Bankless - MERGED with Tim Beiko & Danny Ryan

Episode Date: September 21, 2022

Tim Beiko and Danny Ryan are two of Ethereum’s lead coordinators, and work at the Ethereum Foundation to shepherd the many parts of Ethereum into the future. How are they feeling on the other side of the Merge? What does this mean for Ethereum? Few (if anyone) on the planet are more qualified to discuss the Ethereum Proof-of-Stake than these two, and we use this episode to reflect on the magnitude of the event and look forward to the future of the network. ------  Swell | Liquid Staking for the People https://bankless.cc/swelldiscord  ------  SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER:          https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/    ️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:                 http://podcast.banklesshq.com/     ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:   LENS | WEB3 SOCIAL PROTOCOL https://bankless.cc/Lens   ROCKET POOL | ETH STAKING https://bankless.cc/RocketPool  ️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum   BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave   JUNO | BRIDGE FIAT TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Juno  ️ ZKSYNC | THE LAYER 2 SCALING ENDGAME https://bankless.cc/zkSync  ------ Resources: Tim Beiko   https://twitter.com/TimBeiko  Danny Ryan https://twitter.com/dannyryan  ------- Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. 

Hey, Bangless Nation. Welcome to another State of the Nation episode where we talk about something big that's just happened. Get into the details of it. And David, what could be bigger than the Ethereum merge? Five days ago, proof of work was abandoned. Proof of stake executed, implemented. We merged the proof of work chain and the proof of stake chain. And we're here to talk about it.

This is kind of a post-game show, I think. Who do we have on? What are we covering today? Of course, none other than Danny Ryan and Tim Baco, the two lead coordinators of this whole entire merge effort, who have been just shepherding the many parts of Ethereum to get this done. And there are many parts of Ethereum. So this coordination effort was no small feat. And so these people have been, Danny and Tim have been at the spearhead of this whole coordination effort.

And so we're just going to talk about what are they feeling right now post-merge? And also, what are they going to do next? When they have been thinking merge, proof of steak, beacon chain for the last, you know, over a year now, what's on the horizon? And also, what drink did they drink after they merged? So all of these super important questions and more when we finally get to Tim and Danny. Yeah, these are the important questions, I think, David. And in addition to that, I think we want to ask what the future of Ethereum is. So this is a major milestone.

And now it's in the rear view of mirror. Where do we go next is the question. And I actually think one of those areas we go next is we need to work on decentralizing our staking providers, in particular our staking pools. I wanted to give a shout out to our friends and sponsors at Swell Network. They are a staking application, similar in some respects to Rockapool and Lido, with some differences, though, David. What is a Swell network and what can folks do if they're interested in decentralizing staking points? pools with this new protocol. Yeah, swell has joined the ranks of Lido and Rocket Pool to be a decentralized staking as a service provider slash Dow. It's like Lido in that it's got a

permissioned validator set that the Dow approves or bumps out. But it's also like Rocket Pool and that it has a permissionless validator set that you can join if you put up a bond. So trying to do the best of both worlds. And this Swell Network is just getting started. So if you want to be on the ground floor of something. You can go and click a link in the Discord. And as a disclaimer, you can see that Ryan and I are also angel investors. So they both sponsored this message. And also Ryan and I are angel investors into SWEL. Make sure you check out that discord, an opportunity to get on the ground floor of something new. So David, got to ask you the question. But I think it's pretty obvious what of the state of the nation is today. What is the state of the nation, though, David? No, Ryan, the state of the nation is merged. Importantly, past tense. The state of the nation is. also proof of stake, as in much of the DeFi economy was previously proof of work and is now proof of stake. So, Ryan, the state of the nation is merged with the future, merged with proof of stake, overall,

just merged in general. Yeah, there we go. How did you like that one? I love it. It's music to my ears. And we are going to be right back with two of the individuals instrumental in making this happen, Tim Beko and Danny Ryan. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Lens protocol is an open-source tech stack for building decentralized social media applications. It is the new era for social media. We all have toxic relationships with our Web 2 apps.

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where you complete on-chain activities and receive a free NFT as a reward. Find out more by visiting the Discord at Discord. dot gg slash arbitram. You can also bridge your assets to arbitram at bridge.arbitrum.io and access all of arbitram's apps at portal.arbitrum.com. In order to experience defy and NFTs, the way it was always meant to be, fast, cheap, secure, and fiction-free. Thankless Nation, we are excited to introduce you yet again to Tim Beko and Danny Ryan. These are two of Ethereum's lead coordinators. They've helped shepherd the Ethereum Foundation and Ethereum itself into the future, including implementing most recently the Ethereum merge.

Danny Tim, welcome to bankless. How are you guys feeling? Yeah, thanks for having us. Pretty good, honestly. I had an inclination. Huge relief, very exciting. It's a culmination of quite a bit of work from quite a bit of people. And it went well.

I would say. I think going well might be sort of an understatement in some ways because this thing was like smooth as butter. And I'm wondering if that was kind of like what you anticipated. I'm sure it was what you hoped for. That was on the optimistic side of things. But did you think it would go as well as it seemed to go? Danny first.

I thought it could go as well as it went. I thought there was a non-trivial chance that a client of moderate use would have had more substantial error where, you know, there's a bit of scrambling, maybe a quick release or maybe like telling 10% the network, you have to restart your node or something like that. But the fact that, you know, I think we saw like a 4% drop. I think we saw some intermittent node failures on one client that a few people did have to restart their nodes. but just like it was very it was it was a dream yeah Tim how'd you think about this was it a dream yeah it was like I you know historically when we have an upgrade I have to do something in the next couple hours whether that's reaching out to some operator or client team like you know I didn't expect the network to go down I was incredibly confident we'd like finalize and all of that but

I expected that somebody somewhere would have forgotten something quite important. And we'd have to reach out to them and coordinate. And that didn't happen, which was kind of wild. Like that he said, there were some minor issues. But even that 4% drop, I think, in a matter of hours, it was back and potentially less than that. So yeah, I don't think it could have gone much better. It went pretty much better than most of even the shadow forks and whatnot. that we did.

So I think we've had like one or two shadow forks go similarly as well. Yeah. You know, and ones later in the process, but just like we've had plenty of times we're like, oh, 20% the network's off. The network's fine as a whole. But like we need to go triage an issue. But we didn't have that. Yeah.

So one of my questions was going to be, what did you think you would be doing immediately post-merge versus what you were actually doing? So Tim, it sounds like you were about to be, you know, picking up the phone. calling a particular client team, perhaps, we're messaging them and saying, hey, this thing's going wrong. We have to troubleshoot this. But instead, you were just watching the merge

and nothing going wrong, I guess. How long did that take to set in before you realize, like, wait, we had a perfect merge? How long until, like, were you in disbelief? Like, what was going through your head at the time? So we kind of knew as soon as we finalized And even before we finalized, so there were some people from the research team who were looking at the stations kind of piling up on the epoch. So before it had officially finalized, we sort of knew we were good.

That was like a pretty big relief. Yeah. Each block, like, so you see the first block. And then there's slots, right? Slots are kind of the ticking of time every 12 seconds. And you can have a block or you can not have a block at each slot. And so we had a block and then we had a block and then we had a block and then we had a block. And like every, every slot that ticked by that we had a block and we had no missed slot,

you know, it was an indicator that like the network's online, the network's very healthy and like this thing's going through. So like iteratively through the course of like 20 minutes as we're waiting for finality, I think we're just more and more like, okay, it's working. It's still working. And it's still working. I think we missed maybe one slot, maybe two slots between the beginning. of the merge and finality.

You know, and it was only like on the third epoch or something, which is normal if you have, you know, 95 to 99% online. It was just like kind of shocking. So we're talking within minutes. You guys realize that the merge is going to be perfect, or not perfect, but as good as one could hope. Iteratively, you know, iterative knowledge until that finality point, you know. But it was looking pretty good.

And so where were you two? I know Danny you were at the EF office in Colorado because I saw a picture of you there. Tim, oh, you were also there, Tim. You guys were right next to each other, weren't you? Yes, I flew into you, Colorado for this. It turns out it's hard to plan a party around a total difficulty. Yeah, yeah, I can relate. We're like, is this going to be a breakfast party, maybe a luncheon?

And then at some point we're like, it's going to, okay, we can have dinner and then it's going to be at 8 p.m. And it ended up at 12.30 a.m. So we're just like, we ended up, it's kind of this funny time in between everyone gathering and like waiting. It's like a lot of like, well, so it's coming. Everyone's like re-rushing. There was a wager pool on when it precisely was going to happen. People were playing Super Nintendo, you know. I had like my iPhone had 20 different Bordell tabs open.

Like you know how you can go in this like Safari view of all your tabs? I would just scroll up and it would just be like bordels everywhere. Yeah, so that's what I did all day. I know Vitalik said he was surprised that, you know, kind of the merch date didn't oscillate as much as some of the people expected. Were you guys surprised by that? Yes. I mean, we did this better than a proof of work hard fork.

Like the timing, the timing when we hit it was like closer than we usually get. I mean, it was what? It was just a few hours off of the total predict. time. Right. Yeah, we were aiming for 12 UTC and I think we got six UTC. So we got like six hours from what we made, what we aimed. Yeah, that was that was as good as it could have gone as well. Tim, you mentioned Vitalik during this interim between 8 p.m. and like 1230 when we were waiting, you made it you made a beverage, right? Oh, yes. That's what I did. Yes, I spent all evening drinking Vatalics.

Because I wanted, you know, by 8pm, I wanted to drink, but I didn't want to, like, be drunk if the merch was happening at 2 a.m. I didn't want to fall asleep either. So, like, the Vitalic was actually perfect for this because you had a little bit of red wine, some caffeinated green tea. So it kept me awake and going all the way until the merge hit. And what's the Vatelic ratio? Is that 85% green tea and 15%?

Am I remembering that correctly? Correct. You have to get that ratio correct or else it's just models the whole thing. Yeah, 804.16 just as a taste. Okay. I have to ask, how was it? Was it? It was all right.

Yeah. I feel like it tastes a bit like cranberry juice. That's like the closest I would put it. Yeah. And so what was the atmosphere like when it happened? Of course, I think a lot of people listening, to bank this right now, maybe they've seen clips from the live stream the moment the merge happened. Maybe they were even actually up and present for it.

What was the feeling? I guess you were, you guys were in the Ethereum office. What was there like shouts, was there high fives? Like, how excited were people? Or it was a pretty chill. Like, you know, this is a dev group and like just silent nodding and big smiles. Like, what was the reaction to all of this? Anywhere to go?

Yeah, yeah. exciting. You know, everyone yelled pandas because we all saw pandas on our logs. And then a bit of like anxiety as we, as it approached finality. I wanted to pop champagne after the pandas had happened. And everyone's like, no, you can't pop champagne until finality. But once, you know, call it 18 minutes in, 15 minutes in, finality happened. Champagne popped, lots of hugs, lots of excitement and cheering.

it was an emotional release for a lot of us. I think a lot of people in that room have been working on or at least following this thing for many years, somewhere between two and five years. And so to see it come together, definitely emotional, emotional experience. I sit up until 4 a.m., and I'd usually go to bed at like 9.30, so that speaks worlds towards the importance. Tim, you have anything to that?

Yeah. No, yeah. No, the atmosphere was great. And I mean, the fact also that it went so well, I was sort of expecting people to kind of be partying, but things not to be perfect. So I would be like, you know, going back to work on my computer somewhere, like reaching out to that staking pool or, you know, that forgot to update or something. No. So like I got to eat cake and like drink the champagne with everyone, which was nice. And it was just wild. It was kind of surreal that like, you know, it just happened on. mainnet. Like you kind of see it happen so many times on shadow forks and whatnot. And the graphs all look the same, right? It's like, it's all this, it's literally the same thing that happens over and over. But to think like, oh man, like this is mainnet, right? Like it, that was pretty well to see. Do you guys have any like any, like any family or friends, like you're in real life friends that, uh, that you could share this victory with? Like so, so for me, right, it's a whole bunch of my internet friends, my Ethereum friends, and they're just as excited as I was, the merge happened and like get to share that victory with them, obviously. But then I go to,

you know, real life and it's like, no, it's like that meme and you're the guy in the corner of the party. Nobody knows the merge just happened. Right? As I walked with my wife the next day, I said that to her. I said, I feel like the guy. I mean, because how big was this, Danny? I mean, we're joking before we started recording that the merge may have single-handedly in one night reduced global electricity consumption by 0.2 percent? Like that happened. It seems like a big deal. It's like, you know, Norway or Chile or something.

Yeah. Yeah, it actually was this moment where at least, because I think my parents and others they like kind of know what I do. It's not very clear than what I do. But they're definitely seeing some of like the energy narrative over the past couple of years. As NFTs became more in the mainstream, I think that became fodder for some of the mainstream media. Like my dad always says like Bill Maher, like it's who talk show person, just shits on crypto because of the energy. It's all about the energy.

My dad's like, so this is a big deal. This is like a game changer, right? because Bill Maher can't shit on this anymore. Yeah, I think, I think so. The dad's right, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no. So it's, it is cool. Like, they had some context.

I think they know I very much believe in this stuff, but also, like, had seen some of the mainstream media criticisms. So it came together to a certain extent. My sister actually was in there. She joined the party, which was cool. I think she just got to see a, one, she thought it was going to happen at eight and then ended up saying until 12.30 in the morning

on a weeknight, but she got to see just some of the energy and see how meaningful it is to this little sub-community. So it was cool to get a glimpse there too. Tim, how about you? Did you get any texts from family friends celebrating this with you?

Or they just have no idea what you do? No, my friends definitely follow it. They're not like into crypto, you know, they might hold ether or whatever, but they're not like, you know, LPNYSwap or stuff like that. So they all thought it was pretty cool. My dad texted me, was like, well, if this went well, why did the price go down?

Yeah. Also, a heat holder, but not far beyond that. Yeah, and I think, you know, have this, I think it was kind of nice how a lot of the mainstream media actually covered the merge. Like, I think it is one of the cases where things, at least, I don't. I don't read everything, but the stuff I saw was pretty fair. So I felt like, I don't know, people around me who like sort of follow crypto, you know, they read like New York Times or whatever articles about crypto or like Bloomberg. It seemed like they had like a decent picture of what was about to happen and the impact.

And so, yeah, I think that that made it easier. Like I don't have to go and explain all of this to them. They were like, okay, this is switching off. Seems good. Seems risky. But if it works, you know, it would be a nice thing. So yeah, that was quite neat. Yeah, I definitely, every time I spoke with someone from mainstream media leading up,

they clearly, playing into the risky part, like, they were clearly looking for people to talk about how risky it was and how crazy it was. And they were always trying to get me to validate, like, is this actually like changing the motorway plan? I'm like, yeah, it's going to be fine. So how did it feel to remove points? 0.2% of global energy consumption. Because I feel like if I was one of you two, I'd be like, nice.

I did that. I guess I helped. Very important. I think to contextualize it, though, it's if the ETH price 10x, it wouldn't be 0.2%, right? It'd be like 2%. The new equilibrium. So it's not just removing like an absolute number today, but like removing this kind of insidious growth that was coupled with the platform that we want to reach like massive global

adoption. Right. So it's not even just what it does for today, but what it does. in the event that Ethereum becomes what we want it to be, what it does for that future. And that felt pretty good. I will caveat this a little bit. So we remove, it's like this energy still exists in the world,

but it's like the world, Ethereum can exist in the world without requiring that energy, right? So I kind of feel good. I feel the good that we can keep doing our thing here and not have like a disproportionate impact. But yeah, I also, I'm always skeptical when people like push that too far. And to a certain extent. I mean, like obviously you can use free energy that maybe wasn't being used in some mining,

but you're also putting demand on it, which is either going to increase the supply or increase the price for others that are trying to get, you know, act in that supply. And I think the growth rate, like you said, is like the part for me that like is the hardest to convey. Like there's all these articles, you know what I was saying. like Ethereum reduces its energy impact by 99%. 99.5, 99.9.9.9. And it's almost like those articles are understating it because like you take the point. Yeah. You take the point where we're at today

and the consumption today and sure you can like get a number, even though there's very wide error bars. But it's like 10 years from now, that number would maybe be 10x bigger. And then, you know, even though looking at the energy impact of proof of stake is kind of a weird thing to do, we also benefit from like growth in the opposite directions. Like if computers get better, if chips get better, like then Ethereum takes less energy to run, right? Because it just uses computers now. So I think that is like a really neat thing. It's like we.

And this platform that we rely upon the price of the asset for security, like we no longer have a linear relationship between that thing that we rely on and energy consumption of the platform. Plain and simple. It's very, very, very important. I just don't think that over like a 10-year time horizon, that there's going to be much social and political appetite for something that has that type of relationship. So we can be much more excited about, you know, price increases

without all of the baggage that was kind of lingering, right? Sort of the narrative baggage, but also the real baggage of inefficient energy is. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, also just, as we saw with one of the first applications to be adopted outside of like our immediate community, NFTs and art use cases. Like, you know, even it's very,

the farther you are from like the understanding of like how these mechanisms work, the more you're just like, why the hell are we bringing all this energy? This makes no sense. You know, it's just, it was not going to adoption, I don't think could be adopted,

mass adoption of that paradigm. And as you said, Danny, like as if ether 10x in price, that would actually have been 2% of energy, global energy consumption, you know, in theory. But then if we eliminated it then,

it would have really just been another nine on the other side of the decimal in how much energy we reduced. So like, what does it really mean to the average person to reduce energy by 99.95% versus 99.995%? Like, it's still the same level of, like, impressiveness and kind of like loses a little bit of the point. And I think, you know, bankless listeners

in the broader Ethereum community, we all kind of know why we did the merge. you know it's a more secure consensus mechanism we're reducing energy consumption so like we know what it means from an ethereum for ethereum at a pretty like concrete level but i want to ask you guys what you think that it means for ethereum in a more broad sense like what else does it mean for ethereum i remember vitalik on the on the live stream he said these are the first steps towards ethereum becoming a very mature system so just want to peer in your guys his heads like what do you think he meant by that? And what does the current state of Ethereum mean inside of its own

trajectory and aspirations to fill its own shoes? Tim, I'll start with you. I'll leave the technical roadmap to Danny stuff because I think he has some interesting perspective on it. I think one thing that like the merge, you know, beyond moving to proof of stake and like reducing the energy impact, I think one thing that I am really excited about is like it shows we can ship complicated things. I've grown like much more. excited about this over the past two, three years. Like, it felt like Ethereum launching was like incredibly ambitious. And then we had like a couple years where we weren't shipping that much on chain.

There was a ton happening, you know, with inclined teams, a ton of research happening. But like, I was kind of concerned like, will we be able to ship like complex things? Or are we just going to make these small incremental changes to Ethereum? And then, you know, we launched the beacon chain, which was wild. And I think it, but we did that. from like the applications. And then 1559, I think was also kind of neat because it showed it was the first time since we launched Ethereum that we changed like the format of the network and not just like adding new things in the EVM or whatnot that with these like flexible blocks and stuff like that. It was kind of neat.

And then the merge is just like 10x, you know, 100x bigger than that. But it's like we're shipping this insanely complicated transition across all of these client teams, which all have to work together smoothly behind the. scenes with no downtime. And we did it. And we did it, you know, obviously it took a while, but like when you think that within like 13 months, we went from shipping like the IP 1559 to the merge, it's not like that long, you know, in hindsight. So I'm really excited. It shows like we can ship like really complicated things engineering wise, both from like a coordination point of view, from obviously like the implementation point of view, but also like from getting the community to run this. Not that we shouldn't like try to minimize complexity across out of those

things, but you know, if we want to get through this entire Vitalik roadmap diagram, there will be more complicated things to ship. And I'm, I'm much more optimistic than I was, say, like, three years ago that, like we can ship all of that. And the merge was like a huge bump on that front. To be fair, you could argue we've been attempting to ship the merge since 2018 with the beacon chain. If you actually encompass that complexity into this, right? So like, which, but the fact that for the past year, that the complexity of the merge has not been writing the beacon chain for all these execution layer clients.

It's just been like the plugging together. And I think that the modularization here is also gives us very much gains in terms of scaling out teams, resources and software. Yeah. And Tim, you touched on this subject, but Ethereum previously, previously, it's actually going to be my question, has this branding of like, oh, Ethereum doesn't chip, it's full of promises, it's got a bunch of ideas, but it doesn't actually follow through on them. How much, like, I mean, I'm talking to the person that is directly antagonist

to this idea, but just like, do you think that that take has any weight left to it at all? No, I think it's wrong. Like, and I've tweeted about this before it emerged, but I think, you know, for what Ethereum tries to do, I think even from the beginning, like since Genesis, the execution has probably been like top tier in that like, yes, it was a mess, but like every, every company that does something complicated is a mess or like project or whatnot. Like it's not, this is not like an Ethereum thing. Like it's hard to do complicated things. And I think the fact that it all happens in the open makes it look much worse for Ethereum.

Like you don't see, you know, what SpaceX looks like, you know, like. but imagine what it must feel like to do something like what they're doing. So I think that is like a big part of it. It looks worse because it's all in the open. And I think the other reason why it looks comparatively worse is there's a lot of shortcuts you can take that don't show in the short term. So you can have like all these other competitors that come and like don't do the hard stuff and look like they're making more progress.

But imagine if you had something like someone doing that, the SpaceX, the rocket would just blow up. And actually, you do kind of see that, you know, like there was Tesla and then there's all these like fake self-driving car companies, you know, who stacked, right? And they all had like all these demos and whatnot. And like none of them actually had like a self-driving car. And I think you kind of get a similar effect where like it's easy to like look like you're doing as good as Ethereum or like you're 90% of it. But then it's like the equivalent of this self-driving car that was just rolling down the hill. So I think we look worse than like we are. And I think. And I do think we have improved significantly in like, yeah, the past like two, three years, it's just been wild the amount of stuff that's shipped. Yeah. You also, you say, people might say, oh, it's just ideas. It's not just ideas. We certainly, but we certainly have more ideas than we are able to ship.

I mean, that's just the nature of like the vibrant research community and the Ethereum ecosystem is like, there's new ideas every day. There's new ways to think about how to solve these problems every day. And like what shipping is is actually distilling those into simple, you know, what are the requisite ideas to get where you need to go? How do we simplify them as most as possible? And then how do we not break this, you know, hundreds of billion dollar network in doing so? And so sure, like if you're just watching the ideas, you're going to be like, they're never, this is never going to happen. They're never going to happen.

That's the point of ideas. It's a point of research, right? And it's also kind of wade through it all. And it's a really good sign if all the ideas, they're most of them. come from like people working on Ethereum because it kind of shows you that like this is where a lot of the energy is going, even though it looks worse from the outside because you see all these ideas that actually don't. I mean, the Ethereum, the Ethereum community is a shocking intellectual powerhouse. We call it kind of the intellectual gravity well of Ethereum is strong

and it just continues to suck people into it. Academics, engineers, random people on the internet. that the force is coming for you. Can you guys talk about that for a minute? So like, who actually made this happen? How did it happen? So I think, you know, so many people's experience with software projects, if they're kind of in the field, is there's some top-down hierarchy structure, right? And we have like agile processes, of course, but, you know, there's a budget and then

there's a program and there's a set of teams, even complicated projects run like this. But it's all very well orchestrated and coordinated and kind of top down. But I don't get the impression that this was how the merge shipped at all and how clients are developed in Ethereum at all. I get the impression that it's maybe completely different. I don't know if there's an analog somewhere else in the open source world or you something like Linux, for example. But Danny, could you talk about that?

Because I think people are kind of wondering the core devs, who are these people? Is it hundreds of them? Maybe somewhere? Like, how are they all coordinated? How does the sausage actually get made here? It's hard to say, even being in the middle of it. You know, and there are maybe some analogs. Like maybe some of the, like, engineering standards.

bodies that have mailing lists and like form new standards that ultimately get adopted by the internet like like SSL and that and stuff or maybe Linux. Maybe Linux has some parallels. They have a there's a there's a foundation. They ship a kind of all ship a kernel. There's many different companies that work on it. But ultimately there's Linus who's like the the BDFL, the benevolent dictator for life who gets to like decide what goes in and uses that for their Linux foundation's political agenda to, you know, Maybe if you go work on the plumbing, we'll put your feature in the kernel, that kind of stuff. So we don't, there's some parallels to this stuff, but I honestly do think it's like a very unique, you know, in this context in that there are, like we were talking about ideas, starts with ideas, starts with research, starts with people thinking about the protocol, thinking about its needs, thinking about the kind of the design tradeoffs, those becoming posts, sometimes becoming academic papers, sometimes becoming prototypes. and ultimately becoming proposed specifications, right? And there's a number of places where people work on Ethereum specifications. Just because something is a specification doesn't mean it's ever going to main net. There are probably more specifications that will never make a domain net than are. Maybe Tim has the answer to that one.

And then ultimately, there are a bunch of people that build software that runs on the Ethereum network. These are often what we call core devs. Who is a core devs? I don't know. I think a mean might be able to answer that one for you. But there's the protocol in the abstract, and then there's people that implement the protocol. And we have tons, we have many, many implementations of that.

There's two layers now, the consensus layer and the execution layer. There's something like five teams on each side. Maybe not all of them. They're a production ready, but maybe five, four. And these people, kind of through asynchronous processes around the EIP repo and other specification repos, through the Magicians Forum, and also through some synchronous processes on our all-core devs call and consensus I recall

hash out kind of the importance of one, they kind of technically vet a lot of these specifications and then try to figure out an optimal configuration of how to bring them to main net, you know, balancing, what are the most critical things. Often security bubbles up is like a very, very, very critical thing. Without security, this thing doesn't exist.

But then there's other things like nice to have features. Those might get less prioritized, but sometimes they do make it into this process. And so it's this kind of like amorphous process amongst specification writers, researchers, prototypers, and these client developers to figure out how to bundle specifications into network upgrades, often called forks, and ship it. The process of shipping

it is also very complicated. The amount of testing, testing, security analysis, and all that goes into that is pretty massive too, and happens also in a very distributed fashion. But Danny, what I'm curious about is, you know, so you're a lead organizer here, and you're kind of also like, I don't entirely know how it organizes. It's like somewhat, it's like some kind of chaotic organization type structure. And I would contrast that, you know, Tim was talking about, we've entered a new era for Ethereum, and this is the Ethereum can ship era.

We've just proved it. We have three recent proof points. Ethereum didn't always have that reputation. I harken back to like 2018, 2019, when it felt like the project was almost like stalling out, even though you might say, Danny, like, research stuff was going on behind the scenes. I remember a very famous part of this, maybe. be was the bear market, but part of it was maybe some truth. A famous tweet from Fred Wilson, Unisguer Ventures, and he was like, Ethereum just doesn't

know how to execute. They have the lead, and they are falling. Someone calls Silicon Valley. Right. This is not how, this is basically what he said, because this is not how you build startups in Silicon Valley. How do you build startups? Well, you have startup organization.

You ship fast, you break things, of course. We'll adopt that in the startup mantra, but you have to have good. governance. You have to have accountability. You have to have some structure. And the idea was that Ethereum would just fall prey to the tyranny of structurallessness. And it would never actually get anything done. Why? Because Silicon Valley knows how to build software. We did Facebook. We did Google. And who are these Ethereum people trying to like make this thing happen with like what, volunteers around the internet? Like how does this even happen? Can you? It's funny because the internet actually is much more built like that.

Obviously, you know, rather than these companies that were built on top of it, maybe that's the parallel here is that like, Ethereum's not trying to be a company. Ethereum's trying to be the internet. It's trying to be a foundational protocol of the internet. Like what motivates them? Why did they get involved? But this is like interesting because I think if Ethereum is trying to be the internet, like what a lot of these people are trying to build are like web browsers, right? Like when you think of like a client, it's effectively like a web browser for Ethereum. And the original parody client actually had a UI, like a web browser, UI.

why now they've all ditched that. But, and I think that kind of gives you a good feel for like, why would they do that? It's like, well, why do the people build Chrome or Firefox or like Safari? Like, you know, different organizations want to like own access to the network, like the interface, you know, the access on the network for a bunch of reasons. Like, you know, and so I think you can get this mix where like you have these organizations that are financially motivated. Like consensus is a company, Sigma Prime.

is a company, never mind is a company, right? Like they need to make money at some point somehow. They don't necessarily make money on the client itself or need to ever do that, but like they very much need to like survive in the long run as an organization. And they, I think they do provide like the people working on this are not all just like random volunteers, basically. Like a lot of them, I think, do see themselves as a company as like professionals who need to ship high quality software.

And that's like, we get a lot of like, you know, let's say Fred Wilson was complaining about through that. The thing we don't get is like the top down roadmap, right? Like this is the other thing that's like 10x easier in a startup. You just, you know, you have the VP of product, you know, talk with a CEO, say, okay, we're going to ship these three things. And then that's done, right? And, you know, and then you can just kind of execute on them.

We can't do that on Ethereum for like many reasons. Like the first is just like the people who write the code. aren't the people who run the software as like with the majority of the stake or the majority of the notes on the network. So it needs to be like this weird sort of conversation across all these places of like what what is the thing we're converging towards? And otherwise, you know, client developers can write code for a bunch of stuff. But if the community doesn't want to run the upgrade, then that was useless. And similarly, if the community might want a bunch of stuff to be possible on Ethereum, but if they can't convince client developers that there's value to it,

that it's safe. Yeah, safe is the big one. You know, usually they can't convince client developers that it's safe. But then the code doesn't get rid of, right? And it doesn't go live. So I think this is the part where like from the outside, it's incredibly messy. And even from the inside, it is incredibly messy because like there's no like VP of product who can be like, okay, we ship this thing.

But in terms of the contributors themselves, I do. feel like most people could be spending their time doing something else because they're smarts, they're motivated. So, you know, they want their time working on Ethereum to be valuable. And, you know, I think that does create a pressure to like ship meaningful stuff. Yeah. So, I mean, there are certainly, there are organizations that have structure and are able to ship, but they're like a piece of the larger kind of amorphous puzzle.

I think Ben Edgington referenced a, was an article. from 1999 about Linux, the cathedral and the bazaar, and how the Ethereum process is much more about, is a bizarre. It is a place where there's lots of different specialties, lots of different things going on. And like sometimes if there's something missing, naturally somebody's going to kind of show up and fill in the gaps because there's a motivation to kind of be a part of this thing.

I will say, so you said in 2018, 2019, we weren't shipping. there were Herculean efforts going on on on on guest specifically. I mean, certainly on the beacon chain stuff, like that was all being worked on. But like, sure, the feature set that users saw being upgraded in guest was very minimal.

But like the amount of work going on into like sustainability of that of guess in the context of main net like state management, state access database optimizations, all that kind of stuff so that like it can't. so that it can handle state growth and not be dast off the network and optimizations in sync and other things like that. Like that was happening. That was very, very important, critical.

But it was just like it wasn't felt. So I think it's important to note as client developers, there's always kind of as many streams. But you can think of two streams, like shipping new features and maintaining the client, right? And like it oscillates between how much they're doing of one or the other. In 2018 and 2019, there was like a lot of critical of, the of the ladder of that maintenance of the client. And maybe that goes back to what Tim was saying was that, you know, there was a lot of shipping. But if you tell me what an optimization inside of geth looks like, Danny, I have no clue what that means. Sure, because it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter to you. It's up that like it kept the network up. But yeah, but yeah, I will notice when the network goes down. And so I haven't been seeing the network go down anytime soon. But Danny, I want to zoom in and just get this a little bit more concrete if we can. The way I've kind of pictured you and your job coordinating the arrival of the merge and proof of stake. And maybe this is incorrect. So we can start there. It's like you just go to the heads of the client teams. And maybe Tim, this is also maybe your job as well.

You just go to the heads of the client teams and just like, all right, like, we need to make sure that this part works with the other client teams. So like you drill down into prismatic and you talk to like Preston and Raul and be like, hey, are you guys coordinated with like the other client teams? Are you guys all Gucci over there? And so, like, first question is, like, how many, if that's what you were doing, like, how many people were you interfacing with on, like, a semi-regular basis for, like, the months leading up to the merge? Like, can we actually, like, put that into a number? And then, like, if that's n plus one, where you are, and Danny's, Danny's N, N, Presden Van Loon and Raoul are, like, N plus ones, as in people that Danny actually interfaces with, how many people are they interfacing with that are also working on the merge, right?

Like the question really is how many ETH does it take to make a merge happen? And like is there is it possible to put these things into numbers? I don't spend a lot of my time knocking directly on doors, right? I actually, um, a lot of my time on upgrades is spent writing specifications. Okay. And, uh, communicating and educating and coordinating and coordinating around those. So like, and then dealing with the feedback loop around that, right? And a lot of that isn't like, hey, Preston, have you seen this thing?

A lot of it's like, this is bubbled up as very important, pinging the right people or making sure it comes up in kind of a group setting call to kind of work through and get through. So the coordination mechanisms by default are very good, right? We have, we have GitHub, we have public channels and stuff like that. So like I don't have to, I don't have to be a hub, right? Like I have to sometimes it's like a matter of knowing what's missing and saying, hey, can you do this or hey, like I really think you should take a look at this, that kind of stuff.

But a lot of it is just kind of like keeping your eye on the things and making sure the pieces come together. And sometimes it's a bit more about like seeing seeing the future in the sense that, okay, we have to write the software. We have to write tests for the software. We have to do test nets, just do this and do that. So it's a matter of like making sure that the people that are going to be involved in this piece of the puzzle are aware that that piece of the puzzle is coming, right? And that they need to keep their eye on this so they can trigger that piece of the puzzle.

So, you know, it's it's a lot more kind of these like soft things kind of maneuvering around. And then also like being the more that I think Tim and I both are like moderate to deeply involved in the technical. at times so that we can see, so it helps us kind of see how those pieces of puzzle put together and knowing how to get ahead of things and make sure they come together properly. Tim, any thoughts on this? I guess to answer your end question, if I had to like my sanity, probably like I must have been in touch with 25 to 50 people. And definitely like, you know, 25 would be like multiple messages, multiple interactions,

per week, right? Like, you know, and then 50 is maybe if you're like, you know, once every one or two weeks. And then you probably five to 10x that like in terms of number of people. Like for sure, like, you know, 150-ish people working roughly full, like not necessarily full time on the merge, but for whom the merge was like their main thing, that seems roughly right. But then if you add like a bunch of adjacent folks, probably like double that or something. Like, there was not like a thousand people contributing. I mean, if you start thinking about all the professional node operators and staking, then you get into quite a many.

But I don't think that's what we're coming. Yeah, but if you're thinking about people writing like code that then gets used by professional node operators or average node operators, I say my upper bound of like loosely involved is like on the couple hundreds, tightly involved is like on the hundredish range. Yeah, and that might be variable even within a client team. They might have like at the peak have had four or five people dedicated to getting out the core merge feature set. And then for the past three months, four months might have been more like one to two owning it. And then if they needed backup because there was like some big hole or minor specification change, that more people would be jumping in.

So it's kind of overplace. The fact that we can't really pin down a number is awesome. Well, let me just go to the Ethereum ecosystem org chart. running a quick analysis. You're muted, Ryan. Well, honestly, this is what I wanted to kind of ask, because I think that there's a, like, a wisdom here and a resilience and a strength.

And I would even say a scalability here that Silicon Valley doesn't benefit from and can't benefit from. Because this thing is so decentralized. And actually, when you kind of look back and you actually see that, no, it can ship, which is the main charge, if you have like a decentralized community, it can't ship. No, it can ship. Then you look at how actually strong this thing is and how many individuals are involved because you not only have all of these separate gigabrains in all of the different client teams, you also have the rest of

the Ethereum economy working for you, right? And like staking providers and, you know, bridge software that's being built. And infrastructure applications like, and Fiora and EtherScan. But then you also have like the roll up centric roadmap, which further creates innovation on, I think, what we'd now call the execution layer of Ethereum with teams like Arbitrum and Optimism and like Matter Labs and ZK Sync and Starkware. And all of these teams with their own set of like gigabrains are now economically incented to continue hacking and developing on a.

Ethereum code base and like bringing that back into the core. And so when you start to like look at the different rings of the onion here, you have maybe like this core team and like these, you know, coordinators in the core dev group. But like there are so many other layers to this. And this is a scalability that a Silicon Valley corporate structure could not possibly seek to emulate. And it allows you to like. the ecosystem. Yeah, it allows you to expand

in so many different directions at once. It also has a resiliency, right? Like, Ethereum needs to exist if the EF ceased to exist. Ethereum needs to exist if Nethermind closes shop. You know, like this, and that's a design constraint

that like Google doesn't have, right? Like Google exists when Google exists. Like that's, they're the same, one of the same. Whereas the Ethereum protocol in the abstract and Ethereum, network, you know, are independent of any one of these actors. And that is a, like, very important design constraint of Ethereum. And thus it builds and operates in a way that is just fundamentally different than a corporation. Danny, Tim, when we come back, I think we want to talk about

what's next. What's next for you individually? What's next for the devs? And then also, So what's next for Ethereum? We've bitten off the merge. We've successfully completed it. Is that the end? Are we ready to ossify? Is there more ahead? Guys, we'll be right back with these questions for Danny and Tim.

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and connect to other wallets in Defi apps. So whether you're new to crypto or you're a seasoned pro, it's time to ditch those risky extensions and it's time to switch to the brave wallet. Download brave at brave.com slash bankless and click the wallet icon to get started. And we are back with Danny Ryan and Tim Baker. I think if I were you guys and we were post-merged, I'd be having this like big existential crisis. It's like, what the hell do I do next? How does it feel to be on the other side of it? Do you guys know it? Are you guys taking a vacation? You're going on a break? What's like the next thing, the next chapter of your guys' lives?

uh, Danny, I'll start with you. Um, I spent a lot of time on Friday and Monday and Tuesday doing a deep dive on the 4844 and withdrawal specs. Wow, no breaks,

huh? I think I was totally off on Thursday. I was useless on Thursday. I was useless on Thursday. I stayed up until 4 in the morning. Right. Um, but yeah,

pretty much I want us to be in a good position to have Shanghai conversations and, uh, keep, keep things moving. I think withdrawal is very important to begin. community. So there's a bit of testing and refinement going on there as are scaling proposals like 4844. And, you know, again, one of the things that I really enjoy doing and I think I have a good insight into is kind of writing and reviewing specifications. So I want to make sure that I get

that done so that we can keep moving. But yeah, I need a break. After DevCon, I am taking a not insignificant amount of time off. Okay. So in middle of October, second week of October, or a devcon, you can take like a month off? It's looking like three weeks. Three weeks? You know, it may be up for debate. Okay. Tim, Tim, you taking a break? Anytime soon?

So actually, I think a break, break before to merge. I don't write code for this stuff. So, you know, when my job sort of picks up now, I guess, in a way. Oh, now that the merge is out of the way, you can ship so many more things. Now we need to talk about which we ship next. And that's kind of what I do, right? And I think we had purposefully like stopped talking about that for the past like four or five months just because we wanted to focus on the merge and it was so big. But you can think of it, if it's like a dam, you know, like we kind of closed the dam and the pressure is built up.

And now people really want to talk about what comes next. So yeah, that's what I'll be focusing on. And that said, you know, we didn't want to have the client teams like jump into. the planning Shanghai the day after the merge. So like we're going to be canceling a couple awkward devs and consensus they were caused in the coming week. So people can like have those conversations async and you know slowly kind of wrap their heads about

around what's being proposed. What are the different options here? But without feeling like they need to kind of attend every week. Otherwise they might miss like the whole upgrade scope changing. So I think it's like laying the groundwork so that you know, after DefCon like once people come back and they've, they've had a time to disconnect and kind of refresh. We have a good idea of like the general picture and then we can kind of finalize the scope

and start implementing the stuff. In some sense, consensus layer teams have been working on the merge for four years straight. You know, ever since they started working on the beacon chain, the beacon chain was always intended to become the consensus mechanism of Ethereum. That's all they've been working on, you know, is getting it ready for being the consensus mechanism with theorem. So I think, you know, everyone is. taking a moment. You know, is that, is that a week? Is that a day? Is that a month? And when exactly?

Hard to say. But everyone's taking a breath at a well-deserved moment. Absolutely. Super well-deserved. Yeah, four years straight of just proof-of-stake merge, proof-of-stakes merge, I'm sure. You need to take a break to be able to come back with a new frame of mind. And it sounds like the answer to the question of what's next for Ethereum is Shanghai, the Shanghai hard fork. But- By definition. But, yeah, well, yes, by definition. But also it sounds like the Shanghai hard fork hasn't totally been defined. But Tim, to the best of your ability, can you kind of just like, you know, using our going westward metaphor, can you explain what's in the path ahead of us?

What is the Shanghai Fork mostly going to be about? Yeah. So, like you said, it's still very much in flux. And part of the reason why we stopped discussing it is because like three, four months ago, at least on the execution layer side, people were starting to make decisions about what should maybe go in and whatnot. And it felt like it was so early,

like we didn't have the code for the merch done and we were already committing to all these things for Shanghai. And on the execution layer, we have this concept of like considered for inclusion, which is like a soft commitment to EIPs, because usually we don't know how big EIPs are until we actually start writing the code. So considered for inclusion is when we say,

look, this sounds like a good idea. It seems like it's not going to break Ethereum. We'll try and implement it. And usually if there's no issues, we would move it to main net, right? If we do find something, we might fix it, but it's not like a strong commitment that we'll ship this no matter what.

And then the consensus layer side has a completely different process of just like making PRs to the specs. And I can let Danny chime into that after. But at a high level, from the execution layer side, the two main things we had sort of soft committed to our beacon chain withdrawals. So the spec for that is pretty much done.

Like Danny was saying, he's been refining it in writing tests. And this is something we did leave out of the merge. And there was always this idea that we would have to get to it shortly after. So we have soft committed to that. It's not implemented yet. The second big thing, potentially not as big,

but it's this EIP called EVM object format. And this is like a neat thing. people have been trying to improve the EVM for years. And there's always this question of like, well, what do you do with existing smart contracts? If you add new functionality, are you going to break everything that's on chain? So the Epsilon R&D team has come up with like this really smart thing where we can define versions of the EVM on the network and have contracts specify that they use a new version. And then you introduce new functionality only in those, but everything that already exists kind of

maintains its current behavior. So there's no changes there. And so that's the second kind of big thing we'd already self-committed to. There's a bunch of other smaller thing we've soft-committed to, but you can think of them as basically one-line changes. They're not in practice, but they're all very minor features

that add, yeah. One line of feature and then like 10,000 lines of testing. Yes, yes. So there's a couple of those. Some of them actually aren't even that much testing because they just add bounds that were implicit on the network and we just make those explicit. So things like, like, but basically the two big things we've self-committed to are these withdrawals and then this EVM object format. There's a whole other list of things that's being proposed. There's an Ethereum Magician tag now called Shanghai dash candidate.

So if you go to Ethereum Magicians and you search for that, you can see the whole list of things that are being proposed. And this is what over the next month people will discuss and kind of wade through. And then we'll see if we update our currently existing list with other stuff. If we remove anything, you know, because we think it's either no longer irrelevant or because there's some like unforeseen complexity. So that's what we'll, yeah, right there. So if you click there, you see like say the first one there, you know, Shanghai candidate, EIP 3074, but then you can see there's a tag under it called Shanghai Kemp.

it. So if you click on that tag, oh, you're actually already on the page. Yeah. So that tag will show all of them that are being considered. And the discussions on them. So yeah, so that's basically it on the execution layer. The consensus layer is a bit different. So Danny, do you want to kind of walk through how that works? Right. So the consensus layer, the beacon chain was architected in parallel to the proof work chain. We all know this and then it was merged. But in doing so, the specification process was independent of the EIPs at the time and ended up in its own repo, consensus specs. And here features are proposed as kind of like little branches of code. It's an executable specification where they also do testing and issues in PRs.

We discuss them. We do expect this process to over time inherit and unify a bit more with the EIPs, And especially with some of these features are like cross layer. So like withdrawals are not just a feature on the consensus layer. They're a feature on the consensus layer that interacts with the execution layer. So again, and I think these things will converge over time. But one of the big things that we have on the consensus side that's been spec and is up for discussion or refinement or the withdrawals, the consistent layer analog to the withdrawals.

Then another feature on the consensus layer that has been spec is up for discussion is the 4844, or both of those being cross-layer. There might be, you know, I think especially between now and DevCon, there could be like a little thing or two that pops up and ends up as kind of, you know, analog to one of those like one-line changes, like some sort of like weird edge case that's worth cleaning up. You could expect maybe something like that pops up. But those are the two big ones under discussion.

I think the famous ones, the ones echoing kind of the user and investor community, in our years are definitely withdrawals. So people want to know if they can get their ETH back, right? And when, at what point in time? And the other one, of course, is, as you just mentioned, Danny, EIP 4844, which maybe is the most famous EIP since EIP 1559. 1559, excuse me. Apparently not that famous.

Yeah. And so this is one proto-dank charting. And this is all about, I mean, we've done entire episodes on EIP, P4844 on bankless. This is all about kind of the scalability of data and providing that as part of the roll-up-centric roadmap. So this is the big- Proto, because it's an iterative way to get there.

We get some scale and we let the foundation to get more scale. Just one small point on that. It's also because of Proto-Lamda, right? Correct. And it's dank because it's dank. And it's also dank because it's don't good. Okay, that's just fantastic Ethereum trivia. I wanted to get out there.

So I guess maybe zooming out, right? What problems would you say Ethereum still has yet to solve in its red map? Because I think maybe you guys have a divergent view here, but I think everything we've seen from the core dev community is that Ethereum at a protocol, from a protocol perspective, like will ossify at some point in time. There will be fewer changes over time, right? Like at some point in time, your jobs will be done. And Danny, you could go open that coffee shop. And you've always wanted to open, right? But like that day is not today.

It's not yet. So we've gotten through the merge. But what are the other core problems? And I guess the high level of the merge is now we have staking. And we no longer have proof of work. We've cemented Ethereum's monetary policy and ether's monetary policy as well. But what other big problems are there to solve, would you say, Danny? So my lens, when I'm thinking about what needs to happen to L1 protocol, is first and foremost, we need to get to functional escape velocity.

Patelix written about this, essentially the minimum amount of functionality on layer one to be able to do, extend and build and whatever on top of it so we can stop changing it. And then my lens from there is, and I talk about this all the time, security, sustainability, and scalability. Right. I think we made it massively forward with proof of stake on the security front, also on the sustainability front. sustainability is nice. It encompasses a number of things. Obviously, we've got that environmental sustainability stamp of approval, but now there's other types of sustainability.

So like the sustainability of the protocol from a standpoint of state growth, right? So we need this protocol to be sustainable such that we don't need to intervene with it, abusing that term because sustainability, environmental sustainability, and protocol sustainability is probably a little bit different. But, you know, so some, We need a bound state growth. We need a bound node resource requirements so this thing can stay decentralized. And we need scale, right?

And so that's roll-ups with the nice L1 data multiplier through dang sharding. There's probably some other very important things that could manifest inside of Ethereum like the beacon state route landing in the EVM or BLS signatures landing in the EVM or things like that. A lot of this stuff personally, I consider nice to have. And on our ossification journey, maybe they'll make it in or not. But really, for me, it's this thing needs to be secure, needs to sustainable, and needs to be scalable. And we need to do the minimum and simplest approach to get those three things in a place where we don't have to touch the thing anymore. So, Danny, are we like five years from the coffee shop? Are we 10 years from the coffee shop?

Is it longer? I think five years is actually very, very, very reasonable. And the nice thing is especially like sustainability, like the node architecture, sustainability, that's something that isn't going to bite us in the ass tomorrow. It's something that we have to fix, but it's going to, it can take time. And the scalability, we're getting, we're getting scale to roll up today and we're working on multiplying that iteratively over time. So like it doesn't actually feel like there's a massive fire and that we can do this right.

we can do this over the next three to five years. Tim, what about from your perspective? I think five years is optimistic, but I think one way you could do this, if you really wanted to never touch the core protocol again, is you can segment this between changes that require consensus level changes, not consensus layer, but just like protocol rules. And you can think of something like on the execution layer, like it's stateless Ethereum, right?

Like we need to change the tri-structure from one thing to another, this requires a hard fork, potentially many hard forks. But then once that's done, there's some stuff that you can potentially do outside of the protocol. It's almost like semi-osification. You can have something where like, example, EIP 4444, which is about dropping the history requirements for nodes, but something that doesn't change the protocol rules for theorem, it changes the client behavior, right? And it helps to get kind of a more more accessible nodes and greater decentralization. So I could see a world where like, you know, maybe we have five-ish years left of like

consensus layer changes. And then I'm not optimistic that will be done then, but I could see maybe the second half of that decade is like things that clients agree. So like the protocol rules don't change, but the implementations of them all kind of change in tandem to be to be better. For example, you could have a better state sync protocol. And that you could do. it in eight years and doesn't change it they're young.

But even EIP 4444 doesn't need any protocol changes, right? Yeah, that's kind of like a sync protocol change. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I could see, and same with something like stateless, you know, you could like front load all of the protocol changes, so I don't only start gossiping the witnesses and building the blocks separately after that, right? And the rules of the protocols don't change from that.

So I could see that. I don't get it all done in five years, but if you give me an extra five where you don't change the protocol rules, I think we're going to not, I think it's going to get harder and harder. And for good, like, because it's just going to be harder and because it for good reason. And so, like, things that take 10 years, I don't think are going to happen. Yeah. So I agree with that.

I feel like the bar that a feature needs to hit or like a potential protocol change needs to hit, needs to be considered. Yeah. It's getting higher. And the reason is just there's more stakeholders, right? Like, there's just more people who need to agree. it's a good idea and there's more impact if it's if it goes wrong. And usually we're also at the point where like there's not many free lunches anymore on Ethereum. Most of the things we're considering have like tradeoffs and by virtue of having your tradeoff, it's like you need to get people to

agree to one side of the tradeoff. And that gets harder and harder as the community grows. So I think we have this natural tendency towards there. And the question is like how do you strategically fit all the potential changes such that they're like doable before the community like is too big and too hard to coordinate for something like that. And I think the message we're hearing from both of you is that there's a lot of work ahead and like years of work ahead to pull off the entire Ethereum roadmap. And I know we're all here to like because we believe in crypto, because we think that Ethereum will make the world a better place. But also, Tim, I know it's your take that that's not

necessarily inevitable. And maybe this is a reason that we actually have to put in the hard work. Bankless Twitter account recently tweeted out, what's your most cancelable crypto take? And I thought, Tim, you had a really interesting and insightful take here, which is it's not a given that crypto will actually make the world better, is what you said. And we should heavily caveat such claims and push back and work hard to make sure it actually ends up being the case that the thing that we are building actually does make the world better. Can you talk a little bit about that, Tim? Yeah, I feel like the bankless Twitter baited me right before this call. Yeah, look, I think, you know, especially with the merge now and I think in general, like the

space, we want to believe we're building something that makes the world better. And I think, to be clear, crypto, even today, brings it on a ton of positives, right? And the question is like, 10 years from now is the balance a net positive or a net negative. I think it's sort of recognizing that, like, you know, there's still many scams. The environmental bit was like concerning up to recently. And, you know, things like privacy, there's a world where, like, crypto enables mass financial surveillance on a scale that's, like, never been seen. like lays the path for like central bank digital currencies. You know, we kind of build the technology that's like governments would never have thought

to build and then they just co-opted and build kind of the worst possible version of it. And, you know, I'm not saying that that's the likely outcome. I'm saying it very much is a possible outcome and that's something that like as a community we should think about. I think somewhat paradoxically at the protocol level, it's almost where we have the least impact on a lot of this stuff. I think we can help, you know, anything that helps make joining the protocol and participating as low requirement as possible is good, because it means you just get like a more diverse set of participants and it's harder to capture. But I think, you know, when thinking about like what applications we build, what scaling solutions we build, I don't know, that's something that's very much on my mind.

Like, are we sure that this is not just going to be used by like some government or just use as a solution? is and you know force everyone to say use us DC and then that's actually a worse status school than say bank accounts on many respects. The joke I was giving with Ryan is when we were talking about this tweet before the live stream podcast before the slide from Tim was that oh sweet we just shipped a theorem to proof of stake now our Ponzi sis platform is like super efficient it's going to be great. Right. Unsensurable. And I think I'm yeah I think you know scams are like almost the easiest version to like defend against because like people just kind of learn like you look at the early internet right there were tons of scams and they like mostly went away or got like predicated so i'm i'm not i don't lose sleepover scams i think like privacy and like

financial surveillance is probably the biggest one that i think is is a challenge and um and it's it's it's a challenge not only because like the tech is hard but also because there's a world where you build privacy and that's also like a terrible world like you you know yeah it's very bad ways to build privacy software so like yeah it is i think it's super interesting there certainly can be with any of these new technologies many unintended consequences that that become unleashed i i know in particular of course you guys i'm sure i've been following like the you know ai type discussions and ai ethic type discussions in a it's a bit of a cop out to say they're unintended what i'm saying is i think you know we can very much predict the second order of

effects. And I think there's a world where like, and the AI, the AI risk people will tell you that as well, you know, like with Google and when they'll criticize Google and open the eye, it's like the people there are very well aware of the risk, but they're driving in that direction, thinking, you know, they will somehow avoid them. But it's not like an unintended consequence. It's like a second order effect you chose to dismiss because you thought you could like navigate around it. And we very well might, but it's, Yeah, it's not a given, I think. This kind of stuff breaks my brain a little bit, but Danny, do you have a, do you have a take on this?

My take is that without such technologies that blockchain's enable, we're on a crash course anyway, with the massive corporate surveillance and government surveillance and kind of the manipulation and control going on here. And so at the very least, this intermediates that trajectory and allows us to kind of of rethink and re-architect what's going on. Obviously, we could re-architect it badly, poorly. But one thing that blockchains do provide that traditional structures do not is that even if we end up in a weird or bad equilibrium, you can do new things. So if we end up in a world where we're using two roll-ups and they're massively surveyed and controlled, you can actually build

another roll-up that has privacy. Right. So like there's a certain matter of, choice, as long as we have a neutral base layer, that the stratum provides for humanity. Obviously, there can be structures beyond that disallow us from exercising that choice. For example, if we were regulated to use the government sanctioned roll-up, we might have issues in exercising our choice to create a new privacy roll-up. But that kind of extra protocol, consideration aside, these protocols allow us choice that is not exist in our current structures. So I'm, you know, I'm a pessimist.

I'm trying to be the optimist right here. But, you know, I think that that's my optimism take here. And I did caveat my tweet with like a more optimistic one, which is like, it's really hard to have this conversation because when like critics will compare you to like perfect, right, to the perfect world. And they'll say, you know, like Ethereum is like not perfect because of X, Y, and Z.

But then like Danny was saying, like the status quo very much isn't. Right. So ideally all you want is like a net improve over the status quo. But to get that, I think you need to almost hold yourself to like a much higher bar internally. But yeah, it's a very tricky thing to do when, again, all this happens in the open and there's no top down.

You know, it's not like I can choose what privacy solutions, Ethereum will build, right? Like, you know, I can like. Or even more so that people will build on top of it. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So like, I, you know, like I can do many things like an individual. but it's like, it's not like a top-down thing. So it's like a tricky, yeah, it's almost harder than the AI problem

because the AI problem, you know, you have like a limited number of organizations with enough hardware to actually meaningfully make progress. And then you can like steer them. We have like this amorphous blob of people all working on it. Yeah, and that's a harder thing to. Yeah, this is interesting. It is interesting that it's kind of out of the core.

devs hands, right? And it's, you know, it's back to kind of the layer zero, back to the community. And I do appreciate something that you were saying is like these types of takes or not takes that you'd get canceled for in Ethereum. Like I feel very proud that the Ethereum community is always one that kind of is its harshest critic at times. And I hope we're able to preserve that moving forward because I think that's gotten us to the merge and gotten us to this era of momentum around shipping. Tim and Danny, we just want to want to thank you guys both for joining us and also for helping to deliver this.

I know it's not just you. Of course. You are flanked by and represented by dozens, hundreds of different. Accountable number. Like developers from around the world who helped make this happen. But as kind of their voice and their face, I think on behalf of a community of users and passionate people, individuals on the bankless journey. like sincerely thank you we appreciate you we appreciate all of the core devs all of the researchers

who made the merge happen uh and uh it's feeling very much like the the future of ethereum is bright thanks to your work thank you yeah and echo that shout out to everyone uh involved in this it was a colossal effort speaking of which by the way we are having vitalic on the show tomorrow what should we ask vitalik guys any any burning questions in your mind danny or tim I talk to him all the time Ask him Yeah I think Vitalikin thinking a lot

He's been drawn into the AI Conversations And where that's going For humanity I think a lot of people have But he has some really interesting takes there So if you have a moment Take a side step from

Crypto into his takes on AI That sounds like some great bare market content Well we leave it there everyone in the midst of the bear market but we are building danny and tim thank you so much for joining us and of course bankless nation remember none of this has been financial advice eat is risky so is ethereum it always is crypto is risky all of it you could lose what you put in but we're headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot