here's a good one. When I first, in 2017, when I got rid of my clients and I wanted to figure out how to make theory in my work, I would listen to all the all-core dev calls.

And the opening is steep hills of Vicodentiers by a winged victory for a sullen. That's a mouthful. which yeah um so that that became like my anthem for a while like that album like every morning i would just like i'd drink a cup of coffee put on the headphones and like figure out how to make ethereum you know where to bring value to ethereum and i would just like listen to that album and something about the fact that it's the opener to the all core dev call um and that it also kind of fit my ambient soundscape mode like it became like my uh my power music that's that's awesome That's a great story.

Andy, Danny, as we come down to the end of the show, I have just so I have a few more questions for you. Are you an optimist or a pessimist? I used to be an optimist. So when I was a kid, very extremely optimistic. I think it served me well. And I've realized actually probably over the course of the past 10 years, I've become less of one. So I'm very optimistic about my life. So, like, I, you know, I have a good life.

I have a great cat, got a cool wife. I have a great job, all that kind of stuff. And so I'm definitely optimistic and social relationships and kind of the microcosm of my world. But I definitely like the old man like shaking his finger at the rest of the world in a certain sense. Like I don't, you know, I'm super pessimistic about politics. I'm super pessimistic about like our, you know, mass surveillance capitalism. I'm super pessimistic about a lot of that kind of stuff. and to a way that I need to make peace with because I think it like gets me a little bit too much.

And I also sound like the whack job when I'm talking to regular people. But that's also one of the reasons I work on Ethereum. You know, if you asked me in 2017 why I wanted to work on Ethereum, one, nerd sniped, totally. But two was just like, I don't like the trajectory of the world. I don't like what's happening with big technology. I don't like how we're all super manipulated by our phones. And like we have these little slot machines in our pockets. And they're just like abusing us.

And like, I don't think Ethereum solves all of those problems. But I do think that Ethereum and Related Technology might help change the trajectory. And I think it might help change trajectory for good. You never know. You never know. I do worry about that sometimes. You know, like the tools that are built are often co-opted by the powers that be to kind of continue doing business as usual. I do think that Ethereum and related technologies allow.

for new ways to interact and maybe can help avoid some of those previous issues. But, you know, I'm also naive. Well, Danny, I think that that is a fantastic place to end this conversation. So thank you for joining me on this Layer Zero. Thank you. Very much enjoyed it. Cheers.