Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Anthony Lusardi: Ethereum Classic Cooperative – Accelerating the Growth of ETC

Episode Date: July 17, 2018

The 2016 Ethereum hard fork left us with two distinct Ethereum chains. While the main Ethereum chain dwarfs Ethereum Classic in terms of market cap, ETC has sustained its position as a significant actor in the broader blockchain ecosystem. ETC’s recent listing on Coinbase demonstrates its credibility as a significant industry player. We’re joined by Anthony Lusardi, Director of the Ethereum Classic Cooperative, an organization who’s goal is to promote the development of the Ethereum Classic Network. Similarly to other industry organizations, The Cooperative invests in core development of the ETC blockchain, community building, marketing, and brand awareness. Topics covered in this episode: Anthony’s background and how he became involved in the crypto community The Ethereum Classic Cooperative and the goals of the organization What the ETC ecosystem looks like two years after the fork The people and companies contributing to the project and building on the platform The overlap and friction points with the broader Ethereum community ETC’s unique value proposition as a blockchain platform SputnikVM as an alternative to the Ethereum Virtual Machine The potential attack vectors on ETC, including 51% attacks Why the ETC community stands behind Proof-of-Work The Cooperative’s plans to remain relevant and the project’s development roadmap Episode links: Ethereum Classic Cooperative Website Ethereum Classic Website Crypto51: Cost of a 51% Attack for Different Cryptocurrencies @eth_classic on Twitter This episode is hosted by Sébastien Couture and Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/244

This is Epicenter, Episode 24 with guest Anthony Lassardi. The episode talks about the technologies, projects, and startup strategy, decentralized, and global revolution. Thank you for Joe. My name is Sunny Agarwal. And today we have with us Anthony Lusardi, who is the director of the Ethereum Classic Cooperative. Anthony, glad to have you on the show.

Hey, Sunny, thanks for having me. Yeah, so can you go ahead and introduce yourself and you know a little bit about yourself, how you got involved in the space and yeah okay great so i first got involved in cryptocurrencies not in a very uh in a very typical way so in about like 2014 i was spending you know 10 or 20 bucks at a time on dodge coin red coin a bunch of crappy little coins where i was like they're going to pull a bitcoin and go way up and i still actually own that 10 dollars worth of dutchd coin. And so at the start, I was just kind of like a lot of people, they just hear that there's easy fast money here and you short-term trade it and everything's great. But then I started actually

reading a lot more about blockchain itself and what it gives us and I got really interested in it far beyond the trading aspect of it. And so in about 2015, I, I was a lot of, I, I heard about Ethereum. I looked at it just a little bit. Then the crowd sale kind of happened without me even realizing it. About three to six months after the crowd sale ended, is when I started actually really looking at Ethereum and really getting interested and joined the Ethereum community.

So I was just on the subredits. I was posting a lot. I wasn't really doing anything, though, in any sort of official capacity. I was just a big fan. And after that, you know, the Dow hack happened, then the Dow refund happens a month later. And then I've been working on ETC, mostly in a volunteer capacity up until February of this year, end of February, early March, when I joined the ETC cooperative and now I'm doing ETC full time. And so what were you doing?

were you doing any development for the Ethereum codebase prior to the fork and the DAHA? No, I wasn't doing any development. I still don't really do development. I do program occasionally, but those are either my own projects or they're very small things. I wouldn't consider myself an ETC or Ethereum developer. I see. And so what was your experience during the Dow hack? You know, were you, did you had you had bought into the Dow?

What was like, were you watching it as it happened? What was that whole experience like for you? So I didn't buy into the Dow for a long time. I think I bought into it about a week or two before the Dow hack. Basically, I phomode in just a tiny little bit. The reason I didn't buy into the Dow initially is because I do program occasionally. And I didn't look at the code at all. I just saw that there was this super big, super complex project being launched on a blockchain

where you're not supposed to be able to change it after. And the code seemed like it had been ridden very fast and very rushed. So I just thought to myself there's probably bugs here. and I'll just sit this out and wait until that part gets fixed. And yeah, that was my interest in the Dow at the time. I thought it was really cool. I thought it was great to be able to give the community in a way to invest in this fledgling ecosystem.

It's just unfortunate it played out the way it did. And what were your thoughts about as the Ethereum community tried to pick up the pieces and came up with the idea for the fork, what were your thoughts about it then? Were you already against the fork when it was proposed by the foundation, or is it something that came later on?

Yes, so I don't know if the foundation would agree that they proposed the fork. That's up to them, though, to argue. But I was completely against the fork. at the start, I didn't think that a fork would happen at all to refund the Dow. Mainly for two reasons. One, Ethereum in all their communications were saying that this is an unstoppable blockchain and code is law and all that fun stuff.

And then in the Dow contract itself, it basically said the code of the Dow supersedes the written contract. Whether or not legally that's enforceable is rather an interesting question, since you can't expect people to be able to properly evaluate the code of the Dow for most investors. But at the same time, I couldn't understand why we would, you know, fork the Dow and do this refund and potentially cause damage to the blockchain when previously, we all agreed that even if the Dow contract didn't say that, we all agreed that these are the rules at the start of the game.

We can't change the rules in the middle of the game because that's unfair to some people who are playing by the same rules. Right, cool. And so obviously, you know, you weren't the only one with this viewpoint. There was a number of people who shared that, and this is kind of what led us to this existence of Ethereum Classic. You know, so let's fast forward a little bit. A few months ago, the Ethereum Classic Cooperative was created.

Could you tell us, and now you're the director of this organization, could you tell us a little bit about what the Ethereum Classic Cooperative is, what its mission is, what is the goal, et cetera? Yes, so actually to kind of correct that slightly, the Ethereum Classic Cooperative started back, I think, in April of 2017. but it was rather understaffed. And so when I joined is when it started to really take off. And what the Ethereum class,

what the ETC cooperative is, it's essentially an organization to fill in where we have all these different pain points. So for example, you may have, maybe parity has, I actually just submitted a PR this morning where they needed,

a little support for ETC there and somebody to check and do something. So I did it. There's a lot of community management that needs to happen and needs to be done. So we do that. There's more awareness raising that needs to happen. So we do that. We are planning an ETC summit in September of this year in Seoul, South Korea. So we're managing that. There's a lot of things where people kind of look at these blockchain projects as if everything is grassroots and everything is these good happy feelings but really you you need money and you need people working behind that in order to get it so i'll go into later why etc maybe uh does things a little differently so that when you have money being invested in the platform it's not such that it's going to have

undue influence compared to other blockchains where it might be a bit more centralized. But yeah, we still need these things and particularly for ETC we've suffered on awareness simply because nobody has

been doing anything to improve awareness. A lot of other blockchains have a group or a set of people that help with that and ETC largely because of its origins and initial lack of funding fell behind in that aspect, though still actually has maintained its lead in a lot of other areas.

So what do you consider, like, you know, what you described seems to be sort of what the role of the Ethereum Foundation is, or at least it's supposed to be. So what do you can say that like the ETC cooperative is sort of like the, you know, that equivalent to the Ethereum Foundation, but for the ETC community? Sort of. So I would say the one main difference is we don't do everything. We don't do the majority of the development that's handled by ETC Dev and Ioh-HK. And we don't really like to involve ourselves with that part too much unless it's something like parody needs some help and it doesn't fall under the purview of somebody else. ETC dev of course also

ports code and writes code for parity too so I don't want to take away from that but what Ethereum Foundation does is they kind of do everything for Ethereum they do all the awareness of marketing they do the programming they do all the event planning they do you know

all all those different grants to different people who are involved and so on ETC we try and do it differently like we have ETC labs, for example, that now does grants or initial funding for startups that are running on ETC. Ethereum ETC Cooperative then is what does some more of the awareness and community stuff. And then the various dev teams do the other part. And then, of course, we have volunteers that also do some moderation and other things. but we try and keep it a bit more separate.

So you can imagine that all these pieces are all individually and independently run, whereas for Ethereum Foundation, it's all the one cohesive whole. And there's positives and negatives to both of those approaches, obviously. So, you know, looking back now, you know, we've had the Ethereum Foundation for a couple of years, and, you know, we can certainly sort of look at some of the successes and failures there. In your opinion, sort of one of the things, that with this organization you wish to maybe do differently or to emulate from the Ethereum Foundation? From the Ethereum Foundation, I don't know exactly what we're trying to emulate here.

We're just trying to accomplish the same goals as Ethereum Foundation, like Hoyn Foundation, Zcash, Monero. I don't know if they have a foundation, but whatever they have. we're just trying to fulfill some missing roles that I mentioned but there's no there's no set thing that we want to do

there's no set mission it's simply to get people aware of ETC using ETC and helping out wherever help is needed for ETC kind of you know covering any any base that's not covered Like providing leadership to the ETC community, I guess.

Yeah, that's fair. That's a fair analogy. And just one question. So it's called the Ethereum Classic Cooperative. So legally actually a cooperative. Where is it based? How is it structured as an organization? So currently it's an LLC.

We're applying for a nonprofit status and hoping to get that approved closer towards the end of the year. And that's where we want to be where we're functioning as a nonprofit and able to help develop ETC in a way that doesn't have specific commercial interests. You mentioned that we have all of these, like, multiple teams and stuff. Could you, like, give us, like, a quick summary of, like, who are the players in the Ethereum Classic community? what are like some of the major dev teams and such? Yes, so we've got a bunch of different teams. First, of course, I want to shout out to all the community members,

Firo, Omniage, and a whole bunch of others that I probably don't have time to mention. They do a lot of stuff for ETC that just goes unnoticed. for the most part. So they're really important to us, even though they're not, you know, on a specific team. They're just on Team ETC. But as far as the teams go,

we have ETC dev that's led by Igor Artominov, who has been involved in ETC since the start. They do a lot of the core development for ETC. So Spudnik VM, which Sony, I know you're a big thing. fan of. They've developed that. And they're doing Emerald Projects slash SDK, which is essentially a tool chain to enable developers to more easily work on ETC without having to roll everything yourself. Right now, every blockchain, you roll everything you need yourself. And so they're doing

that, and they actually just hired a great guy, Darcy Reno, who's doing a lot of the day-to-day project management. they're a team in total of about I think 10 people right now and they're looking to double towards the end of the year hit 20 so they're growing pretty rapidly and producing a lot for ETC then there's IOHK which of course is led by Charles Hoskinson and he's dedicated a group of people for the past two years as well since he was involved since the start and they're developing things for ETC too I'm actually waiting to hear on what their remaining roadmap is. I'm actually told there's going to be some surprises from them at the summit, which I don't

even know, which is actually kind of fun because I don't know everything about ETC, and it's great that we're that distributed to reach that point. But yeah, they've so far developed the Mantis client

and then they were working on integrating ETC and Cardano. so they could swap currencies between each other. So that's really interesting. Then beyond that, we have ETC Labs, who is the one investing in startups. They're doing seed funding for them in exchange for a small percentage of the company,

giving them office space, mentorship, and all that nice stuff. So I'm really looking forward to see what comes out of them. And then we also on the ETC Cooperative side, we have not only me, but we have a gentleman by the name of Christian Zhu who's in China and he's essentially doing the same stuff I do on the western side of the world. He does on the eastern side of the world in China, Korea, and Japan. And yeah, those are the main teams. I don't think I'm forgetting anybody. Of course, we also have, you know, parity develops, note software for ETC.

too. It's honestly the software that I run the most of. I probably have about a dozen parity nodes and several Geth ETC nodes too. But yeah, shoutouts to parity for being such a great team. Yeah, I mean, I know like 60% of like the node on a Theorem Classic are even running Parody nodes. So like, you know, I think they've done a really good job of like, like, if I feel like if they hadn't built in and like continued their support for Theorem Classic, like, we won't have had like this much this many nodes and people like even aware of Ethereum Classic if like you know one of the major clients wasn't running it. Another one I've heard of is the Ethereum Commonwealth or Ethereum Classic Commonwealth.

Is that also one of the like main dev teams? So they're not a main dev team. They up until recently maintained classic Ether wallet and Classic Mask. Classic Mask they've sort of stopped maintain. or halted maintenance on. And then classic ether wallet is still maintained by one of their members.

And yeah, they don't do any of the core network development though. They did some of the side wallet stuff. And they were particularly necessary helpful at the start when we weren't

sure if my ether wallet was going to support ETC and that type of thing. Now it's obvious they have and support a lot of other coins too. But yeah, that's what Ethereum Commonwealth has been involved in. But now they've pretty much shifted focus to Colisto, so they don't work on as much ETC stuff anymore. I also heard that MetaMass will be soon supporting Ethereum Classic as well.

Is that true? Yes, hopefully. So there's a PR, but Dan Finlay, obviously, justifiably, said that the PR was too complex and we need to break it out into different PRs for different parts of the features. So we need to do that. And then hopefully we'll be able to get ETC into Metamask. So what's it like having so many teams working together in tandem? I mean, is the, is the cooperative playing a role there in sort of doing some kind of project management or is this happening organically amongst the teams? The cooperative is doing organic project management.

most definitely. Okay. So, yeah, it's fun. It's, there's a, there's a lot to keep track of. And then there's, you know, we're working, I'm working with Darcy and Kevin, who are my main contacts on both ETC Dev and IOHK to streamline the process a bit. You know, there's still a bit of, there's still some friction that we're working out, but we'll get that solved.

But yeah, right now, since March, when I started, it's been, And it's been a fun few months getting started up and ready. So you talked about friction. One thing that I wanted to ask is, you know, regarding the Ethereum community, you know, for those of us who don't actually work and, like, build stuff and, like, our coding, you know, what's, where is their overlap with the sort of Ethereum community, sort of broader Ethereum community, and where are there sort of friction points? Tell us about the interactions there.

What is that like? Yes. So I wouldn't say there's that much friction between ETC and ETH. I think when it comes down to any blockchain or any sports team or anything else, any political party, you have this small core contingent of true believers who believe that anything that isn't them is bad. and they have a very oversized voice and tend to

influence a lot of discourse online but I would say for most everybody on the Ethereum and Ethereum classic side while we don't really agree on everything and yes some people are

a bit more combative and some people are a bit more friendly there's not as much animosity anymore. I think there was a lot of fighting at the start because it was like kind of going through a divorce. There was a lot of bitterness on both sides, but we've all, we've kind of gotten over that, and now I'd say we're even okayish friends. We're actually at the ETC summit going to be having Virgil Griffith and Bob Summerwill of Ethereum coming and talking about, you know, working together more and Bob I'm sure is going to be talking about being nicer to each other. I mean, as a Canadian, I would assume that's probably what he's probably best at there.

Being nice to you're. So you were recently at Edcon in Toronto and you spoke there, I believe. I read a blog post where you said that actually is sort of like the Talic and some other key figures in the Ethereum community came to your talk. tell us what was that like for you to be there at the conference what was the reception what was your talk about first of all and what was the reception to it yes so the talk was about just how very similar etc and eth actually are so when you look at us code wise we're very highly compatible and interoperable same with a lot of other uhetherium-based software forks. And there's this kind of thing where because we formed our own different groups, we

kind of stopped collaborating and working with each other, which seems rather unnecessary because you have these open source projects and it's kind of like, you know, somebody went to your GitHub repo and forked it and now is maintaining a whole separate codebase when maybe you don't need to for every single case. There are probably our cases where it's necessary and makes sense, but there's a lot where it's just a natural thing of we became each other's other. And so my talk was on that. It was also to update everybody there on where Ethereum was,

I mean where ETC was in the sense of its development and community, and that type of thing. And overall, the reception was great. Everybody was welcoming. There were maybe two or three people who were very standoffish, and that was a little weird. Like, I would walk into a group

and start talking to people, and there were two people who would always find a reason to leave. But other than that, everybody else was great. I'm very happy that they had me. Virgil was the one who invited me to his conference, and that's also why Virgil's, you know, of course, invited to

our conference now. But at the start, I can say I was a little nervous. I just figured that I didn't, I really thought most people were going to respond nicely to me and not have any issues. But in the back of my mind, I was like, there's one guy here who is just a diehard Ethereum true believer who is going to try and start an argument with me. So I was prepared for that and it never happened. So it was actually great to see. Cool. Cool.

Can you tell us a little bit about this ETC summit? I know there was one last year as well. And unfortunately, I really wanted to go. I couldn't make it. You guys are doing another one this year. So can tell us a little bit about, you know, about the summit, where it will be. What is the sort of the goal of the summit? What do you hope to achieve by getting like everyone in this community in like one

geographical location for a short period of time? What do you want to see come out of that weekend or week? As far as the ETC summit itself goes, yeah, we're holding it in Seoul, South Korea on September 12th and 13th. The reason we picked Asia and particularly South Korea is because we want to do more outreach internationally. When you look at a lot of

cryptocurrencies, a lot of stuff tends to be based in the U.S. So we wanted to go somewhere else for our conference. There's also a lot of trading activity on ETC in South Korea.

But I feel like the trading activity actually outweighs the actual knowledge of ETC and other cryptocurrencies. So I think it's important to inform people that, yeah, you're trading these things, but here's why they're important beyond the fact that you can maybe make money on them. And that's not an endorsement saying you can make money on cryptocurrencies. You can also lose money. But what we wanted to do, too, is bring together a lot of different people.

So ETC obviously doesn't have the same level of funding as a couple other blockchains. But we do have a good amount and we want to use it responsibly where it's most important to be, where the impact of it is the biggest. So we don't want to just do something where we start a gigantic fund and throw money everywhere. We want the best bang for our buck here. So what we're doing is we're pulling together the developers. We're pulling together general users. We're pulling together a lot of businesses and we're pulling together people interested in the developers. the financial aspect of ETC as well, and presenting talks that at the very least, all of them

should appeal to any general audience, and then each audience in and of themselves has some talks that may have extra appeal to them. So, for example, we'll be going through the developers' roadmaps, will be, ETC Labs is going to be talking about their new projects, ETC Dev is going to do live demonstrations of IoT and then talk about Emerald Project and sidechains. And then we have a couple talks on why maybe immutability matters and how forks work. You know, some of the, I don't want to say ideology, but for lack of a better word, the ideology of blockchain. chain and then some of the finance stuff on kind of market dynamics and ETCG, which is the publicly traded derivative of ETCC that's traded on OTCQX right now.

And we're even going to have a really nice talk on A6 and why they matter and are they dangerous being given by another company, Lindsay, that's interested in producing ETCA6. And yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on. Cool. So, like, you know, it seems really cool that this is, we kind of like bringing together of the Ethereum Classic community. You know, you mentioned all these different people. Like, you know, we're going to have developers there, people who are interested in the financial

aspect, people who are interested in, like, businesses. What do you think it is that, like, brings people into the Ethereum Classic community in the first place? Like, is it normally just, like, speculators? or, you know, is it more like me? My reason was mostly like idealistic reasons and stuff. What do you think is like usually the, what is the driving force of the growth of the Ethereum Classic community

or the current community? I don't know if there's one specific thing that drives people. Like you said, different people have different motivations for doing things. And I think that's very good for ETC because we're trying to be this very general blockchain slash mission critical computing platforms where if you have something important, you can use it. So I don't know if there's any specific draw for ETC, but there's a lot of things where ETC appeals to a lot of different people for different reasons. So we've touched a lot on the community aspect of ADC, but I wanted to sort of circle back now and come back to the project itself. And I mean, at the origins, ETC was sort of created out of the Dow Hard Fork. The original idea was very much ideological.

And this was the difference in ideology where parts of the Ethereum community, were for the fork and one part of that same community that was against the fork. But now that we're sort of one year, I think one year and a half in. It's actually the two-year anniversary coming up. Okay, right. So time flies, right? So now that they're two years in, both projects sort of have their own development communities and their own product roadmaps.

and potentially even, you know, as a product, as a developer product, very different value propositions. So I'm interested in hearing from you sort of, you know, how do you sell ETC to someone? Say someone comes up to you and says, hey, I want to build a next killer Dap. And, you know, I'm considering all these, all these platforms, right? Whether it's, you know, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic or it could be like Cardano, it could be EOS, whatever, like how do you sell ATC to someone as the platform on which they should build their DAF? Okay, so one, just to go back to the DAO, I would actually disagree and say that the split was really close to 50-50. There's just a lot of people willing to go along with the hard fork because it's easier and more advantageous in other ways.

And that's up to them in their own way, you know, whatever is most valuable to you. but how do I sell ETC? Well, for a lot of blockchains right now, what they do is they focus on the end user. And within ETC and maybe within like the Bitcoin community, for example, you actually see this thing where that to us, and I don't want to disparage anybody else who's focusing on solely the end user right now,

but that's kind of putting the card before the horse. So what Ethereum Classic wants to focus on, is machine-to-machine communication and IoT types of things where you can take the benefits of blockchain and use them, you can use blockchain to your benefit and do it in as seamless and transparent of a way as possible. So on your side as the developer, you might need to invest some time in making sure that these things run smoothly and laying the grass. work and your back end rather than using solely the ETC chain itself as the back end for everything. Because right now what we see is there's a tradeoff when you're programming distributed applications

is that if you want high degrees of distribution and decentralization, then you sacrifice the total processing power. You know, you have the processing power on any, any really distributed trustworthy system, your processing power isn't very high. When you go to something like EOS, then your processing power can be a lot higher,

and you can maybe use EOS as your back end, but you end up dealing with the whims of the 21 validator nodes. And so there's tradeoffs there, but ETC is there if you want to have trusted computing and then do it in a way that, you know, it's trusted and distributed,

but you don't need to do everything on main chain. So one of the main things that ETC is going to be focusing on, and I'm sure ETC Dev could speak to this much better than I could, is sidechains and the ability to do most of your computation off-chain, gain your speed benefits there for when you need speed, and then when you need trustlessness, you can use the main chain and interact with that in a seamless way

such that if you have something on your side chain and you want it back on the main chain so that everybody can trust that everything's working right or that nobody can revoke it from you, then you move back to the ETC main chain. So really our core benefit there is that you get a lot of control over the data that you need, but you get trustlessness when you need it.

So is this something that you consider to be sort of a core differentiated than with ETC, say, compared to Ethereum, for instance? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. I would say that for the most part, when I see DAPs being built on ETH, they tend to be very, very focused on the core user. and that's not a bad thing but I think that focus right now is not going to work out because that focus puts them in a situation where they're using ETH as the back end for everything

and they're hoping that plasma is ready in time and deployed on main chain and working right they've essentially written something for a super slow database and they're waiting for that SQL upgrade to come and make everything work. But right now with even minor mild usage of DAPs on any truly distributed blockchain, you end up with very high fees and a very long wait time. So ETC is aiming to avoid that issue. I'm sorry, I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean by they're focusing on the core user. On the end user. So they're focusing on things that the end user can go and use immediately. And then they're using the Ethereum blockchain as the full complete database for everything.

And that's not going to, it doesn't scale. Blockchains don't scale well. Anybody who tells you a blockchain scales well right now is selling you something that's not true. And I don't actually think that Ethereum is selling that their blockchain is scalable today. They know it's not and they're working on plasma and other things to address that. I just don't think that timing is going to work out well. Okay. I mean, so perhaps Sunny has a bit more insights than I do on this.

But I mean, from my perspective, so Ethereum is working on these off-chain solutions as well. So you mentioned plasma, but there are other projects that you, you know, you could use with Ethereum or you could use sort of as a side chain, something like Truebit, for example, to do complex computations. How is, okay, of course, these projects are not built by Ethereum, but I think I'm quite sure you can use them with Ethereum to perform computations, more complex computations off-chain. How is that different and how is ETC positioning itself as a better competitor on this front?

Yeah, so, okay, obviously there are other ways. When I said plasma, I actually should have said Casper. I mix up my terminology. It's just that plasma is using a type of Casper consensus algorithm, so I got a little confused there. But going back, yeah, there are other off-chain scaling solutions. The way ETC differs itself there is that we're going to do it in a way that it's very seamless. So our off-chain processing and EVM and Sputnik VM all execute the same as the main chain.

The only difference is who has control to change those side chains versus the main chain. So it should make development on ETC very smooth. But of course, I'm not familiar with every off-chain scaling solution on Ethereum, so I couldn't speak to and properly compare all of them. So, you know, I saw one of your tweets, just I think a day or two ago was about like how Auger is using like, you know, they just released recently and it just uses like an absorbent amount of gas to just deploy a contract. I tried to deploy a contract the other day.

It was like 6 million gas or so. So is one of, you know, at Cosmos, which is where I work, you know, one of our philosophies is that, like smart contracts are really meant to be used just sort of like that as contracts. Like they're meant to be this like one time used thing. What do you really need scripting capabilities? And then when you want to build applications, you really want to build them on these like application specific side chains like side chains that are designed not with a VM or something

like that for a specific use case. What are your thoughts on this? And then is the goal for the Ethereum classic side chains to focus on EVM side chains or these application-specific side chains? I agree with your analysis there exactly, like 100%. But the goal for ETC sidechains is to do application-specific side-chains. So plasma, for example, is a side-chain for Ethereum that attempts to be one, holistic hole and achieve finality throughout its operation. Whereas ETC, if you have your auger, you launch it on your own side chain.

And then if you have your Gallum, you launch that on another side chain. Right. And so to build these applications-specific blockchain, are you guys developing tooling around this? For example, like, you know, I know something about this project called Emerald SDK. I don't really know too much about it. Is that kind of in the realm of like helping people build application specific blockchains? Or could tell us a little bit about that? Yes.

So ETC Dev could speak much better to this than me. And they actually have a, a very early demo GitHub called Sidekick, I think is the name of the repo, where they have some of the documentation on how the sidechains will work. But yeah, Emerald's Project is intended to be. be a way to wrap up whatever ETC dev produces such that you have these very easy to use, very portable and consumable objects that let you do everything from, and I don't want to overstep my bounds, but I would assume manage a side chain to have a cohesive UI design to manage hardware wallets, addresses,

talk to the different networks and all that, all that stuff. So yeah, I think Emerald SDK is going to be a whole cohesive way to tie all their tooling together, but I'm sure they'll also be talking about it a lot more at the summit and we'll have a live stream of it too if anybody wants to watch and learn. Before we go continue talking about side change, I think the design, of side chains really depends heavily on consensus mechanisms. And so, you know, one thing I've always

noticed within the Ethereum classic community is that you guys tend to be much more pro-proof of work than, let's say, the general Ethereum community. And could you explain a little bit about why that is, is there any thought of like, you know, switching to proof of stake in after maybe, let's say, main net Ethereum switches and like it was a resounding success, is this something that Ethereum Classic would be interested in looking into then?

These are obviously my views on why we say proof of work. For one, like you kind of touched on, proof of stake is in very, very early stages. When it comes to blockchain, the most reliable,

longest running consensus mechanism that we have is proof of work. So we want to stick to that now because we don't know the emergent properties of proof of stake. And we, if we're going to keep this immutable blockchain, we need to proceed with caution. And yeah, that's the basic reason why we don't want to do proof of stake right yet. If we saw proof of steak running for a good five or ten years. Me personally, if I saw proof of stake running for a good five or ten years without any major issues or centralization, then I would be more apt to throw my hat into the ring and say,

yeah, I think proof of stake works here. But there's, you know, there's a lot of things with proof of stake that create potential centralization issues because, for example, a lot of proof of state consensus algorithms just they involve having some of the base currency and locking it up so when you have a relatively finite base currency even in an inflationary model

you're not going to be if somebody gets a large portion of that and most people aren't going to care about staking at all and not going to do it, then if you get under my own assumption that's not based on any math, if you get 10 or 15% of the total coin cap, then you essentially control the network. And all of a sudden, your coins, even though they have this individual value, they've all of a sudden acquired this new property that is far, far more valuable. So if it was a billion dollars worth of coins that you possess, all of a sudden those billion dollars worth of coins might be two or three billion dollars

to the right person who's interested, or they might be so valuable to you in the sense that you have control over this entire network that you'll never give them up and you'll always be that, one block producer. So we see that right now on a lot of blockchains like Bitcoin and ETC and other ones where we're seeing some mining pools

having way, way too high hash power and we want to get that down and more distributed. We have the option to get that down by bringing in people who maybe they weren't even involved previously, but they don't require

anybody's permission to join and start doing with proof of my biggest concern is that it becomes a very permissioned network. I hope that doesn't happen. I want to see a permissionless decentralized blockchain no matter what it is. But that's one of my fears personally of proof of stake. Right. Yeah.

And these are some of the things that we're trying to tackle at Cosmos as well. With proof of work, though, you know, with Thurham Classic, one of the things that, like, you know, always been bugging me a little bit, it's like a little bit scary, is that you, The Ethereum Classic is a minority chain on a certain hash algorithm, which means what I mean by that is, like, you know, it has, like, less than 10% of the hash power of Ethereum. And which means a small coalition of Ethereum miners can suddenly 51% attack Ethereum Classic. There was a cool website that just came out like a month ago that, like, showed, like, how much it would cost to, uh, like, dumped to 51% attack different chains. And Ethereum Classic was, like, you know, one of the top chains on that thing. So what are your, what is the community's thoughts on this?

And has there ever been discussion of, you know, hard forking the proof of work algorithm? Especially now that there's rumors of like, each hash, ASIC miners. I also know that there's one mining pool that has 46% of the hash rate, which to me was a little bit, a little bit, I was taken back by a little bit. What are thoughts on this? As far as 51% attacks, obviously 51% attacks are always an issue for your network. The things, though, that I think we need to remember about 51% attacks is that, one, if you get exactly 51% of the network cash, you're still depending on some luck that your attack works. you're depending on luck in the short term.

So when you look at Crypto51.app, they have the cost per hour. If you want to increase your luck, you need to go for longer in order to actually, in order to reliably pull off your attack. I don't know what the exact numbers are on there, but I actually like looking at Crypto51 because it's very interesting. I just don't know if the prices they have listed their affair. But that aside, 51% attacks are still, of course, an issue. So there are different ways to handle it. Monaro, for example, when they found out there were ASIC miners, they went and did a hard fork.

They had a couple reasons for that. One of them being kind of ideological in that they want to resist A6 for as long as possible, even though I believe their devs also believe asics on proof of work are inevitable. The other one being technical because something like Crypto Knight is very asicable. I think some people who are probably listening don't realize that there's different levels that each of these algorithms could be ASIC at and Crypto Knight was one that could be really ASIC. It's kind of like Bitcoin with the shot 256. And so as far as ETC goes, we're not too concerned about 51% attacks.

For example, even on crypto 51, you need a $20,000 investment for at least an hour's worth of 51% attacks. And you need to have, if you're going to 51% attack, you still need to have a lot of ETC. So the fact that it's rather expensive to acquire and that such attacks are difficult to pull off, maybe not too technically difficult, but particularly difficult in getting away with your stolen goods, when you consider every major exchange does KYC ammo? Most people that have access to that type of capital to reliably pull off a 51% attack, are probably better served by just mining or something to that effect. And I think you see very, very small networks get 51% attacked,

but I don't think you'll see ones get it if there's not a two or 300% at least surplus of available hash rate. I think that's when you end up in a very dangerous situation. And then as far as ASICs go, we don't think that the best approach is to resist them. We think the best approach is to get as many ASIC manufacturers working on ET hash mining. So what we want to do is we want to get as many different manufacturers and mining pools using ASICs. as possible and producing them as possible. Because right now, for example, we have ET hash, and the two things you could reliably mine

with this dagger Hashimoto hashing, consensus algorithm, is you can mine with AMD and Nvidia cards. If either AMD or Nvidia became super interested in mining cryptocurrencies, there's your 100% control of the now. network. You don't even need both of them. You need one of them to decide that we're producing mining hardware and they could pump out their own A6 and run them themselves. So we don't think while GPUs are great right now, we don't think that long term they're that great. And they also

waste a lot of electricity for the amount of hash rate they produce. So we'd like to see A6, which are far more efficient, producing more hash rate for the, the same amount of energy use or potentially less. And those are my thoughts on A6. I, of course, don't speak for the entire community, but the majority are pro-staying proof of work for a variety of reasons. I wonder if in some scenario, like, I mean, of course, as public companies,

Nvidia and other chip manufacturers have an obligation to make, as much profits as they can, if at some point it became obvious that by simply shifting all of their production, rather than selling those cards, shifting that production to mine cryptocurrencies, one could demonstrate that they would make more profits than they currently are actually just selling the cards

to whatever gamers or whoever. If shareholders could force them, or maybe not forced, but through some legal mechanism, pressure to actually shift their business to crypto mining. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a potentiality. It's probably a little far out there because GPUs are such a reliable system

or such a reliable market for them. But I could definitely see a situation where maybe they start to dip their toes into into ASIC manufacturer. It's really not hard for somebody like an AMD or in a video to scale that up. So, you know, 51% attacks are like one type of attack. Another, like, you know, semi-related topic I wanted to ask was, I think I, like, you know, I brought it up on Twitter with you a few weeks ago, but, you know, recently there was this, like, bug in the parody client where they were essentially, like,

literally just not even verifying signatures. And, you know, in Ethereum, luckily, parity was like, you know, it's less than half the hash power. But on Ethereum Classic, parity, you know, miners actually make up the majority of the hash rate. And, you know, like I said, majority of the nodes as well. And so I was, like, wondering, like, you know, I found the bug within like a couple minutes and, like, you know, I wanted to like try to see, like, you know, could I pull off at the attack? on the test net just to see like oh did I actually find the bug and then I was thinking to myself like what happens if someone attacks Ethereum Classic on the client side code what is the community response to that so clearly we can tell

that like if it was a ebm level like a smart contract bug the Ethereum classic you know philosophy is no that's part of the thing you should have audited the code does that but does that reason also stretch into the client Is it the user's responsibility to be auditing the client code and making sure it's bug free? What are your thoughts on this? Yes, so I think it's obviously that that bug was crazy. Props, though, to a couple members of parity, reaching out and letting us know and informing in a way such that we were able to get the major mining pools updated. once they were updated

that closes off the vulnerability so it closed off pretty quick I couldn't believe it when I saw these messages though I was beside myself but yeah we got a pretty quick response there as far as

that goes though the no I would say that if there was a blade and bug in a client software that that violates any of the rules, the pre-agreed rules of the network, like we're validating transactions that shouldn't be validated,

that under the de facto rules are incorrect, then no, we should absolutely fork to fix that because you have to fix bugs in all software and bugs do occur. It's just, it's not the, it's not the network's responsibility to fix a smart contract level bug, that's the responsibility of whoever deployed the smart contract. There are ways to deploy smart contracts in very mutable fashions, as we're seeing currently, with like bank or freezing funds and that type of thing. And there's tradeoffs there, but as far as the base system itself, if there's a bug in the

base system, you fix it. Even Bitcoin, which has been 100% immutable since its start about seven or eight years ago, had a buffer overflow attack that created billions upon billions of coins out of thin air. They immediately forked the blockchain five hours later and achieve the longer, the higher difficulty, and that became the canonical chain and that transaction no longer exists. So there's also precedent for that being an acceptable route, and I would definitely agree with that type of route. As I look at for the closely episode here, I'd like to talk a little bit about sort of

your point of view regarding how ETC can continue to remain relevant in the broader ecosystem, especially when Ethereum is, I guess, taking up a lot of the mine share when it comes to sort of blockchains on which we can deploy smart contracts. What are your plans here and what are some of the things that you can point to as sort of indicators that ETC is and can and will continue to remain relevant in the ecosystem. Yes. So, I mean, one big one might be the Coinbase listing. One of the Ethereum's biggest issues that it's had to deal with for a long time is that it, in my mind, unfairly did not have access to those Fiat pairs that a lot of the other bigger cryptocurrencies had access to. And,

I think we're not at any risk of losing relevance now, and I think we're in a position where we're going to gain a lot of relevance. We now have a lot more attention being paid to ETC. We have, we're on every major exchange. We are developing dev tools. We're seeing partnerships. We're seeing interests from ASIC manufacturers. We're seeing ETC dev, for example, starting some pilots with OpenStack. We're going to see ETC Labs come out with a bunch of projects now. I think we're only going to gain relevance. And I think we're already a lot further ahead than people sometimes think we are

because we were all conditioned from a very early age in blockchain to go look at coin market cap and compare market caps. But when you look at the proof of work coins, the top four are all of the coin-based POW coins in terms of volume. And the fifth POW coin is Ethereum Classic, where actually a rather well-used chain relative to many of them. We do more transactions per day than Bitcoin Cash, considering the fact that we're account-based and B-Cash is UTXO

is kind of interesting that we even beat out that because being account-based, you have a lower threshold there. And yeah, there's a lot of interest and activity in ETC now, and now that we're able to increase our awareness, I think we're only going to see us gain relevance rather than lose it. And it's really great to see keeping this immutable philosophy going into blockchain because I think

we need to reach a critical maxima where blockchain has distributed itself throughout society and only at that point are we going to be able to say immutability and that type of thing is guaranteed

so I'm really looking forward to seeing ETC gain more and more relevance in the market. Cool. So when you talked about Coinbase, is that something that they did on their own, or was there some sort of interaction with members of the community, with their lobbying being done for them to list ATC?

ETC doesn't lobby its coin like at all. You see so many other cryptocurrencies, they hop on your like tags and stuff on Twitter and ruin all your searches and tweet deck. But no, we had no idea, what was it? It was on the 12th, I think. I just came home that day, and I was just up all night, answering questions and talking to people and completely unexpected. I don't remember what time I ate dinner that night. But, yeah, no, there was no, there was no lobbying or anything that I'm aware of to get ETC listed.

I think they just looked at the coin itself, saw that it had had a long history of existence, saw that it did, very decent volume relative to other coins despite not having these fiat pairings and all those things and then some added up to their decision at least that's my view on it i don't honestly know so tell us uh what's the development roadmap um you know for the foreseeable future and where can people get involved if they're looking to either learn about etc you contribute to build apps on the platform, et cetera. Yeah, so if you're looking to get involved in ETC, go to Ethereumclassic.org,

check out all of our resource links and our community links. There you'll find Discord channels, telegrams, everything to talk to us. I personally am one of the admins of the Discord, so if you want to ever reach out to me or some of the ETC Dev people, we're over there. As far as the roadmap goes,

Obviously, we're going to build out side chains, and we're going to have Emerald Project to make development easier. And then beyond that, we'll just have to wait and see. From what I understand, there are a lot of projects interested in ETC, so I'm looking forward to seeing what they are and seeing them develop. Great. Well, Anthony, thanks so much for coming on the show today. It was great to finally dive into ETC. I mean, we've had, as we mentioned, Charles on a few weeks ago, maybe a month or two ago, and we have some discussion about ETC, but we never really had a full-length conversation about the platform. So it was great to learn more and looking forward to seeing what arises in the future.

Yeah, thank you both for having me. It has been a great talk. And thank you to our listeners for once again tuning in. episode releases episodes every week, and you can find us on iTunes, SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're also on YouTube, so you can watch us there at YouTube.com slash episode of VEC. You can follow us on Twitter as well at Episodeadipc. And if you're looking to the support show, obviously you can leave us some iTunes review. That's a great way to get people to know the show, and we're also always very happy to see your reviews.

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