Bankless - Devcon #4 - Péter Szilágyi | Building Geth

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

Welcome to Devcon 6. The first Devcon for Bankless, the conference was a ton of fun and an amazing cultural experience in Bogota, Colombia. Péter Szilágyi is a Core Developer for Ethereum, building the Geth client. One of the most important people in the Ethereum ecosystem, Peter has been tirelessly building critical infrastructure for the last 8 years. ------ 📣 Push | Try the Communication Protocol of Web3 https://bankless.cc/Push ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER:          https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/   🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:                 http://podcast.banklesshq.com/   ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 💠 NEXO | CRYPTO FINANCIAL HUB https://bankless.cc/Nexo 🔐 LEDGER | NANO HARDWARE WALLETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger ⚡️FUEL | THE MODULAR EXECUTION LAYER https://bankless.cc/Fuelpod ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 3:00 Building Geth 5:25 Emerging Worlds 7:42 Forking Geth 9:15 The App Layer 13:30 A Helpful Community 17:09 Ethereum’s Weaknesses 21:00 The Purpose of Ethereum ------ Resources: Peter https://twitter.com/peter_szilagyi  ----- 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://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

Welcome back, Bankless Nation to the DevCon 6 experience. Coming up next in these line of interviews, I'm talking with Peter from the guest team. I don't really know if Peter has ever done an interview before. Peter is one of these core devs that is heads down and just believes in Ethereum. Even though his hot take is that most of the stuff that we do on the Ethereum app layer is just like a bunch of shenanigans that he's confused by. Yet he still is one of the chorus and most important people in this space tirelessly.

and relentingly building out Geth for the rest of us to use. And not just the Ethereum ecosystem, but Geth is that consensus client, the execution client of Ethereum, that so many people have forked and spun off and built their own blockchain and raised billions of dollars, like Avalanche, Phantom, like any, like, alt-layer-one, the whole meme of, like, forking Geth,

and then juicing it up and then raising $100 million, comes from Geith, and a lot of Peter's work and other people's of the guest team. So I asked Peter about how he feels about all of this, And overall, just what it's like, been building Geth for the last eight plus years now. So I hope you enjoyed this interview. But first, I'm going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. In all of my years in crypto, I've never been hacked, scammed, or fished.

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mastercard. of those things is probably what you want. So go check out NXO, the financial hub for the digital age. And let's go ahead and get right into the interview right now. And we are back to Bogota DevCon, DevCon number six. And I'm here with Peter from the guest team. Peter, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me. Peter, for the people that don't know you or aren't familiar with you, you have a critical role in Ethereum and you have for a long time. Could you just give us a quick download as to your history with Ethereum? Wow. What critical, I wouldn't call that. important. I can agree with that. So I've been with Ethereum for, I don't know, around eight years,

give or take, a bit less. That's like all of the years, right? No, it's all but the half, the first half. I'm missing the first half. I'm missing the most funny years. And, well, essentially, I've been on the Gath team building Gath for the past forever and essentially transitioned from a lowly whisper developer up to currently being the lead of of the team. So what's it like to build Geth? Because Geth is such an important part of the Ethereum technology stack. And you've just been heads down building Geth for this entire time. And many people shift around in crypto. They hop from company to team to projects. But you've been with Geth the entire time. What motivates you to build Geth? That's actually a hard question, because

from one perspective, building Geph is particularly boring in that it's a I mean, five, ten years, eight years ago, seven years ago, it was all about adding features and doing all kind of crazy stuff. Nowadays, it's more about maintaining it. So I think initially, many years ago, the drive was around shipping new stuff, shipping awesome stuff, which was really nice. And especially as a fresh developer,

it really gives you the, I don't know, drive to just keep crunching. Now, that drive is most definitely gone, because Ethereum doesn't ship stuff that fast. However, now I think the drive kind of switched over to seeing that you have this immensely valuable network and you know that you're kind of building it and you're one of those handful of people who can understand it and maintain it.

And it's definitely less fun to do it, but it does have its reward aspect. You feel a certain fulfillment of being able to be part of it. Ethereum is often described as a city, right? There was the Metropolis Hard Fork. We use these city metaphors to show and talk about the growth of the ecosystem. And much of this city stands on the infrastructure of Geph.

I believe you've been to most, if not all, of Devcons. What's it like to watch this city emerge on top of this software that you're building? That's interesting. That's sometimes very fun, sometimes very frustrating. I think one of the most predominant aspect, that I've noticed is that in DefCon 1 and 2, it was all about Geph or all about, okay, parity, the other client. So let's not dominate the thing.

But then the core devs were kind of the center of the attention. Everybody wanted to see what we're doing. Everybody was just interested. Now, fast forward seven years, people are like, who are you again? So it's a maybe, maybe. Some people recognize me. But most of the other core devs are having a much, I won't say harder time being recognized, but the focus somehow shifted from Ethereum being this platform and everything revolves around it,

to now somehow the platform is considered a given. And then people, the fun stuff is happening above it. So it definitely changes. But the nice aspect is that there are a legitimate lot of very fun stuff being built on top. So it's nice to see that. Sometimes I'm feeling that, oh, I'm missing out on it. But it's fun. You kind of need to give space for others to build cool stuff.

Yeah. Sometimes do you think it's funny or ironic that some people might not recognize you or know who you are, even though almost in the entire of the Ethereum stack is built on top of Geph? No, no. No, it's very pleasant when somebody recognizes me, and it's very pleasant not to be recognized. as much as Vitalik, since I'm happy to be able to walk around without being stopped every five meters. I think it's a good mix of having that fuzzy feeling without being overwhelmed.

The 2021 era of crypto was marked by just many teams. The meme was that many teams were just forked geth and juice it up and start a new blockchain. What was it like to see this era of crypto in just come to pass? Well, Mixed feelings. I'm trying to formulate in a way without picking on any project. So there were a few projects which grew really, really big and really popular and did relatively little. Those were kind of frustrating because they kind of used their weight and their marketing, specifically marketing weight or, I know, being an exchange weight to pushing their platform.

That one was frustrating. We had other projects, we had a lot of projects. We just take the code, rebrand it and run with it. Yeah, okay, they're going to fail anyway, or they're not really serious, so we don't care. And there's ever so often a couple projects which are serious. Whether they compete with Ethereum or not, debatable, kind of like Avalanche, but I feel

that there are certain projects with try to be nice. And for them, it's nice to, to, collaborate with them, even though we collaborate very little, but it's nice. So kind of mixed bag, frustration, not caring, and being happy. But I think working on open-sost software, it's kind of, that's the game that people are going to take your shit around with it. So are you going to work on geth for the rest of your life? Like what is the trajectory with you and geth? Like, what do you see when you look into the future? I don't know. It's I will definitely admit that I had my ups and downs.

I definitely had my frustrating periods where I like, okay, screw it. I'll just flip the table and walk away. I would probably attribute that mostly to COVID. It was a bit rough. But I don't know. So for now, I really enjoy it. Especially that the merch happened and now we have important folks coming, but a bit smaller ones. I think these are very interesting.

They do give me this drive. I don't know, maybe once we reach the point where things just settle down, then it will be less interesting. Plus, I think now me remaining is kind of useful, and I don't really want to say important, rather it's helpful if I don't go. I'm almost certain that there will be a time when you will have a lot more clients, a lot more specialized, where me alone would not be that relevant. And that might be an interesting time to just call it today. What's your least favorite thing about Ethereum? The DAPs. The DAPs?

Yes. The application layer? Yes. What about the application layer offends you? No, the DPI stuff. No, I will flat admit it. I don't understand it. It's just like this black magic of thing, which for whatever reason works.

I don't understand why it works. I try to understand it. I don't have time to figure it out. And it seems like this thing that I don't understand why it just doesn't collapse. And it's fascinating that it doesn't collapse. I'm afraid that it will collapse. And I don't have time to understand it. It frustrates me.

So that's the thing I hate about Ethereum. So, I mean, Ethereum is a layer four applications. That's kind of the point, right? Like, Geth is an execution client to execute applications. What does your idealized version of the Ethereum app layer look like if it's not a bunch of DeFi stuff? No, no, there's absolutely nothing wrong with defy stuff. I'm just waiting for non-D-Fi stuff.

NFTs, okay, they got a really bad rap. I think there was a lot of abuse, but that was at least something that wasn't necessarily revolving around money initially. It had this money aspects, too. I'm really looking forward to certain, for example, So one thing that was super nice was on the opening ceremony, they announced a small NFD for the merch contributors which would allow people to have access to conferences. And it was like, okay, this is not money.

It actually is an NFT. It uses Ethereum. It is this super nice application and a super nice gesture. But it's completely non-financial. And it seemed like a very nice thing to do. But you have other applications. You have E&S. I really like that.

So anything that doesn't necessarily revolve around the money, I prefer that a bit more. And there's nothing wrong with DFI, nothing wrong with all the money aspects. I know we need them too to be here. So happy that they are here. I'm just not a fan. So you're in the Vitalik camp

where you're just more focused on the non-financial use cases of what Ethereum can do. Yeah. Yeah. I would say, yeah. It's, with the non-financial, aspects, you can have very nice conversations with anybody and you can just talk about the fun aspects. Whereas every time you talk about the financial stuff with somebody, sooner or later,

they will ask, okay, so what do I need to buy? And that's when you want to exit the conversation. And even if I'm among friends, I mean, my tight friend circle, they kind of learned that they don't ask these questions because I'm not answering anyway, and we can just discuss stuff. But if I end up in a broader friend circle, within 10 minutes, we're back to, okay, so what do you think about this token? I'm like, yeah. Okay, so what's your favorite thing about Ethereum then? Either part of the tech stack or the culture or anything.

Actually, I was talking about this with Marius yesterday. I'm not going to give names. He was talking with various non-etherium projects linked to Ethereum, not really Ethereum, these other chains, altus, et cetera. And his observations was that in a lot of these chains, you have a certain rivalry. You have a certain... We don't really like those.

We like those. And I kind of feel that, at least within the circle that I'm moving around, the Ethereum community is very, very positive. It's not about let's make it so that Ethereum becomes this thing and something else fails in exchange. rather, we'll just build our little pie and everybody else does whatever they want.

And at least the people I talk to are kind of, I feel that they are like this, most people. And that is very positive. I think that's the single best thing about this whole Ethereum community. What can the Ethereum community do to make your life easier or make Geth the best thing that it can be? How can we get out of your way? Nothing. No, no, I, this is a question I get asked over and over again. And, well, the fact is GATT is a very, very technical software development project.

We deliberately didn't spin out of the EF. We deliberately don't have our own conferences. We don't have our own booth here at DefCon. We could have had it. And we always said that, no, we don't want to be some big thing. We just want to be a single team that does software development. But because of that, when people ask, how can they help us? Well, yeah, we're developing software.

So kind of that's where our day starts and our day ends. So how can you help us making the software? I know. Our bottlenecks are usually, we receive more code than we can review. Even internally, we have devs who produce more code and we can reliably merge. and then that's the biggest frustration. So I guess if I would necessarily have to name something that somebody from the outside could help GATT with,

it would be joining these testing efforts. For example, the merch had an immense effort. Marius was pioneering the testing, the merge, and we had a lot of teams fuzzing and doing all kinds of stuff. Now, that doesn't necessarily help Get directly, but it does help us sleep well at night, because we know that the thing that we wrote, it's not just that we think that it works,

but actually none of the other tests fail. So that's a very, very net boost to our, I don't know how to call it, us believing that the code is okay. And that really helps, because then I don't have to second guess, I don't have to sit there on needles waiting for the merch to blow up.

I can be sure, for example, when the merch was happened, our biggest fear, was that somebody comes up with an attack, a denial of service that we didn't thought about. The fact that the merge wouldn't go smoothly in its normal form without an attack, well, we were kind of convinced that it's going to go perfectly. So that was, I think that we owe that to the immense effort that essentially the entire community contributed. Peter, what's Ethereum's biggest weakness if you had to attack Ethereum? How would you do it? How would I do it?

I still think Ethereum is the Ethereum software or Ethereum platform is not really robust enough. There are still many areas. So my personal fit with Ethereum and all the EIPs and everything is always the design of service. That's always I try to see, okay, can I somehow break things? And I feel it that Ethereum is very, very. robust. However, our path is, so our network is constantly growing. Everybody wants to do more on it, everyone wants to store more on it, and nobody really wants to talk about, okay, but how can we clean the old crap up? And this is, it works up until a certain point and then things start to

break. And at least for the guest team, sometimes people ask us, what does maintain the gap mean? Because we're not really adding features, so then what are we doing for the past eight years? And the answer is that, well, for eight years, the network constantly growing, and every time it grows path to certain threshold, something breaks. And then maintaining Gath or maintaining Ethereum

is keeping up with the breakages and just redesigning internals, swapping out stuff so that it keeps ongoing. And I think this is, eventually we will run out of ideas to do. And then eventually, if we keep on this collision path, Ethereum will break. But, yeah, we have the, I mean, we have the purge and a few other EIP.

So there are definitely things that we are working towards to solve these problems. But in its current aspect, I think that's how I would break Ethereum. I would just let it run. So just don't touch it, it will break by itself. Interesting. Interesting. So Ethereum, if we just let it sit, we'll break somehow.

And so... Just to give a example, look at the Binance smart chain. So essentially, Binance smart chain is Ethereum as steroids. They just bumped up the constants a bit. So it's like running Ethereum on a 4-5x speed.

And you just look at that chain and you see what's going to happen to us, just... Four to five times slower. Yeah, exactly. And so this is what. what the important of that Ethereum roadmap where, but do you believe that we can actually get to a state where we don't have to touch Ethereum ever? Or are we always going to be having to kind of bump Ethereum back into a good course? So on the roadmap, there are at least two things

that pruning historical chain segments that will help us go very far. Plus there are even now a lot of EIPs, there are a lot of workshops currently going with dank sharding that will allow to push the boundaries without raising the stress on the network too much. So there are a lot of things that we are currently doing to actually do that. And I think this will give us quite a nice runway. There's still a couple thorny issues. Verkle trees might solve some of them. I'm still not 100% sure.

But the nice thing is that there are actually a lot of attempts to solve it. So it's not like we're not talking about these problems, rather, yeah, most people don't really acknowledge it, but at least there's a group of researchers and core devs who figured it out, okay, this is a problem, and we need to solve it. And it might take five years, I don't know, send a random number, maybe 10, maybe two, but we're trying to actively solve it.

So going back to one of my first questions, why work on Geph, what's the motivation? What do you think Ethereum is here to do to the world? like is Ethereum good for the world and how will the world change or hopefully improve because of Ethereum's existence? That's a philosophical question. Usually I suck at those.

I'm more of a practical person. So I kind of just see it as a really nice platform that allows people to build apps that can interact with each other. I think technologically this is amazing that you can even

I have to admit, the DFI space where you have all these little pieces of puzzle, and they somehow just assemble into this huge yarn bowl and it doesn't collapse. That's amazing. And I think this is what this technology allows us to do. Whether that's good or bad for the world, I don't know. I would say that completely depends on what's getting built on top. And I think that kind of depends on the Ethereum community of what it allows to be built or what it prevents from being built.

So I would say Ethereum isn't necessarily good or bad. bad. It's just a thing that allows people to do good or bad for the world. Well, Peter, of course, we always use in the open source world that we stand on the shoulders of giants and you have been tirelessly working on Geith for so many years. And so everyone here, as we're listening, whether they know you or not has so much thanks to give for all of your contributions. So thank you for what you've done for Ethereum. Thank you very much. But I do want to add that many people believe, I mean, a lot of people do say that they owe me a lot, but I am

the vocal part of the team. There are many, many other people on the team, and I most definitely don't deserve all that credit. So when people come to you and tell you, thank you, thank you, on to? Usually I try, whenever people say that this is very awesome or that is very awesome,

I always just try to point out that, yes, but this was done by Martin, that was done by Cina, that was done by Marius. Probably I don't always, manage to do that, but I think it's really important that people who are just in the trenches, they also get at least a shout-out that they're there. And I'm really trying to, for example, when we have a, we had a really nice interrupt, where we spec-out the merge and the interoperability between the clients.

And essentially, EF said that every client team can send three people there. And then we said that, okay, we either going from EF budget or our own budget, but I'm taking the entire team because it's not fair that you have a couple people who are more visible and they get to hang out with all the cool people in Greece. And then people who are in the trenches, they stay there. So I'm trying somehow to make it a bit more equitable so that the silent part also gets some fun. Well, to the silent part, thank you for your service as well because everyone appreciates it. And Peter, thank you for joining me here at DevCon.

Thank you very much for the invite. Cheers.