Bankless - Ethereum’s Progression with Hudson Jameson | Layer Zero

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

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

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 is composed by people. And each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. The Cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it. And Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code because Ethereum is people all the way down. And it always has been. Today on Layer Zero, I'm talking with Hudson Jamison. And Hudson is a perfect example of this intro of this show. He got pulled in like so. many of us do into Ethereum because he saw the vision for it, but it's because he met the people and vibed with the people and in his words and many others felt like he found his tribe. So he tells this story, and we started at the very beginning in 2015 because Hudson has been around Ethereum for so long. And we go up to where Hudson is today. And this is a story of the progression

of the core developer and core developer community in Ethereum, the EF in Ethereum, the story of devcons, the story of the Dow hack, the story of the ICO mania, the 2018 to 2020 bear market, the story of PraguePow, and just really how each one of these events have shaped the story and trajectory of the Ethereum core devs, the Ethereum community, and therefore Ethereum at large. Hudson, he's one of the poorest Ethereum community members that there ever is, and he's seen it all. And so he's one of the most apt people to tell the story of Ethereum and how it's progressed along the way, both from the perspectives of the community and also the perspective of the core devs. Hudson is a person that just exudes Ethereum values and Ethereum ethos. And so it's been a

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Hey, Hudson. What's up? Hey, hi, David. How are you doing? I'm doing absolutely fantastic. How are you? I'm doing pretty good. Pretty good.

We got all the AV issues settled. So I'm happy about that. Yeah. To kick things off, the podcast listeners won't get this one. But I have the guest with the most flowery, vibrant shirt with the most flowery, vibrant wallpaper. in bankless history going on right now. I'm proud of it. I'm proud of it. You can thank my spouse Lilit. They bought me their shirt and bought the wallpaper. Well, it's not me. Hudson, a lot of early Ethereum people and later Ethereum

people like myself definitely know who you are. But how would you explain your perch in Ethereum for people that are new to Ethereum? I would say that it was harder for me to answer this question last year because I was kind of like working so much. I didn't have time to reflect. But now I can say that I see myself as a connector in the ecosystem, someone who tries to bring good vibes and niceness and make sure that like we're not just going to turn into awful toxic, you know, maxis that are going to keep people out of the ecosystem and also keep us on track for the ethos of Ethereum. And how do you go about doing that? That sounds hard. Um, lately I shit post a lot, but I also just maintain presence in a lot of different chat rooms.

I have a lot of discussions. I feel like I've been told I'm one of the more social people at conferences and like online when I get into that mode. So it's just basically keeping connections, making sure, you know, just kind of stay down to earth and talk to people about it. And when did you get into Ethereum? So I got into Ethereum in 2014 to 2015. I was there for the pre-sale and I bought Ether. in the presale, but I didn't actually get heavily involved until, I'd say early 2015. I was writing documentation for the homestead, hard fork as a volunteer, and then I went to DevCon 1 and volunteered, and from there joined the Ethereum Foundation. What'd you do before?

Before that, I did a computer science degree at the University of North Texas and Denton, Texas, and then went on to work for a bank. At first I was doing mainframe development, but I was so annoying about what the promise blockchain brings that they eventually sent me to what they called the innovation lab to be the lead blockchain researcher in 2015, which was really weird for a bank at the time. But I got to look into all the really crappy solutions and scams people were coming up with to get kind of my grounding on blockchain in general. Can you put the listeners into the shoes of 2015? What was blockchain like back then? What did crypto mean? Was crypto a word in 2015? You know, I'm trying to remember. I think it was,

but it wasn't as widely used because there was still some like, oh, that's short for cryptography, people, you know? Right, right, right. I would say that back then there was definitely a different feel about things, a different flavor, because in 2015, there was a lot of Bitcoin forks that we're still trying to compete. Like, everything was a Bitcoin fork. Everything kind of had the same idea that Bitcoin had. And there was a big push for finding a way for people to use cryptocurrency to pay for a cup of. coffee, which, as you can probably see over time. Yeah, that was the meme. And now it's like very different both in Bitcoin and other places in the cryptocurrency space. So, yeah. I wasn't around

for the Bitcoin Fork and Fair launch era, but I've had it described to me as something very, very similar to the food farm launch era on Defi and during Defi summer. Can you help draw those comparisons for listeners who weren't around and me? Yeah, for sure. So like it kind of was that way, But I would say that I think the biggest difference to me is that there was a much more diverse, like, political and social leanings for the D5 food era, where that didn't play as big of a factor as back then in the Bitcoin, you know, fair launch era and stuff like that in 2015 and maybe around 2014. I feel like it was more very heavily libertarian and, like, heavily that kind of dude. Right. And I say, dude, because there was like even less women than there are now and stuff like that. So it had like a different feel and a different like, it was very policy and libertarian focused, in my opinion, and less about innovation and making really cool things.

Whereas the defy farm era was really exciting as well, but it was like about making cool things and pushing the limits on innovation. Okay. Okay. So perhaps the word monoculture might be appropriate. Yes. Absolutely. But were the Bitcoin Forks all that innovative? Like were they, were they? really all that different from each other? How crazy did like the ambitions of these things go? There were a few that stood out. And the problem was the ones that stood out, as you can see, the people I feel like in crypto who are the most creative, push innovation, the hardest, sometimes are more quiet or they're like less like out there and like really trying to shill their product at first because they're just really interested in making cool shit. So for instance, name coin. I think Sunny made the first proof of state coin back then around

that time. Sunny Agarwald from Cosmos? No, a different sunny. Oh, wow. I think they're Annen. It's just like sunny 97 or something, but they made, I can't not think of the name. It was the first proof of state coin back then, which was really crazy, but like everyone was shitting on it because it's not Bitcoin, it's not proof of work. And then, you know, there was a few other experiments that were pretty neat. There was one that was a coin that air dropped to like everyone in a country, I think Finland. And it was the first air drop back then that ever happened. And that was kind of a neat idea to play with the economics of an

air drop and giving people back like, you know, kind of like a universal income in a way, but through a one-time air drop. My take on that whole era of crypto was that a lot of the ideas that it brought are fundamental ideas of the crypto industry and zero of the projects that invented those ideas made it. That's correct. And I think there's a few reasons for that. Yes. And the thing is like, so the biggest one is colored corn. Right. And, you know, kind of the Omni kind of layer of Bitcoin, which was kind of a extracted, you know, smart contract layer in a way. And colored coins were the first chance to do kind of ERC 20 tokens, but on Bitcoin. And like, there was some interest in it for sure. But like, I think it was more the team's execution of the idea. Like, they weren't really marketers. They were technology people like through and through. I think that led to their downfall. So now the need, this really. I'm a lot. I guess at the end of the day highlights the position that marketing is a really big factor in projects. If you don't have marketing, it's much harder to get your innovative idea out there and the sea of other stuff, just like it was back then.

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

There are releases every month or so. There's like one guy doing it. But how name coin worked was basically it was a separate blockchain that was a code fork of Bitcoin and you would get name coins instead of Bitcoins and you can mine name coin to buy name coin domain addresses basically. So I could buy Hudson dot, I think it was dot name. I can't remember. It's been too long.

But I actually did mine name coin for a little bit. It was a long time ago. I think I got like seven name coin, which is now literally almost worth nothing. But yeah, it was very creative and it did lay the groundwork for things like E&S. But I think that there were going to be limitations. Just like, as we've seen now, any code I feel like that has. forked Bitcoin's code base now has limitations heading into programmability. And that includes name coin, that includes Zcash, that includes light coin, everything. Like if you want programmability,

you're forced to do an L2. You can't do base layer as easily as you could. Right, right, right, right. Was there any, like, philosophy on what the name coin asset would become? And, like, fitting that into the broader landscape of, like, all of these different blockchains are being built with each one a little bit more of a specific use case than Bitcoin's, Bitcoin being money, name coin being question mark, peer coin being question mark. What was the philosophy of like what the role of each currency of the blockchain would be over the long term back then? You know, I think that that involves them like working together, which I didn't really see happening, if I recall. Right. So there wasn't like blockchain interoperability. Yeah, there wasn't that cohesiveness and idea of blockchain

interoperability at the time. There wasn't Cosmos. There wasn't a vision of a network of blockchains. So working with one of the blockchains didn't mean you were in competition, but it's like I didn't see Bitcoin people really clamoring to have like connections with name coins. So I guess that's to say, to answer your question, there were people who used all the blockchains, but it was kind of a wait and see who won out and then Bitcoin kind of won out. Right. What was tribalism like back then? The tribalism was mainly about people who were against private and enterprise blockchains. And I guess that's kind of biased on my part, because I worked in the enterprise blockchain space, which then and now wasn't really that

great. Not like enough, there's bad people. There's great people there, but just enterprise blockchain is a hard sell. So like, there are people who are like, to this day. You can't have private blockchains. You can't have, you know, consortium blockchains. Those are stupid. That's where I saw it. So I guess it's hard for me to say, because I wasn't deep in the weeds on Bitcoin development, what the tribalism exactly was like. There would sometimes be some stuff where someone would go crazy and a dev would say something absolutely ridiculous, like Luke Dash Jr. saying something stupid. And then, like, you know, that would make news for a day.

And that's mostly what I remember. Interesting. Okay. So I'm going to go with the tribalism was not nearly as present as it is in today's world. I would say between blockchains, correct. Absolutely. Yeah. Right.

Okay. So there was no real, like, sense of like, Bitcoin maximalism, right? Yeah, because it was kind of the only one. It was like the leader. There wasn't a competitor. There wasn't a competitor or anyone really trying to compete. There were people that were trying to do things that Bitcoin couldn't do, like name coin and Omni and stuff. But in all and all, they would be aligned ethically, politically, et cetera, with Bitcoin for the most part.

And the launch of Ethereum, both has an idea before the actual blockchain got launched. That was like Bitcoin's first significant competitor, right? Like Ethereum as an idea was put out in 2014. And from my very loose understandings of the history back then, like it offended a lot of Bitcoiners back then. And if you're telling me that there was no tribalism, there was no real competition to Bitcoin. But then this Ethereum yellow paper got released by Vitalik and Gavin Wood and a few others. And then a lot of Bitcoiners were like, that's bad. To me, that's like, was that the first indication of when this tribalism part of crypto really got kicked off?

I'm trying to think back to the feelings around the time when the yellow paper and white paper came out. because I remember reading the white paper and was blown away, but also by that time, oh, you know what else? There was starting to actually be more competition to Bitcoin at the time, like maybe 2014, 2015, like you were talking about. I might have to take back my earlier comments because I worked closely with Darkcoin, which was one of the first privacy-based coins. It's now called Dash, and they've kind of gone away from privacy a little bit. But at the time, I was working with them, and they had their own unique, like, X-11 mining protocol. call, they were a brand new code base. So there were starting to be those pop up. And they were starting to go to battle with Bitcoin for their lack of innovative features, lack of privacy, stuff like that.

I think Ethereum's white and yellow paper coming out, I don't think it was taken seriously for a while. I think that there were a few people who were really interested in it. But like, if you go back to the forum on Bitcoin talk, it was kind of treated the same way as like a bunch of projects that never really made it back then, like quark coin and stuff that have their own consensus algorithm and new ideas. as a new code base where it was like, what's this about? Like, I'll look into it, but like, this isn't going to change the world. Like, no one was saying this is changing the world until maybe 2015 when it launched. Interesting. So, like, this is like a little bit of a lesson in Alpha. Like, Ethereum was just as, like, mixed in with all of the shit that never worked and went to zero as every other chain was back in 2014, 2015, huh? Yeah, exactly. And I mean, like, the marketing for Ethereum back then was basically this guy named Stefan Twal.

And that was good marketing from him, but like everybody else who was made on the project, like, did not have the social skills or EQ yet to like really bring Ethereum to the level it is now or do something like what Eos and other ones did to really bring their project up at a marketing level that's respectable. But when I hear that, I'm like, okay, good, because a part of like the philosophy, my philosophy of chains is that I always view blockchains as like a set of concentric circles. And the innermost circle needs to be these like die hard, free. open source software developer maxis that don't care about the money, that don't care about the marketing that are probably like too like just socially awkward to really promote this thing in a shilly way. And that keeps the vibe of the blockchain very pure. Would you agree? Absolutely. Yeah, blockchains and their communities have have a heart. And like if you don't have the social acuity to see that, find someone who does and you can copy their trades because like that is really what

makes a project, like, valuable and also, like, worthwhile. So how did you assemble upon Ethereum, the Ethereum white and yellow papers? Like, what was that first, like, introduction to you? So I was working at USAA. Or actually, this was before USAA. So I was working on Darkcoin stuff. And I saw the white paper. And so I participated in the presale for Ethereum. And then I kind of forgot about it for a while, like, because I was getting, like, started at work, working for USAA and I was reading about Nick Saba's like 1990s ideas around smart contracts, which were like one of the first instances of a smart contract on a blockchain idea before blockchains were even a thing.

And I think that that inspired me to look even deeper into Ethereum. And then when I became like the blockchain person at USAA, Ethereum was the clear winner in technology and innovation. In fact, we had some internal hackathons. USAA where me and a team of people used solidity smart contracts before Ethereum was released. Like in 20, early 2015, I think, or late 2014. And we were like this year. You were writing in solidity before the blockchain was alive.

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

but they did turn into tendermint. So the Cosmos tendermint people, some of them kind of started with Eris Industries connections and other stuff like that to do enterprise blockchain stuff with their software, but yeah, that's just kind of a little side piece that I got to talk to some really early, like, Cosmos people. That was exciting. And then, so you started tinkering with solidity, read the white paper, read the yellow paper, got Ethereum pilled, not to put words in your mouth, but yeah. Absolutely. I would actually be at USAA. Sorry for my old manager from USAA, but I would literally like sneak in working on Ethereum while I was at USAA. And then I'd work like a full day at USAA, come home and then ignore my family and friends and work six to eight hours

on Ethereum, which I do not recommend. I think it contributed badly to my burnout later in life, but I was that obsessed, yes. Yeah, it's certainly kind of part for the course for people that found these things very, very compelling. So what did you do about that? How did you scale that up? I did a few different things. So like right now I'm doing a lot of things to help people, mainly on Twitter who just DM me, like, hey, how do I get into the industry? How do I get a job with Ethereum or with blockchain technology? One of the things is just like be in chat rooms, talk to people and volunteer. So like I let up the homestead guide development, I guess, like one of the only full guides on Ethereum at the time in 2015 for a hard fork that was

going to happen later. And then I also volunteered at DevCon 1. And I wasn't signed up to volunteer, but I got there and it was pure chaos. So I was just like, hey, I can help. And I jump behind and I like did tickets and badges. And then I did T-shirts. And then I did like timekeeping. And then like three hours later, I was like on the phone with the venue solving like structural problems with the venue. And I'm not even, I don't even work for Ethereum. Someone gave me a credit card and said, we need these copies now. Go down the street to the to the copy store and make copies with my credit card. I'm like, ah, okay.

So like I'm just running around doing all this stuff. And I did a postmortem privately for Ming Chan, the executive director where I wrote like a five page thing on what went right and wrong with the conference. And after that, she wanted to hire me. So I got hired to do the future day. dev cons and DevOps and community stuff. Oh, this is a great lesson of people get hired after they just do work for free and improve their value for a lot of these communities. The early culture of Ethereum, I think, is pretty interesting, especially when something

like Ethereum and Bitcoin as well, especially in the early days before the culture is defined by the community, the culture is defined by like the vision or the code. And so like Ethereum was defined by like a bunch of people who read the yellow and white papers and then like got compelled by like Ethereum itself rather than like, you know, Ryan, Sean Adams and David Hoffman of Bankless on YouTube, right? Like, no, it's actually like Ethereum code that is really talking to these people and attracted a very specific set of, like, early believers into this thing. And that was who you were experiencing and meeting with at like DevCon one and like the early days of Ethereum culture. Can you just like for the listeners and also for me just like, what was Ethereum culture way back when? Like, what was it like? What did it mean to be an Ethereum back then?

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

There was people early on talking about NFTs and ERCs and the EIP repo got released during DevCon one, which I ended up eventually being one of the main maintainer. of. So like all these things coming together was like really crazy. And on top of that, you had that combination with like Reddit posters and somewhat Twitter posters, although less so than Reddit at the time, people like Vlad Zamfir, where you'd read their stuff. And then I got to DevCon 1 and I was like, fan girling because I was like, oh my God, there's Vlad. And I got to talk to him and he was super nice. And he actually ran out of fiat money and had like three or four Bitcoin or something. It was like, hey, can I trade you this Bitcoin and you go to the ATM and get me cash? And I was like,

I'm doing a task for Vlad. And it was like, I was just like so freaked out. And I got to talk to like Alex Vandesan was super nice. The first person I met when I got there was Piper Mariam. And I was the first Ethereum person he had met too. So I'd gone to dinner with like Piper and Martin Swinday well before they worked at the Ethereum Foundation. And we were all just there like we found each other. We're here.

Like we've talked online for months every day, sometimes multiple hours a day and we're here. So yeah, it was just this excitement of finding your tribe, finding people. people who really relate to your ideas and being excited about a common goal. This is the same exact experience that I, like, communicate when I tell, like, my beginnings into Ethereum. Yeah. Like, your DevCon one was my East Denver, 2017. And just to have, like, a little bit more context on that.

Like, I was part of a recreational soccer team with, like, some of my best friends growing up. I was part of a fraternity in college. I was part of all these, like, different, like, social groups. But I never felt, like, 100% a part of these groups. And then I go to East Denver, 2017, and I have like three days of conversations, listen to the talks, talk to strangers. Yet, like, at the end of that weekend, I'm like, this is the 100% like alignment with

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

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

But like, what about, like, actually getting shit done? Like, you kind of talked about the chaos of like DevCon one. Can you talk about like that whole side of things? Yeah. You mean at the time during DevCon one? Yeah. And overall, just in like the 2015 to like 2016 era of Ethereum and they like the chaos of like, because there's so many, like, visionaries, right? Everyone has these, like, utopian visions for what Ethereum could be,

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

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

in the Ethereum Foundation myself, I also led the core developer calls, which meant that I had to be a kind of middle person between parity technologies, Romans Java team, and the Geith team and the JavaScript team and everything else. So, like, it was just very difficult. I I don't think, I think if you look back on those calls, you can kind of see the tension and how difficult it was, but it would be very, very boring because they're core developer calls and they're just boring by default. So yeah, it's been a challenge. Hasu recently talked a lot about his vision over Maker-Dow governance and how right now currently Maker-Dow governance is being pulled in seven different directions at once because no one really has a coherent or

articulated vision for what Maker-Dow is. Therefore, everyone imparted their vision for what it is upon Maker Dow and tried to tug MakerDAO in that direction. Is that kind of how you would describe like the early days of Ethereum is like everyone, it's like, you know, the blind men feeling the elephant metaphor, like Gavin Wood feels Ethereum is going to be like this and somebody else thinks Ethereum is going to be like that. And like all of a sudden, like none of these visions are actually completely compatible with each other and therefore there's friction.

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

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

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

going to like promote Ethereum. I'm guessing at 17, he was probably like, okay, that makes sense. This is what I do. Not really having developed his total and comprehensive philosophy of blockchains that he has today. What was Vitalik like? Because he was around like 17, 18, maybe even younger. No, not younger. No, not younger. No, he was, I mean, by the time 2015 rolled around how old would he have been? He would have been like 21. Oh, really? 20, 21.

Yeah, because I was like 22 to 24 in 2015. Anyways, this is an extremely huge responsibility putting on a 19, 20, 20, year old back in 2015 and 2016. Like, from your observations, how did Vitalik hang? Like, how do you handle that? I think he had to grow up really quickly, but I'm not saying that in like a negative way, just more of a, that's what ended up happening. I think he handled it pretty well. the circumstances, I don't think I could have done any better, honestly, and neither could

many, many other people I know. He was definitely put in a position where there was a lot of people from a lot of sides talking to him and giving their opinions. And it's really hard to cut through the BS and know who to trust and things like that when that's happening. And I've been there too because, like, I was listening to the same voice as he was in EF leadership and outside of EF leadership where I'm like, well, wait, are they really meaning well? Are they really wanting the best for this. So it's always really hard to juggle. He also, and this is something that I think other people have commented on, his speaking skills improved drastically from 2015 till today. So that was something that helped a lot with the communication around Ethereum's vision and stuff like that.

But again, what I try to stress to people, it's like, I almost feel weird dissecting Vitalik because he's a person. And to me, it's like, if there was someone on a podcast dissecting me, I would feel weird about that. And it's not to say that we shouldn't because he is a public figure and that's fair. But like at the end of the day, anyone who's talking to him, like, they start to realize like he's just a dude. Right. Yeah, like, exactly. Like he's just a person.

Like, and that's kind of the thing I've always taken. And that's also why I think he appreciates people who provide blunt feedback to him about when he's wrong because he's not better than anyone else. Right. Well, I don't mean to do this a little bit more. I mean, this has one more question in the same vein. Sure, sure. Do you think at that time in 2015 to 2016 that Vitalik understood the magnitude of what Ethereum would eventually become?

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

So, yeah, that's kind of a take that I hear a lot of early Ethereum people have, which is, no, we had no idea it would get to this magnitude. And because of that, bad things are happening and we feel bad. You can't stop it once it starts. Crazy. And that's actually the first time I've heard that. But my general answer for why proof of sake has taken so long is that all the early Ethereum developers underestimated how complex of a transition that was going to be.

This is the first time I've heard that no one expected Ethereum to become so gargantuan so quickly, and that was actually a big reason as to why it got so complex. That's kind of, yeah. I mean, like, I do want to separate it to say that, like, I, at least me personally, and I've heard this for other people too, I thought we'd have more time to, like, really hammer out everything. But the proof of stake transition has a long and sorted history because we want to do our best to get it right at timely, but more importantly, get it right so that it lasts for a long time, which is I think a lot of the motivation for ditching the Casper proof of stake chain

that Danny finalized as an EIP a few years ago. That wasn't the hybrid proof of work, proof of stake. No, sorry, not the hybrid. No, no, no. It was the one where it was going to be like Casper proof of steak, and then we were going to put sharding like right after or something like that. Right, right, right, right. Yeah.

Okay. All right. So let's keep on going into Ethereum's history. 2016 I kind of correlate to 2020 in that like 2020 was up only for ETH price after we hit the bottom in March and 2016 if you look at the price charts is like up only because it's like the crescendo

building up to the ICO mania when was it obvious that Ethereum was about to go through this like massive bull market back then you mean? Yeah back then yeah oh man I'll be honest I am an awful trader I didn't even look at the price

that much back then that I recall Hang on let me ask this question slightly differently Yeah how did the community received the Auger ICO. Oh, that, okay, I see what you're saying. Okay, that was pretty exciting when those things started happening because I'll put it this way.

When Ethereum first launched, there were a lot of games, like little mini games, kind of like Satoshi Dai style games on Ethereum and, you know, like kind of Ponzi games in a way that were like just little like, be the top of the pyramid. And that's all we had for a while. And yeah, like, no, seriously, like you could look it up. There's like games where there was a pyramid and you was like get to the top of the pyramid. I'm like that's sketch, right? Okay, so there were games like that and like people just doing random stuff.

But like there were a few use cases people were really, really excited about, but they hadn't been developed yet. One of them was Maker now. One of them was auger. Another one was going to be, oh, the stuff where you could do a graphics card. Oh, Golem. Golem. Golem. Gollum.

So like those were coming to some of the big ones. and the only ones out of those three that I feel like really delivered in all the ways they need to so far has been Maker, although it is going through somewhat of a crisis right now. It sounds like from certain people. Yeah, it's kind of through crisis these before. Yeah. So basically, to answer your question, yeah, it felt like once these started coming out with the ICO, oh, another big one was Digixtow for the gold that you could store. I think I had some Digixtow. I definitely had some ICO Auger tokens. But it was very cool to see it being like, It's almost here. It's almost here. And all we got to do is give a little bit of money.

And that plays into the psyche of how the ICO era tricked so many people into giving into scams or giving into projects that weren't going to make it. Because it's like, oh, this is an idea. I love this idea. And it's so close. And all they need is a little bit of money. I can throw them some money for tokens. Maybe you need a little funding. Yeah, they need a little funding. And then they run away with it. And then it's like, oh, no. But I had such high hopes. It makes people jaded. So that's unfortunate. Right. But Auger didn't do that. For listeners who aren't familiar with Auger, A-U-G-U-R is what you want to Google. It was the first ICO on Ethereum led by Joey Krug, and it was a prediction market. It was the first, like, construction of an Ethereum DAP.

We called the DAPs back then that, like, I think just kind of made sense on paper. It was like, yes, you do need a token for this thing. The token has a very specific role to play, and the idea is sound and that it definitely needs a blockchain to do it. And it was the first ICO on Ethereum. It was really like one of the few ICOs that weren't tainted, right? Like they actually built the product. They actually delivered it.

But then it like kicked off this snowball of like shit that followed over the next like 18 months. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Auger was very impressive. It turns out that like the downfall of a lot of daps that would come out over the next few years. And I'm talking Auger. I'm talking Funfair. That's going to be on the regulatory. Yeah.

That's going to be on the regulatory side. Funfair was like a casino on the blockchain. style set of dapps that used state channels very early on, which was a scaling technique. But I believe, I'm not positive, so don't take my word for this. But I felt like there was a lot of regulatory pressure on both Auger and Funfair, which led to slowdowns. And then also, the other side of it is other dapps that didn't quite make it, some of it was a marketing thing where like you couldn't tell if they were legit in a stream of just shit daps. And so they didn't rise to the top or get usage. Right. Yeah. And this is when I come into this story where I like

start to see these ICOs and be like, you can fund an idea before it exists, and then you can manifest the idea into existence via your funding. Wow, we've solved human coordination. And then like 99% of them, they're just like, no, you just paid us money. Thanks, bro. And then the bear market comes. Yeah. Lens Protocol is an open source text act for building decentralized social media applications. It is the new era for social media. We all have toxic relationships with our web two apps. We want to break up with them, but we can't. These applications own our digital lives and all the relationships that we've made. We need to break through to a new paradigm of social networking applications that we control

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Wow. So like this whole entire massive mania went on and the core developers were like, Nice. Not even that. They would actually get a little annoyed some of the time because users, especially new users, would blame them for congestion on the network because there were major ICOs such as the status ICO that would slow down the network to a point where it was basically unusable for certain users who weren't paying high enough gas fees. And at the time, you know, crazy that you'd have to pay a $20 gas fee. And that's way too high. Now it's very different now. But no, like I would kind of hear every once in a while, little. quibbles about stuff, but like, no, if it was basically, if it was important enough to be brought up to them, myself or someone else would just bring it to them during the all-core devs call or in the chat room. But no, they just kept coding on what they were needing to code on because, like, yeah, they cared more about the product of Ethereum than the use cases that were fly-by-night, potentially. And how has your role in Ethereum change during this period? What are you up to these days in 2017. Yeah. So 2017. So when I started in 2016, the middle of 2016, I was on the DevOps team for

the Ethereum Foundation, one of two people. The other is Jamie Pitts, who's amazing. And then I also ran DevCon 2, and then I ran DevCon 3 in 2017. Also in the middle of that time, our awesome communications director at the Ethereum Foundation, George Hallam, had to leave. So I took over as communications as well as DevOps, as well as DevCon. I also started. doing the EIP editing. So, like, I was an EIP editor and I did the all core devs meeting every other week. So that was, like, all the things I did at that moment and it only grew. Yeah, that's, and that was a lot of things. How has, like, the culture in the EF and around, like, the innermost circle of the concentric circles of Ethereum, like the core devs, how is the vibe shifted by, like,

two, three years into it? Like, how is it developed? We're starting to see some stress, burnout and being tired from some of the inner circle. Part of that also was something, we completely skipped, which was the Dow hack. Oh, yeah. That happened during that time. So, like, that actually took out a few, at least one or two core devs from their job, not out of fear, but out of just like it was just an absolutely the most stressful thing ever because there was a ticking time clock.

There was, you know, a lot of stuff at risk. There was the, you know, credible neutrality of the network at risk, a bunch of other stuff. So that affected a lot of people for a long time. There are people who completely broke, like, mentally because of the Dow hack. And then after that, as the ICO thing happened, there was a lot of stress and pressure that, you know, devs are still feeling to this day, but have been alleviated thanks to some of the work by people like Trent Van Epps who go in there like more of a voice for the community than, you know, having to speak directly to a core developer if you have a problem with your DAB, for instance. So, yeah, the morale wasn't the highest ever, but they still believed in the mission. It was just everyone was really tired.

We had been working for four years straight. Right, right, right. And if Flissers wanted to hear just a very deep dive into the Dow hack story, I did an episode with Griff Green, Layer Zero with Griff Green. And so, like, if you want to hear that part of Ethereum, you can just, like, supplant that right into this middle of conversation with Hudson. And you can dive down that rabbit hole because it's definitely a deep rabbit hole. But could you summarize, like, how the Dow hack, maybe it's fair to say, like, left a scar on, like, the Ethereum devs? How did the trajectory of Ethereum change because of the Dow hack? Obviously, like, we hardforked, but, like, more about the developers and, like,

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

in a way where people who were purist from a not a mutability standpoint with Ethereum classic. And then Ethereum kept people who were practical. And I liked that. I stayed with the practical people. I wasn't really, I was back and forth on whether or not we should do it at the time. I would have been fine if we had actually let the attacker keep the ETH and the Dow tokens, et cetera, and not intervened. But I respected the fact that there was a lot of discussion with the community from around the world that Vitalik and others did to come to the conclusion that there should be kind of a signaling system from leadership, including some of the core devs, Vitalik, others, that this should be the default option in some clients. So can you summarize the argument as to why the choices were made in the way that they were? Sure. About the Dow hack?

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

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

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

You can look back and be like, why didn't people keep their money? Like a huge percentage of people participated in that. So you'd basically be saying like making a lot of people sad that they lost their money. You'd be losing a lot of people who were using your blockchain and you might not recover from that. Or you can do this one-time thing from someone who is a, actor and then at an early stage of your development and, you know, maybe be more prosperous. The best thing I heard about this was, I think it was years later, but Andreas Antonopoulos,

who's a Bitcoin advocate and very popular Bitcoin speaker, said that he considers the Dow hack like a baby hitting their head while they're trying to learn to walk. Like if you're a baby, you're trying to learn to walk. Like Ethereum was less than a year old from launch, I think. You're going to hit your head on a table and fall down. But like, you're going to learn not to do that. And then as an adult, you don't hit your head on that same table ever. So, yeah, that's how I see it.

I remember Andreas giving a talk at 2019 Ethereum, Denver, maybe it's 2020 Ethereum, Denver. And he talked about how you get one molligan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You get one mulligan. Because if you use it twice, then you know, two is a trend. One is a mulligan. Two is like, and now, well, fast forwarding super far into the future. And we had like this tornado cache thing.

Like if the authorities came and said, hey, roll back the. chain and you tell them, well, we can't do it. And they say, like, well, you did it twice. Yeah. Like, that's different than like a one single molligan. And I don't think, and no one in today's world thinks that you can roll back the Ethereum blockchain, even though it did, we didn't roll it back. We didn't regular state transition. But no one thinks that you can just do that. No one thinks that that's a tool in the tool belt that we have. I agree. The tornado cash thing is a shame too. I mean, I think it'll be solved in the end. But yeah. Right. Well, yeah. Yeah. That's at the very end of this conversation because we're doing a very good order.

We're going to chronologically. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay, so that was a Dow hack. A little speed to run through 2017. The 2018 to 2020 bear market, now I'm here. Now I'm involved. So I can start to remember some of this.

How would you describe like developer morale and just like the developer attitude back then? I thought that developer morale was actually really good because there was a lot of cool, new, creative ideas during that time. And we weren't distracted by a lot of the stuff. that a bull market brings. People say, you know, it's kind of cliche within crypto Twitter to say, like, I'm so glad there's a bear market because now we can build.

But like, that truly is a thing that developers feel because there's less distractions and there's less people throwing money at you to do things because that's a hard thing to turn away when, you know, you might not be making as much money. Right. I want to check this with you. I think before 2017, the Ethereum community and the Ethereum, like, intersaintom of core dev believers was more or less the same thing. And then in 2018, after the ICO mania, there was an actual Ethereum community that was separate from the devs. And like post-2017

mania, I think this is when like there was this big growth in Ethereum community that like, you know, listen to the devs and like listen to like what was going on, but didn't actually partake. And so there was like a new concentric circle that was outside of the inner circle of the Ethereum core devs and Vitalik and you. And then there's people like me, Anthony Sizzano, Ryan, Eric Connor on this more outside circle. And I don't think that existed prior to that bull market. Would you agree with that? I would agree with that.

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

I love that. I think that's perfect because the last thing I want and the last thing the core developers want is to have all the decision-making power with no influence from the community. Right. And I actually kind of consider you as somebody that spans both of these parts of these circles. You're definitely a part of the broader Ethereum community, and you interface with the core devs quite a lot. How would you describe this relationship between the innermost circle of Ethereum and then the first concentric circle outwards of this? And how did it change over 2018 to 2020 or so? Yeah. So I would say that Ethereum itself, as a community, with everything involved in it, got so big, it was untenable for there to be more of a direct connection.

between the core developers and say the commenters on Reddit or the commenters on Twitter. Commentors, people who commented. I said comment, commenters. Yeah, you plebe. Stop talking to us. No, I'm just not. It wasn't that. Okay, so, no, what happened was it got so big that it was just untenable to do that. So there started to be more direct things like at that time, I was more of, I would call myself a developer liaison all the time, or core developer liaison,

because I'd be in Reddit and I'd be in Twitter and I'd be wherever else, chat rooms, and then I would bring the concerns to the core developer agenda or to individual core developers or projects or clients and then be that interface because they were so busy and there were so much on their plate they didn't have the time. So it was more of a growth thing. It was more of a growth thing rather than like not wanting to be involved. Not to say that you indicated that at all, but just like the core devs like it just became too big. When did like a big tug of war happen around core devs where like there's like political

desires to pull Ethereum in one direction and the community wanted to pull in another direction? When did that become really relevant? There's a little something called Prague, pal. That was fun. Yeah. Was that really the first instance of this? That was the largest instance in my opinion of the community disagreeing with the decision of the core developers. I can't think of another one before then. Was it all the core developers though? Did all the core developers believe in Prague pal? I would say all the core developers were either neutral to approving just about, yeah. Interesting. I mean, maybe not every single one, but yeah.

Why did that schism come out? The schism came out because the community felt like they weren't being heard. In fact, I think Eric Connor was either on your podcast or Sassel's podcast and said that, like, the community doesn't feel hurt. It was probably his own podcast. You mean into the ether? Could it be his? Oh, it was into the ether. Yes, it was the episode with Joe DeLong.

Crazy to think that Eric Connor did stuff once in a while. Shout out Eric. I love you. Okay, so basically that was one of the biggest schisms because although the core devs had been making that decision for a while, I came on Reddit and said, hey, this decision has been made. And at that time, I was having a large family crisis. So there was like a good two to four week time where I hadn't updated the community on anything like I had because I had been Ethereum obsessed for years. And it finally came to a head where I didn't. So then when I updated them late, I kind of blame myself for this because like then everyone was like, whoa, we didn't hear about this. We didn't get enough warning. And then everyone like started getting like there was memes made about me. Like there was a meme that Makira made. And it was a thing where I was at a table like the table at the college campus where it says change my mind. But it said Prague Pao is happening this year.

Change my mind. And it had my face on it. And I was like, I got mean. This is so cool. But like other people were like, oh man, don't make fun of Hudson. I was like, well, you can make fun of me. But don't actually like send me. angry messages like a few of you have.

Like it got really contentious and it ended up the community winning, I guess, to an extent. But like at the same time, like in that time, we wasted a lot of time and money by doing like audits and there was just no cohesion there. I think the community learned from that, though. A lot of people I talked to privately who were some of the biggest voices against PraguePau apologized to me privately to say, hey, I got onto you too much. I didn't research enough. It really wouldn't have been the end of the world if it happened.

that kind of stuff. Right. And just to speed run, listeners on ProcPowl, ProcPow sounds for progressive proof of work. And it was basically, we're going to swap out the Ethereum mining algorithm from ETHHash, which it currently is, to progressive proof of work. And this came about as a result of a bunch of ASICs arriving on the scene for Ethereum. And Ethereum is supposed to be this ASIC-resistant mining algorithm. And so if you enable ASICs into Ethereum, you produce a more centralized mining, like industry around Ethereum. And we don't like centralization. We like these things to be GPU minable. And so Prague-Pal was supposed to restore the first-class nature of GPU miners in Ethereum. But the community thought that this change was too political

in nature. And so it was determining there were going to be some winners, some parties of Ethereum that were going to win over others. And we didn't really feel like it was a justifiable change to change the mining algorithm because it wouldn't have really changed the trajectory too much of Ethereum. And so the idea was like necessary changes only. But for some reason, to the say, I still don't know why, a lot of the core developers like this update. Do you, why did ProgPow resonate with CoreDefts? Yeah. So it was actually programmatic proof of work for those looking at up. Sorry, David. Not programmatic. Cool. This is why we were interviewing you, not me. Yeah. Also, I have this website, Hudson Jamison.com. If you look like one page back

on my blog post, I have like a 15-minute blog post of the entire history of PraguePow. So if anyone's interested to get nerdy, go there. So, yeah, the core developers liked it because that seemed to them like a credible threat that A6 could take control of the network. And how we have it now is like, and including today, we know the people who are the top five biggest pools that make up over like 60% of the network or like 70%. Two of them make over 50%. But they're altruistic and good actors. We know that because they're helping out right now with the merge. But if the ASICs came on, those people would be forced to be kicked off potentially. And then we'd have unknown actors operating ASICs that could easily take up over 50% of the network.

And then if they're bad actors, who knows what could happen. But all that was unknown at the time. There was a rising. A6 were being made for ET hash, the algorithm, but they weren't like super relevant yet. They were starting to be. Here's the thing, though. This is very interesting because people are probably wondering, well, what about today? Are ASICs taking over the network?

now that we haven't done anything. It turns out there is only about 20% ASICs on the network as of earlier this year is what I've heard from people's analysis. Now, here's the thing. I think the reason for that is the pandemic and the chip shortage that stopped ASIC manufacturing and the pandemic stopped a lot of other stuff. So had that not happened, would ASICs have taken over? Maybe.

So really, we're still at an unknown if it was a good idea or not. But it turned out okay in the end because we're moving to proof of stake in a month. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully, crossing fingers, knock on wood. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, that's just an interesting side thing I was going to mention. Right. Yeah. And it's not that like prog pal was really all that interesting. It was more about the interface between the community and the developer, which is really the big story out of prog pal is that it was just like prog pal was the field between these two things. How did that event impact Ethereum, would you say, like moving forward? I think that it was a wake-up call to certain people, that there need to be better interfacing between the people who are making the decisions on the core developer side with the community.

So we started having more ideas about that. The Ethereum cat herders, which is a group of people who do note-taking for the core dev calls, and they also do surveys of the community and educational podcast and stuff like that. They're a group I co-created with a few other people. and they also had some ideas that started to be enacted, like we started having more Ethereum cat herders on the call, on the core dev call, and we started interfacing with people like Trent Van Eps more to be a conduit and Tim Biko,

to be a conduit for the community to the core devs. And also Tim started, I think it was right after that time, Tim started doing his tweet threads, his core developer call tweet threads, which have been very, very valuable to get the word out to everybody. So now,

if you're out of the know of what the core devs are doing, like, I'm not going to say it's your fault, but like we have notes, we have a Twitter thread, we have live and recorded videos on YouTube, and so like, just look at it yourself. And the core devs,

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

I never talked to anyone specifically about that point, But I would say that I'm personally surprised at how loud and big the community can get. Not in a negative way. Like I'm impressed. Like, I'm like, oh, people can come together and really share their opinion in a mature way, unlike Bitcoiners who literally just backstab each other and yell. And like, again, this community that it rose around, it was really like, it was Anthony Cizano, Ryan Sean Adams, Eric Connor, me, DC investor, Spencer Noon was around, many other

people who I've forgotten. Eeks on Twitter. shout out Eeks. Like, generally he stays silent until something like political happens and then he wakes up. And then he also, Chad, donates like 20 ether into like 50 different Bitcoin grants. But yeah, this is like where a lot of the Ethereum community like banded together. Like, yo, we don't know how to be devs, but we understand the philosophy and like we've got a voice. I would call like this era of Ethereum where like this second concentric circle around Ethereum

really calcified and like got built out. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think it did. And I think the community is growing and growing. but like we're starting to learn how to better manage that as a group, as everybody, I guess, like how to interface with people and like etiquette for how to talk to your projects and DAPs that you like and not be a prick and a Discord server and stuff like that. And at the end of this era, I think 2020, maybe early 2021, I can't remember refresh my memory, but this is when you actually stepped down from your role at the EF, right? Yeah, April 2021. I stepped down from the Ethereum Foundation. I also pretty much had stopped EIP editing for a while.

at that point, but had been helping a little bit with management. But honestly, people like Micah Zoltu, who's a beast and a few other people, have really taken up the torch on that. And then, yeah, I quit the Ethereum Foundation, waited a few months, and then voluntarily checked myself into a mental hospital. Because I was burned down and was having issues. Okay, talk about that. And also, can you talk about this, like, burnout culture in this space? Yeah, absolutely. And just a quick, what's it called? Shill. Yeah, quick shill. I'm doing a talk at DevCon and Bogota, Columbia, on burnout culture and how to avoid it and stuff. But basically, I've had mental health problems for a while. Like, I have Twitter threads on it. You can probably search. But basically, and also on my blog. But I have, like, depression, anxiety, bipolar 2, OCD, ADHD, and probably have autism, but we're figuring that one out later. And that's not even a mental illness. That's just like, oh, Hudson, you're kind of weird.

Yeah, it's neuroticality, right? Yeah, so neuroticality, exactly. So basically, I had been depressed and had not left my bed for weeks. And part of my bipolar two symptoms is having intrusive thoughts. So there are thoughts that, like, I literally sit there and have to think about them. I can't stop thinking about them and they involve suicide. So I was sitting there in my bed thinking about it, thinking about it. I'm not going to do it, but it was so annoying and so just blasting in my brain.

I checked myself into a mental hospital to like, get help voluntarily. I stayed there for a month in 2021 and yeah, it was a very good experience overall. I did go to like a rich person mental hospital called Menager Clinic, which was really good. I say rich person because like all the other mental hospitals have bad like things attached to them. Like they have like histories of like not being good stigma. They have a stigma around them. Yeah, yeah. So this one actually got me on new medicine. They did new test on me. I completely got off all my medicine onto new medicine. And by the time I got out, I was pretty good. So then I started working for flashbots later that year. And then I burned out again because I started working too fast

because I was too excited about the industry. And so I left flashbots on very good terms in February. They were super supportive the whole time about the struggles I was going through. Flashbots is amazing. Shout out to them. And so then that's into 2022, I guess. So we're almost there to now. And since then, I've only done Zcash community grants, which is a grants committee that isn't a full-time job. So, but that's been good for me as well. Can you talk about Ethereum's role? Is it Ethereum that sent you to a mental hospital, Hudson? That's a good question.

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

But there's a ways to go. I'm going to have some very strong opinions on that at my devcon talk. But in general, we all need to just kind of make sure that if you are a boss, have some time for employees to have like mental health days with no questions asked. And like if you're a person, like get a therapist. They're really cool. Like it helped me a lot. That's like the number one thing that helped me.

And look into, you know, de-stressing yourself and finding ways to everyone's going to be different, but just find ways to not get too obsessed so that you burn out. Yeah. Therapy is tight. The therapists are basically just like personal trainers for your brain. Like everyone should have one regardless of like what mental state you're in. Oh yeah. I mean, otherwise you'll end up in brain jail like me. So don't go to brain jail, kids. Yeah, they don't let you have real curtains. It's all Velcro. It's not good. Right, right, right. Yeah. No things that you can hook a line around. Yep. Hudson, what would you say that the legacy you've left behind has been?

in this industry. The way you phrased that made me think that you think I'm leaving or I've left, the legacy you've left behind. So far. So far. So far. How has the industry trajectory been altered by your existence? I think that there's a few times that I've heavily affected some of the trajectory behind the Ethereum Foundation, which I'm pretty proud of when I did my work there with the amazing people there. There's some people who've been there since the beginning and are incredible. And then also from a community perspective, I'd like to be remembered as someone who was nice and eventually did the right thing and started speaking up for things I believe in. I think the first half of my Ethereum experience, I was very quiet about causes I believed in,

which are like mental health issues, queer issues, privacy issues, because that wasn't in line with Ethereum all the time. But now I'm much more open about that. And I want to almost be known for that. I think a few people are starting to call me woke on Twitter. So, like, you know, there's a win. So yeah, I just want to be a nice person who's changed some stuff, I guess. I don't really have, like, huge goals or anything. I just want to be a nice person. If you were able to spin up like five clones of Hudson and set them off on different

tasks of things that you want the industry to be better about or work on, what would those things be? All right, five clones. Two clones would go to Z-Cash so that they could accelerate their progress and deciding to join a route towards Ethereum alignment and programmability potentially. I would have another clone go and work with Trent and Tim because that's really fun and they're awesome people and maybe they could do more collection of like community stuff even though Trent's doing a good job. And then there's two clones left. Hold on. All right. So two clones, I would have one of them

go to conferences and speak on shit that's like really important. I don't know what those topics are yet. And then the last clone would be like a shit posting podcast where I go over the shitpost of the day on crypto Twitter. That's one of the best answers to any question I've ever asked on this show. That's amazing. Which is a great. I'm glad you answered that. But what I kind of meant is just like, what about crypto culture do you think we would

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

So that's kind of a big thing right now is that if we get more diverse voices from different genders and sexualities and races and religions and Ethereum, that's going to be the ultimate way for us to really reach places we haven't reached before, which is like non-white male spaces. Right. Basically, what you're saying is that if you take a passive neutral stance, you don't get to pat yourself on the back and pride yourself and how progressive you are. you actually need to tilt the board in favor of the underrepresented people.

And that should be considered the new neutral is when you've tilted the board in the favor of the underrepresented communities. Yeah, exactly. And it's like, it doesn't have to be like, oh, give the woman a job instead of a man. Like, it doesn't have to be like that. But it's like, I don't know. Just like if you see something call it out and don't just say, well, that person's stupid and must be in the minority. Like, call it out. I want to see 30 people calling out.

If a woman in crypto Twitter is getting like slut shamed or something, I want to see 50 people call it out. I don't want to see it just left there. That's one example. What other things can we do to help in this regard? I think the community needs to be a bigger advocate for privacy. I think that privacy is incredibly important, and it's a shame that it's not going to be built into the base layer of Ethereum anytime soon, if ever.

Because if it's not built into the base layer, then you're going to have to bring on non-anonymous assets to turn it into railgun or tornado cash, well, not anymore, or other things. So privacy is a big deal. And I actually, I have a quick anecdote about you, David, if you don't mind about privacy. So, David, you have a problem getting it up. And what happens is when you take someone home from like a nice third date or something,

you're in the mood, you can't get it up. So you go and you buy penis, you know, erectile dysfunction pills for your penis. And that transaction, you maybe use a credit card or Venmo or PayPal. And then suddenly it's out there for everyone to see. The metadata is out there. And you would think I'm not doing anything wrong. So I don't need privacy. So I'm not going to use anonymous crypto for it.

but really someone later can look at the fact that you have ED and not date you in the future because they have a bias against that or something if they're like work in a place that has that metadata. So my point is even if you're not doing something wrong, you need privacy. If I am funding like someone's abortion or like maybe an abortion rights organization, I don't want the government because this is something that they're starting to try to do is like come in and like actually look at those transactions and if it's across state lines charging you with stuff just because. you paid that way. We should all be supporting bigger privacy for both chat services and anonymous monies. Just not too long ago, some like period tracking app sold all their data to Facebook. Yep. I'm trying to find the tweet from Evan McMullen about this. Oh yeah. She goes, in May I explained onstage that Web 2 surveillance data would be used to prosecute women and limit their body autonomy on multiple podcasts that are repeated that data self-custody is the key to safety.

And now it's happening. And she retweeted something that says from the motherboard Twitter account says, Pinned court documents that show Facebook gave police and Nebraska teenagers private chats about her abortion and then use those chats to seize her phone and computer. Okay, so slightly different than what I said. So yeah, super relevant. Still, that's a good example though. Yeah, because it's like, that's the serious case. The other ones about your penis. Sorry I had to bring you in this. Yeah, I would like to say that Hudson used me as an example, but this is not a conversation I've had with Hudson previously. He's just. Yes, I should make that clear. That's completely a happening to use me as a person, not a personal, personal experience.

Everyone, David's penis is fine. Oh, my God. Hudson, I definitely appreciate everything that you've done for this community. And in the very candid and comical way that you do all of your things as listeners of this podcast have enjoyed thus far, is there any final messages or just final words of wisdom that you have to impart upon the listeners of layer zero? Yeah, I would say that. A lot of advice that I've been giving to people lately, especially that are like just starting out in Ethereum or blockchain. I was just at ZCon the other day. And there was someone who came up and like took a picture with me and another person who saw me at a bar and like wouldn't talk to me.

And I talked to them and I was like, oh, he was like, I'm kind of starstruck right now. And I was like, okay, I'm not better than you and you're not better than me. You're not better than Vitalik or Zucco Wilcox or anyone else. Like, if you don't have confidence, just fake it. Like don't interrupt people or be rude if you're at a conference with them, obviously. like there's still social etiquette, but like don't be too starstruck to really put your chance out there to share ideas and meet people. A lot of people are friendly, especially in Ethereum and Zcash. They're very friendly and open to chats and dialogues over chat message and chat rooms. So start there. And I mean, you really can be as big as you want to be and do as much as you want to do. Just try to gain some confidence. 100%. I really enjoy that sentiment. And honestly, ironically, I've had this experience as well, like some people will aggressively like go out of their way to meet me. and then like those people tend to be the ones that like pitch me something within 30 seconds. And then there's the other people that are very silent and they're like, oh, I don't want to disturb you, but just like I'm a huge fan.

And it's those people that I enjoy talking to far more. It's like those people who kind of get it and want to be humble and not like, you know, bother the people that they see on crypto Twitter or podcast all day. But it's the humble ones that actually are the ones that have interesting thoughts and like are worth talking to. And it's the super agro ones that go out of your way to, like, you know, aggressively annoy you and, like, talk about, hey, can I come out on your podcast? I don't have anything interesting to say. And so if you are one of the quieter, more introverted, shyer people of the crypto community, you are free to lean into not being so quiet and shy. I will lean into that.

Hudson, thank you so much for coming on layers here.