Bankless - Griff Green and the DAO | Layer Zero

Episode Date: November 2, 2021

Griff Green is a builder and community manager in the Ethereum space. He is also a hippie, a former chemical engineer, and Seattle Supersonics super-fan. A true individual, Griff opted out of society after becoming disillusioned with modern institutions, traveling in a van with gold and silver until he heard about Bitcoin. Falling down the crypto rabbit hole led Griff to become a deep Ethereum community member, eventually launching The DAO. The story of the DAO's beginnings, hack, and eventual hard for are the stuff of Sci-Fi. Filled with countless stories, this episode follows the life and times of a deeply fascinating member of Layer Zero. ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ 📣 DHARMA | Trade on Polygon! https://bankless.cc/dharma  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 💰 GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/go-gemini​  💧LIDO | DECENTRALIZED STAKING https://bankless.cc/Lido  👻 AAVE | LEND & BORROW ASSETS https://bankless.cc/aave  🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 4:00 Griff Green & the SuperSonics 13:34 Chemical Engineering 18:20 Bankless with Gold 21:51 Bitcoin & Traveling 29:44 Into the Crypto World 35:07 Crypto Masters Degree 38:00 Ethereum Arrives 44:43 Entering the Community 51:29 Culture vs Price 56:00 Early Ethereum Culture 1:02:43 The DAO 1:07:20 Coming up with the DAO 1:13:25 Exploits 1:16:46 The DAO Token Creation 1:23:20 Explosion & Speculation 1:27:29 The Hack & Hard Fork 1:36:00 Dark DAO and Ethereum Classic 1:40:12 Hard Fork & Edge Cases 1:46:58 Lessons Learned 1:49:24 The Next 4 Years & Giveth 2:02:10 Closing ------ Resources: Griff on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thegrifft?s=20  Giveth: https://giveth.io/  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

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

Today, I'm speaking with Griff Green, who has an event. fascinating story of journey through crypto. And I think the story really starts in many to many places, but it starts with Griff living off of the grid and choosing to use gold to store his value in order to live a bankless life before Bitcoin was even a thing, or Bitcoin had entered his life. Griff was off the grid, being kind of a hippie communal type guy kind of traveling the world that really got turned off by some aspects about society. So he just yeated himself out of society, he traveled the world, got rid of all his belongings, put everything in a backpack, and started using gold to store his value, and then, of course, found his way into the world of Bitcoin and then

Ethereum later on. Griff has the most fascinating story about the Dow. As somebody who had front-and-row seats of the Dow, the 2016 Dow, we spend at least the second half, the whole entire second half of the episode, is going through the story of the Dow. And that's actually the first time I've heard that story in such granular detail. So, that really was just the absolute highlight of this interview, in my opinion. I had a fantastic time like speaking with Griff and getting to know him a little bit more. So without further ado, let's go ahead and get right into the interview with Griff Green, but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Bankless is proud to be supported by

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Hey, how's it going? Ah, fantastically, man. How are you? Also fantastic, always fantastic. It's always a fun time to be in crypto. So the last time we talked was in Colorado after MCon. And I have a little funny story to tell you about it because I was talking to you, asking you a little bit about your background and your life. And then I went on a plane ride to New York and I started listening to Matt Lysing's book about Ethereum.

And then he talks about the parts of the Dow hack and talks about like this guy, Griff Green, that was part of the damage control for the Dow hack. I'm like, wait, Griff Green. I was just talking to that guy in Krook. Colorado. Now he's like in the subject matter of this book. Yeah, Matt, Matt did a, Matt had a lot of fun with that book for sure. It was, it wasn't as accurate as some of the other books that are coming out on Ethereum. It was definitely like, oh, hey, let's make, let's have this be like more adventurous and more fun. But, yeah, it was fun talking with him over the years, too. He's been writing that for a while.

Yeah, it was just fun from my perspective about like, oh, I'm going to this convention, at a cartel convention. And then I'm also just meeting the people that these kind of sci-fi stories about Ethereum are being written about. And it's crazy how much literature has been made so quickly about this industry. And then it's also like still happening, right? The stories are still unfolding at the same time. Oh, yeah.

So much, man. And yeah, it's a, you know, Ethereum's been around for a long time. Surprisingly. There's been a lot of chaos, a lot of adventures. And I have to say, I've been in a lot of them, a lot of these, like, crazy. crazy times. So. And then that's definitely some of the stories I want to get told on on the show today. But, but I think in order to tell those stories, we have to just go all the way back and hear a little bit about Griff Green. So Griff, who were you as a kid? What were you interested when

you were growing up? What captured your attention? And how did Griff Green come to be Griff Green? Let's see. As a kid, I mean, I was just a normal kid. My mom was like a waitress. My dad was correctional officer. Actually, my dad was my stepdad. And I met my real dad when I was like 12. and I end up having about six parents, right? And so that was really fun having this like family of families, so many grandparents, so many socks at Christmas, you know. And I was, I mean, we can zoom through it. You know, I used to coach my little brothers and sisters basketball teams.

And I was really into basketball and ended up getting a chemical engineering degree, the University of Washington. In high school, I was on the... Griff is really tall, by the way, for listeners that don't know that. He's a pretty tall guy. Yeah. I mean, I'm not that tall guy, for sure. He's got me by a mile.

But, yeah, I'm okay. It's fun on the screen, right? To come out of the screen and meet everybody in person and be like, who's tall, who's short? Right. It's the fun game. Like, who's in tall dow, who's in short down? Oh, man. That might be a fun game, right?

I've been trying to poke the crypto-twitters sphere to start creating tall-dow and short-dow. but I don't know actually where short thou starts. Oh, man. Where would you think short thou should start? I don't know, man. It's shorter than me. No. Okay, so we'll keep on zoom in through your background, but you said you had like six parents, six fans, like people taking care of you.

Because a lot of the times I've heard you talk, you have very communal vibes about you. Definitely. Yeah. Do you think, are those two things connected? Maybe. You think? Maybe. I'm definitely a Sharon is carrying kind of guy.

But I don't know, probably. I definitely like the family vibe. And, you know, it's just, but it's the same thing. It's like divorced parents and stuff. So it wasn't all communal. It was just like. It wasn't one set of one family of parents of six. Yeah, exactly.

The tribal polyamorous, like, like, no, it's just more, more muggily than that, you know, pretty normal lifestyle. Yeah. And I don't know. I don't feel like there's too much interesting things. I grew up in Spokane, which is like part of near, in Washington's. state near Idaho, you know, nothing wild there. I went to, lived in Seattle for like eight years. And actually, where in Seattle did you live? In North Seattle, all over North Seattle, I went to UW for four years. So I was in the U district and Lake City. And, yeah, just all over

maple leaf, green lake. You know, just, yeah, dancing around. That's, that's where my family is, is maple leaf. Oh, really? Wow. Do you know Pataia, Pia, Pia Thai cuisine? It's like an apartment building on 90th and Lake City Way. I definitely have driven right past it a bajillion times, but no, I don't know. There's a strip club there called Ricks. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's still there. That's still there.

Oh, good. In the shanty tavern. I pass by Ricks and I drive up to my dad's house. Nice. Yeah, exactly, right? Well, there's that apartment building right across the street. I lived there for like two years. So that's fun.

Okay, yep, yep, yep. Yeah, no, we're from the same part of the woods, man. Nice. Nice. Yeah, I love to see. Actually, I, I cut, I'm really more of a community organizer in the theorem space, and I cut my teeth with Savar Sonics. It was this like, you remember, of course, Seattle Super Sonic, so I was a huge Sonics fan. Like, out of this world, Sonics fan.

I had a whole room, like, when I was a chemical engineer, and I, like, moved up to a decent, like, I shared a house with another chemi, and we got, like, a really nice party house for, like, little bit and I had a whole room dedicated to the Sonics. It was just wall-to-wall Sonics gear, right? And I had a, I would carry a Gary Payton rookie card in my pocket everywhere I go and like cut out the only days I didn't wear Sonics gear, whereas the days after they lose a game because I was in mourning, you know? It was like I had all these traditions built around it. My whole life purpose was basically to get courtside seats of the Sonics. And then they were bought by a basket by like this guy in Oklahoma City who said he wanted to keep them there. But also before he bought the team, he was like, I'm bringing a team to Oklahoma, you know?

So everyone knew that it was a scam. He sold off all of the good players and then got a bunch of rookies and stuff and good draft picks like Kevin Durant and Russell Restbrook. And then like because the team sucked, he was like, oh, well, hey, either we get a new arena. or we move because this is how it works. And so for two years, I was like general of the fans working to keep the team in town. So this was like my political movement, you know. And I was already kind of an Austrian economist. Like I kind of came from that side of the scene.

Hated the banks. Hated all the like all of the taxes and these sorts of things that were, I don't know, challenging to like individual freedom. And I kind of like put some of those values on hold so I could try to like get taxes for an arena. And then we actually were about to win. There was this court case that we that we levied where they paid for some improvements to key arena, which they were playing basketball in at the time. And they had a 15 year contract that.

that had a closet that's like special purpose. Like they have to stay in Seattle and play games in that arena, according to this contract for 15 years and it only been 13 years. So it was a pretty clear cut case. And we held a huge rally that I organized. It was like 3,000 person rally in front of key arena. And, you know, I had to get the permits and all that crap. And Gary Payton and Sean Kemp were there, you know.

And it was like, it was basically this huge. huge, it was a huge thing. And then the day the judge was going to give their ruling that was going to like keep the team there for two more years. And it would have basically forced the guy into selling the team because we had rallied support against him all over the place. The mayor held a press conference right before the ruling and said, actually, I'm just going to sign away the team. And they're going to give us like $60 million. And that's it. And it was like I had worked, you know, two years, every ounce of time that I had was dedicated to this. I was championing this cause. And then with one stroke of a pen, some politician just said, ah, fuck it, you know.

Sorry, can I swear on this? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Is that your Blizzard Wirt Nerfing, the Warlock spell that created a theory? Is that your moment for you? Absolutely. I was, I basically lost it. You know, and it's, of course, you know, the worst things that happen to you are always the best things that happen to you. You know, if we would have succeeded and kept the Sonics in town, I probably would just be an overweight chemical engineer, like with courtside seats, just, you know, sitting in a cubicle, heck, building power plants for the man, right? But instead, I was like, fuck all this. I asked to be laid off in 2008 when all the layoffs were coming, right? When was the whole Sonic story? When did that happen again?

Sonic, so the Sonics. I should know this. A lot of my friends were at that rally, by the way. Oh, yeah? Yeah. That's so cool. Yeah, we were in middle school at the time. Yeah, I guess the Sonics would have happened in 2009.

And then that would have been like summer of 2009, I think. And then the layoffs happened at the end of 2009. So it was like a few months later. And I had already kind of like, it was just like in my mind, like, I don't want to do the same There was also some stuff with the chemical engineering. I'm a pretty ethical. I'm a hippie straight up, right? And I had to design an airation basin for the pollution that was coming out of this aluminum smelter.

And like, so I was working for a power plant company that was doing mostly natural gas power plants and also some renewable energy power plants. And I felt fine with that because natural gas is basically a waste product, you know. They often just burn it after drilling for oil. So it feels like you're taking garbage and turning in electricity people can use. I felt okay with that and super clean. But this specific power plant that I was designing and working on was fueling an aluminum smelter. It was my job to take the pollution from the aluminum smelter and, you know, make it prepared well enough for the ocean. The problem is that this...

Prep the pollution for the rest of the world. secret to chemical engineering, a dirty little secret. The solution of pollution is dilution. So the real question was, how much seawater do I pump into our pollution before you just dump it out into the ocean? Yeah, can we turn it into not waste by diluting it with a lot of things that isn't waste? Yeah, I mean, it's still poison, but, you know, hey, at least it's diluted. So it's like, oh. And so I actually was, you know, there's a lot of buffers. There's a lot of interesting things with ocean water. It's not like clear cut. If you bring in this ocean water, how will the pollution react with the ocean water? And so I kind of cheated a little bit, and I made the specification a little conservative on what the pH would be.

The regulations in Abu Dhabi were horrible, and it was like the ocean was a pH of 8.4. And the pollution coming out, the regulation said it had to be a pH of 6. And that's a logarithmic scale. So that's like the pollution can be 300 times more acidic than the ocean water itself. That's not cool. You know, like a little. And so I cheated and I was trying. I have like one calc over here.

And then the calc that was the official calc that would like say, hey, look, an engineer said this would give out these results. And I kind of just like tweaked it so that the pH would be about seven, which is rainwater and totally great. But then the seawater pumps were so big that it didn't really. wasn't very cost effective and my boss basically told me to redo the caliph can fix it because it's not right that's just not real and I was like ah shit and so

I should have said at the time if I was I was a lot younger than I am now I should say I actually don't feel good about this can you just make someone else do it but instead I fixed it and you know did the math right and then now there's a pipe in Abu Dhabi that's like little fish are swimming in front of it and

going ah it burns and then you know and so that plus the I was just like, I'm done with chemi. I'm done with all of this chemical engineering stuff. I just want to like sell everything I own and become a hippie, right? Yeah. Society just turned, you just got turned off by society. Yeah.

From the left and the right. Totally. Totally. It's just like this is, I wanted to exit the banks, exit the American system and the American way of materialism and and the classic things. And just, so I just sold everything I own. I bought a pop top van and drove around the states for a little bit, had a great time. I went to Burning Man for the first time. This was 20, 2011. And because I was doing a lot of

stuff, I had started a little moving company, and I was doing all sorts of random, you know, under the table. Basically, he started Craigslist businesses all over the place. And just gig work. You were just like doing a bunch of different things to scrape some dollars together just so you could keep on doing what you're doing. Yeah. Is that about right? Yeah, exactly. And I was living off savings. You know, I was a chemical engineer. I never really bought a lot of things. I was always pretty cheap. And also, I was storing all of my value in gold and silver. And eventually I avoided even having a bank account. And so I just had gold, silver bars. And I would go and go to a, there's Northwest territorial mint, which doesn't exist anymore, but down in Tacoma. So I'd just make it run

down to Tacoma, buy a bunch of gold and silver. And then like, you know, that's a, where I would put my money. That was your bank account. Yeah, and I was doing that beef when I was a chemical engineer, too. Right. Before crypto was even a thing. So you had gone bankless before Bitcoin hadn't even mined its first block. Yeah, definitely.

And then when I heard about Bitcoin, well, no, I still had a bank account. I probably went bankless in 2011, where I had no bank account. And maybe even 2010, somewhere in that time. I didn't have a bank account. and I didn't have a bank account for years, actually. What motivated, because that's a big pain in the butt. Like, I want to break up with my bank just as much as, like, Ryan does and as much as I say that I do on the podcast. But, like, also, I still need to, like, you know, pay rent and stuff like that.

So, like, not having a bank account would be, like, really cumbersome, I would imagine. It was. Where did the motivation come to just, like, acts of your bank account? You know, at the time, it was like Occupy Wall Street was going on. There was a lot of things. And really, this idea of banks being the root of all heathel. You know, like, could we have war without banks, fund, payrolling it? You know, the whole banking system being this, being something I didn't want to support.

I didn't want my energy to be part of that world, you know. I just wanted to escape. And I was living in a van, right? I was totally off the grid. I didn't, I wouldn't do any. I was doing Craigslist deals back and forth, you know, and just playing the, playing the free market. without governments and banks. That was like where I wanted to be.

So I made that reality, right? So you weren't a gold bug. You didn't really believe in gold, like going up in price. You were literally just using it as a tool. Yeah, I mean, I did. I was a gold bug of sorts, but I really was just like the Fiat, like the Federal Reserve note is garbage. So what can I keep my value in?

You know, gold or, and that's the thing, buying and selling stuff on Craigslist that I thought was a good deal that I could like. like, you know, hold on to small things and large things and then put it back on and try to make some money here and there, improve the Craigslist ads, basically. You know, so I would store my capital in things that I thought were good investments that were not part of, like, not Amazon stock, but, you know, whatever I could. Yeah, and so it just, and then stuff that I could add out. The original NFT flipping?

Yeah, a little bit, a little bit. Yeah, where you're trading physical goods on Craigslist and the way that people are flipping NFTs on OpenC right now? Yeah, 100%. I said NFTs on OpenC is so much better. Oh, my God. You know, you don't have to go talk with someone and then give them cash. And then they're probably like, half the time, they're a scammer and just a time wasteer. I think it's crazy how much of your pre-crypto life actually resembles what crypto life is nowadays.

That's really funny. And that's how I got into it, right? Like, I saw a Trace Mayer video when Bitcoin was $5. And then I was like, oh, this is so cool, you know. I can't believe they made it money outside of the banking system. I want to see this nerd money, you know? But then it was like to get it, you had to wire money to somewhere in Japan, Mount Gawks, right? Empty Gox.

And I just, I was like, no, I'm not going to do that. That's how is that even. It's not that cool. Yeah. And wiring, I don't want to talk to the banks. They don't exist in my world, right? Right. So, but then eventually one of my buddies figured out how to get Bitcoin from Coinbase. This is in 2013. And at that time, I had left the States completely. I sold my van. And I started traveling. Went to South America in Ecuador. And I love Latin America. And I fell in love with that area of the world. And then came back to the States. Went to Burning Man again. That's 2012. Then I went to Asia. I went to India for a few months, went to the Kumbamela, the largest gathering of humans every time it happens

every 12 years. A hundred million people. Oh, the bathrooms were gross, man. The bathrooms were, oh, wow, wow. Like, a tin roof, like, kind of cubicle thing with just shit smearing out of the walls. Oh, no. Oh, no. Yeah, it was, it was atrocious, but interesting for sure.

Kind of like a spiritual burning man where there's a, yeah. Anyway, I can keep going. And then there's a, then I went to Thailand. And when I was in Thailand, my buddy, I was just talking to my buddy. He was like, yeah, he was buying drugs on Silk Road, right? And he told me he could, he was using Bitcoin. Oh my God. Dude, I want some, right?

I had some gold and silver store with another friend in the States. And he would sell it and then wire me money. And that's, that's how I was traveling. And... Okay, so you had a bank account. No, I didn't have a bank account. He would wire me money. I'd pick it up at a, like, Western Union or whatever.

Yeah, I'm like, okay, sure, sure, sure. And then, and he would sell the gold and silver for me. Usually he'd just buy it from me and then sell it a little later whenever he felt like it. And then so he actually gave my friend three grand worth of golden silver. He was about 50-50. And then my buddy sent me three grand of Bitcoin. And I instantly turned that Bitcoin into half Bitcoin, half light coin, name coin, pure coin, prime coin, a terra coin, feather coin. You know, everything that was on BTCE, which was the exchange I was holding my Bitcoin on.

And this is like, oh, this was right after the Cyprus riots, you know, and there was this, in April 2013, Bitcoin, I was watching Bitcoin and it had gone up. from, you know, $50 to about $250 and then crashed down to $50. And right at the crash is when I made the trade. And so I was able to buy Bitcoin at about. Like somewhere, it was, I bought it a few times at around $58 was the lowest price I got. And most of it was around $90. The average price was about $80. And so I had like $3,000 at $80.

And then while I was eventually, I went back to the States and I got a girlfriend in L.A. And so then I was living in West Hollywood, I learned to become a Thai masseuse in Thailand. And so that was what my profession was going to be, I figured. And so I was giving Thai massages in Beverly Hills. I had a like a nice, a clientele that liked me as a bear. You know, right? I had like, I passed my card to this one guy and then he passed it to a bunch of friends. And it was like all these gay guys in Beverly Hills.

And that was like my big, my big money. So I was getting paid like $200 at massage to go in and like, you know, it was a little awkward sometimes. I'm not going to lie. I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm sure there's stories inside of stories inside of stories. Yeah. We can keep it PG.

We don't need to go there. Yeah. That's fine. So when you traded your gold for Bitcoin, what was the motivation on that? Was it that it's literally a. digital form of gold so it's like the ux for you in your life is better or was it more speculation it was like i think this thing could go up in price a little bit of both but mostly speculation i mean it had just crashed from 250 to 50 and and i had seen it when it was five dollars so i had a good feeling

about it to say the least okay and uh but the idea and the promise was there uh but honestly it didn't worked for what I wanted to do because eventually I had to even interact. I had to get a bank account. Bitcoin actually made me get a bank account. And so I know. Rural. Isn't that sad? Right. So sad. But this is why we talk about why we need DFI, but that's a subject for a different day. Yeah. I mean, this is 2013, 2014. Defi was a gleam in Vitalik's eye to say the least. Sure. Sure, sure. I mean, Ethereum didn't even exist. In fact, it was a, interesting time. You know, I was, so Bitcoin, I was in West Hollywood and Bitcoin went from, you know, $100 to $1,000. And it blew my mind because I turned three grand into 24 grand.

Mostly light coin money was like where the big profit was. Gains. Yeah. I bought light coin at $2.50 and went to $42, right? And so it's just mind-boggling. And so I turned three grand into 24 grand and I'm like, I can live off this for a year. Like, well, what is this stuff? You know, I'm going to stop massaging and just research Bitcoin. And I'm a chemical engineer. I have a technical background. I'm not a dev, but I would, but I'm a community organizer and with some technical understanding. So I can like, I dove in and then the deeper I went, the more value aligned I found myself. And at the time, Bitcoin was a mix of all. There was. There was. was no blockchain. No one talked about blockchain. They just talked about Bitcoin. And all the

Ethereum people were in Bitcoin, you know? And they were talking about it. Because there wasn't Ethereum at that time, right? Yeah, there was no Ethereum. There was no, there was, MasterCoin was coming up. NXT was coming up. There were these other like 2.0 coins. Right. Right. What they're called. Like, Vitalik called these, uh, Swiss Army knife coins. Yeah. Like it's where Bitcoin is like a knife, all these other coins came out like, were Swiss Army knives where they did a bunch of things. But no one had yet cracked for incompleteness yet. No.

And a lot of people, you know, there were a lot of forks of other, of Bitcoin, too. They were just, the dogecoin, honestly, was like my favorite community by far. There's lots of fun stuff going on and people had high vibes. Everywhere else, it was so much money, money, money, money. But there were pockets of the Bitcoin community, which turned into the theorem community, honestly, that we're talking about the revolutionary aspects of how you can use this currency and currency creation in itself to actually like change the way we coordinate as a society. And that's where I just was like, yes, yes, yes, we can do, you know, here, we can start doing things.

So this moment in your life to me seems like the counter moment to you tapping out of society after the Sonics and the 08 crisis and also the whole like nuclear power plant thing or not maybe not nuclear. Yeah. So like the one ejected you from so you chose to eject yourself from society. And now with discovering the ethos behind Bitcoin, you're like, oh, this, like, I want to go into this society. I'm like, I'm ready to get back into the world of the world. Is that a fair description? Absolutely.

I wouldn't say get back into the world, but get back, get into the crypto world. Into something. Into the crypto world. I'm like, how do I do it? And actually, I never, I have very little faith in educational system and certificate. I always thought certifications were bullshit. But because I'm like, I want to get into crypto. How do I do it?

I took, I made two choices. Number one, I broke up with my girlfriend because she was jealous of Bitcoin. I was given too much attention. I was obsessed with Bitcoin. And she wanted my attention. I was just like, I love you, but I can't. I'm obsessed. I'm a man possessed, right?

Wow. I think there are any crypto wives or crypto girlfriends listening to this might absolutely empathize with that. Yeah, I feel bad, but it wasn't going to happen. So I broke up with her and went to Ecuador and was like, I'm going to be the... Is that really the reason? It was like you just couldn't stop focusing about Bitcoin and it just drove a wedge in the relationship? 100%. I mean, before I was giving her a lot more attention, I would go and massage.

for two to four hours a day, max, and we would hang out. And there was lots of quality time. I mean, there was love, like, you know, love languages, right? Like quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service, you know, all these things. And I didn't have the time to do quality time. And so that, that, I don't want to say it was only because of that. There, of course, it's always a very complex thing. But in the end, she wanted to be in L.A. And I didn't see like a lot of value in being out at LA while I'm focusing all the time on Bitcoin. And I saw a lot of opportunity to bring Bitcoin to Ecuador, right? And I was like, I'm going to bring Bitcoin to Ecuador. I'm going to, and I'm going to get a master's degree in digital currencies. Those are like the two,

that was the path I chose to take for the next period of time. And so I went to Ecuador. I started knocking on, I started just making meetups with the few other people that were into crypto there. I chose Ecuador number one because I loved Ecuador. It was my favorite place in my travels. And number two, they use the U.S. dollars and they have a 5% tax on any money that leaves the country. So I'll be honest and like, well, this is an opportunity, right? Because we have payment rails that the government can't meter. And it seems like easy money. Like, let's just get a, let's get a big. Bitcoin community here. Once people trust it, people will use it because there's a 5% reason to use it, right?

And so I was going to start. The business model rights itself. Exactly. I didn't know exactly how or what, but I knew I just needed to meet like-minded people and build something. And so I met like-minded people and while I was getting this master's degree and ended up, like, finding out that Ecuador had their own plans for a digital currency of like a phone. currency, a dumb phone currency. Also, I found out that it was just really hard to talk to Ecuadorians about like this kind of tech. I would go, I had some success. Like early on, it was like, wow, no one has, they're just like a kind of afraid of technology. They didn't trust technology, right?

And so I would actually go to, well, where are the tech people? I go to colleges and actually just knock on doors of computer science classrooms. say, hey, I want to give everyone in here a little bit of Bitcoin and tell them about it. And I did this seven times. And four out of the seven times they let me in. And I would just like, you know, interrupt their class, which maybe it says something about the educational opportunities in Ecuador. I don't know. Like, and then I would just like give a little bit of Bitcoin to a few people and then tell them to pass it on, right? And then so everyone is sending each other Bitcoin in the classroom. I tell them about blockchain. info and show them how to

this. They've created a wallet and save their 17 words, I think it was at the time. You know, and everything was, all the standards have changed at this point. Yeah, and it was a lot of fun and I loved it. But then eventually, you know, it was clear that Ecuador was going to make Bitcoin illegal. And the jails in Ecuador, they don't feed you. So I was like, you know, I think I'm going to bail on this idea. and just continuing my crypto journey elsewhere. So I went to Burning Man as I do every year

and just kind of was bumming around in the States and decided to live in a van in the States again. Actually, U-Haul. And so... At this point, where are you conversing with other crypto people online? Reddit? It's all on Reddit? What was the community there like? Was there like reoccurring names

that you would like converse with on frequently? Well, Andreas Antonopoulos. videos were like my crack. I mean, I couldn't get enough. I've probably watched every Andrei Santonovus video that existed. I had a, I had a master's program. So there were the people in that program and the teachers and all that. Yeah, that master's program. Who was giving a master's in digital currency? University of Nicosia. What's that? It's a college in Cyprus. Was that literally cryptocurrency? Yeah, digital currency. So I have a master's, I have the first master's degree in digital currencies that ever existed. First,

degree in digital currencies that ever existed. Is that program still running? Yeah. Yeah. Still running. Still going strong. Andrea Santinopoulos was part of it and teaches the first course. It's like a MOOC online that anyone can take.

So what was actually like the course matter? Because it was in 2013 or 14, there wasn't really much to talk about at the time other than just like, yeah, how it blockchain works, right? Yeah, totally. I would say that it was more of a international finance degree and business degree than it was you know, I learned about how international finance works, the, you know, the Fed, Federal Reserve system, like moving money around, you know, all these different, like, what do nation states do? How do they move money around?

And so, and there was, there was some crypto stuff. Yeah, I mean, I definitely, like, my first project was, well, later, I wrote a white paper for a bike share. economy, mostly based on the Bit Shares protocol and their terminology there. It was like decentralized autonomous corporations. And there, you know, there was like little projects like that and a lot of international banking laws and legal stuff that you learn about. But honestly, I bet the course matter is so different now. Yeah. Yeah. It has to be. While you were in tinkering around with Bit Shares, did you come across Roon Christensen? You know, I got to meet Roon before like while the Dow was happening but I didn't actually get to talk to Roon during those days now.

Okay. Okay. Okay. But Roon told me that later on like because he was in Seattle a lot and I was in Seattle a lot during the Dow days. And he was like, why are you guys using 16 decimals? That is the dumbest idea ever. You're ruining the standard. Everyone should use 18. And he had a couple other things about the Dow and we had like a nice exchange.

maybe argument, maybe argument about design choices. So that was really fun. But yeah. So, okay, so this is 2013, 2014. When did Ethereum arrive across your feed of your life? Yeah, so this is the master's degree was 2014, 2015, 2016. It was a two-year degree. And I came about, you know, when I first heard of Ethereum, I thought it was vaporware.

That was kind of the resounding opinion of the internet. And I didn't know any of the Ether Ethereum crew. So I was just... What was the alternative blockchains that weren't Bitcoin? What was the vibe like way back then about like non-Bitcoin things? Like was there Bitcoin maximalism as fine. Yeah. Really?

No. No. I mean, there was a little bit. But that came from, that was like, what was it? Blockstream. You know, Blockstream really created that. And before Athenianian. existed, Bitcoin was much more idealistic. There was still hope that we would change the block size,

you know? And that was a debate that started really, probably even before I heard about it in like 2014, 2015. It was probably there the whole time, just like people expecting it would happen. And then Blockstream, who was paying all the devs and, you know, putting, throwing money around, decided that it wasn't good for Lightning Network and their other investments and said, no. And used a lot of cultural tools to overtake the Bitcoin ecosystem in my opinion and really pushed the

small blocks ideas which anyone who wanted to use Bitcoin for anything cooler than a store of value could see that that's a dumb idea but you know I guess it's in the end it works out fine I think the Bitcoin crew

and the push during that time I felt very sad you know and and disgruntled because I saw the potential of using Bitcoin as a, as the layer of, you know, revolution of an evolution of how we can coordinate as a society around like these public goods. It's now the terminology,

but like just around like basically repelps placing governments with economies, which is what I was always really stoked about that what these tools could do. And, yeah, and so I was, I was pretty sad about that approach at the time. but now I feel like it's the right way. Did you blame Blockstream?

Yeah, totally. I feel like, I mean, they're by far the largest voice pushing that direction. And, you know, it was Blockstream and what was, man, I'm losing all these names and terms. It's been so long. Dallius or the basically the guy, the moderator of the subreddit, RBTC and RBCC and RBCC. And he was also the moderator of a few other things. Like that guy was censoring everybody and it got, it just got really ugly, you know. And but, you know, before I got into Ethereum before that all started kicking off.

Because I wrote, so in my master's degree, there was a task to write a will contract using the Bitcoin blockchain. Right. And so it's like, oh, cool. Can I use Ethereum instead? I had, so I, let's back up a little bit. So I wrote this bike sharing economy white paper. And it was really cool. The idea was like it was called Bicycles in Kind for Everyone, B-I-K-4-E, but the four was silent.

So it was bike, right? And it would be like a currency that would be printed and vested inside a bicycle whenever you would donate it to the network. So you would go and get a network, get the bike, and you would steward the bike. but the idea was the bike was owned by the DAC, because that was the terminology at the time, the Dow, would own all the bikes. And if you were the first bike within like a 100 mile radius, you'd get this bonus of extra tokens that would be held in the bike, right?

And then, you know, as more bikes were in that area, then the bonus would decrease. And it was this like basically printing money to create a bike sharing network, international bike sharing network and cities around the world was the design. Which I think we are definitely now. I mean, there are like electric scooters, electric bikes, all over cities, all over the world nowadays. It's just that they're run by corporations, not decentralized corporations. Exactly.

And it'd be so cool. And I think that eventually we will see that reality where these things are owned by Dow's and not corporations. But, you know, bridging meat space and crypto space is harder than it sounds. So it's extremely hard. It hasn't happened yet. But I made that by, it was the sharing economy. It was really interesting to me. And using that as a gateway to like the collective ownership by communities without governments,

which is always where I've been focusing on. And I sent that, I made a video explaining the white paper for my class. And I sent that to Slokit, which when I Googled sharing economy, you know, Bitcoin. So I Google because at the time, crypto was barely a term. Slocut was the number one thing that was coming up. And this was way before the Dow or anything. In fact, Slocut had just had a website. When you Google stuff back then, there wasn't much.

You know, when I was reading all of the media, I could read all of the media. Because there just wasn't that many people talking about this. And so Slocke came up on my radar and I basically would email them every couple weeks and saying, I will work for free. I want to support you guys in this mission. Like, pick me up. I'm getting a master's degree. I'm doing this.

Eventually, Christoph Yenz, who was a pretty huge member of the early Ethereum community, he would, he saw my video. I was like, this guy's funny. Okay, cool. And then, like, let me work for free. And I was effectively their first employee. So it was like, Slokket, the three founders. and me eventually left her wrist joined.

And this is 2015. And that was my first experience with Ethereum and realizing Ethereum is a real thing. Before that, everyone, like if you were just a casual Reddit user, Ethereum was vaporware. It will never really work. It was never a thing.

They don't have any prototypes. They don't have anything you can use. And that was the resounding idea. They did a crowd sale and it's a Ponzi. Right. So that's why I asked about like the cultural around like non-Bitcoin coins. And it's weird to hear you say that there was no such thing as Bitcoin

maximalism. All these other coins were out there were generally accepted. But then this Ethereum came around. Ethereum thing came around and it was vaporware. How did, why do you think people thought it was vaporware at Genesis? Because people, because Ethereum raised money and they didn't do what you would call now a fair launch, right? Usually most people just would launch the token.

That was the prevailing. It was the mere fact of the fact that they actually just had a raise and they sold the tokens. Yeah. Yeah. They raised a bunch of money and then, you know, now they have that money and they're working on stuff. Sure they are. Right. Let's see.

Why aren't you launching something? Where's the, you know, where's the Genesis block? Blah, blah, blah. And so for years, that was the understanding or maybe a year and a half. And then like they started deploying things and you could use it. And then it's like, okay, this isn't vaporware. This is interesting. There was also some design choices, man, that I didn't agree with with Ethereum.

You know, it's like there's no check sum in the address, right? You change one number. I don't know what that means. In every other crypto, the last few digits of the address is a check sum. Actually, the last few digits will tell you if the address is a valid address. Okay. So like if you change one character in a Bitcoin address, every wallet could tell you that is an invalid address. As in like there are no private keys that associate with that address?

Yeah, because, or it's more like this address is following an invalid format so it can't be real, right? Because there's these extra, I don't know if it's like four or seven characters or whatever at the end of the address that are derived from the rest of the address. And so credit cards are like this. Every credit card has a checksum and that's how you're, when you type it in online, they know that that is like. like a valid, you know, credit card number. And so this is not existent in Ethereum, right? And it's just like, why? And why are there so few characters, you know?

And like there's just weird choices, you know, there are weird choices. And people at the time when they were talking about these choices, it's just like, why are you doing it? What about the rest of crypto? What we learned and what we determined, you know? Or is the HD wallets? Where are these things? So, yeah, it was easy to. hate on Ethereum early on.

But then I got into the community and, wow, it was so lov-y-dovey. So I had that will contract, right? I had to write a will contract. And because I had started working for socket, I was like, how would I do it in Ethereum instead of Bitcoin? Is that okay, Professor? Right? And he was like, yeah, sure, give it a try.

And he didn't know anything about Ethereum. And he thought that was cool. And this project was supposed to take like a week. And it was a huge project. I did it in four hours on Ethereum. And I don't know how to. a code. So like, I mean, I took a coding class in college, but I'm fresh. And, and so I was like, whoa, Ethereum is better. And while everyone else is like grueling away on this project, I'm like,

well, I'm done. And so then I actually made a blog post for Slokit that was like, hey, how to make, how I made a will contract on Ethereum. And it was basically my homework. I'm going to get a blog post and hang out with the Ethereum community. And everyone was so nice. My expectation was like, I'm going to post this and I'm going to get a bunch of people telling me how shitty it is and how dumb I am and da-da-da. Because that's the crypto community. Yep.

But in the Ethereum community, it was just all love like, oh, that's a really nice try. Oh, that's so cool. That's cute, you know, a little bit of that. Oh, that's cute. It's cute. You did that. Yeah. Yeah.

But then ABSA, Alex Van Dandes. who works for the Ethereum Foundation, took the time to show, and it was really nice about, like, here's a way that you could reduce the number of lines of code. Like, because that's really important when you're coding in solidity, less surface area of attacks and stuff like that.

I don't remember what he said, but it was so nice about it. And he improved it. And I'm like, where am I? Yeah. Is this crypto? This isn't crypto. This isn't even the Internet.

This is some rainbow fairyland with unicorns jumping around. It doesn't make any. sense. And I was sold. Right away, I was sold on Ethereum, and I'm like, this is the right. First off, it's easy to work on a non-developer. I'm a technical person, but a non-developer could come in and actually make something that has utility. And everyone's like encouraging me. It was blue my mind. With the other like cryptos that were out there. And like you talked about how like this homework assignment was meant for Bitcoin, but also in theory you could build anything on any other as somebody who watched the development of the communities of all crypto communities as they kind of came up and about,

how did the crypto communities change over time? And then can you also just unpack even more the differences between the Ethereum community that was created versus like the like coin community and the Bitcoin community that came around in the early days? I think the biggest difference is the money, the focus on money. And I think the number one thing that built of such a beautiful culture in Ethereum, was having our eth trader and our Ethereum. Yeah. Having that separation really allowed Ethereum culture to develop in such an organic, natural, lovey-dovey way

where that like, you know, when you think about money, it just brings you into that scarcity mindset. And you have this like, ah, number go up, you know, only up. I don't know, no, no. You know, it's this, you know, it doesn't really combine well with like, hey, let's advance society together. Pother some games, yeah. Yeah, you know, funding public goods, you know, coordination tools, like that these two people,

these two groups of things. Like what's great is you could go and have both. It's not like it's, oh, this person is all about that and this person's all about money. No, it's like when you want to talk about the money and you're ready for that vibe, then you go there and it's like, oh, yeah, a number go up. Cool, cool, cool. But when you want to talk about like, hey, how are we going to make the world a better place? Our Ethereum is there.

And no other crypto community had that. I don't know who made that innovation. But in my opinion, it's one of the most important things that happened in Ethereum history. From what I remember, ETH trader was created because our Ethereum banned price talk. And so it wasn't a, we're going to have these two communities be built up simultaneously. It was like, well, a lot of people wanted to talk prices and like all the developers of Ethereum, like, Vitalik, we're like, I don't want to talk about prices. I want to talk about Ethereum.

So they banned price talk in our Ethereum. And then as a result, people are like, all right, well, we're going to go to our ETH trader and talk about prices over there. That's how I remember it happening. That's great. Yeah, because I wasn't part of the Ethereum community, really. I just started working for an Ethereum company, right?

So that was before my Ethereum time. Other crypto communities, Dogecoin was great. I love Doge. Doge coin with the tip bot and, like, you know, bringing the Jamaican bobsled team to the Olympics and and the NASCAR. It was also not about money, right? It was about like jokes and vibes.

Yeah. And those were the two Reddit communities I liked hanging out in. Bit Shares was interesting, but like, I don't know. It didn't have the right vibes. I also liked Monaro. I like the privacy focus. Like I thought that was interesting, you know. But the rest of the communities, like name coin, light coin.

All of those things, it was, they were lame. And then Bitcoin was all, be just slowly became all about number go up. Like all the interesting conversations eventually moved from Bitcoin. There was stuff that I would go to our Bitcoin for. They all moved to our Ethereum. And it was a very natural progression for me to just like, I just looked at our Bitcoin less and our Ethereum more. And eventually I barely looked at our Bitcoin. Do you think our Ethereum and the Ethereum community kind of like sucked that side of Bitcoin away?

Or do you think Bitcoin, our Bitcoin number go up by pushed the builders out of Bitcoin? Or maybe it's a little bit of both. Definitely both. You know, it's really hard not to be consumed by your holdings or biased by your holdings, right? So everyone had Bitcoin. So everyone cared about Bitcoin, right? No one didn't care about Bitcoin. Right.

Because everyone has a decent chunk of exchange. You couldn't not own Bitcoin. Yeah, right. Have you cared about crypto? I mean, yeah, you really couldn't because pretty much that's how you'd get the money to an exchange. That's how you would, for most people, Bitcoin is the Fiat. And still, to this day, it's the Fiat on ramp and off ramp. You know, Bitcoin has the network, the global network where you can buy and sell it,

whether it's peer to peer or with exchanges. in every exchange, period. You know, I don't know any fiat exchange that doesn't have Bitcoin. Right. That would be wild. I'm sure it'll come soon if it's not already there,

but at that time, not even close. I think Bitcoin network dominance was well above 95% for market cap. Yeah. For most of the time. So I tell the story of getting even more just integrated with the Ethereum community.

Well, it was all through the Dow, right? So I was a community organizer, and that's what I said I would do for Slack it. I like, I like doing community organization. You know, I'm good with people and I have a hug a troll approach, you know, when someone's trolling. It's like, oh, thank you for the feedback. That's so nice. You know, thank you for the troll. Nice, man. Thank you. Appreciate that. Kill them with love. Exactly. With sincerity, because I'm not talking to the troll. I'm talking to everyone who's in the chat room, you know, and it's always good to have that perspective. And

And so if the troll says something interesting, but with a negative tone, people might agree with the troll. So you have to be like, well, that's a valid concern for the people who aren't trolls that actually agree with the point that was poorly spoken, right? And so then it's like, well, da, duh. And these are the stuff that I learned also just from trying to keep the Sonics in Seattle, surprisingly. And then we built one hell of a community. I'm also an educator. I was a coach. I was a math tutor. I was all these things. So, you know, I created a Dow Ninja course. And, you know, at the time the ERC 20 standard was barely standard. And like the first question in the Dow Ninja course is like, what does approve do? You know, which is like basic knowledge now. But at the time, I got wild answers, you know? And so we would, we had everyone would, it was basically a, test or an essay type assignment. And we graded the homework and different people became Dow Ninjas.

You know, and dude, all those Down Ninjas are rock stars in the Ethereum community today, right? The guy behind Trueblocks, you know, Jordi Bellina who ended up who does so much. And all these, all these OG Ethereum people. It's amazing. And same with the people in Sloket that, well, in the Dow chat room that like became like insiders in the Dow and kind of in that middle layer. Because I would, my community management style is more of a fractal nature. It's like, well, let's create a group of people who are doing community management.

And I give them inside information. Like, oh, hey, here's the blog post that Slocut is going to publish while it's in a Google Doc. Like, what do you guys think? They go in and edit it for us, you know. And they would, for them, they're getting inside information. For us, they're editing our blog posts and giving us important feedback. And, you know, and then they would feel like they're in the know. And they could be good community management 24-7.

So we had a group of like fit. By the end of it, we had a group of about 50 people that were kind of like on the inside. You know, Kosovo and Taylor from my ether wallet, my crypto and my ether wallet now. And yeah. And so like we just, you know, Slokit had such a sexy product. It was the Dow. It was the first Dow. And we were going to build a universal sharing network.

which I helped develop a lot of the ideas around, you know, and it was like this idea that we could build a network where autonomous entities or anybody could actually post requests for, you know, for buying and selling things or sharing things, renting things. And it was kind of like Craigslist for anything everywhere. And it was going to be so cool. You could just go to a locker outside that is someone's house or maybe on a corner that a few people would rent and it'd have a lock that you'd send Ethereum to, some Ethereum currency. And then the lock would, maybe you'd send like maybe there's a power drill in it and there's a lock, the lock request $50.

So you send $50 to the lock and then you get the power drill and then you actually bring the power drill back to some dude who sits on his porch, you know, hanging out these times and he checks to make sure it's okay, puts it back in the. the in the locker, he gets a dollar and you get, you know, $47 back. You pay $2 to use the drill. And then in this way, we can have a sharing economy and we can better utilize scarce resources and, like, manage things. And to the point where maybe you have a drone that comes and opens the lock for you, you know, and the drone collects money. And the drone becomes its own autonomous economic agent. And maybe it's owned by a drone Dow.

and people invest in the drone down. The drones are going around providing value. In fact, we had a hackathon in 2015, I think it was the end of 2015, where with this idea, and the person who won it created a solar panel that would charge phones, right? And then it would collect money. And when it had collected enough money, it would put up an ad on the Universal Sharing Network that would say, hey, connect another solar panel.

and then it would check its voltage to see if the solar panel is working and on there. And then when that's correct, the solar panel would release the escrow. And the person who added the solar panel would get paid. They could add batteries and solar panels. And it would just charge things. And then, you know, eventually the solar panel would grow and grow until all of humanity is just working on the solar panel and gets to see the light when the solar panel has a need. You know, no. But that's the dystopian.

This is, this is the part of the Ethereum culture that I actually kind of miss. I came into Ethereum 2017 and a lot, by that time, like, ICOs had already been, like, decently tainted. But a lot of, like, the models for ICOs were crazy stuff like that. We're, like, we can have just these global networks. We can put cryptocurrency inside of drones and they can deliver goods. if you need a drill, you can just go find the nearest drill and borrow it rather than going and buying another one and then having that be a private good rather than a public good. And then it really got people's imaginations going with like what happens when we have like these global networks that also have money involved with them. Like I actually kind of really miss that era about Ethereum.

Again, sadly like a lot of these crazy futuristic ideas about what Ethereum could do ended up turning into like a white paper and an ICO and then a failure of an actual product. launch, but I've really missed that, because you don't really see these crazy ideological like use cases like what you just discussed in Ethereum land anymore. I kind of miss that. And I feel like the Dow caused a lot of those problems, unfortunately. Hey, guys, I hope you're enjoying the conversation with Griff thus far. In the second half of the show, this is where we get into all of the story of the Dow. So stay tuned for that.

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account in under three minutes at Gemini.com slash go bankless, and if you trade more than $100 within the first 30 days after sign up, you'll be gifted a free $15 dollar Bitcoin bonus. Check them out at gemini.com slash go bankless. You know, because the Dow wasn't an ICO. The Dow was a huge raise, right? We raised $150 million, which was way more than we intended. And like, like, we thought, well, Christopher, Christoph thought it was going to be five to ten.

I thought it would be like 30. but obviously 150 was a lot more than all of that. And then when we had the hack, there was over $200 million in it at the time because Ether had gone up so much. And then everyone used that as an excuse to do ICOs because Dow's aren't safe. You know, Sloket didn't get any money.

We raised $150 million and we didn't get anything. We were then going to have to request money from the Dow to do the Universal Sharing Network. And it was really hard. There were lots of problems with that. What was the relationship between Sloket and the Dow? Slocut was a service provider. Okay.

So we worked like, you know, for free basically to develop the Dow. And then we were going to ask funding from it. And the Dow was going to be like a sort of a collective organization that would fund various projects, not just ours. And the idea was that like Sloket would build the code for the Dow. And then once the Dow was up and running, you would ask for like, hey, because we helped build this thing, can you guys pay us? Not retroactively. We actually wanted to build the, so the Dow served as our governing body. So we wanted to be an international, the universal sharing network. We wanted to be like, you know, not part of any nation state.

We wanted to be governed by the Dow. Property of the Dow. Yeah. And so we wanted the Dow to be, we were choosing the Dow as our jurisdiction, which lived on the Ethereum blockchain as the main jurisdiction. and not in any specific jurisdiction because what if someone puts weed in the locker, you know? You know, oh, God forbid, you know, and then what are we supposed to do? And so we to kind of circumvent this and, of course, now legal thought is very different. But to circumvent this, we thought, well, let's just create a Dow.

And everyone wants a Dow anyway. And actually, at the time, it was always called, a lot of people were calling it DAO. But I'm a big fan of the Tao Te Ching and I push really hard to first. frame it as a Dow, you know, and call Dow's, DOWs, which I feel like very successful at. Now everyone is just a Dow, right? You were the reason why we went from DAO to Dow? I definitely made a huge push, huge push. At the time, it was kind of, there were people doing both.

Right. And even the DACs were also acceptable terminology. So then I pushed. And I think the Dow, because of its success, became its Tao's, right? And because I was pushing hard and I, you know, I had some fights, not fights, but discussions with Stefan and, and Christoph about this to get it to be Dow. But I was like, the Dow Day Ching, man. And so we got it. We got it through.

We'll put a penit in that. I do want to say one other little thing on that, though, because the Dow was not supposed to be its name. It was supposed to vote on its name once it had good governance. So the Dow was a placeholder name. I did not know that. Yeah. It was a placeholder name because. the Tao should name itself.

But it probably wouldn't have worked out. It probably would have always been the Dow. So I wouldn't actually go into the story intentfully. So when was the first time, like the Dow came into your brain? Like, when did you first run into the Dow? When the concept of it? When we were diving into the Universal Sharing Network, we needed a solution for the jurisdiction.

And we kind of always thought that we would have a Dow, but we didn't know exactly how to play it. At first it was going to be the Sloket Dow. And we were going to have our own entity there. And then it was better. We figured, oh, it'd be better if the Dow was a separate entity. And we were a service provider working for the Dow and the Dow pays us. And that was, that was, so it came from Sloket.

Like, we, early on, I don't know if the plan was always to have the Dow. But it didn't come in my radar for after, until working for them for like a couple months. Okay. So whose idea was the Dow? Probably Christoph Yance. and he's probably the main brain behind it. Okay. And so he was the guy that triggered the idea to be in other people's brains as well.

And eventually people were like, okay, let's do this. How did that story happen? Do you know? Well, yeah. I mean, at the time, Dows were a major use case of Ethereum. That was always like, that was, that was, Ethereum is a place where you could build Dows. Right. And so the idea was there.

But also, Dows were very, very different from what we consider Dows to be now, right? Because right now, Dows are like a token gate. Discord and like Snapchat vote. What did people consider Dow's to be back then? Yeah, you know, I think people thought of Dow's more focused on having their own economy a little bit. You know, that it'd be their own token system in a way to collectively govern things. I don't think it's changed so much, but I feel like it was less focused on as a corporate entity and more focused on an economic entity at the time.

Right. I think back to like decentralized Uber, where like Uber, but as code on Ethereum, that's a Dow. Decentralized Airbnb. Like, that's a Dow. A decentralized drone network that delivers goods. If it's operated by like smart contracts on Ethereum, that drone network is a Dow. That's kind of how I remember it way back when. Yeah. I mean, I feel like there was just like, you know, there wasn't as much, there weren't Dow's. Right. So it was kind of like a lot of people saying everything could be a Dow or this could be a a DAO or that could be a DAO. So it was very dispersed. But I don't know. And the idea behind the Dow was like, all right, there's going to be all these other littler DAOs. Yeah. But what if we had like a Dow that managed the Daos? Yeah. And that was the idea that became like the Dow.

Yeah. Part of the Dow, one of the names of the Dow that was going to come up was called the Genesis Dow because the idea was the Dow could break into lots of smaller Dow's. It would naturally do that because anyone who disagreed with a Dow vote could take their money and make a child Dow. And then this, so if people, if like a proposal to come out for some like decentralized Uber or Golem, Golem was going to propose to the Dow, people voted no, like the mass voted no, but people that voted yes could just make a child Dow and split and take their funds and make a Golem sub-Dow. you know, a Golem Dow. That would be separate, but a child Dow of the Dow, right?

Or people would burn their Dow tokens for the ether that's in the Dow, and then they would go into the sub-dow, and they would do Golem. And so it was kind of this way that we would just like make, here's this self-replicating Dow contract, where everyone just proposes to the Dow. If they get it, they're part of the big club. If they don't, then they probably just create their own sub-Dow. And really, anyone could start a startup in the Dow ecosystem. Were people talking about conversations as the Dow as like a new government or like a new like large organ, yeah? Yeah, that's a that's that's the direction that I still believe Dow's will take. I actually saw a tweet by one of my heroes, Michael Sargum, that was like, I wonder if Dow's will, if Dow's will be what corporation will be to corporations as.

democracies were to monarchies. And I feel like, well, actually, DOWs would be to democracies, what democracies will be to monarchies. And I really do believe that. I feel like we have this opportunity to, like, change the way we coordinate around, you know, things that governments do, which is provide public goods. You know, I don't even understand why we have to pay taxes. That whole idea is broken to me.

If a government is creating value, they should just be rewarded for that value. We shouldn't need taxes. We shouldn't need sacrifice through nonprofits. We should be able to create economic models that reward value creation when it's happening if people really believe that there's value being created. And I feel like we're at the precipice of that. We're so close. Right. So when the, the Dow happened and people were like, you know, aping in, it was like one of the first big apes on Ethereum,

were people understanding that kind of like prospect of what the Tao was? or like, yeah, that was like, oh, this could be like the new, like, global order. I don't know about global order, but for the most part, it was like there was high vibes, super high vibes in the community, a lot of interest, and it felt like a risk-free investment. I mean, in the end, it collected 14% of all ether in existence. Right. Right. So 14% of, you know, all ether ended up in the Dow because it was like, well, if it doesn't work out,

I can split the Dow and get my ether back. So it's like I can be part of this super cool club at almost no risk. Were there people talking about like, were there exploits or hacks or bugs at this point in Ethereum? Or were like the contracts just like not sophisticated enough? There was there were, of course, small bugs and things, but not things of, there was never anything near the scale. Right. All that was there was the Ethereum multisig. That's the only thing, a repeat of contract that had a lot of value behind it.

There's nothing. There's nothing else. Right. So like no one really thought about like, oh, if I put my money in this contract, it could get exploited. That wasn't like a thought that people had? Solidity was eight months old. So no. No.

We started the whole smart contract auditing, like, idea. We actually got an audit, but it was from a normal tech company. company that said, hey, yeah, there might be rounding errors. You know, that's like, that was all we got. Right. So there was no, there were no smart contract auditors. They didn't exist. We were buddy, buddy with all the people who wrote solidity, you know?

Left terrorists and Christoph were major parts of that. And who are our lead devs. And then, you know, Christian Rightweisner, like, we talk to him all the time. And he invented solidity. Don't listen to Gavin Wood. Christian Wright-Weisner invented solidity and was maintaining it. So, Vatalek reviewed our code. You know, it doesn't get better than that, right?

So, yeah, but there, and the Dow hack was not a simple thing, right? It was very complex. Right. The Dow hack contracts were larger than the Dow contracts. It was multiple contracts that are exchanging money between each other and exploiting this weird little bug that's in a subcontract over here. Really complicated stuff. Right. So it was hard to spy.

Yeah. So it was completely unprecedented. Like not only there were two unprecedented things, the Dow receiving a ton of money. And then like people actually learning like, oh, these things can be exploited in ways that we had no idea. I mean, people knew it could be exploited, but the ways were not known. You know, and that and that was actually what happened when we raised so much money. The Dow curators, the subgroup of the Dow that would allow people, you had to propose to the curators and get whitelisted before. you could propose to the Dow. They actually said, like, moratorium. It's too big to fail. We can't let anyone propose to the Dow until we talk about this a little bit more. But you could still

split the Dow, which is where the bug was. So people would split. So the bug was basically, I'm going to split the Dow, which is like the equivalent of rage quitting these days. And you split the Dow, and effectively you say, oh, yeah, here's my Dow tokens to burn. okay, give me the ether. Just kidding. Okay, here's my Dow tokens to burn. Give me the ether. Just kidding.

It's like putting the quarter down a vending machine with a string tied around it? With a string. Yeah. Pulling it back. Pulling it back. Pulling it back 40 times in a transaction. And then the transaction just fails, but you end up with all the ether. Right.

And so, but then, so the hacker did it and stole about 4% of all ether. Sorry, do you want to set that up better? Yeah. I just kind of want to go through the progression a little bit. Were you watching when the Dow got minted? Where were you when that happened? Yeah. I mean, I was in Seattle, I think, right when we launched the token generation event, you know?

Token generation, right. Is that what they called it back then? I think we called it token creation. I think we called it the token creation event. And why did you guys do it? Because it wasn't just because you wanted the Dow to function with Sloket. It was more like, what was the motivation behind the Dow? Was it just about like an experiment or like the vision or what's up?

We were excited for DAO's on Ethereum. We were excited to play with these experimental tools for sure. I mean, the business model. Did you have a plan? And did you have a plan like, okay, now that the Dow is minted, like here's the next steps or like that would be. Yeah? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

I mean, our first steps were to, okay, launch the Dow and then propose the Universal Sharing Network to the Dow. Right. Best laid plans, but they didn't. But it wasn't about like, all right, like, I'm going to be the leader of the Dow, the metaphorical CEO. Okay. Oh, no, not at all.

Mint the Dow and then have Slok could be a part of it. Our whole legal strategy was that we were not the Dow. Okay. And Christoph didn't have any Dow tokens. And no one really, no one else on the team had Dow tokens either. I'm sure. Right. But I actually have.

In known wallets. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right. I mean, I did. I wasn't worried about these things. I've always been irreverent to that shit. But yeah, so we intended the Dow to be a pure Dow.

And that was definitely the idealistic motivation. But at the same time, we had a business model that could back it up. Right. So the idea was like to basically give the gift of the Dow to the broader Ethereum community. It's like, hey, here's this thing we made. You guys go build it. Also. Yeah.

Here's Slack it. Yeah. Okay. Exactly. Okay. Here's this thing we made. And we built the community. Right.

I mean, we had one of the largest slacks in crypto by far. Everything was on Slack at that way. Thank God. Everyone moved away from that. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, for a while it was chaos. There was people using riot.

There are people using everything. Keybase. Right. And then now we've all settled back on Discord. It feels good to be all in the same time. But anyway. Okay. So you guys meant the Dow.

So money starts coming in. How fast did money start coming in? Oh, man. A bunch of money came in the first few days. And then it was like a slow trickle until the last. So there was a 28 day period. And the first 14 days were supposed to be like one ether for 100 Dow tokens. And they were.

But then there was actually a miscalculation on an off by one error. and the 15th day also had the price of one Dow token for one, for, or sorry, one ether for 100 Dow tokens. And so it was almost like, oh, you get an extra day of cheap Dow tokens, which was it a huge push. Was it a bonding curve or something? How did the price change over time? It was a step curve. Yeah.

And so then, and that's why we had an alpha one error because it was like, okay, and then it'll step to 1.05 ether for 100 Dow tokens, 1.1 ether. but the first step was just to one ether. It was like, oh, damn it. We didn't totally miss that. And then in the code, you know. And so we just, basically there was this extra day where Dow tokens were cheap, which just allowed way, a bunch of extra phomo.

And I think we raised somewhere around, you know, $100 million at that point, you know, in that first round. And then the next $50 million over the next 14 days where it was still. stepping up. Yeah. And then we had a $150 million in the Dow. And right before the end, you know, we're all like- Did you like shit your pants?

I was stoked. I was having a blast. I didn't do that. I'm not a developer, you know, left terrorists and Christoph were shitting their pants. Okay. Christoph, Christoph actually physically vomited. Oh, my God.

There was $100 million in the Dow. He was at a dinner and he had to leave the table and he went and puked because he was so nervous about the code, you know? I mean, a hundred million dollars in code where the language is eight months old, you know, and he wrote it, you know, and it's like him and Lepterris wrote this. Leptaris was a little bit more chill about it. Christoph was, you know, sweating bullets. And I was having a great time. Like, all the community, the vibes were so high, you know, like, yeah, we're all high fives, you know. It's like, this is insane.

This is going to be huge. But then at the very end, there was, you know, the curator, Vlad Zamfir, Iman Gunn Serrier, who does Avalanche now. And this guy, Dino Marx, came out with this thing called the moratorium. And it was like, hey, like, we is too, the Dow is too big to fail, basically. We have to, like, stop and rethink things. The design could have these improvements. And maybe since there's 14% of all ether in existence, and we plan.

on doing proof of stake later, we should just like, you know, try to figure out how to upgrade the Dow and make some improvements to it before we go. And so that's what Slack it was spending most of their time on, like, mitigating this thing and being like, hey, like our first proposal was, hey, let's like increase the security of the Dow. Let's have 24-7 surveillance and, and, like, do better audits and all this stuff. And we were trying to get whitelisted to, you know, collect some funding to do that. And that's when I found out, it's actually really hard to get money out of a Dow.

You have to design the Dow so it's easier to get money out of them because people don't want to spend their money on things. It's really easy just to say no, to spending money. So collect only, collect only never pay. Exactly, right? And that's like the collective, like, yes, of course.

But, you know, spending money on security, I don't know. Right. And I mean, there's nothing that that proposal would have done anyway, though, because maybe two weeks after the Dow was launched and had all the money in it, and we're like scrambling to figure out how to deal with this moratorium, there was a revision to the docs of solidity that was like, oh, yeah, we have this call function before all these lines of code.

Oh, there's a re-entrancy bug. We need to put the call function after all the lines of code. of code. And then we had, and we're like, oh, crap, you know, we don't do that in our code base. So went to Christian and went to other people and like, is this going to cause any problems? And lots of people looked in and they're like, no, no, no. We've made this blog post that was like, hey, there's a bug, but the Dow is safe. Oh, God.

Oh, God. Stefan really got it for that one, man. Do you think that was the post that alerted the would be the future attacker to the fact that there was an exploit there? Yeah, probably. It could have been. I mean, who knows? Who knows? Because no one knows who the Dow hacker is, although there are rumors, of course, of various people that it could be. But no one knows for sure. And I don't think anyone will unless the person actually says, yeah, it was me. Because, you know, it's a hard thing to prove. Different rumors have it like, oh, well, this wallet was associated to this Poloniac's account. And this. It looks like somehow eventually it paid the gas here. So maybe it's connected to this person or that person. But it's like, well, maybe they just sold crypto to some random dude. Right.

So it's hard to say. And. Do you think the Dow hacker was a member of the Dow? They had to be because they had to have Dow tokens. So, I mean, they could have bought it. They could have bought it in the exchange, though. I mean, the thing is everyone was a member of the Dow. There was, Ethereum was the Dow at that time.

If you didn't weren't, right, you, you, you, you didn't hold Ethereum off in exchange, you know? Right. And even Ethereum and the Dow were like almost anonymous. Absolutely. I mean, our Dow curator list was like the Ethereum Foundation, effectively. Right. You know, it's like all the who's who. Because Christoph Yance was like, you know, he was the core tester for all the clients.

So you'd make sure that the clients were in sync for all the launches. up into that point before he started Sloket with his brother and brought in Stefan. Stefan used to be the community manager for Ethereum. And it was like, this was the core, you know, a huge heart and soul of Ethereum was Sloket. Right. And Ethereum was all about like coordination technologies, right? So it seems to be like, all right, like now that we have this Ethereum thing, let's do the coordination thing. So it seems like from the perspective of the early days of Ethereum, it's like, all right, like, we just now, we make a Dow now.

That's what we do. Like we made the, we made the blockchain. Now we make the Dow. Yeah, of course. Yeah, exactly. The Ethereum blockchain was for Dow's. It was for coordination. Right.

So that was the thing. How can you not? And it's a risk-free investment, right? What can go wrong? Yeah. What could go wrong? So after the Dow started collecting, like, way more money than was ever expected, did like the game plan change?

Or like, did what change as a result of that? What changed is the expectations of being able to get a decent chunk of change from the Dow. I mean, we were looking for just a small amount of money to get started as a startup. But crypto numbers are just audacious, is what we discovered. So, I mean, I flew to Germany. I had never met most of the Slocut team at that point. And I flew to Germany. Well, first I flew to London to be with Stefan for a week and then went to Mitvaida, this small town where Christoph Yenz and his seven kids and stuff and his brother. with his with 11 kids you know like this time this yeah it was a while it was fun having dinner

with the families you know uh and that's where i was when the dow hack happened it's like at christoph's mom's house uma yens you know and so how did that notification come into your brain how did you hear that the dial was getting something something was up with the dale well a community member was sending links because we were in uh in in in europe so i woke up at like like, I don't know, 6.30 in the morning or something. And, but people in the U.S. were already awake. And they had seen something on etherskin. And they're like, hey, is there a bug on ether scan?

And is this guy Mo? And he sent me that link. And I was like, looking at it. I'm like, oh, uh-oh. I don't think this is a bug on ether scan because it's on Mist as well. You know, uh, missed was the Ethereum wallet at the time. I remember it. I remember it.

And so then I send that, I'm like, yo, Christop. I'm like demon dialing everyone until I get a hold of Christoph's brother, Simon, who's founder of Ethereum as well. He was the first person, other person to wake up. And like, you got to get a hold of Christoph and everyone fucking else. You know, I mean, we're alerting everybody that we can to look at this because it was, it was at least, yeah, I mean, I basically got to sound the alarm, right? That it was real.

And then. What did you think was happening? Did you say, oh, if somebody is stealing money from the Dow? Or like, what did you, what would you, did you suspect? I mean, because we could, we could see it. It was like a split, the split functions were being called. So it's like, okay, this, I don't know exactly what's happening. But, you know, at first it was like, is someone splitting the Dow with that much money?

Right. But then it was every other block this function was being called. So it was like, oh, no, this is just weird with the same person. And so we could, yeah, we knew pretty quickly it was. was a hack. I mean, minutes. So when there was no hacks before the Dow, how did you guys even know what to do? Like, what was the game plan? Asked Vitalik.

I mean, that was the thing. We didn't know what to do, but we knew we had to say, I mean, I knew that we had to say something to the community. So, but we can't just say something like, hey, we're hacked, we're fucked, you know. We have to give them something to do. do something they can do to help. So the idea was that we could slow down the network. We could spam the network as a community and slow down the hacker while we look at other strategies. So I wrote this like little post in the Slack. It's like at everyone, this is not a drill. The Dow is being attacked. Here's what you can do to help us slow down the attacker. All the geniuses in Ethereum are on this right now, looking at the,

looking at it, seeing what we can do. And then now go. And probably within an hour or two after I made that post, Vitalik was already talking about a hard fork being the best solution. He figures it out like that. Yeah. Yeah, totally. It was like, yeah.

I mean, in the end, you know, Vitalik is the shelling point, right? Metallic is the decider. And it's like, well, if he is on board, then that's what we're going to do. and it was the only solution. I mean, before the hack was even over, that was the plan basically, or that was the strongest opinion. And then it was like, well, what else can we do? Because hard forks, at the time, hard forks were unheard of.

Unheard of. No one was that. Yeah. Well, they're still, yeah, right. So. Well, Ethereum, had it hard forked yet? I mean, it had upgraded to from, from Homestead to, like from Frontier to Homestead. So it had had its first, like, upgraded, planned hard fork.

Yeah. But you're saying this is, like, going to be the first unplanned, like, contentious hard fork. This is a contentious hard fork. This is like, hey, let's make an irregular state transition and hack the hacker, hard fork, right? And what made that possible was that when the Dow is split, the money goes into a child Dow, which then has its own creation phase, where it can raise money from other Dow token hold. for 28 days. And so, and then, and then from those 28 days, the money would then be released. And then the person would have to call a split-dow function to move it to another place, another address. And that would take five, sorry, that would take seven days. So there was 35 days where the money was

guaranteed to be in this one address. That is such a crazy property of this story, because basically, the way that the Dow works is that if you wanted to exit your money from the Dow, you had to have a 28-day waiting period, which saved the whole entire operation. The fact that that was true saved perhaps all of Ethereum, honestly. Yeah. Like there's a potential world where, like,

without that property about the Dow, like the Dow hack would have been successful and correct me if I'm wrong, but like, you, we wouldn't have been able to hard fork Ethereum if the ether got out of the Dow, got out of the contracts, and then intermingled with the rest of the economy because you can't hard fork away at that point in time.

Yeah, because then they send it to exchanges. They send it to different things. Their money is not their money. They get away with it anymore. And we don't want to take from other people. We want to hack the hacker. And it's not even for saving the Dow and the Dow token holders. Hey, they were investing in something that was risky.

Whether they knew it or not, it was the truth. So it's about, hey, we're going to go to proof of stake. This guy clearly has ill intent for the community. Do we want someone with ill intent to hold 4% of all ether in existence? You know, like, because he only stole a third of it. Actually, the, so then I split up, split off with other Dow Ninjas, basically, to form the, first it was the Robin Hood group. And we stole the rest of the money. So the Dow hacker took $50 million.

We took $100 million. Right. And we hacked the rest of the Dow's so no one else could. Actually, we strategically waited until someone else started hacking the Dow. But we had already been playing, like, war games. and had a mass, massive capital. So that every one transaction that we hack the DAO with, we have so many Dow tokens that it's not a quarter.

It's like a stack of $1,000 bills, you know, that we're sticking into the coin machine and pulling out with the strength. Okay. You know, while everyone else is using quarters. So we just, you know, we just dominated the Dow Wars, basically. And it was like you guys were hacking the money first because you guys were the white hats, right?

Yeah. And we had all the money. Right. So we actually waited until someone else. We made sure that we hacked second for two reasons. One was kind of like legal, like, you know, like, oh, we're not choosing to hack the Dow. We're doing it on necessity to protect, right? And then the other reason was honestly, I wanted it to be messy.

You know, like if the Dow hack was simple, then maybe the hard fork doesn't happen. Because it's just this address. There's lots of solutions, right? But then when it's like, oh, there's like, and there ended up being about 10 Dow hackers, right? So that's messy. There's lots of money all over the place. And in the end, we were able to hack all of the small, there were major Dow Wars. It was crazy, man.

It was like, and it was almost like the Matrix at the time, you know, looking at the blockchain and like waiting for transactions that happen. Watch in the ones and zeros. And you're like, the bytecode. And it's like, okay, go, go, go, go, go. you know and and then it was it was insane man those are insane times and that's what an experience yeah we ended up being able to hack all of the small other hackers we there was this other money aside that was called the extra balance and we were able to request the extra balance into the Dow and then make a proposal to

actually spend that money into and to buy Dow tokens in all the sub-dows besides the big one to give us 51% majority in all of the White House, 51% majority in all the other child DAOs that had hacked the DAO and then take over their DAOs and take the money out of them. Oh, my God. And yeah, it was, it was nuts. But we, you know, right before the hard fork, we actually also bought Dow tokens in the Dark Dow.

And, but then the hard fork happened. And we thought, well, the hard fork happened. You know, Ether works. Like, we knew ETC would exist, but we thought it had no value. Why would it ever have value? Because, you know, like, everyone who has Ether has ETC, they would just dump it. No one cares about ETC. And then we started hearing these rumors.

And so we could have kept taking actions to actually stop the Dark Dow on the ETC chain and do like this kind of basically a game of stalemate where, We threatened to hack the dark Dow so he can never make a proposal to pull money out. He always has to keep splitting into a child Dow, into a child Dow, into a Child Dow, and we just try to each hack the child Dow's continuously hacking each other. You just grieve them until the end of time. Yeah, every 35 days. And that was the biggest argument for why we had to hard fork,

because otherwise, every 35 days, we would have to hack the Dark Dow to stop them from pulling out the money. So we just, every 35 days there would be Dow Wars. Like, you'd mark it on the calendar. And that was going to be our job, you know. For the rest of time. Yeah. I mean, you think there's enough spam on the Ethereum network already, you know? So it was a clear argument, had the hard fork.

But then after the hard fork, we thought Ethereum Classic was dead. So we didn't end up, you know, executing the plans that we need to execute to stop the Dark Dow from splitting. And so the Dark Dow had all. already split by the time we found out Ether Classic was going to be a thing. Like people started, there was like this undercurrent of like people trying to buy Ether Classic tokens from large Ethereum holders for a penny all over the place, right? And it turns out that was probably someone related to Barry Silbert, who runs the DCG because Barry Silbert was like the biggest Ethereum Classic Maxi that ever existed.

And he also owned a large part of Poloniacs. And so Polonius, you know, after a while, Polonix listed Ether Classic as on the Air Exchange. And, you know, and Barry Silbert's making these tweets like, I will never hold, or ETC is the only alt coin that I will ever hold, you know. And so all these Bitcoin maxis ended up rallying around this idea that, you know, Ether Classic is a way to destroy Ethereum. Right. Enemy of my enemies, my friend. Yeah.

And that like, well, and also this like social approach. So this is another thing that happened right after the Dow hack, everything was pretty chill in the Dow Slack. But three days after the Dow hack, there was a mass flood of like internet trolls. and we couldn't control the community anymore. It was a social attack. And we found out later that it was likely this group from Bitcoin that was called the Dragons Den, which was like this underground like troll army that would be unleashed on different projects. And of course, we were targeted after the hack as a way to fight, you know, to promote Bitcoin maximumism,

probably by Blockstream, which is probably why I have something against Blockstream. But so that was, I felt like this ETC is like kind of a continuation of this, like how to, this opportunity from Bitcoin Maxis to use the Dow as a way to destroy Ethereum and to use ETC as a way to like basically undercut the legitimacy of Ethereum, saying like, hey, you know, immutability is important. Like ETC is the real Ethereum and all that, that whole story. So when the hard fork was everyone, it seemed that everyone just fell in line with the hard fork idea.

How was the hard fork actually scheduled? Was it scheduled for just like the day before the hacker was able to get their money out? Like when did the hard fork actually happen? Two days. Two days before? Yeah. Just because like this is the two day buffer? So it's like 33 days.

33 days after the hack. And then how did the Dow actually like unwind after that? It was a state transition. And so what state did it change and how did that change the properties of the Dow? And then how did the Dow progress forward after that? Yeah, it was an irregular state transition is the technical term. A lot of people think it was like a rollback like the Dow never happened. But if you go on the blockchain, all those things happened.

It was just on this block. I think it was like 1,900,920,000, right? there was this irregular state transition that basically any contract that matched the bytecode of the Dow, all of the funds that were in it were taken and then given and put in this withdrawal contract. So all of the child dows, which there were well over 70 child dows, split dows that had money in it, and the Dark Dow and all the White Hat Dow's. and the Dow itself, which had like just a few ways of ether, right? All of that was taken and put into the withdrawal contract, and anyone with Dow tokens could then withdraw their money from the withdrawal contract. But it's not that clean.

That's the thing. So I was, I basically self-appointed myself to take the cleanup mission, right? Because there are all sorts of edge cases. The people who had the child Dow money, right? they didn't have Dow tokens. They had child Dow tokens. So they couldn't get their money out of the Dow. They had to get their money out of this, you know, out of their own Dow.

And so they could go to ETC and run some Dow transactions, make a proposal to get the ETC out that they split. But they couldn't get the ether. So we had to make a small contract for every Dow, child Dow. So they could get ether. And basically there was a clawback function in the withdrawal contract. And me, Vitalik and Vlad Zamfir and a few other people, I think six other people, were on the new curator multisig, which then could claw back money from the Dow contract and make sure that, but just money that there were no Dow tokens for. Right. So, and then, and so that we could.

So that was the process of just human verification. And that's why it needed to be a multi-sig? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like, okay, so if there's no Dow tokens to claim the money that's sent to this contract, that's in this contract, then that money would be stuck. So it must be somebody's. So then this multi-sig has to configure all the edge cases. And the other edge case was the people that put money into that last half of the Dow raise, the Dow.

So then those people would, they paid more than one ether for every 100 Dow tokens. So there's the extra balance people. But they actually had a token that they could use then to claim money. So Nick Johnson, who does E&S, Boki Puba, and then us, we made sure that there was a, we audited an extra balance with draw contract. And actually, you know, funny story, I don't know of know, Alexi from TurboGath. He was one of the biggest trolls during the Dowdy days, biggest trolls. And I hated this guy, but I hugged him, you know, but I hated. him for sure. And then he, uh, he didn't, you know, he ended up splitting the Dow. I got, I made,

I had a lot of respect for him when I found out that he was trolling the Dow. He was pissed at the way the Dow was organized and structured. And then he walked the walk. He actually split his money from the Dow way before the hack. But then he didn't get the Dow money out of his split Dow in time. So then his money was taken with the rest of the child dows. And then he stepped it up and saved the day for everyone. He was like our number one Deb in this like edge case scenario and eventually went from being like the most hated

troll at least from Slocket and the crew because he was always really smart and really making it hard, talking a lot of shit. You know, when smart people talk a lot of shit, it's hard. So then he ended up being like our biggest ally in making all the contracts and

doing really, making really smart solutions for a lot of these problems that we were having of how do we give people the money back? And there were... Is there still money in that contract? Or did all of the ether got claimed? No, there's so much money, dude. There's hundreds of millions of dollars that's still unclaimed from the Dow.

Although now Dow tokens have numismatic value, right? So actually... What value? Numismatic? Like an old coin, you know? Oh, okay. Yeah, sure, sure. Like an artifact.

Yeah, it's an artifact that is backed by ether, but there's a, there's a Dow Museum that actually has a kind of a fork of uniswap. I mean, it uses Uniswap, but a fork of the front end. Because the Dow token wasn't an ERC20 token. So it has like, it doesn't work well with Uniswap. But it has enough stuff to use Uniswap if you change the front end in the stuff. So he made like a Dow Museum and the actual

market price for Dow tokens is like well over twice what they're worth if you go and try to pull out the ether. Actually claim the ether? Yeah. I Wow, I didn't know that Dow tokens actually had a market value. Oh, yeah. But, yeah, it's probably because it's off the radar due to the uncompliant ERC 20 token standard that it has. Yeah. And SIE tokens, too, you know, the old dye, I think that's going to have new mismatic value as sure.

I didn't sell any of my SIE. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, no, I still have seven Sye. Oh, yeah, yeah. And I have fat stacks. Yeah. I have fat sacks. I have fat sikes.

Yeah. Nice. Yeah. I do. I think that's a good, that's a good call. And like for Dow tokens, I needed Dow tokens because they would eventually, I would need to pass votes in the doubt. People would send Dow tokens to the Dow, you know. And then, but we could try to get them out and then like refund their money, you know. And so for two years, I was cleaning up all the mistakes people were making in the withdrawal process and making sure that like people could get their money back. Well, mostly through Gibeth and the Giveeth Slack and helping out there. zooming all the way out, what did you learn? Oh, from the Dow? I mean, well, smart contract development is pretty serious business. Always cap.

You know, now I'm working in this token engineering comments, right? And token engineering is a really nascent field of study. And there's a lot of lessons from the Dow in that kind of thing. It's like controlling the configuration space, right? Like, what is possible with your system? make sure you know and can test what is possible. You saw the Faye explosion, right, where they raised a billion dollars. But then, you know, that made their governance token, you know, one of the top tokens in the crypto for a brand new project.

Like, come on in an instant dump and just destruction of the peg and everything went out of control. If they would have just controlled the configuration space, they wouldn't have had that issue. I'm sure they tested to raise, you know, $100 million or something, but they didn't test to raise a billion. So these sorts of things. Also, you know, the biggest lesson was immutability is a cultural, like, idea and concept. At that time, everyone thought immutability was a natural principle of blockchain. Like, it's a technical property. Yeah.

But no, it's a cultural value. And in the end, like, it's one. that's held dearly, but not as dearly as others, right? So the community rules all in crypto. And that's why we call it the Layer Zero podcast. Because it's people all the way down. And so when we talk about immutability as like a cultural icon, I always start these shows off by saying cyphabunks know that their code they write create social systems. It's because the buck stops at the humans that run the code. So it's really important to talk to the humans that run the code. And economics is a social science.

It's not a hard science. This is just the reality of things. And I feel like, and this is one of the things we're doing with the token engineering commons too. It's like, you know, we got to make sure we have conflict resolution. We have to make sure that we have like good community building because that is what this is all about. We're building communities that have an economic underpinning. But we're building communities. So what do communities need?

Well, Griff, this was a fantastic story. And I think this is a great place to end it. But you also want to tell the listeners a little bit about more in detail about what you're up to with Giveth and all that action going on over there. And also just where people can find you on Twitter and stuff like that. Sure, yeah. I mean, man, there's a lot of stories. You know, there's a parody multi-sig hack that the White HAC group did. Like, let me just give, like, the next like four years really quick.

Yeah. Because, you know, that was 2016. Sounds like we're going to have to do this again. Yeah. I mean, there was a year later, well, we started the Dow. We made a mini-me contract. We did a bunch of white hat actions for different ICOs that failed. And then there was the big one, which was the parity multi-sig hack, where we rescued $210 million

and like scared the hell out of the Ethereum Foundation for a little bit. But they, and then gave it all back to everybody. And then there was the next parody multi-sig hack where they just froze all their money. And then, you know, there was a lot of efforts to support open source block explorers and scaling solutions that were all done through Giveth. And Giveth has been a fixture of the theorem community for a long time, especially in 2018, because we've been running off of donation since the beginning. It was basically the White Hat group started Giveth after the Dow.

And it was a place where people went to claim their Dow tokens and understand like all basically customer support for the Dow. And then also like a charity platform. And the idea of Gibbeth and what I've been working on to this day since the Dow is really focused on how do we replace or how do we build a third way to fund public goods. Right now we have governments and nonprofits. Nonprofits rely on sacrifice and donations and it's just a poor incentive structure to say the least, right? And governments rely on taxes, which effectively is sacrifice and the use of force and they have a monopoly over every, over every government. public goods vertical. When a bureaucrat collects their salary, you know, they get it whether they

make good decisions or bad decisions. It's another poorly designed incentive layer. We can do better. And the problem with public goods and the value that governments and nonprofits provide is that they're providing non-excludable value. There's no customers. There's no way to create a business model. But you can create an economic model. And cryptocurrencies have done this all for, for For a decade, you know, Bitcoin is basically an open global payment system. Anyone in the world can create a Bitcoin address and receive currency from peer to peer. There's no cost. Don't get me wrong.

There's also like to send currency, you have to pay a little bit and stuff. But this is a public good. Anyone can create an Ethereum can create a Bitcoin address or an Ethereum address. And there's no, there's no cost to that. And there's no, it's non-excutable. Anyone can do it. and it's non-rivalrous. It's public good.

And it's funded through economic means. We're printing money to fund the development of the network. And so I think that we can take that into meat space. And Gibbeth's approach is to start with the nonprofits. These are the communities that are really doing it. So we have to educate them. They're the ones creating public goods in a bottom-up way. And so let's cherish them.

Let's make it easy for them to raise money on crypto. So with Giveeth, you can just, go on if you have a favorite nonprofit. They log in with their Google account and they collect, they get an Ethereum address, and then they can start raising money like they would on Kickstarter or Indiegogo or GoFundMe. Same process with one difference. They use Ethereum, you know, that's it. And then our goal is to then like, hey, once they've raised a thousand dollars, say,

hey, do you know Google can steal your money? Maybe you should download Metamask, right? Just like one step. And then we create a slippery slope. And we're about to launch a give token, the give token, which will be used for governance over the platform. And the idea is that every time you donate to one of these projects, you'll actually earn give tokens in return. So, and it's not earn like you can, it's more like a tax deductible donation. You still donate and you'll just get reimbursed a little bit of your donation into this governance token, which then allows you to have, you know, governance rights over the gift platform.

we'll use conviction voting and gardens, which is a really cool thing that I probably don't have time to go into. But then that will govern the give economy. But also, you'll be able to use the give tokens eventually to stake behind these projects. And so if you lock your give tokens behind a project, then they will get more givebacks. They're donors. When someone don't donate to a project don't give it, all the money goes to the charity, all of it. There's no, like, we don't take a cut. But then we also give, give tokens for the next five years,

we will be giving away a million give tokens every two weeks to donors on the platform. And up to 75% of the donation. So it's always a donation. You're always losing money when you donate. That's still true. But we're going to reimburse us up to 75% of it. And then with those tokens, they can stake beyond projects, and the projects that have more give token stake.

and locked for a longer time, we'll end up getting, the donors will get more give tokens than projects that don't have any give token staked. Everyone will get givebacks who donates to verified projects, but the staking will allocate more givebacks

to different projects, so we have this curation mechanism. The goal of Giveeth and this ecosystem is to replace the government service, the 501C3 government service with an economy, right? And so, but the real driver, dream is that when there's enough give tokens staked behind one of these projects, we will actually

use those tokens to initialize a bonding curve, which I'm not going to go into so much, but it's super cool because you can create a micro economy with this bonding curve where you can have accurate price discovery for low liquidity markets. But anyway, you end up with printing money for this charity. You just give them free tokens. And then the people who were staking give tokens, they also get a bunch of tokens. Everyone makes money because of magic. internet money. Sorry, but it's true. And they all make money on paper. All those tokens have to be bested so they don't have a run on the bonding curve. But then this project, who maybe they started out, they didn't know anything about Ethereum. They just logged in with Google. But as they

advanced in their education and in their success in the give give a system, they eventually end up with their own economy. And with their own economy, they can start rewarding themselves. And and their community for the value that they're being created. And they can be rewarded and invested into, right? If you, every time a project with a bonding curve will end up with a donation, the donation still goes 100% to the charity. But the givebacks will go into the bonding curve, create project tokens, increasing the price of the project token, and then those project tokens will go to the donor.

The donor effectively becomes partially invested in the future economy of this ecosystem. And people could just come in and speculate on the future donations of this charity. And they could just buy and invest in that economy and have an upside by supporting this charity. Because now there's a bonding curve. There's an economy behind it. And so, and this has always been the dream of give it, as to somehow create the system where nonprofits come in and they educate and skill up. and eventually end up with their own economy.

And so now we have that roadmap in place, and we're just about to execute it. Super excited about that. That's awesome. It sounds like what it is is like a flywheel in a box. Yeah. It's like, hey, bring your nonprofit. Like, we are your flywheel.

Just plug in this flywheel and here you go. Yeah. No, totally. And here's the, you know, it might take years for you to get, you know, educated enough to be able to hold your own keys and understand that people don't have to sacrifice. sacrifice to support you as a nonprofit. Like there's a lot of like relearning.

Like your labor has value. That idea is like the hardest part of this whole process. Just like really just like getting people to appreciate the value that they're, they're creating by, you know, their nonprofit work. But so that's the that's the give it approach. And that's like the kind of indirect let's like slippery slope nonprofits into economies. But then there's the direct like let's just build. public goods focused economies. And that's the common stack approach. So we have our pilot project

with the token engineering commons. And this will be the first public goods focused economy that's like explicit. This is what we're doing. And this is all we're doing. And the goal is to create microeconomies to compete to provide public services. So instead of having a government with monopoly over every public goods vertical. We create a repeatable pattern where anyone can effectively create a public goods startup. They can receive investment and basically follow the normal venture capital model, but instead of their venture capital model requiring customers, their venture capital model is built on an economic system where they are providing public goods as the output, but competing with donations for the input. So instead of it being like,

it's more like, okay, I want to help orphans. I want to, you know, I want to support a food bank. I could donate or I could invest in this economy and get governance rights over how the funds are spent. It's way more transparent. It's, you know, I can be part of a community and have upside. And this is, this is the framing where it's like, it's not about creating like a successful business.

It's about being better than donations. And actually, that's a very low bar. So it doesn't even have to be profitable. Even if people lose money in this system, it's still better than donations. And the dream is that you would have these startups, startup economies, that could actually provide public services. And if they're not doing a good job, someone else could spin up a startup to compete with them. And now instead of having a monopoly over building roads,

instead of having a monopoly over providing public safety, public health, public anything, you have competing people who care, the same people who are working for public services, for governments and nonprofits, the same people that have the same knowledge. But now they have a better incentive system. They have an aligned, they have an opportunity to succeed. Is it just like putting the power of competitive markets behind nonprofits? Pretty much. That's really the bridge that's being built here.

That's exactly the dream. Free market economies as opposed to free market businesses, instead of having the economy that all the businesses are competing in in a free market where, you know, the Federal Reserve just decides to change interest rates whenever they want. Yeah. It's a free market, you know. But it's the economy. Instead of the economy, you could start thinking of it as an economy.

And these are all other economies, but their focus and their intention, they're a purpose-driven. economy. And their purpose is what is exciting for people, you know? I mean, just think about all the people who are, they get excited about a nonprofit cause and they work and they volunteer and they support. And eventually they get burned out because they're competent. They can go work in the free market and like actually make good money, have a nice house, have like all the all the joys of society that when they're working for the nonprofit, they're like, oh man, I wish I had like AC. But I can't afford it because I'm like, you know, helping orphans all day. Eventually, I guess I'll go get a job and sell out. What if you could set? What if you didn't have to sell out? What if the value that was being

created was appreciated? What if we had systems that gave a fuck? Right? That's, that's the dream. And, you know, I'm probably not going to do it wrong. I'm a bit of a, I'm probably going to do it wrong. I'm a bit of a joker. But, you know, we're pushing. And at the very least, we're inspiring. And we definitely know that we learn in this industry from experiments. Everything is an experiment until one of the experiments turns into a success and then it's no longer an experiment. So, Griff, I admire your passion and your commitment to public goods. And I find that what you are doing is very in line with the community around Ethereum at large. So thank you for coming on layer zero and telling us your sword today.

Yeah, thanks, man. And if anyone wants to play with that second side, there are these parameter parties. We're doing this collaborative economics thing. So go follow TE Commons on Twitter, T-E-C-M-N-S at T-E-C-M-N-S. We'll put it in the show notes. Nice. Yeah, and there's these parameter parties. It's like, you know, economies have always been designed by people in the back room.

Don't get me wrong. I love Ethereum, but who voted on a 32-Ether, right? Like, it's just, it's not a thing because economies are for smart people to design. But I think that's what monarchies said about democracy, right? And like, you know. So I think that. we can end this economic monarchy idea and actually start allowing for a collaborative design of economies. And we're doing that for the first time in the token engineering commons. You can design

a bonding curve, complicated conviction voting thing. And we will everyone can, anyone can submit a design and then we can collectively and iteratively fork it and improve it. So it'll be super cool. And if you want like a real token engineering learning opportunity, it's happening right now in the T.E. Discord for the next three weeks. So super cool opportunity. There's your call to action. So bankless listeners, you heard him. Griff, thanks for coming on, my man. Hey, thanks. Thanks for letting me rant. Of course, cheers.